Chapter 5

THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING

But man is fortunately not wholly dependent in his political thinking upon those forms of inference by immediate association which come so easily to him, and which he shares with the higher brutes. The whole progress of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we could if we merely followed the line of least resistance in the use of our minds.

These methods, however, when applied in politics, still represent a difficult and uncertain art rather than a science producing its effects with mechanical accuracy.

When the great thinkers of Greece laid down rules for valid reasoning, they had, it is true, the needs of politics specially in their minds. After the prisoners in Plato's cave of illusion should be unbound by true philosophy it was to the service of the State that they were to devote themselves, and their first triumph was to be the control of passion by reason in the sphere of government. Yet if Plato could visit us now, he would learn that while our glass-makers proceed by rigorous and confident processes to exact results, our statesmen, like the glass-makers of ancient Athens, still trust to empirical maxims and personal skill. Why is it, he would ask us, that valid reasoning has proved to be so much more difficult in politics than in the physical sciences?

Our first answer might be found in the character of the material with which political reasoning has to deal. The universe which presents itself to our reason is the same as that which presents itself to our feelings and impulses--an unending stream of sensations and memories, every one of which is different from every other, and before which, unless we can select and recognise and simplify, we must stand helpless and unable either to act or think. Man has therefore to create entities that shall be the material of his reasoning, just as he creates entities to be the objects of his emotions and the stimulus of his instinctive inferences.

Exact reasoning requires exact comparison, and in the desert or the forest there were few things which our ancestors could compare exactly. The heavenly bodies seem, indeed, to have been the first objects of consciously exact reasoning, because they were so distant that nothing could be known of them except position and movement, and their position and movement could be exactly compared from night to night.

In the same way the foundation of the terrestrial sciences came from two discoveries, first, that it was possible to abstract single qualities, such as position and movement, in all things however unlike, from the other qualities of those things and to compare them exactly; and secondly, that it was possible artificially to create actual uniformities for the purpose of comparison, to make, that is to say, out of unlike things, things so like that valid inferences could be drawn as to their behaviour under like circumstances. Geometry, for instance, came into the service of man when it was consciously realised that all units of land and water were exactly alike in so far as they were extended surfaces. Metallurgy, on the other hand, only became a science when men could actually take two pieces of copper ore, unlike in shape and appearance and chemical constitution, and extract from them two pieces of copper so nearly alike that they would give the same results when treated in the same way.

This second power over his material the student of politics can never possess. He can never create an artificial uniformity in man. He cannot, after twenty generations of education or breeding render even two human beings sufficiently like each other for him to prophesy with any approach to certainty that they will behave alike under like circumstances.

How far has he the first power? How far can he abstract from the facts of man's state qualities in respect of which men are sufficiently comparable to allow of valid political reasoning?

On April 5th, 1788, a year before the taking of the Bastille John Adams, then American Ambassador to England, and afterwards President of the United States, wrote to a friend describing the 'fermentation upon the subject of government' throughout Europe. 'Is Government a science or not?' he describes men as asking. 'Are there any principles on which it is founded? What are its ends? If indeed there is no rule, no standard, all must be accident and chance. If there is a standard, what is it?'[25]

[25] _Memoir of T. Brand Hollis_, by J. Disney, p. 32.

Again and again in the history of political thought men have believed themselves to have found this 'standard,' this fact about man which should bear the same relation to politics which the fact that all things can be weighed bears to physics, and the fact that all things can be measured bears to geometry.

Some of the greatest thinkers of the past have looked for it in the final causes of man's existence. Every man differed, it is true, from every other man, but these differences all seemed related to a type of perfect manhood which, though few men approached, and none attained it, all were capable of conceiving. May not, asked Plato, this type be the pattern--the 'idea'--of man formed by God and laid up 'in a heavenly place'? If so, men would have attained to a valid science of politics when by careful reasoning and deep contemplation they had come to know that pattern. Henceforward all the fleeting and varying things of sense would be seen in their due relation to the eternal and immutable purposes of God.

Or the relation of man to God's purpose was thought of not as that between the pattern and the copy, but as that between the mind of a legislator as expressed in enacted law, and the individual instance to which the law is applied. We can, thought Locke, by reflecting on the moral facts of the world, learn God's law. That law confers on us certain rights which we can plead in the Court of God, and from which a valid political science can be deduced. We know our rights with the same certainty that we know his law.

'Men,' wrote Locke, 'being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business; they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's, pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy another as if we were made for one another's uses as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.'[26]

[26] Locke, _Second Treatise of Government_, 1690, ed. 1821, p. 191.

When the leaders of the American revolution sought for certainty in their argument against George the Third they too found it in the fact that men 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'

Rousseau and his French followers rested these rights on a presumed social contract. Human rights stood upon that contract as the elephant upon the tortoise, though the contract itself, like the tortoise, was apt to stand upon nothing at all.

At this point Bentham, backed by the sense of humour of mankind, swept aside the whole conception of a science of politics deduced from natural right. 'What sort of a thing,' he asked, 'is a natural right, and where does the maker live, particularly in Atheist's Town, where they are most rife?'[27]

[27] _Escheat vice Taxation_, Bentham's Works, vol. ii. p. 598.

Bentham himself believed that he had found the standard in the fact that all men seek pleasure and avoid pain. In that respect men were measurable and comparable. Politics and jurisprudence could therefore be made experimental sciences in exactly the same sense as physics or chemistry. 'The present work,' wrote Bentham, 'as well as any other work of mine that has been or will be published on the subject of legislation or any other branch of moral science, is an attempt to extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral.'[28]

[28] MS. in University College, London, quoted by Halévy, _La Jeunesse de Bentham_, pp. 289-290.

Bentham's standard of 'pleasure and pain' constituted in many ways an important advance upon 'natural right.' It was in the first place founded upon a universally accepted fact; all men obviously do feel both pleasure and pain. That fact was to a certain extent measurable. One could, for instance, count the number of persons who suffered this year from an Indian famine, and compare it with the number of those who suffered last year. It was clear also that some pains and pleasures were more intense than others, and that therefore the same man could in a given number of seconds experience varying amounts of pleasure or pain. Above all, the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to the political thinker himself. John Stuart Mill quotes Bentham as saying of all philosophies which competed with his Utilitarianism: 'They consist, all of them, in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself.'[29]

[29] Bentham's _Works_, vol. i. p. 8, quoted in Lytton's _England and the English_ (1833), p. 469. This passage was written by Mill, cf. preface.

A 'Benthamite,' therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament like Grote or Molesworth, or an official like Chadwick, or an organising politician like Francis Place, could always check his own feelings about 'rights of property,' 'mischievous agitators,' 'spirit of the Constitution,' 'insults to the flag,' and so on, by examining statistical facts as to the numerical proportion, the income, the hours of work, and the death rate from disease, of the various classes and races who inhabited the British Empire.

But as a complete science of politics Benthamism is no longer possible. Pleasure and pain are indeed facts about human nature, but they are not the only facts which are important to the politician. The Benthamites, by straining the meaning of words, tried to classify such motives as instinctive impulse, ancient tradition, habit, or personal and racial idiosyncrasy as being forms of pleasure and pain. But they failed; and the search for a basis of valid political reasoning has to begin again, among a generation more conscious than were Bentham and his disciples of the complexity of the problem, and less confident of absolute success.

In that search one thing at least is becoming clear. We must aim at finding as many relevant and measurable facts about human nature as possible, and we must attempt to make all of them serviceable in political reasoning. In collecting, that is to say, the material for a political science, we must adopt the method of the biologist, who tries to discover how many common qualities can be observed and measured in a group of related beings, rather than that of the physicist, who constructs, or used to construct, a science out of a single quality common to the whole material world.

The facts when collected must, because they are many, be arranged. I believe that it would be found convenient by the political student to arrange them under three main heads: descriptive facts as to the human type; quantitative facts as to inherited variations from that type observed either in individuals or groups of individuals; and facts, both quantitative and descriptive, as to the environment into which men are born, and the observed effect of that environment upon their political actions and impulses.

A medical student already attempts to master as many as possible of those facts about the human type that are relevant to his science. The descriptive facts, for instance, of typical human anatomy alone which he has to learn before he can hope to pass his examinations must number many thousands. If he is to remember them so that he can use them in practice, they must be carefully arranged in associated groups. He may find, for instance, that he remembers the anatomical facts about the human eye most easily and correctly by associating them with their evolutionary history, or the facts about the bones of the hand by associating them with the visual image of a hand in an X-ray photograph.

The quantitative facts as to variations from the anatomical human type are collected for him in statistical form, and he makes an attempt to acquire the main facts as to hygienic environment when and if he takes the Diploma of Public Health.

The student teacher, too, during his period of training acquires a series of facts about the human type, though in his case they are as yet far less numerous, less accurate and less conveniently arranged than those in the medical text-books.

If the student of politics followed such an arrangement, he would at least begin his course by mastering a treatise on psychology, containing all those facts about the human type which have been shown by experience to be helpful in politics, and so arranged that the student's knowledge could be most easily recalled when wanted.

At present, however, the politician who is trained for his work by reading the best-known treatises on political theory is still in the condition of the medical student trained by the study of Hippocrates or Galen. He is taught a few isolated, and therefore distorted, facts about the human type, about pleasure and pain, perhaps, and the association of ideas, or the influence of habit. He is told that these are selected from the other facts of human nature in order that he may think clearly on the hypothesis of there being no others. What the others may be he is left to discover for himself; but he is likely to assume that they cannot be the subject of effective scientific thought. He learns also a few empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, after he has read a little of the history of institutions, his political education is complete. It is no wonder that the average layman prefers old politicians, who have forgotten their book-learning, and young doctors who remember theirs.[30]

[30] In the winter of 1907-8 I happened, on different occasions, to discuss the method of approaching political science with two young Oxford students. In each case I suggested that it would be well to read a little psychology. Each afterwards told me that he had consulted his tutor and had been told that psychology was 'useless' or 'nonsense.' One tutor, a man of real intellectual distinction, was said to have added the curiously scholastic reason that psychology was 'neither science nor philosophy.'

A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve the conception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in a separate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts of experience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not permitted to enter. Professor Ostrogorski published, for instance, in 1902, an important and extraordinarily interesting book on _Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties_, containing the results of fifteen years' close observation of the party system in America and England. The instances given in the book might have been used as the basis of a fairly full account of those facts in the human type which are of importance to the politician--the nature of our impulses, the necessary limitations of our contact with the external world, and the methods of that thinking brain which was evolved in our distant past, and which we have now to put to such new and strange uses. But no indication was given that Professor Ostrogorski's experience had altered in the least degree the conception of human nature with which he started. The facts observed are throughout regretfully contrasted with 'free reason,'[31] 'the general idea of liberty,'[32] 'the sentiments which inspired the men of 1848,'[33] and the book ends with a sketch of a proposed constitution in which the voters are to be required to vote for candidates known to them through declarations of policy 'from which all mention of party is rigorously excluded.'[34] One seems to be reading a series of conscientious observations of the Copernican heavens by a loyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy.

[31] _Passim_, e.g., vol. ii. p. 728.

[32] _Ibid_., p. 649.

[33] _Ibid_., p. 442.

[34] _Ibid_., p. 756.

Professor Ostrogorski was a distinguished member of the Constitutional Democratic Party in the first Duma of Nicholas II., and must have learnt for himself that if he and his fellows were to get force enough behind them to contend on equal terms with the Russian autocracy they must be a party, trusted and obeyed as a party, and not a casual collection of free individuals. Some day the history of the first Duma will be written, and we shall then know whether Professor Ostrogorski's experience and his faith were at last fused together in the heat of that great struggle.

The English translation of Professor Ostrogorski's book is prefaced by an introduction from Mr. James Bryce. This introduction shows that even in the mind of the author of _The American Constitution_ the conception of human nature which he learnt at Oxford still dwells apart.

'In the ideal democracy,' says Mr. Bryce, 'every citizen is intelligent, patriotic, disinterested. His sole wish is to discover the right side in each contested issue, and to fix upon the best man among competing candidates. His common sense, aided by a knowledge of the constitution of his country, enables him to judge wisely between the arguments submitted to him, while his own zeal is sufficient to carry him to the polling booth.'[35]

[35] Ostrogorski, vol. i. p. xliv.

A few lines further on Mr. Bryce refers to 'the democratic ideal of the intelligent independence of the individual voter, an ideal far removed from the actualities of any State.'

What does Mr. Bryce mean by 'ideal democracy'? If it means anything it means the best form of democracy which is consistent with the facts of human nature. But one feels, on reading the whole passage, that Mr. Bryce means by those words the kind of democracy which might be possible if human nature were as he himself would like it to be, and as he was taught at Oxford to think that it was. If so, the passage is a good instance of the effect of our traditional course of study in politics. No doctor would now begin a medical treatise by saying, 'the ideal man requires no food, and is impervious to the action of bacteria, but this ideal is far removed from the actualities of any known population.' No modern treatise on pedagogy begins with the statement that 'the ideal boy knows things without being taught them, and his sole wish is the advancement of science, but no boys at all like this have ever existed.'

And what, in a world where causes have effects and effects causes, does 'intelligent independence' mean?

Mr. Herman Merivale, successively Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, under-Secretary for the Colonies, and under-Secretary for India, wrote in 1861:

'To retain or to abandon a dominion is not an issue which will ever be determined on the mere balance of profit and loss, or on the more refined but even less powerful motives supplied by abstract political philosophy. The sense of national honour; the pride of blood, the tenacious spirit of self-defence, the sympathies of kindred communities, the instincts of a dominant race, the vague but generous desire to spread our civilisation and our religion over the world; these are impulses which the student in his closet may disregard, but the statesman dares not....'[36]

[36] Herman Merivale, _Colonisation_, 1861, 2nd edition. The book is a re-issue, largely re-written, of lectures given at Oxford in 1837. The passage quoted forms part of the 1861 additions, p. 675.

What does 'abstract political philosophy' here mean? No medical writer would speak of an 'abstract' anatomical science in which men have no livers, nor would he add that though the student in his closet may disregard the existence of the liver the working physician dares not.

Apparently Merivale means the same thing by 'abstract' political philosophy that Mr. Bryce means by 'ideal' democracy. Both refer to a conception of human nature constructed in all good faith by certain eighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer exactly believed in, but which, because nothing else has taken its place, still exercises a kind of shadowy authority in a hypothetical universe.

The fact that this or that writer speaks of a conception of human nature in which he is ceasing to believe as 'abstract' or 'ideal' may seem to be of merely academic interest. But such half-beliefs produce immense practical effects. Because Merivale saw that the political philosophy which his teachers studied in their closets was inadequate, and because he had nothing to substitute for it, he frankly abandoned any attempt at valid thought on so difficult a question as the relation of the white colonies to the rest of the British Empire. He therefore decided in effect that it ought to be settled by the rule-of-thumb method of 'cutting the painter'; and, since he was the chief official in the Colonial Office at a critical time, his decision, whether it was right or wrong, was not unimportant.

Mr. Bryce has been perhaps prevented by the presence in his mind of such a half-belief from making that constructive contribution to general political science for which he is better equipped than any other man of his time. 'I am myself,' he says in the same Introduction, 'an optimist, almost a professional optimist, as indeed politics would be intolerable were not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the blue sky he can.'[37] Imagine an acknowledged leader in chemical research who, finding that experiment did not bear out some traditional formula, should speak of himself as nevertheless 'grimly resolved' to see things from the old and comfortable point of view!

[37] _Loc. cit._, p. xliii.

The next step in the course of political training which I am advocating would be the quantitative study of the inherited variations of individual men when compared with the 'normal' or 'average' man who had so far served for the study of the type.

How is the student to approach this part of the course? Every man differs quantitatively from every other man in respect of every one of his qualities. The student obviously cannot carry in his mind or use for the purposes of thought all the variations even of a single inherited quality which are to be found among the fifteen hundred millions or so of human beings who even at any one moment are in existence. Much less can he ascertain or remember the inter-relation of thousands of inherited qualities in the past history of a race in which individuals are at every moment dying and being born.

Mr. H.G. Wells faces this fact in that extremely stimulating essay on 'Scepticism of the Instrument,' which he has appended to his _Modern Utopia_. His answer is that the difficulty is 'of the very smallest importance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed in relation to anything but philosophy and wide generalisations. But in philosophy it matters profoundly. If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances are they serve my rude physiological purpose.'[38]

[38] _A Modern Utopia_, p. 381.

To the politician, however, the uniqueness of the individual is of enormous importance, not only when he is dealing with 'philosophy and wide generalisations' but in the practical affairs of his daily activity. Even the fowl-breeder does not simply ask for 'two eggs' to put under a hen when he is trying to establish a new variety, and the politician, who is responsible for actual results in an amazingly complicated world, has to deal with more delicate distinctions than the breeder. A statesman who wants two private secretaries, or two generals, or two candidates likely to receive equally enthusiastic support from nonconformists and trade-unionists, does not ask for 'two men.'

On this point, however, most writers on political science seem to suggest that after they have described human nature as if all men were in all respects equal to the average man, and have warned their readers of the inexactness of their description, they can do no more. All knowledge of individual variations must be left to individual experience.

John Stuart Mill, for instance, in the section on the Logic of the Moral Sciences at the end of his _System of Logic_ implies this, and seems also to imply that any resulting inexactness in the political judgments and forecasts made by students and professors of politics does not involve a large element of error.

'Excepting,' he says, 'the degree of uncertainty, which still exists as to the extent of the natural differences of individual minds, and the physical circumstances on which these may be dependent, (considerations which are of secondary importance when we are considering mankind in the average or _en masse_), I believe most competent judges will agree that the general laws of the different constituent elements of human nature are even now sufficiently understood to render it possible for a competent thinker to deduce from those laws, with a considerable approach to certainty, the particular type of character which would be formed, in mankind generally, by any assumed set of circumstances.'[39]

[39] _System of Logic_, Book vi. vol. ii. (1875), p. 462.

Few people nowadays would be found to share Mill's belief. It is just because we feel ourselves unable to deduce with any 'approach to certainty' the effect of circumstances upon character, that we all desire to obtain, if it is possible, a more exact idea of human variation than can be arrived at by thinking of mankind 'in the average or _en masse_.'

Fortunately the mathematical students of biology, of whom Professor Karl Pearson is the most distinguished leader, are already showing us that facts of inherited variation can be so arranged that we can remember them without having to get by heart millions of isolated instances. Professor Pearson and the other writers in the periodical _Biometrika_ have measured innumerable beech leaves, snails' tongues, human skulls, etc. etc., and have recorded in each case the variations of any quality in a related group of individuals by that which Professor Pearson calls an 'observation frequency polygon,' but which I, in my own thinking, find that I call (from a vague memory of its shape) a 'cocked hat.'

Here is a tracing of such a figure, founded on the actual measurement of 25,878 recruits for the United States army.

The line _ABC_ records, by its distance at successive points from the line _AC_, the number of recruits reaching successive inches of height. It shows, e.g. (as indicated by the dotted lines) that the number of recruits between 5 ft. 11 in. and 6 ft. was about 1500, and the number of those between 5 ft. 7 in. and 5 ft. 8 in. about 4000.[40]

[40] This figure is adapted (by the kind permission of the publishers) from one given in Professor K. Pearson's _Chances of Death_, vol. i. p. 277. For the relation between such records of actual observation and the curves resulting from mathematical calculation of known causes of variation, see _ibid._, chap, viii., the paper by the same author on 'Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Evolution,' in vol. 186 (A) of the _Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions_ (1896), and the chapters on evolution in his _Grammar of Science_, 2nd edition.

Such figures, when they simply record the results of the fact that the likeness of the offspring to the parent in evolution is constantly inexact, are (like the records of other cases of 'chance' variation) fairly symmetrical, the greatest number of instances being found at the mean, and the descending curves of those above and those below the mean corresponding pretty closely with each other. Boot manufacturers, as the result of experience, construct in effect such a curve, making a large number of boots of the sizes which in length or breadth are near the mean, and a symmetrically diminishing number of the sizes above and below it.

In the next chapter I shall deal with the use in reasoning of such curves, either actually 'plotted' or roughly imagined. In this chapter I point out, firstly, that they can be easily remembered (partly because our visual memory is extremely retentive of the image made by a black line on a white surface) and that we can in consequence carry in our minds the quantitative facts as to a number of variations enormously beyond the possibility of memory if they were treated as isolated instances; and secondly, that we can by imagining such curves form a roughly accurate idea of the character of the variations to be expected as to any inherited quality among groups of individuals not yet born or not yet measured.

The third and last division under which knowledge of man can be arranged for the purposes of political study consists of the facts of man's environment, and of the effect of environment upon his character and actions. It is the extreme instability and uncertainty of this element which constitutes the special difficulty of politics. The human type and the quantitative distribution of its variations are for the politician, who deals with a few generations only, practically permanent. Man's environment changes with ever-increasing rapidity. The inherited nature of every human being varies indeed from that of every other, but the relative frequency of the most important variations can be forecasted for each generation. The difference, on the other hand, between one man's environment and that of other men can be arranged on no curve and remembered or forecasted by no expedient. Buckle, it is true, attempted to explain the present and prophesy the future intellectual history of modern nations by the help of a few generalisations as to the effect of that small fraction of their environment which consisted of climate. But Buckle failed, and no one has attacked the problem again with anything like his confidence.

We can, of course, see that in the environment of any nation or class at any given time there are some facts which constitute for all its members a common experience, and therefore a common influence. Climate is such a fact, or the discovery of America, or the invention of printing, or the rates of wages and prices. All nonconformists are influenced by their memory of certain facts of which very few churchmen are aware, and all Irishmen by facts which most Englishmen try to forget. The student of politics must therefore read history, and particularly the history of those events and habits of thought in the immediate past which are likely to influence the generation in which he will work. But he must constantly be on his guard against the expectation that his reading will give him much power of accurate forecast. Where history shows him that such and such an experiment has succeeded or failed he must always attempt to ascertain how far success or failure was due to facts of the human type, which he may assume to have persisted into his own time, and how far to facts of environment. When he can show that failure was due to the ignoring of some fact of the type and can state definitely what that fact is, he will be able to attach a real meaning to the repeated and unheeded maxims by which the elder members of any generation warn the younger that their ideas are 'against human nature.' But if it is possible that the cause was one of mental environment, that is to say, of habit or tradition, or memory, he should be constantly on his guard against generalisations about national or racial 'character.'

One of the most fertile sources of error in modern political thinking consists, indeed, in the ascription to collective habit of that comparative permanence which only belongs to biological inheritance. A whole science can be based upon easy generalisations about Celts and Teutons, or about East and West, and the facts from which the generalisations are drawn may all disappear in a generation. National habits used to change slowly in the past, because new methods of life were seldom invented and only gradually introduced, and because the means of communicating ideas between man and man or nation and nation were extremely imperfect; so that a true statement about a national habit might, and probably would, remain true for centuries. But now an invention which may produce profound changes in social or industrial life is as likely to be taken up with enthusiasm in some country on the other side of the globe as in the place of its origin. A statesman who has anything important to say says it to an audience of five hundred millions next morning, and great events like the Battle of the Sea of Japan begin to produce their effects thousands of miles off within a few hours of their happening. Enough has already occurred under these new conditions to show that the unchanging East may to-morrow enter upon a period of revolution, and that English indifference to ideas or French military ambition are habits which, under a sufficiently extended stimulus, nations can shake off as completely as can individual men.