'Science,' however, is associated by most men, even in Europe, only with things exterior to themselves, things that can be examined by test-tubes and microscopes. They are dimly aware that there exists a science of the mind, but that knowledge suggests to them, as yet, no ideal of conduct.

It is true that in America, where politicians have learnt more successfully than elsewhere the art of controlling other men's unconscious impulses from without, there have been of late some noteworthy declarations as to the need of conscious control from within. Some of those especially who have been trained in scientific method at the American Universities are now attempting to extend to politics the scientific conception of intellectual conduct. But it seems to me that much of their preaching misses its mark, because it takes the old form of an opposition between 'reason' and 'passion.' The President of the University of Yale said, for instance, the other day in a powerful address, 'Every man who publishes a newspaper which appeals to the emotions rather than to the intelligence of its readers ... attacks our political life at a most vulnerable point.'[60] If forty years ago Huxley had in this way merely preached 'intelligence' as against 'emotion' in the exploration of nature, few would have listened to him. Men will not take up the 'intolerable disease of thought' unless their feelings are first stirred, and the strength of the idea of Science has been that it does touch men's feelings, and draws motive power for thought from the passions of reverence, of curiosity, and of limitless hope.

[60] A. T. Hadley in Munsey's Magazine, 1907.

The President of Yale seems to imply that in order to reason men must become passionless. He would have done better to have gone back to that section of the Republic where Plato teaches that the supreme purpose of the State realises itself in men's hearts by a 'harmony' which strengthens the motive force of passion, because the separate passions no longer war among themselves, but are concentrated on an end discovered by the intellect.[61]

[61] Cf. Plato's Republic, Book IV.

In politics, indeed, the preaching of reason as opposed to feeling is peculiarly ineffective, because the feelings of mankind not only provide a motive for political thought but also fix the scale of values which must be used in political judgment. One finds oneself when trying to realise this, falling back (perhaps because one gets so little help from current language) upon Plato's favourite metaphor of the arts. In music the noble and the base composer are not divided by the fact that the one appeals to the intellect and the other to the feelings of his hearers. Both must make their appeal to feeling, and both must therefore realise intensely the feelings of their audience, and stimulate intensely their own feelings. The conditions under which they succeed or fail are fixed, for both, by facts in our emotional nature which they cannot change. One, however, appeals by easy tricks to part only of the nature of his hearers, while the other appeals to their whole nature, requiring of those who would follow him that for the time their intellect should sit enthroned among the strengthened and purified passions.

But what, besides mere preaching, can be done to spread the conception of such a harmony of reason and passion, of thought and impulse, in political motive? One thinks of education, and particularly of scientific education. But the imaginative range which is necessary if students are to transfer the conception of intellectual conduct from the laboratory to the public meeting is not common. It would perhaps more often exist if part of all scientific education were given to such a study of the lives of scientific men as would reveal their mental history as well as their discoveries, if, for instance, the young biologist were set to read the correspondence between Darwin and Lyell, when Lyell was preparing to abandon the conclusions on which his great reputation was based, and suspending his deepest religious convictions, in the cause of a truth not yet made clear.

But most school children, if they are to learn the facts on which the conception of intellectual conduct depends, must learn them even more directly. I myself believe that a very simple course on the well-ascertained facts of psychology would, if patiently taught, be quite intelligible to any children of thirteen or fourteen who had received some small preliminary training in scientific method. Mr. William James's chapter on Habit in his Principles of Psychology would, for instance, if the language were somewhat simplified, come well within their range. A town child, again, lives nowadays in the constant presence of the psychological art of advertisement, and could easily be made to understand the reason why, when he is sent to get a bar of soap, he feels inclined to get that which is most widely advertised, and what relation his inclination has to that mental process which is most likely to result in the buying of good soap. The basis of knowledge necessary for the conception of intellectual duty could further be enlarged at school by the study in pure literature of the deeper experiences of the mind. A child of twelve might understand Carlyle's Essay on Burns if it were carefully read in class, and a good sixth form might learn much from Wordsworth's Prelude.

The whole question, however, of such deliberate instruction in the emotional and intellectual facts of man's nature as may lead men to conceive of the co-ordination of reason and passion as a moral ideal is one on which much steady thinking and observation is still required. The instincts of sex, for instance, are becoming in all civilised countries more and more the subject of serious thought. Conduct based upon a calculation of results is in that sphere claiming to an ever increasing degree control over mere impulse. Yet no one is sure that he has found the way to teach the barest facts as to sexual instinct either before or during the period of puberty, without prematurely exciting the instincts themselves.

Doctors, again, are more and more recognising that nutrition depends not only upon the chemical composition of food but upon our appetite, and that we can become aware of our appetite and to some extent control and direct it by our will. Sir William Macewen said not long ago, 'We cannot properly digest our food unless we give it a warm welcome from a free mind with the prospect of enjoyment.'[62] But it would not be easy to create by teaching that co-ordination of the intellect and impulse at which Sir William Macewen hints. If you tell a boy that one reason why food is wholesome is because we like it, and that it is therefore our duty to like that food which other facts of our nature have made both wholesome and likeable, you may find yourself stimulating nothing except his sense of humour.

[62] British Medical Journal, Oct. 8, 1904.

So, in the case of the political emotions, it is very easy to say that the teacher should aim first at making his pupils conscious of the existence of those emotions, then at increasing their force, and finally at subordinating them to the control of deliberate reasoning on the consequences of political action. But it is extraordinarily difficult to discover how this can be done under the actual conditions of school teaching. Mr. Acland, when he was Education Minister in 1893, introduced into the Evening School Code a syllabus of instruction on the Life and Duties of the Citizen. It consisted of statements of the part played in social life by the rate-collector, the policeman, and so on, accompanied by a moral for each section, such as 'serving personal interest is not enough,' 'need of public spirit and intelligence for good Government,' 'need of honesty in giving a vote,' 'the vote a trust as well as a right.' Almost every school publisher rushed out a text-book on the subject, and many School Boards encouraged its introduction; and yet the experiment, after a careful trial, was an acknowledged failure. The new text-books (all of which I had at the time to review), constituted perhaps the most worthless collection of printed pages that have ever occupied the same space on a bookshelf, and the lessons, with their alternations of instruction and edification, failed to stimulate any kind of interest in the students. If our youths and maidens are to be stirred as deeply by the conception of the State as were the pupils of Socrates, teachers and the writers of text-books must apparently approach their task with something of Socrates' passionate love of truth and of the searching courage of his dialectic.

If again, at an earlier age, children still in school are to be taught what Mr. Wells calls 'the sense of the State,'[63] we may, by remembering Athens, get some indication of the conditions on which success depends. Children will not learn to love London while getting figures by heart as to the millions of her inhabitants and the miles of her sewers. If their love is to be roused by words, the words must be as beautiful and as simple as the chorus in praise of Athens in the Oedipus Coloneus. But such words are not written except by great poets who actually feel what they write, and perhaps before we have a poet who loves London as Sophocles loved Athens it may be necessary to make London itself somewhat more lovely.

[63] The future in America, chapter ix.

The emotions of children are, however, most easily reached not by words but by sights and sounds. If therefore, they are to love the State, they should either be taken to see the noblest aspects of the State or those aspects should be brought to them. And a public building or ceremony, if it is to impress the unflinching eyes of childhood, must, like the buildings of Ypres or Bruges or the ceremonies of Japan, be in truth impressive. The beautiful aspect of social life is fortunately not to be found in buildings and ceremonies only, and no Winchester boy used to come back uninfluenced from a visit to Father Dolling in the slums of Landport; though boys' eyes are even quicker to see what is genuine in personal motive than in external pomp.

More subtle are the difficulties in the way of the deliberate intensification by adult politicians of their own political emotions. A life-long worker for education on the London School Board once told me that when he wearied of his work—when the words of reports become mere words, and the figures in the returns mere figures—he used to go down to a school and look closely at the faces of the children in class after class, till the freshness of his impulse came back. But for a man who is about to try such an experiment on himself even the word 'emotion' is dangerous. The worker in full work should desire cold and steady not hot and disturbed impulse, and should perhaps keep the emotional stimulus of his energy, when it is once formed, for the most part below the level of full consciousness. The surgeon in a hospital is stimulated by every sight and sound in the long rows of beds, and would be less devoted to his work if he only saw a few patients brought to his house. But all that he is conscious of during the working hours is the one purpose of healing, on which the half-conscious impulses of brain and eye and hand are harmoniously concentrated.

Perhaps indeed most adult politicians would gain rather by becoming conscious of new vices than of new virtues. Some day, for instance, the word 'opinion' itself may become the recognised name of the most dangerous political vice. Men may teach themselves by habit and association to suspect those inclinations and beliefs which, if they neglect the duty of thought, appear in their minds they know not how, and which, as long as their origin is not examined, can be created by any clever organiser who is paid to do so. The most easily manipulated State in the world would be one inhabited by a race of Nonconformist business men who never followed up a train of political reasoning in their lives, and who, as soon as they were aware of the existence of a strong political conviction in their minds, should announce that it was a matter of 'conscience' and therefore beyond the province of doubt or calculation.

But, it may be still asked, is it not Utopian to suppose that Plato's conception of the Harmony of the Soul—the intensification both of passion and of thought by their conscious co-ordination—can ever become a part of the general political ideals of a modern nation? Perhaps most men before the war between Russia and Japan would have answered, Yes. Many men would now answer, No. The Japanese are apparently in some respects less advanced in their conceptions of intellectual morality than, say, the French. One hears, for instance, of incidents which seem to show that liberty of thought is not always valued in Japanese universities. But both during the years of preparation for the war, and during the war itself, there was something in what one was told of the combined emotional and intellectual attitude of the Japanese, which to a European seemed wholly new. Napoleon contended against the 'ideologues' who saw things as they wished them to be, and until he himself submitted to his own illusions he ground them to powder. But we associate Napoleon's clearness of vision with personal selfishness. Here was a nation in which every private soldier outdid Napoleon in his determination to see in warfare not great principles nor picturesque traditions, but hard facts; and yet the fire of their patriotism was hotter than Gambetta's. Something of this may have been due to the inherited organisation of the Japanese race, but more seemed to be the effect of their mental environment. They had whole-heartedly welcomed that conception of Science which in Europe, where it was first elaborated, still struggles with older ideals. Science with them had allied, and indeed identified, itself with that idea of natural law which, since they learnt it through China from Hindustan, had always underlain their various religions.[64] They had acquired, therefore, a mental outlook which was determinist without being fatalist, and which combined the most absolute submission to Nature with untiring energy in thought and action.

[64] See Okakura, The Japanese Spirit (1905).

One would like to hope that in the West a similar fusion might take place between the emotional and philosophical traditions of religion, and the new conception of intellectual duty introduced by Science. The political effect of such a fusion would be enormous. But for the moment that hope is not easy. The inevitable conflict between old faith and new knowledge has produced, one fears, throughout Christendom, a division not only between the conclusions of religion and science, but also between the religious and the scientific habit of mind. The scientific men of to-day no longer dream of learning from an English Bishop, as their predecessors learnt from Bishop Butler, the doctrine of probability in conduct, the rule that while belief must never be fixed, must indeed always be kept open for the least indication of new evidence, action, where action is necessary, must be taken as resolutely on imperfect knowledge, if that is the best available, as on the most perfect demonstration. The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical will leave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out in long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organic evolution. Mental habits count for more in politics than do the acceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences. When an English clergyman sits at his breakfast-table reading his Times or Mail, his attitude towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his belief or doubt that he who uttered certain commandments about non-resistance and poverty was God Himself, but by the degree to which he has been trained to watch the causation of his opinions. As it is, Dr. Jameson's prepared manifesto on the Johannesburg Raid stirred most clergymen like a trumpet, and the suggestion that the latest socialist member of Parliament is not a gentleman, produces in them a feeling of genuine disgust and despair.

It may be therefore that the effective influence in politics of new ideals of intellectual conduct will have to wait for a still wider change of mental attitude, touching our life on many sides. Some day the conception of a harmony of thought and passion may take the place, in the deepest regions of our moral consciousness, of our present dreary confusion and barren conflicts. If that day comes much in politics which is now impossible will become possible. The politician will be able not only to control and direct in himself the impulses of whose nature he is more fully aware, but to assume in his hearers an understanding of his aim. Ministers and Members of Parliament may then find their most effective form of expression in that grave simplicity of speech which in the best Japanese State papers rings so strangely to our ears, and citizens may learn to look to their representatives, as the Japanese army looked to their generals, for that unbought effort of the mind by which alone man becomes at once the servant and the master of nature.



CHAPTER II

REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

But our growing knowledge of the causation of political impulse, and of the conditions of valid political reasoning, may be expected to change not only our ideals of political conduct but also the structure of our political institutions.

I have already pointed out that the democratic movement which produced the constitutions under which most civilised nations now live, was inspired by a purely intellectual conception of human nature which is becoming every year more unreal to us. If, it may then be asked, representative democracy was introduced under a mistaken view of the conditions of its working, will not its introduction prove to have been itself a mistake?

Any defender of representative democracy who rejects the traditional democratic philosophy can only answer this question by starting again from the beginning, and considering what are the ends representation is intended to secure, and how far those ends are necessary to good government.

The first end may be roughly indicated by the word consent. The essence of a representative government is that it depends on the periodically renewed consent of a considerable proportion of the inhabitants; and the degree of consent required may shade from the mere acceptance of accomplished facts, to the announcement of positive decisions taken by a majority of the citizens, which the government must interpret and obey.

The question, therefore, whether our adoption of representative democracy was a mistake, raises the preliminary question whether the consent of the members of a community is a necessary condition of good government. To this question Plato, who among the political philosophers of the ancient world stood at a point of view nearest to that of a modern psychologist, unhesitatingly answered, No. To him it was incredible that any stable polity could be based upon the mere fleeting shadows of popular opinion. He proposed, therefore, in all seriousness, that the citizens of his Republic should live under the despotic government of those who by 'slaving for it'[65] had acquired a knowledge of the reality which lay behind appearance. Comte, writing when modern science was beginning to feel its strength, made, in effect, the same proposal. Mr. H.G. Wells, in one of his sincere and courageous speculations, follows Plato. He describes a Utopia which is the result of the forcible overthrow of representative government by a voluntary aristocracy of trained men of science. He appeals, in a phrase consciously influenced by Plato's metaphysics, to 'the idea of a comprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behind the shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of the ostensible world....'[66] There are some signs, in America as well as in England, that an increasing number of those thinkers who are both passionately in earnest in their desire for social change and disappointed in their experience of democracy, may, as an alternative to the cold-blooded manipulation of popular impulse and thought by professional politicians, turn 'back to Plato'; and when once this question is started, neither our existing mental habits nor our loyalty to democratic tradition will prevent it from being fully discussed.

[65] [Greek: douleusanti te ktesei autou] (Republic, p. 494).

[66] Wells, A Modern Utopia, p. 263. 'I know of no case for the elective Democratic government of modern States that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes. It is manifest that upon countless important public issues there is no collective will, and nothing in the mind of the average man except blank indifference; that an electional system simply places power in the hands of the most skilful electioneers....' Wells, Anticipations, p. 147.

To such a discussion we English, as the rulers of India, can bring an experience of government without consent larger than any other that has ever been tried under the conditions of modern civilisation. The Covenanted Civil Service of British India consists of a body of about a thousand trained men. They are selected under a system which ensures that practically all of them will not only possess exceptional mental force, but will also belong to a race, which, in spite of certain intellectual limitations, is strong in the special faculty of government; and they are set to rule, under a system approaching despotism, a continent in which the most numerous races, in spite of their intellectual subtlety, have given little evidence of ability to govern.

Our Indian experiment shows, however, that all men, however carefully selected and trained, must still inhabit 'the ostensible world.' The Anglo-Indian civilian during some of his working hours—when he is toiling at a scheme of irrigation, or forestry, or famine-prevention—may live in an atmosphere of impersonal science which is far removed from the jealousies and superstitions of the villagers in his district. But an absolute ruler is judged not merely by his efficiency in choosing political means, but also by that outlook on life which decides his choice of ends; and the Anglo-Indian outlook on life is conditioned, not by the problem of British India as history will see it a thousand years hence, but by the facts of daily existence in the little government stations, with their trying climates, their narrow society, and the continual presence of an alien and possibly hostile race. We have not, it is true, yet followed the full rigour of Plato's system, and chosen the wives of Anglo-Indian officials by the same process as that through which their husbands pass. But it may be feared that even if we did so, the lady would still remain typical who said to Mr. Nevinson, 'To us in India a pro-native is simply a rank outsider.'[67]

[67] The Nation, December 21, 1907.

What is even more important is the fact that, because those whom the Anglo-Indian civilian governs are also living in the ostensible world, his choice of means on all questions involving popular opinion depends even more completely than if he were a party politician at home, not on things as they are, but on things as they can be made to seem. The avowed tactics of our empire in the East have therefore always been based by many of our high officials upon psychological and not upon logical considerations. We hold Durbars, and issue Proclamations, we blow men from guns, and insist stiffly on our own interpretation of our rights in dealing with neighbouring Powers, all with reference to 'the moral effect upon the native mind.' And, if half what is hinted at by some ultra-imperialist writers and talkers is true, racial and religious antipathy between Hindus and Mohammedans is sometimes welcomed, if not encouraged, by those who feel themselves bound at all costs to maintain our dominant position.

The problem of the relation between reason and opinion is therefore one that would exist at least equally in Plato's corporate despotism as in the most complete democracy. Hume, in a penetrating passage in his essay on The First Principles of Government, says: 'It is ... on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and the most popular.'[68] It is when a Czar or a bureaucracy find themselves forced to govern in opposition to a vague national feeling, which may at any moment create an overwhelming national purpose, that the facts of man's sublogical nature are most ruthlessly exploited. The autocrat then becomes the most unscrupulous of demagogues, and stirs up racial, or religious, or social hatred, or the lust for foreign war, with less scruple than does the proprietor of the worst newspaper in a democratic State.

[68] Hume's Essays, chap. iv.

Plato, with his usual boldness, faced this difficulty, and proposed that the loyalty of the subject-classes in his Republic should be secured once for all by religious faith. His rulers were to establish and teach a religion in which they need not believe. They were to tell their people 'one magnificent lie';[69] a remedy which in its ultimate effect on the character of their rule might have been worse than the disease which it was intended to cure.

[69] [Greek: gennaion ti en pseudomenous] (Republic, p. 414).

But even if it is admitted that government without consent is a complicated and ugly process, it does not follow either that government by consent is always possible, or that the machinery of parliamentary representation is the only possible, or always the best possible, method of securing consent.

Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, and who is himself restrained by custom from mere tyranny, may at certain stages of culture be better than anything else which can be substituted for it. And representation, even when it is possible, is not an unchanging entity, but an expedient capable of an infinite number of variations. In England at this moment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to persons of the male sex above twenty-one years of age, who have occupied the same place of residence for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes in constituencies based upon locality. But in all these respects, age, sex, qualification, and constituency, as well as in the political power given to the representative, variation is possible.

If, indeed, there should appear a modern Bentham, trained not by Fenelon and Helvetius, but by the study of racial psychology, he could not use his genius and patience better than in the invention of constitutional expedients which should provide for a real degree of government by consent in those parts of the British Empire where men are capable of thinking for themselves on political questions, but where the machinery of British parliamentary government would not work. In Egypt, for instance, one is told that at elections held in ordinary local constituencies only two per cent, of those entitled to vote go to the poll.[70] As long as that is the case representative government is impossible. A slow process of education might increase the proportion of voters, but meanwhile it would surely be possible for men, who understand the way in which Egyptians or Arabs think and feel, to discover other methods by which the vague desires of the native population can be ascertained, and the policy of the government made in some measure to depend on them.

[70] Times, January 6, 1908.

The need for invention is even more urgent in India, and that fact is apparently being realised by the Indian Government itself. The inventive range of Lord Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the moment appear to extend much beyond the adaptation of the model of the English House of Lords to Indian conditions, and the organisation of an 'advisory Council of Notables';[71] with the possible result that we may be advised by the hereditary rent-collectors of Bengal in our dealings with the tillers of the soil, and by the factory owners of Bombay in our regulation of factory labour.

[71] Mr. Morley in the House of Commons. Hansard, June 6, 1907, p. 885.

In England itself, though great political inventions are always a glorious possibility, the changes in our political structure which will result from our new knowledge are likely, in our own time, to proceed along lines laid down by slowly acting, and already recognisable tendencies.

A series of laws have, for instance, been passed in the United Kingdom during the last thirty or forty years, each of which had little conscious connection with the rest, but which, when seen as a whole, show that government now tends to regulate, not only the process of ascertaining the decision of the electors, but also the more complex process by which that decision is formed; and that this is done not in the interest of any particular body of opinion, but from a belief in the general utility of right methods of thought, and the possibility of securing them by regulation.

The nature of this change may perhaps be best understood by comparing it with the similar but earlier and far more complete change that has taken place in the conditions under which that decision is formed which is expressed in the verdict of a jury. Trial by jury was, in its origin, simply a method of ascertaining, from ordinary men whose veracity was secured by religious sanctions, their real opinions on each case.[72] The various ways in which those opinions might have been formed were matters beyond the cognisance of the royal official who called the jury together, swore them, and registered their verdict. Trial by jury in England might therefore have developed on the same lines as it did in Athens, and have perished from the same causes. The number of the jury might have been increased, and the parties in the case might have hired advocates to write or deliver for them addresses containing distortions of fact and appeals to prejudice as audacious as those in the Private Orations of Demosthenes. It might have become more important that the witnesses should burst into passionate weeping than that they should tell what they knew, and the final verdict might have been taken by a show of hands, in a crowd that was rapidly degenerating into a mob. If such an institution had lasted up to our time, the newspapers would have taken sides in every important case. Each would have had its own version of the facts, the most telling points of which would have been reserved for the final edition on the eve of the verdict, and the fate of the prisoner or defendant would often have depended upon a strictly party vote.

[72] See, e.g., Stephen, History of the Criminal Law, vol. i. pp. 260-72.

But in the English jury trial it has come to be assumed, after a long series of imperceptible and forgotten changes, that the opinion of the jurors, instead of being formed before the trial begins, should be formed in court. The process, therefore, by which that opinion is produced has been more and more completely controlled and developed, until it, and not the mere registration of the verdict, has become the essential feature of the trial.

The jury are now separated from their fellow-men during the whole case. They are introduced into a world of new emotional values. The ritual of the court, the voices and dress of judge and counsel, all suggest an environment in which the petty interests and impulses of ordinary life are unimportant when compared with the supreme worth of truth and justice. They are warned to empty their minds of all preconceived inferences and affections. The examination and cross-examination of the witnesses are carried on under rules of evidence which are the result of centuries of experience, and which give many a man as he sits on a jury his first lesson in the fallibility of the unobserved and uncontrolled inferences of the human brain. The 'said I's,' and 'thought I's,' and 'said he's,' which are the material of his ordinary reasoning, are here banished on the ground that they are 'not evidence,' and witnesses are compelled to give a simple account of their remembered sensations of sight and hearing.

The witnesses for the prosecution and the defence, if they are well-intentioned men, often find themselves giving, to their own surprise, perfectly consistent accounts of the events at issue. The barristers' tricks of advocacy are to some extent restrained by professional custom and by the authority of the judge, and they are careful to point out to the jury each other's fallacies. Newspapers do not reach the jury box, and in any case are prevented by the law as to contempt of court from commenting on a case which is under trial. The judge sums up, carefully describing the conditions of valid inference on questions of disputed fact, and warning the jury against those forms of irrational and unconscious inference to which experience has shown them to be most liable. They then retire, all carrying in their minds the same body of simplified and dissected evidence, and all having been urged with every circumstance of solemnity to form their conclusions by the same mental process. It constantly happens therefore that twelve men, selected by lot, will come to a unanimous verdict as to a question on which in the outside world they would have been hopelessly divided, and that that verdict, which may depend upon questions of fact so difficult as to leave the practised intellect of the judge undecided, will very generally be right. An English law court is indeed during a well-governed jury trial a laboratory in which psychological rules of valid reasoning are illustrated by experiment; and when, as threatens to occur in some American States and cities, it becomes impossible to enforce those rules, the jury system itself breaks down.[73]

[73] On the jury system see Mr. Wells's Mankind in the Making, chapter vii. He suggests the use of juries in many administrative cases where it is desirable that government should be supported by popular consent.

At the same time, trial by jury is now used with a certain degree of economy, both because it is slow and expensive, and because men do not make good jurors if they are called upon too often. In order that popular consent may support criminal justice, and that the law may not be unfairly used to protect the interests or policy of a governing class or person, no man, in most civilised countries, may be sentenced to death or to a long period of imprisonment, except after the verdict of a jury. But the overwhelming majority of other judicial decisions are now taken by men selected not by lot, but, in theory at least, by special fitness for their task.

In the light of this development of the jury trial we may now examine the tentative changes which, since the Reform Act of 1867, have been introduced into the law of elections in the United Kingdom. Long before that date, it had been admitted that the State ought not to stretch the principle of individual liberty so far as to remain wholly indifferent as to the kind of motives which candidates might bring to bear upon electors. It was obvious that if candidates were allowed to practise open bribery the whole system of representation would break down at once. Laws, therefore, against bribery had been for several generations on the statute books, and all that was required in that respect was the serious attempt, made after the scandals at the general election of 1880, to render them effective. But without entering into definite bargains with individual voters, a rich candidate can by lavish expenditure on his electoral campaign, both make himself personally popular, and create an impression that his connection with the constituency is good for trade. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 therefore fixed a maximum of expenditure for each candidate at a parliamentary election. By the same Act of 1883, and by earlier and later Acts, applying both to parliamentary and municipal elections, intimidation of all kinds, including the threatening of penalties after death, is forbidden. No badges or flags or bands of music may be paid for by, or on behalf of, a candidate. In order that political opinion may not be influenced by thoughts of the simpler bodily pleasures, no election meeting may be held in a building where any form of food or drink is habitually sold, although that building may be only a Co-operative Hall with facilities for making tea in an ante-room.

The existing laws against Corrupt Practices represent, it is true, rather the growing purpose of the State to control the conditions under which electoral opinion is formed, than any large measure of success in carrying out that purpose. A rapidly increasing proportion of the expenditure at any English election is now incurred by bodies enrolled outside the constituency, and nominally engaged, not in winning the election for a particular candidate, but in propagating their own principles. Sometimes the candidate whom they support, and whom they try to commit as deeply as possible, would be greatly relieved if they withdrew. Generally their agents are an integral part of his fighting organisation, and often the whole of their expenditure at an election is covered by a special subscription made by him to the central fund. Every one sees that this system drives a coach and horse through those clauses in the Corrupt Practices Act which restrict election expenses and forbid the employment of paid canvassers, though no one as yet has put forward any plan for preventing it. But it is acknowledged that unless the whole principle is to be abandoned, new legislation must take place; and Lord Robert Cecil talks of the probable necessity for a 'stringent and far-reaching Corrupt Practices Act.'[74] If, however, an act is carried stringent enough to deal effectually with the existing development of electoral tactics, it will have to be drafted on lines involving new and hitherto unthought-of forms of interference with the liberty of political appeal.

[74] Times, June 26, 1907.

A hundred years ago a contested election might last in any constituency for three or four weeks of excitement and horseplay, during which the voters were every day further removed from the state of mind in which serious thought on the probable results of their votes was possible. Now no election may last more than one day, and we may soon enact that all the polling for a general election shall take place on the same day. The sporting fever of the weeks during which a general election even now lasts, with the ladder-climbing figures outside the newspaper offices, the flash-lights at night, and the cheering or groaning crowds in the party clubs, are not only waste of energy but an actual hindrance to effective political reasoning.

A more difficult psychological problem arose in the discussion of the Ballot. Would a voter be more likely to form a thoughtful and public-spirited decision if, after it was formed, he voted publicly or secretly? Most of the followers of Bentham advocated secrecy. Since men acted in accordance with their ideas of pleasure and pain, and since landlords and employers were able, in spite of any laws against intimidation, to bring 'sinister' motives to bear upon voters whose votes were known, the advisability of secret voting seemed to follow as a corollary from utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill, however, whose whole philosophical life consisted of a slowly developing revolt of feeling against the utilitarian philosophy to which he gave nominal allegiance till the end, opposed the Ballot on grounds which really involved the abandonment of the whole utilitarian position. If ideas of pleasure and pain be taken as equivalent to those economic motives which can be summed up as the making or losing money, it is not true, said Mill, that even under a system of open voting such ideas are the main cause which induce the ordinary citizen to vote. 'Once in a thousand times, as in the case of peace or war, or of taking off taxes, the thought may cross him that he shall save a few pounds or shillings in his year's expenditure if the side he votes for wins.' He votes as a matter of fact in accordance with ideas of right or wrong. 'His motive, when it is an honourable one, is the desire to do right. We will not term it patriotism or moral principle, in order not to ascribe to the voter's frame of mind a solemnity that does not belong to it.' But ideas of right and wrong are strengthened and not weakened by the knowledge that we act under the eyes of our neighbours. 'Since then the real motive which induces a man to vote honestly is for the most part not an interested motive in any form, but a social one, the point to be decided is whether the social feelings connected with an act and the sense of social duty in performing it, can be expected to be as powerful when the act is done in secret, and he can neither be admired for disinterested, nor blamed for mean and selfish conduct. But this question is answered as soon as stated. When in every other act of a man's life which concerns his duty to others, publicity and criticism ordinarily improve his conduct, it cannot be that voting for a member of parliament is the single case in which he will act better for being sheltered against all comment.'[75]

[75] Letter to the Reader, Ap. 29, 1865, signed J.S.M., quoted as Mill's by Henry Romilly in pamphlet, Public Responsibility and Vote by Ballot, pp. 89, 90.

Almost the whole civilised world has now adopted the secret Ballot; so that it would seem that Mill was wrong, and that he was wrong in spite of the fact that, as against the consistent utilitarians, his description of average human motive was right. But Mill, though he soon ceased to be in the original sense of the word a utilitarian, always remained an intellectualist, and he made in the case of the Ballot the old mistake of giving too intellectual and logical an account of political impulses. It is true that men do not act politically upon a mere stock-exchange calculation of material advantages and disadvantages. They generally form vague ideas of right and wrong in accordance with vague trains of inference as to the good or evil results of political action. If an election were like a jury trial, such inferences might be formed by a process which would leave a sense of fundamental conviction in the mind of the thinker, and might be expressed under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to which publicity would lend an added weight, as it does in those 'acts of a man's life which concern his duty to others,' to which Mill refers—the paying of a debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treatment of one's relatives. But under existing electoral conditions, trains of thought, formed as they often are by the half-conscious suggestion of newspapers or leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense. Apart from direct intimidation the voice of the canvasser, the excitement of one's friends, the look of triumph on the face of one's opponents, or the vague indications of disapproval by the rulers of one's village, are all apt to be stronger than the shadowy and uncertain conclusions of one's thinking brain. To make the ultimate vote secret, gives therefore thought its best chance, and at least requires the canvasser to produce in the voter a belief which, however shadowy, shall be genuine, rather than to secure by the mere manipulation of momentary impulse a promise which is shamefacedly carried out in public because it is a promise.

Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of the personal disciples of Mill, and at present he is devoting himself to a campaign in favour of 'proportional representation,' in which, as it seems to me, the old intellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. He proposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under the existing system of the 'single ballot' a minority in any single-member constituency may, if there are more candidates than two, return its representative, and secondly, that certain citizens who think for themselves instead of allowing party leaders to think for them—the Free-Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High-Church Liberals—have, as a rule, no candidate representing their own opinions for whom they can vote. He proposes, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order of preference a ballot paper containing lists of candidates for large constituencies, each of which returns six or seven members, Manchester with its eight seats being given as an example.

This system, according to Lord Courtney, 'will lead to the dropping of the fetters which now interfere with free thought, and will set men and women on their feet, erect, intelligent, independent.'[76] But the arguments used in urging it all seem to me to suffer from the fatal defect of dwelling solely on the process by which opinion is ascertained, and ignoring the process by which opinion is created. If at the assizes all the jurors summoned were collected into one large jury, and if they all voted Guilty or Not Guilty on all the cases, after a trial in which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses were examined simultaneously, verdicts would indeed no longer depend on the accidental composition of the separate juries; but the process of forming verdicts would be made, to a serious degree, less effective.

[76] Address delivered by Lord Courtney at the Mechanics' Institute, Stockport, March 22, 1907, p. 6.

The English experiment on which the Proportional Representation Society mainly relies is an imaginary election, held in November 1906 by means of ballot papers distributed through members and friends of the society and through eight newspapers. 'The constituency,' we are told, 'was supposed to return five members; the candidates, twelve in number, were politicians whose names might be expected to be known to the ordinary newspaper reader, and who might be considered as representative of some of the main divisions of public opinion.'[77] The names were, in fact, Sir A. Acland Hood, Sir H. Campbell-Banner-man, Sir Thomas P. Whittaker, and Lord Hugh Cecil, with Messrs. Richard Bell, Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Haldane, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, Bonar Law, and Philip Snowden. In all, 12,418 votes were collected.

[77] Proportional Representation Pamphlet, No. 4, p. 6.

I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot papers were distributed at the end of a dinner party. No discussion of the various candidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memory of Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about him to my next neighbour. We were all politicians, and nearly all the names were those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fifty whose faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect their readers to recognise.

At our dinner party not much unreality was introduced by the intellectualist assumption that the list of names were, as a Greek might have said, the same, 'to us,' as they were 'in themselves.' But an ordinary list of candidates' names presented to an ordinary voter is 'to him' simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he will either do nothing or do as he is told.

The Proportional Representation Society seem to assume that a sufficient preliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and that not only the names and party programmes but the reasons for the selection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items in his programme will be known to 'the ordinary newspaper reader,' who is assumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen. But even if one neglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration of newspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their control for frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now reads or is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to the propaganda of a small political group. Men read newspapers for news, and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths of the electorate read between them a small number of established papers advocating broad party principles. These newspapers, at any rate during a general election, only refer to those particular contests in which the party leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until, on the day of the poll, they issue general directions 'How to vote.' The choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local party organisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of a candidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of the consciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by local electioneering in each constituency, i.e. by meetings and canvassing and the distribution of 'election literature.' Lord Courtney's proposal, even if it only multiplied the size of the ordinary constituency by six, would multiply by at least six the difficulty of effective electioneering, and even if each candidate were prepared to spend six times as much money at every contest, he could not multiply by six the range of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in a day.

These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of the nearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever been actually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish induced the House of Commons to adopt 'plural voting' for School Board elections. I fought in three London School Board elections as a candidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legal arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be given about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats should be assigned to the district. In the provinces a town or parish was given a number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might 'plump' all his votes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any of them.

This left the local organisers both in London and the country with two alternatives. They might form the list of party candidates in each district into a recognisable entity like the American 'ticket' and urge all voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative 'eight' or 'five' or 'three.' If they did this they were saved the trouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to the individual personalities of the members of the list. Or they might practically repeal the plural voting law, split up the constituency by a voluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeks of the election in making one candidate for each party known in each section. The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, and had all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of the French scrutin de liste. The second method was adopted in London, and perhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than they otherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates. Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon by practically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organised Roman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of those who plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachers or school-keepers.

If Lord Courtney's proposal is adopted for parliamentary elections, it is the 'ticket' system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling, will be generally used. Each voter will bring into the polling booth a printed copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., according to the decision of his party association, and will copy the numbers onto the unmarked official paper. The essential fact, that is to say, on which party tactics would depend under Lord Courtney's scheme is not that the votes would finally be added up in this way or in that, but that the voter would be required to arrange in order more names than there is time during the election to turn for him into real persons.

Lord Courtney, in speaking on the second reading of his Municipal Representation Bill in the House of Lords,[78] contrasted his proposed system with that used in the London Borough Council elections, according to which a number of seats are assigned to each ward and the voter may give one vote each, without indication of preference, to that number of candidates. It is true that the electoral machinery for the London Boroughs is the worst to be found anywhere in the world outside of America. I have before me my party ballot-card instructing me how to vote at the last Council election in my present borough. There were six seats to be filled in my ward and fifteen candidates. I voted as I was told by my party organisation giving one vote each to six names, not one of which I remembered to have seen before. If there had been one seat to be filled, and, say, three candidates, I should have found out enough about one candidate at least to give a more or less independent vote; and the local party committees would have known that I and others would do so. Bach party would then have circulated a portrait and a printed account of their candidate and of his principles, and would have had a strong motive for choosing a thoroughly reputable person. But I could not give the time necessary for forming a real opinion on fifteen candidates, who volunteered no information about themselves. I therefore, and probably twenty-nine out of every thirty of those who voted in the borough, voted a 'straight ticket.' If for any reason the party committee put, to use an Americanism, a 'yellow dog' among the list of names, I voted for the yellow dog.

[78] April 30, 1907.

Under Lord Courtney's system I should have had to vote on the same ticket, with the same amount of knowledge, but should have copied down different marks from my party card. On the assumption, that is to say, that every name on a long ballot paper represents an individual known to every voter there would be an enormous difference between Lord Courtney's proposed system and the existing system in the London Boroughs. But if the fact is that the names in each case are mere names, there is little effective difference between the working of the two systems until the votes are counted.

If the sole object of an election were to discover and record the exact proportion of the electorate who are prepared to vote for candidates nominated by the several party organisations Lord Courtney's scheme might be adopted as a whole. But English experience, and a longer experience in America, has shown that the personality of the candidate nominated is at least as important as his party allegiance, and that a parliament of well-selected members who represent somewhat roughly the opinion of the nation is better than a parliament of ill-selected members who, as far as their party labels are concerned, are, to quote Lord Courtney, 'a distillation, a quintessence, a microcosm, a reflection of the community.'[79]

[79] Address at Stockport, p. 11.

To Lord Courtney the multi-member constituency, which permits of a wide choice, and the preferential vote, which permits of full use of that choice, are equally essential parts of his plan; and that plan will soon be seriously discussed, because parliament, owing to the rise of the Labour Party and the late prevalence of 'three-cornered' contests, will soon have to deal with the question. It will then be interesting to see whether the growing substitution of the new quantitative and psychological for the old absolute and logical way of thinking about elections will have advanced sufficiently far to enable the House of Commons to distinguish between the two points. If so, they will adopt the transferable vote, and so get over the difficulty of three-cornered elections, while retaining single-member constituencies, and therewith the possibility of making the personality of a candidate known to the whole of his constituents.

A further effect of the way in which we are beginning to think of the electoral process is that, since 1888, parliament, in reconstructing the system of English local government, has steadily diminished the number of elections, with the avowed purpose of increasing their efficiency. The Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894 swept away thousands of elections for Improvement Boards, Burial Boards, Vestries, etc. In 1902 the separately elected School Boards were abolished, and it is certain that the Guardians of the Poor will soon follow them. The Rural Parish Councils, which were created in 1894, and which represented a reversion by the Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, have been a failure, and will either be abolished or will remain ineffective, because no real administrative powers will be given to them. But if we omit the rural districts, the inhabitant of a 'county borough' will soon vote only for parliament and his borough council, while the inhabitant of London or of an urban district or non-county borough will only vote for parliament, his county, and his district or borough council. On the average, neither will be asked to vote more than once a year.

In America one notices a similar tendency towards electoral concentration as a means of increasing electoral responsibility. In Philadelphia I found that this concentration had taken a form which seemed to me to be due to a rather elementary quantitative mistake in psychology. Owing to the fact that the reformers had thought only of economising political force, and had ignored the limitations of political knowledge, so many elections were combined on one day that the Philadelphia 'blanket-ballot' which I was shown, with its parallel columns of party 'tickets,' contained some four hundred names. The resulting effects on the personnel of Philadelphian politics were as obvious as they were lamentable. In other American cities, however, concentration often takes the form of the abolition of many of the elected boards and officials, and the substitution for them of a single elected Mayor, who administers the city by nominated commissions, and whose personality it is hoped can be made known during an election to all the voters, and therefore must he seriously considered by his nominators. One noticed again the growing tendency to substitute a quantitative and psychological for an absolute and logical view of the electoral process in the House of Commons debate on the claim set up by the House of Lords in 1907 to the right of forcing a general election (or a referendum) at any moment which they thought advantageous to themselves. Mr. Herbert Samuel, for instance, argued that this claim, if allowed, would give a still further advantage in politics to the electoral forces of wealth acting, at dates carefully chosen by the House of Lords, both directly and through the control of the Press. Lord Robert Cecil alone, whose mind is historical in the worst sense of that term, objected 'What a commentary was that on the "will of the people,"'[80] and thought it somehow illegitimate that Mr. Samuel should not defend democracy according to the philosophy of Thomas Paine, so that he could answer in the style of Canning. The present quarrel between the two Houses may indeed result in a further step in the public control of the methods of producing political opinion by the substitution of General Elections occurring at regular intervals for our present system of sudden party dissolutions at moments of national excitement.

[80] Times, June 25, 1907.

But in the electoral process, as in so many other cases, one dares not hope that these slow and half-conscious changes in the general intellectual attitude will be sufficient to suggest and carry through all the improvements of machinery necessary to meet our growing difficulties, unless they are quickened by a conscious purpose. At my last contest for the London County Council I had to spend the half hour before the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of a very poor district. I was watching the proceedings, which in the crush at the end are apt to be rather irregular, and at the same time was thinking of this book. The voters who came in were the results of the 'final rally' of the canvassers on both sides. They entered the room in rapid but irregular succession, as if they were jerked forward by a hurried and inefficient machine. About half of them were women, with broken straw hats, pallid faces, and untidy hair. All were dazed and bewildered, having been snatched away in carriages or motors from the making of match-boxes, or button-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the public house, or, since it was Saturday evening, from bed. Most of them seemed to be trying, in the unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name for which, as they had been reminded at the door, they were to vote. A few were drunk, and one man, who was apparently a supporter of my own, clung to my neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely tremendous fact which just eluded his power of speech. I was very anxious to win, and inclined to think that I had won, but my chief feeling was an intense conviction that this could not be accepted as even a decently satisfactory method of creating a government for a city of five million inhabitants, and that nothing short of a conscious and resolute facing of the whole problem of the formation of political opinion would enable us to improve it.

Something might be done, and perhaps will be done in the near future, to abolish the more sordid details of English electioneering. Public houses could be closed on the election day, both to prevent drunkenness and casual treating, and to create an atmosphere of comparative seriousness. It is a pity that we cannot have the elections on a Sunday as they have in France. The voters would then come to the poll after twenty or twenty-four hours' rest, and their own thoughts would have some power of asserting themselves even in the presence of the canvasser, whose hustling energy now inevitably dominates the tired nerves of men who have just finished their day's work. The feeling of moral responsibility half consciously associated with the religious use of Sunday would also be so valuable an aid to reflection that the most determined anti-clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it would add to the political power of the churches. It may cease to be true that in England the Christian day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of the founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by the traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn act of citizenship. It might again be possible to lend to the polling-place some of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings were available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms now used. But such improvements in the external environment of election-day, however desirable they may be in themselves, can only be of small effect.

Some writers argue or imply that all difficulties in the working of the electoral process will disappear of themselves as men approach to social equality. Those who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motive for corrupt electoral expenditure, nor superfluity of money to spend on it; while the women and the working men who are now unenfranchised or politically inactive, will bring into politics a fresh stream of unspoilt impulse.

If our civilisation is to survive, greater social equality must indeed come. Men will not continue to live peacefully together in huge cities under conditions that are intolerable to any sensitive mind, both among those who profit, and those who suffer by them. But no one who is near to political facts can believe that the immediate effect either of greater equality or of the extension of the suffrage will be to clear away all moral and intellectual difficulties in political organisation.

A mere numerical increase in the number of persons in England who are interested in politics would indeed itself introduce a new and difficult political factor. The active politicians in England, those who take any part in politics beyond voting, are at present a tiny minority. I was to speak not long ago at an election meeting, and having been misdirected as to the place where the meeting was to be held, found myself in an unknown part of North London, compelled to inquire of the inhabitants until I should find the address either of the meeting-hall or of the party committee-room. For a long time I drew blank, but at last a cabman on his way home to tea told me that there was a milkman in his street who was 'a politician and would know.' There are in London seven hundred thousand parliamentary voters, and I am informed by the man who is in the best position to know that it would be safe to say that less than ten thousand persons actually attend the annual ward meetings of the various parties, and that not more than thirty thousand are members of the party associations. That division of labour which assigns politics to a special class of enthusiasts, looked on by many of their neighbours as well-meaning busybodies, is not carried so far in most other parts of England as in London. But in no county in England, as far as I am aware, does the number of persons really active in politics amount to ten per cent. of the electorate.

There are, I think, signs that this may soon cease to be true. The English Elementary Education Act was passed in 1870, and the elementary schools may be said to have become fairly efficient by 1880. Those who entered them, being six years old, at that date are now aged thirty-four. The statistics as to the production and sale of newspapers and cheap books and the use of free libraries, show that the younger working men and women in England read many times as much as their parents did. This, and the general increase of intellectual activity in our cities of which it is only a part, may very probably lead, as the social question in politics grows more serious, to a large extension of electoral interest. If so, the little groups of men and women who now manage the three English parties in the local constituencies will find themselves swamped by thousands of adherents who will insist on taking some part in the choice of candidates and the formation of programmes. That will lead to a great increase in the complexity of the process by which the Council, the Executive, and the officers of each local party association are appointed. Parliament indeed may find itself compelled, as many of the American States have been compelled, to pass a series of Acts for the prevention of fraud in the interior government of parties. The ordinary citizen would find then, much more obviously than he does at present, that an effective use of his voting power involves not only the marking of a ballot paper on the day of the election, but an active share in that work of appointing and controlling party committees from which many men whose opinions are valuable to the State shrink with an instinctive dread.

But the most important difficulties raised by the extension of political interest from a very small to a large fraction of the population would be concerned with political motive rather than political machinery. It is astonishing that the early English democrats, who supposed that individual advantage would be the sole driving force in politics, assumed, without realising the nature of their own assumption, that the representative, if he were elected for a short term, would inevitably feel his own advantage to be identical with that of the community.[81] At present there is a fairly sufficient supply of men whose imagination and sympathies are sufficiently quick and wide to make them ready to undertake the toil of unpaid electioneering and administration for the general good. But every organiser of elections knows that the supply is never more than sufficient, and payment of members, while it would permit men of good-will to come forward who are now shut out, would also make it possible for less worthy motives to become more effective. The concentration both of administrative and legislative work in the hands of the Cabinet, while it tends to economy of time and effort, is making the House of Commons yearly a less interesting place; and members have of late often expressed to me a real anxiety lest the personnel of the House should seriously deteriorate.

[81] E.g. James Mill, Essay on Government (1825), 'We have seen in what manner it is possible to prevent in the Representatives the rise of an interest different from that of the parties who choose them, namely, by giving them little time not dependent upon the will of those parties' (p. 27).

The chief immediate danger in the case of the two older parties is that, owing to the growing expense of electioneering and the growing effect of legislation on commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of the members and candidates may be drawn from the class of 'hustling' company-promoters and financiers. The Labour Party, on the other hand, can now draw upon an ample supply of genuine public spirit, and its difficulties in this respect will arise, not from calculated individual selfishness, but from the social and intellectual environment of working-class life. During the last twenty years I have been associated, for some years continuously and afterwards at intervals, with English political working men. They had, it seemed to me, for the most part a great advantage in the fact that certain real things of life were real to them. It is, for instance, the 'class-conscious' working men who, in England as on the Continent, are the chief safeguard against the horrors of a general European war. But as their number and responsibility increase they will, I believe, have to learn some rather hard lessons as to the intellectual conditions of representative government upon a large scale. The town working man lives in a world in which it is very difficult for him to choose his associates. If he is of an expansive temperament, and it is such men who become politicians, he must take his mates in the shop and his neighbours in the tenement house as he finds them—and he sees them at very close range. The social virtue therefore which is almost a necessity of his existence is a good-humoured tolerance of the defects of average human nature. He is keenly aware of the uncertainty of his own industrial position, accustomed to give and receive help, and very unwilling to 'do' any man 'out of his job.' His parents and grandparents read very little and he was brought up in a home with few books. If, as he grows up, he does not himself read, things beyond his direct observation are apt to be rather shadowy for him, and he is easily made suspicious of that which he does not understand. If, on the other hand, he takes to reading when he is already a grown man, words and ideas are apt to have for him a kind of abstract and sharply outlined reality in a region far removed from his daily life.

Now the first virtue required in government is the habit of realising that things whose existence we infer from reading are as important as the things observed by our senses, of looking, for instance, through a list of candidates for an appointment and weighing the qualifications of the man whom one has never met by the same standard as those of the man whom one has met, and liked or pitied, the day before; or of deciding on an improvement with complete impartiality as between the district one knows of on the map and the district one sees every morning. If a representative elected to govern a large area allows personal acquaintance and liking to influence his decisions, his acquaintance and liking will he schemed for and exploited by those who have their own ends to gain. The same difficulty arises in matters of discipline, where the interests of the unknown thousands who will suffer from the inefficiency of an official have to be balanced against those of the known official who will suffer by being punished or dismissed; as well as in those numerous cases in which a working man has to balance the dimly realised interests of the general consumer against his intimate sympathy with his fellow-craftsmen.

The political risk arising from these facts is not, at present, very great in the parliamentary Labour Party. The working men who have been sent to parliament have been hitherto, as a rule, men of picked intelligence and morale and of considerable political experience. But the success or failure of any scheme aiming at social equality will depend chiefly on its administration by local bodies, to which the working classes must necessarily send men of less exceptional ability and experience. I have never myself served on an elected local body the majority of whose members were weekly wage earners. But I have talked with men, both of working-class and middle-class origin, who have been in that position. What they say confirms that which I have inferred from my own observation, that on such a body one finds a high level of enthusiasm, of sympathy, and of readiness to work, combined with a difficulty in maintaining a sufficiently rigorous standard in dealing with sectional interests and official discipline.

One is told that on such a body many members feel it difficult to realise that the way in which a well-intentioned man may deal with his own personal expenditure, his continued patronage, for instance, of a rather inefficient tradesman because he has a large family, or his refusal to contest an account from a dislike of imputing bad motives, is fatal if applied in the expenditure of the large sums entrusted to a public body. Sometimes there are even, one learns, indications of that good-humoured and not ill-meant laxity in expending public money which has had such disastrous results in America, and which lends itself so easily to exploitation by those in whom the habit of giving and taking personal favours has hardened into systematic fraud. When one of the West Ham Guardians, two years ago, committed suicide on being charged with corruption, the Star sent down a representative who filled a column with the news. 'His death,' we were told, 'has robbed the district of an indefatigable public worker. County Council, Board of Guardians, and Liberal interests all occupied his leisure time.' 'One of his friends' is described as saying to the Star reporter, 'You do not need to go far to learn of his big-souled geniality. The poor folks of the workhouse will miss him badly.'[82] When one has waded through masses of evidence on American municipal corruption, that phrase about 'big-souled geniality' makes one shudder.

[82] Star, November 28th, 1906.

The early history of the co-operative and trade-union movements in England is full of pathetic instances of this kind of failure, and both movements show how a new and more stringent ideal may be slowly built up. But such an ideal will not come of itself without an effort, and must be part of the conscious organised thought of each generation if it is to be permanently effective.

Those difficulties have in the past been mainly pointed out by the opponents of democracy. But if democracy is to succeed they must be frankly considered by the democrats themselves; just as it is the engineer who is trying to build the bridge, and not the ferry-owner, who is against any bridge at all, whose duty it is to calculate the strain which the materials will stand. The engineer, when he wishes to increase the margin of safety in his plans, treats as factors in the same quantitative problem both the chemical expedients by which he can strengthen his materials and the structural changes by which the strain on those materials can be diminished. So those who would increase the margin of safety in our democracy must estimate, with no desire except to arrive at truth, both the degree to which the political strength of the individual citizen can, in any given time, be actually increased by moral and educational changes, and the possibility of preserving or extending or inventing such elements in the structure of democracy as may prevent the demand upon him being too great for his strength.



CHAPTER III

OFFICIAL THOUGHT

It is obvious, however, that the persons elected under any conceivable system of representation cannot do the whole work of government themselves.

If all elections are held in single member constituencies of a size sufficient to secure a good supply of candidates; if the number of elections is such as to allow the political workers a proper interval for rest and reflection between the campaigns; if each elected body has an area large enough for effective administration, a number of members sufficient for committee work and not too large for debate, and duties sufficiently important to justify the effort and expense of a contest; then one may take about twenty-three thousand as the best number of men and women to be elected by the existing population of the United Kingdom—or rather less than one to every two thousand of the population.[83]

[83] I arrive at this figure by dividing the United Kingdom into single member parliamentary constituencies, averaging 100,000 in population, which gives a House of Commons of 440—a more convenient number than the existing 670. I take the same unit of 100,000 for the average municipal area. Large towns would contain several parliamentary constituencies, and small towns would, as at present, be separate municipal areas, although only part of a parliamentary constituency. I allow one local council of 50 on the average to each municipal area.

This proportion depends mainly on facts in the psychology of the electors, which will change very slowly if they change at all. At present the amount of work to be done in the way of government is rapidly increasing, and seems likely to continue to increase. If so, the number of elected persons available for each unit of work must tend to decrease. The number of persons now elected in the United Kingdom (including, for instance, the Parish Councillors of rural parishes, and the Common Council of the City of London) is, of course, larger than my estimate, though it has been greatly diminished by the Acts of 1888, 1894 and 1902. Owing, however, to the fact that areas and powers are still somewhat uneconomically distributed it represents a smaller actual working power than would be given by the plan which I suggest.

On the other hand, the number of persons (excluding the Army and Navy) given in the Census Returns of 1901 as professionally employed in the central and local government of the United Kingdom was 161,000. This number has certainly grown since 1901 at an increasing rate, and consists of persons who give on an average at least four times as many hours a week to their work as can be expected from the average elected member.

What ought to be the relation between these two bodies, of twenty-three thousand elected, and, say, two hundred thousand non-elected persons? To begin with, ought the elected members be free to appoint the non-elected officials as they like? Most American politicians of Andrew Jackson's time, and a large number of American politicians to-day, would hold, for instance, as a direct corollary from democratic principles, that the elected congressman or senator for a district or State has a right to nominate the local federal officials. There may, he would admit, be some risk in that method, but the risk, he would argue, is one involved in the whole scheme of democracy, and the advantages of democracy as a whole are greater than its disadvantages.

Our political logic in England has never been so elementary as that of the Americans, nor has our faith in it been so unflinching. Most Englishmen, therefore, have no feeling of disloyalty to the democratic idea in admitting that it is not safe to allow the efficiency of officials to depend upon the personal character of individual representatives. At the General Election of 1906 there were at least two English constituencies (one Liberal and the other Conservative) which returned candidates whose personal unfitness had been to most men's minds proved by evidence given in the law courts. Neither constituency was markedly unlike the average in any respect. The facts were well known, and in each case an attempt was made by a few public-spirited voters to split the party vote, but both candidates were successful by large majorities. The Borough of Croydon stands, socially and intellectually, well above the average, but Mr. Jabez Balfour represented Croydon for many years, until he was sentenced to penal servitude for fraud. No one in any of these three cases would have desired that the sitting member should appoint, say, the postmasters, or collectors of Inland Revenue for his constituency.

But though the case against the appointment of officials by individual representatives is clear, the question of the part which should be taken by any elected body as a whole in appointing the officials who serve under it is much more difficult, and cannot be discussed without considering what are to be the relative functions of the officials and the representatives after the appointment has taken place. Do we aim at making election in fact as well as in constitutional theory the sole base of political authority, or do we desire that the non-elected officials shall exert some amount of independent influence?

The fact that most Englishmen, in spite of their traditional fear of bureaucracy, would now accept the second of these alternatives, is one of the most striking results of our experience in the working of democracy. We see that the evidence on which the verdict at an election must be given is becoming every year more difficult to collect and present, and further removed from the direct observation of the voters. We are afraid of being entirely dependent on partisan newspapers or election leaflets for our knowledge, and we have therefore come to value, even if for that reason only, the existence of a responsible and more or less independent Civil Service. It is difficult to realise how short a time it is since questions for which we now rely entirely on official statistics were discussed by the ordinary political methods of agitation and advocacy. In the earlier years of George the Third's reign, at a time when population in England was, as we now know, rising with unprecedented rapidity, the question of fact whether it was rising or falling led to embittered political controversy.[84] In the spring of 1830 the House of Commons gave three nights to a confused party debate on the state of the country. The Whigs argued that distress was general, and the Tories (who were, as it happened, right) that it was local[85]. In 1798 or 1830 the 'public' who could take part in such discussions numbered perhaps fifty thousand at the most. At least ten million people must, since 1903, have taken part in the present Tariff Reform controversy; and that controversy would have degenerated into mere Bedlam if it had not been for the existence of the Board of Trade Returns, with whose figures both sides had at least to appear to square their arguments.

[84] Bonar's Malthus, chap. vii.

[85] Hansard, Feb. 4th, 5th, 6th, 1830.

If official figures did not exist in England, or if they did not possess or deserve authority, it is difficult to estimate the degree of political harm which could be done in a few years by an interested and deliberately dishonest agitation on some question too technical for the personal judgment of the ordinary voter. Suppose, for instance, that our Civil Service were either notoriously inefficient or believed to be dominated by party influence, and that an organised and fraudulent 'currency agitation' should suddenly spring up. A powerful press syndicate brings out a series of well-advertised articles declaring that the privileges of the Bank of England and the law as to the gold reserve are 'strangling British Industry.' The contents bills of two hundred newspapers denounce every day the 'monopolists' and the 'gold-bugs,' the 'lies and shams' of the Bank Returns, and the 'paid perjurers of Somerset House.' The group of financiers who control the syndicate stand to win enormous sums by the creation of a more 'elastic' currency, and subscribe largely to a Free Money League, which includes a few sincere paper-money theorists who have been soured by the contempt of the professional economists. A vigorous and well-known member of parliament—a not very reputable aristocrat perhaps, or some one loosely connected with the Labour movement—whom everybody has hitherto feared and no one quite trusted, sees his opportunity. He puts himself at the head of the movement, denounces the 'fossils' and 'superior persons' who at present lead Conservative and Liberal and Labour parties alike, and, with the help of the press syndicate and the subscription fund of the 'Free Money League,' begins to capture the local associations, and through them the central office of the party which is for the moment in opposition, Can any one be sure that such a campaign, if it were opposed only by counter-electioneering, might not succeed, even although its proposals were wholly fraudulent and its leaders so ignorant or so criminal that they could only come into power by discrediting two-thirds of the honest politicians in the country and by replacing them with 'hustlers' and 'boodlers' and 'grafters,' and the other species for whom American political science has provided names? How is the ordinary voter—a market-gardener, or a gas-stoker, or a water-colour painter—to distinguish by the help of his own knowledge and reasoning power between the various appeals made to him by the 'Reformers' and the 'Safe Money Men' as to the right proportion of the gold reserve to the note issue—the 'ten per cent.' on the blue posters and the 'cent. per cent.' on the yellow? Nor will his conscience be a safer guide than his judgment. A 'Christian Service Wing' of the Free Money League may be formed, and his conscience may be roused by a white-cravatted orator, intoxicated by his own eloquence into something like sincerity, who borrows that phrase about 'Humanity crucified on a cross of gold' which Mr. W.J. Bryan borrowed a dozen years ago from some one else. In an optimistic mood one might rely on the subtle network of confidence by which each man trusts, on subjects outside his own knowledge, some honest and better-informed neighbour, who again trusts at several removes the trained thinker. But does such a personal network exist in our vast delocalised urban populations?

It is the vague apprehension of such dangers, quite as much as the merely selfish fears of the privileged classes, which preserves in Europe the relics of past systems of non-elective government, the House of Lords, for instance, in England, and the Monarchy in Italy or Norway. Men feel that a second base in politics is required, consisting of persons independent of the tactics by which electoral opinion is formed and legally entitled to make themselves heard. But political authority founded on heredity or wealth is not in fact protected from the interested manipulation of opinion and feeling. The American Senate, which has come to be representative of wealth, is already absorbed by that financial power which depends for its existence on manufactured opinion; and our House of Lords is rapidly tending in the same direction. From the beginning of history it has been found easier for any skilled politician who set his mind to it, to control the opinions of a hereditary monarch than those of a crowd.

The real 'Second Chamber,' the real 'constitutional check' in England, is provided, not by the House of Lords or the Monarchy, but by the existence of a permanent Civil Service, appointed on a system independent of the opinion or desires of any politician, and holding office during good behaviour. If such a service were, as it is in Russia and to a large extent in India, a sovereign power, it would itself, as I argued in the last chapter, have to cultivate the art of manipulating opinion. But the English Civil servants in their present position have the right and duty of making their voice heard, without the necessity of making their will, by fair means or foul, prevail.

The creation of this Service was the one great political invention in nineteenth-century England, and like other inventions it was worked out under the pressure of an urgent practical problem. The method of appointing the officials of the East India Company had been a critical question in English politics since 1783. By that time it had already become clear that we could not permanently allow the appointment of the rulers of a great empire kept in existence by the English fleet and army to depend upon the irresponsible favour of the Company's directors. Charles James Fox in 1783, with his usual heedlessness, proposed to cut the knot, by making Indian appointments, in effect, part of the ordinary system of parliamentary patronage; and he and Lord North were beaten over their India Bill, not only because George the Third was obstinate and unscrupulous, but because men felt the enormous political dangers involved in their proposal. The question, in fact, could only be solved by a new invention. The expedient of administering an oath to the Directors that they would make their appointments honestly, proved to be useless, and the requirements that the nominees of the Directors should submit to a special training at Hayleybury, though more effective, left the main evil of patronage untouched.

As early, therefore, as 1833, the Government Bill introduced by Macaulay for the renewal and revision of the Company's charter contained a clause providing that East India cadetships should be thrown open to competition.[86] For the time the influence of the Directors was sufficient to prevent so great a change from being effected, but in 1853, on a further renewal of the Charter, the system of competition was definitely adopted, and the first open examination for cadetships took place in 1855.