Chapter 7

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: epeidê tò telos [tês politikês] estìn ou gnêsis allà 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 versâ_, 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, 'À la guerre, tout est moral, et le moral et l'opinion font plus de la moitié de la réalité.'[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 Penseés 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 'idéologues' 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.