But, on the other hand, the nervous system of most men will not tolerate the frequent repetition of that adjustment of the mind and sympathies to new acquaintanceship, a certain amount of which is so refreshing and so necessary. One can therefore watch in great modern cities men half consciously striving to preserve the same proportion between privacy and intercourse which prevailed among their ancestors in the woods, and one can watch also the constant appearance of proposals or experiments which altogether ignore the primary facts of human nature in this respect. The habitual intellectualism of the writers of political Utopias prevents them from seeing any 'reason' why men should not find happiness as well as economy in a sort of huge extension of family life. The writer himself at his moments of greatest imaginative exaltation does not perhaps realise the need of privacy at all. His affections are in a state of expansion which, without fancifulness, one may refer back to the emotional atmosphere prevalent in the screaming assemblies of his prehuman ancestors; and he is ready, so long as this condition lasts, to take the whole world almost literally to his bosom. What he does not realise is that neither he nor any one else can keep himself permanently at this level. In William Morris's News from Nowhere the customs of family life extend to the streets, and the tired student from the British Museum talks with easy intimacy to the thirsty dustman. I remember reading an article written about 1850 by one of the early Christian Socialists. He said that he had just been riding down Oxford Street in an omnibus, and that he had noticed that when the omnibus passed over a section of the street in which macadam had been substituted for paving, all the passengers turned and spoke to each other. 'Some day,' he said, 'all Oxford Street will be macadamised, and then, because men will be able to hear each other's voices, the omnibus will become a delightful informal club.' Now nearly all London is paved with wood, and people as they sit in chairs on the top of omnibuses can hear each other whispering; but no event short of a fatal accident is held to justify a passenger who speaks to his neighbour.

Clubs were established in London, not so much for the sake of the cheapness and convenience of common sitting-rooms and kitchens, as to bring together bodies of men, each of whom should meet all the rest on terms of unrestrained social intercourse. One can see in Thackeray's Book of Snobs, and in the stories of Thackeray's own club quarrels, the difficulties produced by this plan. Nowadays clubs are successful exactly because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of them that no member must speak to any other who is not one of his own personal acquaintances. The innumerable communistic experiments of Fourier, Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially because of the want of privacy. The associates got on each other's nerves. In those confused pages of the Politics, in which Aristotle criticises from the point of view of experience the communism of Plato, the same point stands out: 'It is difficult to live together in community,' communistic colonists have always 'disputed with each other about the most ordinary matters'; 'we most often disagree with those slaves who are brought into daily contact with us.'[10]

[10] Politics, Book II. ch. V.

The Charity Schools of 1700 to 1850 were experiments in the result of a complete refusal of scope, not only for the instinct of property, but for the entirely distinct instinct of privacy, and part of their disastrous nervous and moral effect must be put down to that. The boys in the contemporary public boarding-schools secured a little privacy by the adoption of strange and sometimes cruel social customs, and more has been done since then by systems of 'studies' and 'houses.' Experience seems, however, to show that during childhood a day school with its alternation of home, class-room, and playing field, is better suited than a boarding-school to the facts of normal human nature.

This instinctive need of privacy is again a subject which would repay special and detailed study. It varies very greatly among different races, and one supposes that the much greater desire for privacy which is found among Northern, as compared to Southern Europeans, may be due to the fact that races who had to spend much or little of the year under cover, adjusted themselves biologically to a different standard in this respect. It is clear, also, that it is our emotional nature, and not the intellectual or muscular organs of talking, which is most easily fatigued. Light chatter, even among strangers, in which neither party 'gives himself away,' is very much less fatiguing than an intimacy which makes some call upon the emotions. An actor who accepts the second alternative of Diderot's paradox, and feels his part, is much more likely to break down from overstrain, than one who only simulates feeling and keeps his own emotional life to himself.

It is in democratic politics, however, that privacy is most neglected, most difficult, and most necessary. In America all observers are agreed as to the danger which results from looking on a politician as an abstract personification of the will of the people, to whom all citizens have an equal and inalienable right of access, and from whom every one ought to receive an equally warm and sincere welcome. In England our comparatively aristocratic tradition as to the relation between a representative and his constituents has done something to preserve customs corresponding more closely to the actual nature of man. A tired English statesman at a big reception is still allowed to spend his time rather in chaffing with a few friends in a distant corner of the room than in shaking hands and exchanging effusive commonplaces with innumerable unknown guests. But there is a real danger lest this tradition of privacy may be abolished in English democracy, simply because of its connection with aristocratic manners. A young labour politician is expected to live in more than American conditions of intimate publicity. Having, perhaps, just left the working bench, and having to adjust his nerves and his bodily health to the difficult requirements of mental work, he is expected to receive every caller at any hour of the day or night with the same hearty good will, and to be always ready to share or excite the enthusiasm of his followers. After a year or two, in the case of a man of sensitive nervous organisation, the task is found to be impossible. The signs of nervous fatigue are at first accepted by him and his friends as proofs of his sincerity. He begins to suffer from the curate's disease, the bright-eyed, hysterical condition in which a man talks all day long to a succession of sympathetic hearers about his own overwork, and drifts into actual ill-health, though he is not making an hour's continuous exertion in the day. I knew a young agitator in that state who thought that he could not make a propagandist speech unless the deeply admiring pitman, in whose cottage he was staying, played the Marseillaise on a harmonium before he started. Often such a man takes to drink. In any case he is liable, as the East End clergymen who try to live the same life are liable, to the most pitiable forms of moral collapse.

Such men, however, are those who being unfit for a life without privacy, do not survive. Greater political danger comes perhaps from those who are comparatively fit. Any one who has been in America, who has stood among the crowd in a Philadelphian law-court during the trial of a political case, or has seen the thousands of cartoons in a contest in which Tammany is concerned, will find that he has a picture in his mind of one type at least of those who do survive.

Powerfully built, with the big jaw and loose mouth of the dominant talker, practised by years of sitting behind saloon bars, they have learnt the way of 'selling cheap that which should be most dear.' But even they generally look as if they drank, and as if they would not live to old age.

Other and less dreadful types of politicians without privacy come into one's mind, the orator who night after night repeats the theatrical success of his own personality, and, like the actor, keeps his recurring fits of weary disgust to himself; the busy organising talkative man to whom it is a mere delight to take the chair at four smoking concerts a week. But there is no one of them who would not be the better, both in health and working power, if he were compelled to retire for six months from the public view, and to produce something with his own hand and brain, or even to sit alone in his own house and think.

These facts, in so far as they represent the nervous disturbance produced by certain conditions of life in political communities, are again closely connected with the one point in the special psychology of politics which has as yet received any extensive consideration—the so-called 'Psychology of the Crowd,' on which the late M. Tarde, M. Le Bon, and others have written. In the case of human beings, as in the case of many other social and semi-social animals, the simpler impulses—especially those of fear and anger—when they are consciously shared by many physically associated individuals, may become enormously exalted, and may give rise to violent nervous disturbances. One may suppose that this fact, like the existence of laughter, was originally an accidental and undesirable result of the mechanism of nervous reaction, and that it persisted because when a common danger was realised (a forest fire, for instance, or an attack by beasts of prey), a general stampede, although it might be fatal to the weaker members of the herd, was the best chance of safety for the majority.

My own observation of English politics suggests that in a modern national state, this panic effect of the combination of nervous excitement with physical contact is not of great importance. London in the twentieth century is very unlike Paris in the eighteenth century, or Florence in the fourteenth, if only because it is very difficult for any considerable proportion of the citizens to be gathered under circumstances likely to produce the special 'Psychology of the Crowd.' I have watched two hundred thousand men assembled in Hyde Park for a Labour Demonstration. The scattered platforms, the fresh air, the wide grassy space, seemed to be an unsuitable environment for the production of purely instinctive excitement, and the attitude of such an assembly in London is good-tempered and lethargic. A crowd in a narrow street is more likely to get 'out of hand,' and one may see a few thousand men in a large hall reach a state approaching genuine pathological exaltation on an exciting occasion, and when they are in the hands of a practised speaker. But as they go out of the hall they drop into the cool ocean of London, and their mood is dissipated in a moment. The mob that took the Bastille would not seem or feel an overwhelming force in one of the business streets of Manchester. Yet such facts vary greatly among different races, and the exaggeration which one seems to notice when reading the French sociologists on this point may be due to their observations having been made among a Latin and not a Northern race.

So far I have dealt with the impulses illustrated by the internal politics of a modern State. But perhaps the most important section in the whole psychology of political impulse is that which is concerned not with the emotional effect of the citizens of any state upon each other, but with those racial feelings which reveal themselves in international politics. The future peace of the world largely turns on the question whether we have, as is sometimes said and often assumed, an instinctive affection for those human beings whose features and colour are like our own, combined with an instinctive hatred for those who are unlike us. On this point, pending a careful examination of the evidence by the psychologists, it is difficult to dogmatise. But I am inclined to think that those strong and apparently simple cases of racial hatred and affection which can certainly be found, are not instances of a specific and universal instinct but the result of several distinct and comparatively weak instincts combined and heightened by habit and association. I have already argued that the instinct of political affection is stimulated by the vivid realisation of its object. Since therefore it is easier, at least for uneducated men, to realise the existence of beings like than of beings unlike themselves, affection for one's like would appear to have a natural basis, but one likely to be modified as our powers of realisation are stimulated by education. Again, since most men live, especially in childhood, among persons belonging to the same race as themselves, any markedly unusual face or dress may excite the instinct of fear of that which is unknown. A child's fear, however, of a strangely shaped or coloured face is more easily obliterated by familiarity than it would be if it were the result of a specific instinct of race-hatred. White or Chinese children show, one is told, no permanent aversion for Chinese or white or Hindoo or negro nurses and attendants. Sex love, again, even when opposed by social tradition, springs up freely between very different human types; and widely separated races have been thereby amalgamated. Between some of the non-human species (horses and camels, for instance) instinctive mutual hatred, as distinguished from fear, does seem to exist, but nowhere, as far as I know, is it found between varieties so nearly related to each other and so readily interbreeding as the various human races.

Anglo-Indian officials sometimes explain, as a case of specific instinct, the fact that a man who goes out with an enthusiastic interest in the native races often finds himself, after a few years, unwillingly yielding to a hatred of the Hindoo racial type. But the account which they give of their sensations seems to me more like the nervous disgust which I described as arising from a constantly repeated mental and emotional adjustment to inharmonious surroundings. At the age when an English official reaches India most of his emotional habits are already set, and he makes, as a rule, no systematic attempt to modify them. Therefore, just as the unfamiliarity of French cookery or German beds, which at the beginning of a continental visit is a delightful change, may become after a month or two an intolerable gene, so the servility and untruthfulness, and even the patience and cleverness of those natives with whom he is brought into official contact, get after a few years on the nerves of an Anglo-Indian. Intimate and uninterrupted contact during a long period, after his social habits have been formed, with people of his own race but of a different social tradition would produce the same effect.

Perhaps, however, intellectual association is a larger factor than instinct in the causation of racial affection and hatred. An American working man associates, for instance, the Far Eastern physical type with that lowering of the standard wage which overshadows as a dreadful possibility every trade in the industrial world. Fifty years ago the middle class readers to whom Punch appeals associated the same type with stories of tortured missionaries and envoys. After the battle of the Sea of Japan they associated it with that kind of heroism which, owing to our geographical position, we most admire; and drawings of the unmistakably Asiatic features of Admiral Togo, which would have excited genuine and apparently instinctive disgust in 1859, produced a thrill of affection in 1906.

But at this point we approach that discussion of the objects, sensible or imaginary, of political impulse (as distinguished from the impulses themselves), which must be reserved for my next chapter.



CHAPTER II

POLITICAL ENTITIES

Man's impulses and thoughts and acts result from the relation between his nature and the environment into which he is born. The last chapter approached that relation (in so far as it affects politics) from the side of man's nature. This chapter will approach the same relation from the side of man's political environment.

The two lines of approach have this important difference, that the nature with which man is born is looked on by the politician as fixed, while the environment into which man is born is rapidly and indefinitely changing. It is not to changes in our nature, but to changes in our environment only—using the word to include the traditions and expedients which we acquire after birth as well as our material surroundings—that all our political development from the tribal organisation of the Stone Ages to the modern nation has apparently been due.

The biologist looks on human nature itself as changing, but to him the period of a few thousands or tens of thousands of years which constitute the past of politics is quite insignificant. Important changes in biological types may perhaps have occurred in the history of the world during comparatively short periods, but they must have resulted either from a sudden biological 'sport' or from a process of selection fiercer and more discriminating than we believe to have taken place in the immediate past of our own species. The present descendants of those races which are pictured in early Egyptian tombs show no perceptible change in their bodily appearance, and there is no reason to believe that the mental faculties and tendencies with which they are born have changed to any greater degree.

The numerical proportions of different races in the world have, indeed, altered during that period, as one race proved weaker in war or less able to resist disease than another; and races have been mingled by marriage following upon conquest. But if a baby could now be exchanged at birth with one born of the same breeding-stock even a hundred thousand years ago, one may suppose that neither the ancient nor the modern mother would notice any startling difference. The child from the Stone Age would perhaps suffer more seriously than our children if he caught measles, or might show somewhat keener instincts in quarrelling and hunting, or as he grew up be rather more conscious than his fellows of the 'will to live' and 'the joy of life.' Conversely, a transplanted twentieth-century child would resist infectious disease better than the other children in the Stone Age, and might, as he grew up, be found to have a rather exceptionally colourless and adaptable character. But there apparently the difference would end. In essentials the type of each human stock may be supposed to have remained unchanged throughout the whole period. In the politics of the distant future that science of eugenics, which aims at rapidly improving our type by consciously directed selective breeding, may become a dominant factor, but it has had little influence on the politics of the present or the past.

Those new facts in our environment which have produced the enormous political changes which separate us from our ancestors have been partly new habits of thought and feeling, and partly new entities about which we can think and feel.

It is of these new political entities that this chapter will treat. They must have first reached us through our senses, and in this case almost entirely through the senses of seeing and hearing. But man, like other animals, lives in an unending stream of sense impressions, of innumerable sights and sounds and feelings, and is only stirred to deed or thought by those which he recognises as significant to him. How then did the new impressions separate themselves from the rest and become sufficiently significant to produce political results?

The first requisite in anything which is to stimulate us toward impulse or action is that it should be recognisable—that it should be like itself when we met it before, or like something else which we have met before. If the world consisted of things which constantly and arbitrarily varied their appearance, if nothing was ever like anything else, or like itself for more than a moment at a time, living beings as at present constituted would not act at all. They would drift like seaweed among the waves.

The new-born chicken cowers beneath the shadow of the hawk, because one hawk is like another. Animals wake at sunrise, because one sunrise is like another; and find nuts or grass for food, because each nut and blade of grass is like the rest.

But the recognition of likeness is not in itself a sufficient stimulus to action. The thing recognised must also be significant, must be felt in some way to matter to us. The stars reappear nightly in the heavens, but, as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated to action by recognising them. The moth is not stimulated by recognising a tortoise, nor the cow by a cobweb.

Sometimes this significance is automatically indicated to us by nature. The growl of a wild beast, the sight of blood, the cry of a child in distress, stand out, without need of experience or teaching, from the stream of human sensations, just as, to a hungry fox-cub, the movement or glimpse of a rabbit among the undergrowth separates itself at once from the sounds of the wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers. Sometimes the significance of a sensation has to be learned by the individual animal during its own life, as when a dog, who recognises the significance of a rat by instinct, learns to recognise that of a whip (provided it looks like the whip which he saw and felt before) by experience and association.

In politics man has to make like things as well as to learn their significance. Political tactics would indeed be a much simpler matter if ballot-papers were a natural product, and if on beholding a ballot-paper at about the age of twenty-one a youth who had never heard of one before were invariably seized with a desire to vote.

The whole ritual of social and political organisation among savages, therefore, illustrates the process of creating artificial and easily recognisable political likenesses. If the chief is to be recognised as a chief he must, like the ghost of Patroclus, 'be exceedingly like unto himself.' He must live in the same house, wear the same clothes, and do the same things year by year; and his successor must imitate him. If a marriage or an act of sale is to be recognised as a contract, it must be carried out in the customary place and with the customary gestures. In some few cases the thing thus artificially brought into existence and made recognisable still produces its impulsive effect by acting on those biologically inherited associations which enable man and other animals to interpret sensations without experience. The scarlet paint and wolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive nature. But even in very early societies the recognition of artificial political entities must generally have owed its power of stimulating impulse to associations acquired during life. A child who had been beaten by the herald's rod, or had seen his father bow down before the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the king, or the stone by association.

Recognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whether naturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised. Such points then become symbols of the thing as a whole. The evolutionary facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating insects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion to induce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellow bands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep off birds.[11] In early political society most recognition is guided by such symbols. One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in all respects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man. But one can tattoo both of them with the same pattern. It is even more easy and less painful to attach a symbol to a king which is not a part of the man himself, a royal staff for instance, which may be decorated and enlarged until it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. The king is then recognised as king because he is the 'staff-bearer' ([Greek: skeptouchos basileus]). Such a staff is very like a name, and there may, perhaps, have been an early Mexican system of sign-writing in which a model of a staff stood for a king.

[11] Cf. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. ii. p. 392:—'The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the history of our taking advantage of the ways in which they judge of everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them.'

At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise the whole process. Our own 'common-sense' and the systematised common-sense of the eighteenth-century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribal man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of the original social contract between ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure and pain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leadership and royal punishments, and that he therefore decided by a process of reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king.

When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language, it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional association with the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effects of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a process of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their other effects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical use of language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle of sensations—one's memory, for instance, of a royal person; the selection of a single quality—kingship, for instance—shared by other such bundles of sensations, the giving to that quality the name king, and the use of the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstraction. When we are consciously trying to reason correctly by the use of language all this does occur, just as it would occur if we had not evolved the use of voice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic of colours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology will explain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as a description of that which actually happens when language is used for the purpose of stimulating us to action.

Indeed the 'brass-instrument psychologists,' who do such admirable work in their laboratories, have invented an experiment on the effect of significant words which every one may try for himself. Let him get a friend to write in large letters on cards a series of common political terms, nations, parties, principles, and so on. Let him then sit before a watch recording tenths of seconds, turn up the cards, and practise observation of the associations which successively enter his consciousness. The first associations revealed will be automatic and obviously 'illogical.' If the word be 'England' the white and black marks on the paper will, if the experimenter is a 'visualiser,' produce at once a picture of some kind accompanied by a vague and half conscious emotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or anxiety, or the remembrance of puzzled thought. If the experimenter is 'audile,' the marks will first call up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional reaction may be associated. I am a 'visualiser,' and the picture in my case was a blurred triangular outline. Other 'visualisers' have described to me the picture of a red flag, or of a green field (seen from a railway carriage), as automatically called up by the word England. After the automatic picture or sound image and its purely automatic emotional accompaniment comes the 'meaning' of the word, the things one knows about England, which are presented to the memory by a process semi-automatic at first, but requiring before it is exhausted a severe effort. The question as to what images and feelings shall appear at each stage is, of course, settled by all the thoughts and events of our past life, but they appear, in the earlier moments at least of the experiment, before we have time consciously to reflect or choose.

A corresponding process may be set up by other symbols besides language. If in the experiment the hats belonging to members of a family be substituted for the written cards, the rest of the process will go on—the automatic 'image,' automatically accompanied by emotional association, being succeeded in the course of a second or so by the voluntary realisation of 'meaning,' and finally by a deliberate effort of recollection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poet and partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brain occasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in his account of those separate mental states which for most men are merged into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess,' describes the succession which I have been discussing:—

'Thy voice is heard through rolling drums, That beat to battle where he stands. Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands: A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee; The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee.'

'Thine and thee' at the end seem to me to express precisely the change from the automatic images of 'voice' and 'face' to the reflective mood in which the full meaning of that for which he fights is realised.

But it is the 'face' that 'gives the battle to his hands.' Here again, as we saw when comparing impulses themselves, it is the evolutionarily earlier more automatic, fact that has the greater, and the later intellectual fact which has the less impulsive power. Even as one sits in one's chair one can feel that that is so.

Still more clearly can one feel it if one thinks of the phenomena of religion. The only religion of any importance which has ever been consciously constructed by a psychologist is the Positivism of Auguste Comte. In order to produce a sufficiently powerful stimulus to ensure moral action among the distractions and temptations of daily life, he required each of his disciples to make for himself a visual image of Humanity. The disciple was to practice mental contemplation for a definite period each morning of the remembered figure of some known and loved woman—his mother, or wife, or sister. He was to keep the figure always in the same attitude and dress, so that it should always present itself automatically as a definite mental image in immediate association with the word Humanite.[12] With that would be automatically associated the original impulse of affection for the person imaged. As soon as possible after that would come the meaning of the word, and the fuller but less cogent emotional associations connected with that meaning. This invention was partly borrowed from certain forms of mental discipline in the Roman Catholic Church and partly suggested by Comte's own experiences of the effect on him of the image of Madame de Vaux. One of the reasons that it has not come into greater use may have been that men in general are not quite such good 'visualisers' as Comte found himself to be.

[12] The Catechism of Positive Religion (Tr. by Congreve), First Part, 'Explanation of the Worship,' e.g. p. 65: 'The Positivist shuts his eyes during his private prayers, the better to see the internal image.'

Cardinal Newman, in an illuminating passage of his Apologia, explains how he made for himself images of personified nations, and hints that behind his belief in the real existence of such images was his sense of the convenience of creating them. He says that he identified the 'character and instinct' of 'states' and of those 'governments of religious communities,' from which he suffered so much, with spirits 'partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might he.... My preference of the Personal to the Abstract would naturally lead me to this view. I thought it countenanced by the mention of the "Prince of Persia" in the prophet Daniel: and I think I considered that it was of such intermediate beings that the Apocalypse spoke, when it introduced "the angels of the seven churches."'[13] In 1837 ... I said ... 'Take England with many high virtues and yet a low Catholicism. It seems to me that John Bull is a spirit neither of Heaven nor Hell.'

[13] Newman, Apologia (1864), pp. 91, 92.

Harnack, in the same way, when describing the causes of the expansion of Christianity, lays stress on the use of the word 'church' and the 'possibilities of personification which it offered.'[14] This use may have owed its origin to a deliberate intellectual effort of abstraction applied by some Christian philosopher to the common qualities of all Christian congregations, though it more likely resulted from a half conscious process of adaptation in the employment of a current term. But when it was established the word owed its tremendous power over most men to the emotions automatically stimulated by the personification, and not to those which would follow on a full analysis of the meaning. Religious history affords innumerable such instances. The 'truth embodied in a tale' has more emotional power than the unembodied truth, and the visual realisation of the central figure of the tale more power than the tale itself. The sound-image of a sacred name at which 'every knee shall bow,' or even of one which may be formed in the mind but may not be uttered by the lips, has more power at the moment of intensest feeling than the realisation of its meaning. Things of the senses—the sacred food which one can taste, the Virgin of Kevlaar whom one can see and touch, are apt to be more real than their heavenly anti-types.

[14] Harnack, Expansion of Christianity (Tr.), vol. ii. p. 11.

If we turn to politics for instances of the same fact, we again discover how much harder it is there than in religion, or morals, or education, to resist the habit of giving intellectual explanations of emotional experiences. For most men the central political entity is their country. When a man dies for his country, what does he die for? The reader in his chair thinks of the size and climate, the history and population, of some region in the atlas, and explains the action of the patriot by his relation to all these things. But what seems to happen in the crisis of battle is not the logical building up or analysing of the idea of one's country, but that automatic selection by the mind of some thing of sense accompanied by an equally automatic emotion of affection which I have already described. Throughout his life the conscript has lived in a stream of sensations, the printed pages of the geography book, the sight of streets and fields and faces, the sound of voices or of birds or rivers, all of which go to make up the infinity of facts from which he might abstract an idea of his country. What comes to him in the final charge? Perhaps the row of pollard elms behind his birth-place. More likely some personification of his country, some expedient of custom or imagination for enabling an entity which one can love to stand out from the unrealised welter of experience. If he is an Italian it may be the name, the musical syllables, of Italia. If he is a Frenchman, it may be the marble figure of France with her broken sword, as he saw it in the market-square of his native town, or the maddening pulse of the 'Marseillaise.' Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed staff, Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound of the pipes.

Once in a thousand years a man may stand in a funeral crowd after the fighting is over, and his heart may stir within him as he hears Pericles abstract from the million qualities of individual Athenians in the present and the past just those that make the meaning of Athens to the world. But afterwards all that he will remember may be the cadence of Pericles' voice, the movement of his hand, or the sobbing of some mother of the dead.

In the evolution of politics, among the most important events have been the successive creations of new moral entities—of such ideals as justice, freedom, right. In their origin that process of conscious logical abstraction, which we are tempted to accept as the explanation of all mental phenomena, must have corresponded in great part to the historical fact. We have, for instance, contemporary accounts of the conversations in which Socrates compared and analysed the unwilling answers of jurymen and statesmen, and we know that the word Justice was made by his work an infinitely more effective political term. It is certain too that for many centuries before Socrates the slow adaptation of the same word by common use was from time to time quickened by some forgotten wise man who brought to bear upon it the intolerable effort of conscious thought. But as soon as, at each stage, the work was done, and Justice, like a rock statue on whom successive generations of artists have toiled, stood out in compelling beauty, she was seen not as an abstraction but as a direct revelation. It is true that this revelation made the older symbols mean and dead, but that which overcame them seemed a real and visible thing, not a difficult process of comparison and analysis. Antigone in the play defied in the name of Justice the command which the sceptre-bearing king had sent through the sacred person of his herald. But Justice to her was a goddess, 'housemate of the nether gods'—and the sons of those Athenian citizens who applauded the Antigone condemned Socrates to death because his dialectic turned the gods back into abstractions.

The great Jewish prophets owed much of their spiritual supremacy to the fact that they were able to present a moral idea with intense emotional force without stiffening it into a personification; but that was because they saw it always in relation to the most personal of all gods. Amos wrote, 'I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will not smell the savour of your assemblies.... Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.'[15] 'Judgment' and 'righteousness' are not goddesses, but the voice which Amos heard was not the voice of an abstraction.

[15] Amos, ch. v., vv. 21, 23, 24 (R.V.M.).

Sometimes a new moral or political entity is created rather by immediate insight than by the slow process of deliberate analysis. Some seer of genius perceives in a flash the essential likeness of things hitherto kept apart in men's minds—the impulse which leads to anger with one's brother, and that which leads to murder, the charity of the widow's mite and of the rich man's gold, the intemperance of the debauchee and of the party leader. But when the master dies the vision too often dies with him. Plato's 'ideas' became the formulae of a system of magic, and the command of Jesus that one should give all that one had to the poor handed over one-third of the land of Europe to be the untaxed property of wealthy ecclesiastics.

It is this last relation between words and things which makes the central difficulty of thought about politics. The words are so rigid, so easily personified, so associated with affection and prejudice; the things symbolised by the words are so unstable. The moralist or the teacher deals, as a Greek would say, for the most part, with 'natural,' the politician always with 'conventional' species. If one forgets the meaning of motherhood or childhood, Nature has yet made for us unmistakable mothers and children who reappear, true to type, in each generation. The chemist can make sure whether he is using a word in precisely the same sense as his predecessor by a few minutes' work in his laboratory. But in politics the thing named is always changing, may indeed disappear and may require hundreds of years to restore. Aristotle defined the word 'polity' to mean a state where 'the citizens as a body govern in accordance with the general good.'[16] As he wrote, self-government in those States from which he abstracted the idea was already withering beneath the power of Macedonia. Soon there were no such States at all, and, now that we are struggling back to Aristotle's conception, the name which he defined is borne by the 'police' of Odessa. It is no mere accident of philology that makes 'Justices' Justice' a paradox. From the time that the Roman jurisconsults resumed the work of the Greek philosophers, and by laborious question and answer built up the conception of 'natural justice, it, like all other political conceptions, was exposed to the two dangers. On the one hand, since the original effort of abstraction was in its completeness incommunicable, each generation of users of the word subtly changed its use. On the other hand, the actions and institutions of mankind, from which the conception was abstracted, were as subtly changing. Even although the manuscripts of the Roman lawyers survived, Roman law and Roman institutions had both ceased to be. When the phrases of Justinian were used by a Merovingian king or a Spanish Inquisitor not only was the meaning of the words changed, but the facts to which the words could have applied in their old sense were gone. Yet the emotional power of the bare words remained. The civil law and canon law of the Middle Ages were able to enforce all kinds of abuses because the tradition of reverence still attached itself to the sound of 'Rome.' For hundreds of years, one among the German princes was made somewhat more powerful than his neighbours by the fact that he was 'Roman Emperor,' and was called by the name of Caesar.

[16] Politics, ch. vii., [Greek: hotan to plethos pros to koinon politeue tai sympheron.]

The same difficulties and uncertainties as those which influence the history of a political entity when once formed confront the statesman who is engaged in making a new one. The great men, Stein, Bismarck, Cavour, or Metternich, who throughout the nineteenth century worked at the reconstruction of the Europe which Napoleon's conquests shattered, had to build up new States which men should respect and love, whose governments they should willingly obey, and for whose continued existence they should be prepared to die in battle. Races and languages and religions were intermingled throughout central Europe, and the historical memories of the kingdoms and dukedoms and bishoprics into which the map was divided were confused and unexciting. Nothing was easier than to produce and distribute new flags and coins and national names. But the emotional effect of such things depends upon associations which require time to produce, and which may have to contend against associations already existing. The boy in Lombardy or Galicia saw the soldiers and the schoolmaster salute the Austrian flag, but the real thrill came when he heard his father or mother whisper the name of Italy or Poland. Perhaps, as in the case of Hanover, the old associations and the new are for many years almost equally balanced.

In such times men fall back from the immediate emotional associations of the national name and search for its meaning. They ask what is the Austrian or the German Empire. As long as there was only one Pope men handed on unexamined the old reverence from father to son. When for forty years there had been two Popes, at Rome and at Avignon, men began to ask what constituted a Pope. And in such times some men go further still. They may ask not only what is the meaning of the word Austrian Empire, or Pope, but what in the nature of things is the ultimate reason why the Austrian Empire or the Papacy should exist.

The work therefore of nation-building must be carried forward on each plane. The national name and flag and anthem and coinage all have their entirely non-logical effect based on habitual association. Meanwhile the statesmen strive to create as much meaning as possible for such symbols. If all the subjects of a State serve in one army and speak, or understand, one language, or even use a black-letter alphabet which has been abandoned elsewhere, the national name will mean more to them. The Saxon or the Savoyard will have a fuller answer to give himself when he asks 'What does it mean, that I am a German or a Frenchman?' A single successful war waged in common will create not only a common history, but a common inheritance of passionate feeling. 'Nationalists,' meanwhile, may be striving, by songs and pictures and appeals to the past, to revive and intensify the emotional associations connected with older national areas—and behind all this will go on the deliberate philosophical discussion of the advantages to be derived from large or small, racial or regional States, which will reach the statesman at second-hand and the citizen at third-hand. As a result, Italy, Belgium, and the German Empire succeed in establishing themselves as States resting upon a sufficient basis of patriotism, and Austria-Hungary may, when the time of stress comes, be found to have failed.

But if the task of State building in Europe during the nineteenth century was difficult, still more difficult is the task before the English statesmen of the twentieth century of creating an imperial patriotism. We have not even a name, with any emotional associations, for the United Kingdom itself. No Englishman is stirred by the name 'British,' the name 'English' irritates all Scotchmen, and the Irish are irritated by both alike. Our national anthem is a peculiarly flat and uninspiring specimen of eighteenth-century opera libretto and opera music. The little naked St. George on the gold coins, or the armorial pattern on the silver coins never inspired any one. The new copper coinage bears, it is true, a graceful figure of Miss Hicks Beach. But we have made it so small and ladylike that it has none of the emotional force of the glorious portrait heads of France or Switzerland.

The only personification of his nation which the artisan of Oldham or Middlesbrough can recognise is the picture of John Bull as a fat, brutal, early nineteenth-century Midland farmer. One of our national symbols alone, the 'Union Jack,' though it is as destitute of beauty as a patchwork quilt, is fairly satisfactory. But all its associations so far are with naval warfare.

When we go outside the United Kingdom we are in still worse case. 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland together with its Colonies and Dependencies' has no shorter or more inspiring name. Throughout the Colonial Conference of 1907 statesmen and leader writers tried every expedient of periphrasis and allusion to avoid hurting any one's feelings even by using such a term as 'British Empire.' To the Sydney Bulletin, and to the caricaturists of Europe, the fact that any territory on the map of the world is coloured red still recalls nothing but the little greedy eyes, huge mouth, and gorilla hands of 'John Bull.'

If, again, the young Boer or Hindoo or ex-American Canadian asks himself what is the meaning of membership ('citizenship,' as applied to five-sixths of the inhabitants of the Empire, would be misleading) of the Empire, he finds it extraordinarily difficult to give an answer. When he goes deeper and asks for what purpose the Empire exists, he is apt to be told that the inhabitants of Great Britain conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind and have not yet had time to think out an ex post facto justification for so doing. The only product of memory or reflection that can stir in him the emotion of patriotism is the statement that so far the tradition of the Empire has been to encourage and trust to political freedom. But political freedom, even in its noblest form, is a negative quality, and the word is apt to bear different meanings in Bengal and Rhodesia and Australia.

States, however, constitute only one among many types of political entities. As soon as any body of men have been grouped under a common political name, that name may acquire emotional associations as well as an intellectually analysable meaning. For the convenience, for instance, of local government the suburbs of Birmingham are divided into separate boroughs. Partly because these boroughs occupy the site of ancient villages, partly because football teams of Scotch professionals are named after them, partly because human emotions must have something to attach themselves to, they are said to be developing a fierce local patriotism, and West Bromwich is said to hate Aston as the Blues hated the Greens in the Byzantine theatre. In London, largely under the influence of the Birmingham instance, twenty-nine new boroughs were created in 1899, with names—at least in the case of the City of Westminster—deliberately selected in order to revive half-forgotten emotional associations. However, in spite of Mr. Chesterton's prophecy in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, very few Londoners have learnt to feel or think primarily as citizens of their boroughs. Town Halls are built which they never see, coats of arms are invented which they would not recognise; and their boroughs are mere electoral wards in which they vote for a list of unknown names grouped under the general title adopted by their political party.

The party is, in fact, the most effective political entity in the modern national State. It has come into existence with the appearance of representative government on a large scale; its development has been unhampered by legal or constitutional traditions, and it represents the most vigorous attempt which has been made to adapt the form of our political institutions to the actual facts of human nature. In a modern State there may be ten million or more voters. Every one of them has an equal right to come forward as a candidate and to urge either as candidate or agitator the particular views which he may hold on any possible political question. But to each citizen, living as he does in the infinite stream of things, only a few of his ten million fellow-citizens could exist as separate objects of political thought or feeling, even if each one of them held only one opinion on one subject without change during his life. Something is required simpler and more permanent, something which can be loved and trusted, and which can be recognised at successive elections as being the same thing that was loved and trusted before; and a party is such a thing.

The origin of any particular party may be due to a deliberate intellectual process. It may be formed, as Burke said, by 'a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.'[17] But when a party has once come into existence its fortunes depend upon facts of human nature of which deliberate thought is only one. It is primarily a name, which, like other names, calls up when it is heard or seen an 'image' that shades imperceptibly into the voluntary realisation of its meaning. As in other cases, emotional reactions can be set up by the name and its automatic mental associations. It is the business of the party managers to secure that these automatic associations shall be as clear as possible, shall be shared by as large a number as possible, and shall call up as many and as strong emotions as possible. For this purpose nothing is more generally useful than the party colour. Our distant ancestors must have been able to recognise colour before they recognised language, and the simple and stronger emotions more easily attach themselves to a colour than to a word. The poor boy who died the other day with the ribbon of the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club on his pillow loved the colour itself with a direct and intimate affection.

[17] Thoughts on the Present Discontents (Macmillan, 1902), p. 81.

A party tune is equally automatic in its action, and, in the case of people with a musical 'ear,' even more effective than a party colour as an object of emotion. As long as the Marseillaise, which is now the national tune of France, was the party tune of the revolution its influence was enormous. Even now, outside of France, it is a very valuable party asset. It was a wise suggestion which an experienced political organiser made in the Westminster Gazette at the time of Gladstone's death, that part of the money collected in his honour should be spent in paying for the composition of the best possible marching tune, which should be identified for all time with the Liberal Party.[18] One of the few mistakes made by the very able men who organised Mr. Chamberlain's Tariff Reform Campaign was their failure to secure even a tolerably good tune.

[18] Westminster Gazette, June 11, 1898.

Only less automatic than those of colour or tune come the emotional associations called up by the first and simplest meaning of the word or words used for the party name. A Greek father called his baby 'Very Glorious' or 'Good in Counsel,' and the makers of parties in the same way choose names whose primary meanings possess established emotional associations. From the beginning of the existence and activity of a party new associations are, however, being created which tend to take the place, in association, of the original meaning of the name. No one in America when he uses the terms Republican or Democrat thinks of their dictionary meanings. Any one, indeed, who did so would have acquired a mental habit as useless and as annoying as the habit of reading Greek history with a perpetual recognition of the dictionary meanings of names like Aristobulus and Theocritus. Long and precise names which make definite assertions as to party policy are therefore soon shortened into meaningless syllables with new associations derived from the actual history of the party. The Constitutional Democrats in Russia become Cadets, and the Independent Labour Party becomes the I.L.P. On the other hand, the less conscious emotional associations which are automatically excited by less precise political names may last much longer. The German National Liberals were valuable allies for Bismarck during a whole generation because their name vaguely suggested a combination of patriotism and freedom. When the mine-owners in the Transvaal decided some years ago to form a political party they chose, probably after considerable discussion, the name of 'Progressive.' It was an excellent choice. In South Africa the original associations of the word were apparently soon superseded, but elsewhere it long suggested that Sir Percy Fitzpatrick and his party had the same sort of democratic sympathies as Mr. M'Kinnon Wood and his followers on the London County Council. No one speaking to an audience whose critical and logical faculties were fully aroused would indeed contend that because a certain body of people had chosen to call themselves Progressives, therefore a vote against them was necessarily a vote against progress. But in the dim and shadowy region of emotional association a good name, if its associations are sufficiently subconscious, has a real political value.

Conversely, the opponents of a party attempt to label it with a name that will excite feelings of opposition. The old party terms of Whig and Tory are striking instances of such names given by opponents and lasting perhaps half a century before they lost their original abusive associations. More modern attempts have been less successful, because they have been more precise. 'Jingo' had some of the vague suggestiveness of an effectively bad name, but 'Separatist,' 'Little Englander,' 'Food Taxer,' remain as assertions to be consciously accepted or rejected.

The whole relation between party entities and political impulse can perhaps be best illustrated from the art of advertisement. In advertisement the intellectual process can be watched apart from its ethical implications, and advertisement and party politics are becoming more and more closely assimilated in method. The political poster is placed side by side with the trade or theatrical poster on the hoardings, it is drawn by the same artist and follows the same empirical rules of art. Let us suppose therefore that a financier thinks that there is an opening for a large advertising campaign in connection, say, with the tea trade. The actual tea-leaves in the world are as varied and unstable as the actual political opinions of mankind. Every leaf in every tea-garden is different from every other leaf, and a week of damp weather may change the whole stock in any warehouse. What therefore should the advertiser do to create a commercial 'entity,' a 'tea' which men can think and feel about? A hundred years ago he would have made a number of optimistic and detailed statements with regard to his opportunities and methods of trade. He would have printed in the newspapers a statement that 'William Jones, assisted by a staff of experienced buyers, will attend the tea-sales of the East India Company, and will lay in parcels from the best Chinese Gardens, which he will retail to his customers at a profit of not more than five per centum.' This, however, is an open appeal to the critical intellect, and by the critical intellect it would now be judged. We should not consider Mr. Jones to be an unbiassed witness as to the excellence of his choice, or think that he would have sufficient motive to adhere to his pledge about his rate of profit if he thought he could get more.

Nowadays, therefore, such an advertiser would practice on our automatic and subconscious associations. He would choose some term, say 'Parramatta Tea,' which would produce in most men a vague suggestion of the tropical East, combined with the subconscious memory of a geography lesson on Australia. He would then proceed to create in connection with the word an automatic picture-image having previous emotional associations of its own. By the time that a hundred thousand pounds had been cleverly spent, no one in England would be able to see the word 'Parramatta' on a parcel without a vague impulse to buy, founded on a day-dream recollection of his grandmother, or of the British fleet, or of a pretty young English matron, or of any other subject that the advertiser had chosen for its association with the emotions of trust or affection. When music plays a larger part in English public education it may be possible to use it effectively for advertisement, and a 'Parramatta Motif' would in that case appear in all the pantomimes, in connection, say, with a song about the Soldier's Return, and would be squeaked by a gramophone in every grocer's shop.

This instance has the immense advantage, as an aid to clearness of thought, that up to this point no Parramatta Tea exists, and no one has even settled what sort of tea shall be provided under that name. Parramatta tea is still a commercial entity pure and simple. It may later on be decided to sell very poor tea at a large profit until the original associations of the name have been gradually superseded by the association of disappointment. Or it may be decided to experiment by selling different teas under that name in different places, and to push the sale of the flavour which 'takes on.' But there are other attractive names of teas on the hoardings, with associations of babies, and bull-dogs, and the Tower of London. If it is desired to develop a permanent trade in competition with these it will probably be found wisest to supply tea of a fairly uniform quality, and with a distinctive flavour which may act as its 'meaning.' The great difficulty will then come when there is a change of public taste, and when the sales fall off because the chosen flavour no longer pleases. The directors may think it safest to go on selling the old flavour to a diminishing number of customers, or they may gradually substitute another flavour, taking the risk that the number of housewives who say, 'This is not the real Parramatta Tea,' may be balanced by the number of those who say, 'Parramatta Tea has improved.' If people will not buy the old flavour at all, and prefer to buy the new flavour under a new name, the Parramatta Tea Company must be content to disappear, like a religion which has made an unsuccessful attempt to put new wine into old bottles.

All these conditions are as familiar to the party politician as they are to the advertiser. The party candidate is, at his first appearance, to most of his constituents merely a packet with the name of Liberal or Conservative upon it. That name has associations of colour and music, of traditional habit and affection, which, when once formed, exist independently of the party policy. Unless he bears the party label—unless he is, as the Americans say, a 'regular' candidate—not only will those habits and affections be cut off from him, but he will find it extraordinarily difficult to present himself as a tangible entity to the electors at all. A proportion of the electors, varying greatly at different times and at different places, will vote for the 'regular' nominee of their party without reference to his programme, though to the rest of them, and always to the nominating committee, he must also present a programme which can be identified with the party policy. But, in any case, as long as he is a party candidate, he must remember that it is in that character that he speaks and acts. The party prepossessions and party expectations of his constituents alone make it possible for them to think and feel with him. When he speaks there is between him and his audience the party mask, larger and less mobile than his own face, like the mask which enabled actors to be seen and heard in the vast open-air theatres of Greece. If he can no longer act the part with sincerity he must either leave the stage or present himself in the mask of another party.

Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation which they control is an entity with an existence in the memory and emotions of the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions. This does not mean that party leaders cannot be sincere. As individuals they can indeed only preserve their political life by being in constant readiness to lose it. Sometimes they must even risk the existence of their party itself. When Sir Robert Peel was converted to Free Trade in 1845, he had to decide whether he and his friends should shatter the Tory Party by leaving it, or should so transform its policy that it might not be recognised, even in the half-conscious logic of habit and association, as that entity for which men had voted and worked four years before. In either case Peel was doing something other and more serious than the expression of his individual opinion on a question of the moment. And yet, if, recognising this, he had gone on advocating corn duties for the sake of his party, his whole personal force as a politician, and therefore even his party value, would have been lost.

If a celestial intelligence were now to look down from heaven on the earth with the power of observing every fact about all human beings at once, he might ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, what that Socialism is which influences so many lives? He might answer himself with a definition which could be clumsily translated as 'a movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon three main factors, the growing political power of the working classes, the growing social sympathy of many members of all classes, and the belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social arrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberate contrivance.' He would see men trying to forward this movement by proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective administration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfully adapted to the facts of human existence and some would in the end be abandoned, either because no nation could be persuaded to try them or because when tried they failed. But he would also see that this definition of a many-sided and ever-varying movement drawn by abstraction from innumerable socialistic proposals and desires is not a description of 'Socialism' as it exists for the greater number of its supporters. The need of something which one may love and for which one may work has created for thousands of working men a personified 'Socialism,' a winged goddess with stern eyes and drawn sword to be the hope of the world and the protector of those that suffer. The need of some engine of thought which one may use with absolute faith and certainty has also created another Socialism, not a personification, but a final and authoritative creed. Such a creed appeared in England in 1884, and William Morris took it down in his beautiful handwriting from Mr. Hyndman's lectures. It was the revelation which made a little dimly educated working man say to me three years later, with tears of genuine humility in his eyes, 'How strange it is that this glorious truth has been hidden from all the clever and learned men of the world and shown to me.'

Meanwhile Socialism is always a word, a symbol used in common speech and writing. A hundred years hence it may have gone the way of its predecessors—Leveller, Saint-Simonism, Communism, Chartism—and may survive only in histories of a movement which has since undergone other transformations and borne other names. It may, on the other hand, remain, as the Republic has remained in France, to be the title on coins and public buildings of a movement which after many disappointments and disillusionments has succeeded in establishing itself as a government.

But the use of a word in common speech is only the resultant of its use by individual men and women, and particularly by those who accept it as a party name. Each one of them, as long as the movement is really alive, will find that while the word must be used, because otherwise the movement will have no political existence, yet its use creates a constant series of difficult problems in conduct. Any one who applies the name to himself or others in a sense so markedly different from common use as to make it certain or probable that he is creating a false impression is rightly charged with want of ordinary veracity. And yet there are cases where enormous practical results may depend upon keeping wide the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed. The 'Modernist' Roman Catholic who has studied the history of religion uses the term 'Catholic Church' to mean a society which has gone through various intellectual stages in the past, and which depends for its vitality upon the existence of reasonable freedom of change in the future. He therefore calls himself a Catholic. To the Pope and his advisers, on the other hand, the Church is an unchanging miracle based on an unchanging revelation. Father Tyrrell, when he says that he 'believes' in the Catholic Church, though he obviously disbelieves in the actual occurrence of most of the facts which constitute the original revelation, seems to them to be simply a liar, who is stealing their name for his own fraudulent purposes. They can no more understand him than can the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Democrats understand Bernstein and his Modernist allies. Bernstein himself, on the other hand, has to choose whether he ought to try to keep open the common use of the name Socialist, or whether in the end he will have to abandon it, because his claim to use it merely creates bad feeling and confusion of thought.

Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and power of expression is, so to speak, a party—a political entity—in himself. He may fashion a permanent and recognisable mask for himself as 'Honest John' or 'The Grand Old Man.' But this can as a rule only be done by those who learn the main condition of their task, the fact that if an individual statesman's intellectual career is to exist for the mass of the present public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence to unchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent. The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towards politics is like a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes to be clearly photographed must stand before it in the same attitude for a long time. A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark.

'Change of opinion,' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a course which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But it is always to be watched with vigilance; always to be challenged and put upon its trial.'[19] Most statesmen avoid this choice between the loss of force resulting from a public change of opinion, and the loss of character resulting from the public persistence in an opinion privately abandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their own conclusions, but by a delay, which often seems cowardly and absurd, in the public expression of their thoughts upon all questions except those which are ripe for immediate action. The written or reported word remains, and becomes part of that entity outside himself which the stateman is always building or destroying or transforming.

[19] Gleanings, vol. vii. p. 100, quoted in Morley's Life, vol. i. p. 211.

The same conditions affect other political entities besides parties and statesmen. If a newspaper is to live as a political force it must impress itself on men's minds as holding day by day to a consistent view. The writers, not only from editorial discipline, but from the instinctive desire to be understood, write in the character of their paper's personality. If it is sold to a proprietor holding or wishing to advocate different opinions, it must either frankly proclaim itself as a new thing or must make it appear by slow and solemn argumentative steps that the new attitude is a necessary development of the old. It is therefore rightly felt that a capitalist who buys a paper for the sake of using its old influence to strengthen a new movement is doing something to be judged by other moral standards than those which apply to the purchase of so much printing-machinery and paper. He may be destroying something which has been a stable and intelligible entity for thousands of plain people living in an otherwise unintelligible world, and which has collected round it affection and trust as real as was ever inspired by an orator or a monarch.



CHAPTER III

NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE IN POLITICS

The assumption—which is so closely interwoven with our habits of political and economic thought—that men always act on a reasoned opinion as to their interests, may be divided into two separate assumptions: first, that men always act on some kind of inference as to the best means of reaching a preconceived end, and secondly, that all inferences are of the same kind, and are produced by a uniform process of 'reasoning.'

In the two preceding chapters I dealt with the first assumption, and attempted to show that it is important for a politician to realise that men do not always act on inferences as to means and ends. I argued that men often act in politics under the immediate stimulus of affection and instinct, and that affection and interest may be directed towards political entities which are very different from those facts in the world around us which we can discover by deliberate observation and analysis.

In this chapter I propose to consider the second assumption, and to inquire how far it is true that men, when they do form inferences as to the result of their political actions, always form them by a process of reasoning.

In such an inquiry one meets the preliminary difficulty that it is very hard to arrive at a clear definition of reasoning. Any one who watches the working of his own mind will find that it is by no means easy to trace these sharp distinctions between various mental states, which seem so obvious when they are set out in little books on psychology. The mind of man is like a harp, all of whose strings throb together; so that emotion, impulse, inference, and the special kind of inference called reasoning, are often simultaneous and intermingled aspects of a single mental experience.

This is especially true in moments of action and excitement; but when we are sitting in passive contemplation we would often find it hard to say whether our successive states of consciousness are best described as emotions or inferences. And when our thought clearly belongs to the type of inference it is often hard to say whether its steps are controlled by so definite a purpose of discovering truth that we are entitled to call it reasoning.

Even when we think with effort and with a definite purpose, we do not always draw inferences or form beliefs of any kind. If we forget a name we say the alphabet over to ourselves and pause at each letter to see if the name we want will be suggested to us. When we receive bad news we strive to realise it by allowing successive mental associations to arise of themselves, and waiting to discover what the news will mean for us. A poet broods with intense creative effort on the images which appear in his mind and arranges them, not in order to discover truth, but in order to attain an artistic and dramatic end. In Prospero's great speech in The Tempest the connection between the successive images—the baseless fabric of this vision—the cloud-capped towers—the gorgeous palaces—the solemn temples—the great globe itself—is, for instance, one not of inference but of reverie, heightened by creative effort, and subordinated to poetic intention.

Most of the actual inferences which we draw during any day belong, indeed, to a much humbler type of thought than do some of the higher forms of non-inferential association. Many of our inferences, like the quasi-instinctive impulses which they accompany and modify, take place when we are making no conscious effort at all. In such a purely instinctive action as leaping backwards from a falling stone, the impulse to leap and the inference that there is danger, are simply two names for a single automatic and unconscious process. We can speak of instinctive inference as well as of instinctive impulse; we draw, for instance, by an instinctive mental process, inferences as to the distance and solidity of objects from the movements of our eye-muscles in focussing, and from the difference between the images on our two retinas. We are unaware of the method by which we arrive at these inferences, and even when we know that the double photograph in the stereoscope is flat, or that the conjurer has placed two converging sheets of looking-glass beneath his table, we can only say that the photograph 'looks' solid, or that we 'seem' to see right under the table.

The whole process of inference, rational or non-rational, is indeed built up from the primary fact that one mental state may call up another, either because the two have been associated together in the history of the individual, or because a connection between the two has proved useful in the history of the race. If a man and his dog stroll together down the street they turn to the right hand or the left, hesitate or hurry in crossing the road, recognise and act upon the bicycle bell and the cabman's shout, by using the same process of inference to guide the same group of impulses. Their inferences are for the most part effortless, though sometimes they will both be seen to pause until they have settled some point by wordless deliberation. It is only when a decision has to be taken affecting the more distant purposes of his life that the man enters on a region of definitely rational thought where the dog cannot follow him, in which he uses words, and is more or less conscious of his own logical methods.

But the weakness of inference by automatic association as an instrument of thought consists in the fact that either of a pair of associated ideas may call up the other without reference to their logical connection. The effect calls up the cause as freely as the cause calls up the effect. A patient under a hypnotic trance is wonderfully rapid and fertile in drawing inferences, but he hunts the scent backward as easily as he does forward. Put a dagger in his hand and he believes that he has committed a murder. The sight of an empty plate convinces him that he has had dinner. If left to himself he will probably go through routine actions well enough. But any one who understands his condition can make him act absurdly.

In the same way when we dream we draw absurd inferences by association. The feeling of discomfort due to slight indigestion produces a belief that we are about to speak to a large audience and have mislaid our notes, or are walking along the Brighton Parade in a night-shirt. Even when men are awake, those parts of their mind to which for the moment they are not giving full attention are apt to draw equally unfounded inferences. A conjurer who succeeds in keeping the attention of his audience concentrated on the observation of what he is doing with his right hand can make them draw irrational conclusions from the movements of his left hand. People in a state of strong religious emotion sometimes become conscious of a throbbing sound in their ears, due to the increased force of their circulation. An organist, by opening the thirty-two foot pipe, can create the same sensation, and can thereby induce in the congregation a vague and half-conscious belief that they are experiencing religious emotion.

The political importance of all this consists in the fact that most of the political opinions of most men are the result, not of reasoning tested by experience, but of unconscious or half-conscious inference fixed by habit. It is indeed mainly in the formation of tracks of thought that habit shows its power in politics. In our other activities habit is largely a matter of muscular adaptation, but the bodily movements of politics occur so seldom that nothing like a habit can be set up by them. One may see a respectable voter, whose political opinions have been smoothed and polished by the mental habits of thirty years, fumbling over the act of marking and folding his ballot paper like a child with its first copybook.

Some men even seem to reverence most those of their opinions whose origin has least to do with deliberate reasoning. When Mr. Barrie's Bowie Haggart said: 'I am of opeenion that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion,'[20] he was comparing the merely rational conclusion which might have resulted from a reading of Burns's works with the conviction about them which he found ready-made in his mind, and which was the more sacred to him and more intimately his own, because he did not know how it was produced.

[20] Auld Licht Idylls, p. 220.

Opinion thus unconsciously formed is a fairly safe guide in the affairs of our daily life. The material world does not often go out of its way to deceive us, and our final convictions are the resultant of many hundreds of independent fleeting inferences, of which the valid are more numerous and more likely to survive than the fallacious. But even in our personal affairs our memory is apt to fade, and we can often remember the association between two ideas, while forgetting the cause which created that association. We discover in our mind a vague impression that Simpson is a drunkard, and cannot recollect whether we ever had any reason to believe it, or whether some one once told us that Simpson had a cousin who invented a cure for drunkenness. When the connection is remembered in a telling phrase, and when its origin has never been consciously noticed, we may find ourselves with a really vivid belief for which we could, if cross-examined, give no account whatever. When, for instance, we have heard an early-Victorian Bishop called 'Soapy Sam' half a dozen times we get a firm conviction of his character without further evidence.

Under ordinary circumstances not much harm is done by this fact; because a name would not be likely to 'catch on' unless a good many people really thought it appropriate, and unless it 'caught on' we should not be likely to hear it more than once or twice. But in politics, as in the conjuring trade, it is often worth while for some people to take a great deal of trouble in order to produce such an effect without waiting for the idea to enforce itself by merely accidental repetition. I have already said that political parties try to give each other bad names by an organised system of mental suggestion. If the word 'Wastrel,' for instance, appears on the contents bills of the Daily Mail one morning as a name for the Progressives during a County Council election, a passenger riding on an omnibus from Putney to the Bank will see it half-consciously at least a hundred times, and will have formed a fairly stable mental association by the end of the journey. If he reflected, he would know that only one person has once decided to use the word, but he does not reflect, and the effect on him is the same as if a hundred persons had used it independently of each other. The contents-bills, indeed, of the newspapers, which were originally short and pithy merely from considerations of space, have developed in a way which threatens to turn our streets (like the advertisement pages of an American magazine) into a psychological laboratory for the unconscious production of permanent associations. 'Another German Insult,' 'Keir Hardie's Crime,' 'Balfour Backs Down,' are intended to stick and do stick in the mind as ready-made opinions.

In all this again the same rule holds as in the production of impulse. Things that are nearer sense, nearer to our more ancient evolutionary past, produce a readier inference as well as a more compelling impulse. When a new candidate on his first appearance smiles at his constituents exactly as if he were an old friend, not only does he appeal, as I said in an earlier chapter, to an ancient and immediate instinct of human affection, but he produces at the same time a shadowy belief that he is an old friend; and his agent may even imply this, provided that he says nothing definite enough to arouse critical and rational attention. By the end of the meeting one can safely go as far as to call for three cheers for 'good old Jones.'[21]

[21] Three-quarters of the art of the trained salesman depends upon his empirical knowledge of this group of psychological facts. A small girl of my acquaintance, explaining why she had brought back from her first independent shopping expedition a photograph frame which she herself found to be distressing, said: 'The shopman seemed to suppose I had chosen it, and so I paid for it and came away.' But her explanation was the result of memory and reflection. At the moment, in a shadowy way which was sufficient for the shopman, she supposed that she had chosen it.

Mr. G.K. Chesterton some years ago quoted from a magazine article on American elections a sentence which said: 'A little sound common-sense often goes further with an audience of American working men than much high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential election.'[22] The 'sound common-sense' consisted, not, as Mr. Chesterton pretended to believe, in the presentation of the hammering as a logical argument, but in the orator's knowledge of the way in which force is given to non-logical inference and his willingness to use that knowledge.

[22] Heretics, p. 122.

When a vivid association has been once formed it sinks into the mass of our mental experience, and may then undergo developments and transformations with which deliberate ratiocination had very little to do. I have been told that when an English agitation against the importation of Chinese contract labour into South Africa was proposed, an important personage said that 'there was not a vote in it.' But the agitation was set on foot, and was based on a rational argument that the conditions enacted by the Ordinance amounted to a rather cruel kind of slavery imposed upon unusually intelligent Asiatics. Any one, however, who saw much of politics in the winter of 1905-6 must have noticed that the pictures of Chinamen on the hoardings aroused among very many of the voters an immediate hatred of the Mongolian racial type.

This hatred was transferred to the Conservative party, and towards the end of the general election of 1906 a picture of a Chinaman thrown suddenly on a lantern screen before a working-class audience would have aroused an instantaneous howl of indignation against Mr. Balfour.

After the election, however, the memory of the Chinese faces on the posters tended slowly to identify itself, in the minds of the Conservatives, with the Liberals who had used them. I had at the general election worked in a constituency in which many such posters were displayed by my side, and where we were beaten. A year later I stood for the London County Council in the same constituency. An hour before the close of the poll I saw, with the unnatural clearness of polling-day fatigue, a large white face at the window of the ward committee-room, while a hoarse voice roared: 'Where's your bloody pigtail? We cut it off last time: and now we'll put it round your bloody neck and strangle you.'

In February 1907, during the County Council election, there appeared on the London hoardings thousands of posters which were intended to create a belief that the Progressive members on the Council made their personal livelihood by defrauding the ratepayers. If a statement had been published to that effect it would have been an appeal to the critical intellect, and could have been met by argument, or in the law courts. But the appeal was made to the process of subconscious inference. The poster consisted of a picture of a man supposed to represent the Progressive Party, pointing a foreshortened finger and saying, with sufficient ambiguity to escape the law of libel: 'It's your money we want.' Its effectiveness depended on its exploitation of the fact that most men judge of the truth of a charge of fraud by a series of rapid and unconscious inferences from the appearance of the man accused. The person represented was, if judged by the shape of his hat, the fashion of his watch-chain and ring, the neglected condition of his teeth, and the redness of his nose, obviously a professional sharper. He was, I believe, drawn by an American artist, and his face and clothes had a vaguely American appearance, which, in the region of subconscious association, further suggested to most onlookers the idea of Tammany Hall. This poster was brilliantly successful, but, now that the election is over, it, like the Chinese pictures, seems likely to continue a career of irrational transference. One notices that one Progressive evening paper uses a reduced copy of it whenever it wishes to imply that the Moderates are influenced by improper pecuniary motives. I myself find that it tends to associate itself in my mind with the energetic politician who induced the railway companies and others to pay for it, and who, for all I know, may in his own personal appearance recall the best traditions of the English gentleman.

Writers on the 'psychology of the crowd' have pointed out the effect of excitement and numbers in substituting non-rational for rational inference. Any cause, however, which prevents a man from giving full attention to his mental processes may produce the phenomena of non-rational inference in an extreme degree. I have often watched in some small sub-committee the method by which either of the two men with a real genius for committee work whom I know could control his colleagues. The process was most successful towards the end of an afternoon, when the members were tired and somewhat dazed with the effort of following a rapid talker through a mass of unfamiliar detail. If at that point the operator slightly quickened the flow of his information, and slightly emphasised the assumption that he was being thoroughly understood, he could put some at least of his colleagues into a sort of waking trance, in which they would have cheerfully assented to the proposition that the best means of securing, e.g., the permanence of private schools was a large and immediate increase in the number of public schools.

It is sometimes argued that such non-rational inferences are merely the loose fringe of our political thinking, and that responsible decisions in politics, whether they are right or wrong, are always the result of conscious ratiocination. American political writers, for instance, of the traditional intellectualist type are sometimes faced with the fact that the delegates to national party conventions, when they select candidates and adopt programmes for Presidential elections, are not in a condition in which they are likely to examine the logical validity of their own mental processes. Such writers fall back on the reflection that the actual choice of President is decided not by excited conventions, but by voters coming straight from the untroubled sanctuary of the American home.

President Garfield illustrated this point of view in an often-quoted passage of his speech to the Republican Convention of 1880:—

'I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man. But I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured.... Not here, in this brilliant circle where fifteen thousand men and women are gathered, is the destiny of the Republic to be decreed for the next four years ... but by four millions of Republican firesides, where the thoughtful voters, with wives and children about them, with the calm thoughts inspired by love of home and country, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, and knowledge of the great men who have adorned and blessed our nation in days gone by. There God prepares the verdict that shall determine the wisdom of our work to-night.'[23]

[23] Life of J.A. Garfield, by R. H. Conwell, p. 328.

But the divine oracle, whether in America or in England, turns out, too often, only to be a tired householder, reading the headlines and personal paragraphs of his party newspaper, and half-consciously forming mental habits of mean suspicion or national arrogance. Sometimes, indeed, during an election, one feels that it is, after all, in big meetings, where big thoughts can be given with all their emotional force, that the deeper things of politics have the best chance of recognition.

The voter as he reads his newspaper may adopt by suggestion, and make habitual by repetition, not only political opinions but whole trains of political argument; and he does not necessarily feel the need of comparing them with other trains of argument already in his mind. A lawyer or a doctor will on quite general principles argue for the most extreme trade-unionism in his own profession, while he thoroughly agrees with a denunciation of trade-unionism addressed to him as a railway shareholder or ratepayer. The same audience can sometimes be led by way of 'parental rights' to cheer for denominational religious instruction, and by way of 'religious freedom' to hoot it. The most skilled political observer that I know, speaking of an organised newspaper attack, said, 'As far as I can make out every argument used in attack and in defence has its separate and independent effect. They hardly ever meet, even if they are brought to bear upon the same mind.' From the purely tactical point of view there is therefore much to be said for Lord Lyndhurst's maxim, 'Never defend yourself before a popular assemblage, except with and by retorting the attack; the hearers, in the pleasure which the assault gives them, will forget the previous charge.'[24]

[24] Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. i. p. 122.



CHAPTER IV

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?