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INTRODUCTION

The study of politics is now in an unsatisfactory position. Throughout Europe and America, representative democracy is generally accepted as the best form of government; but those who have had most experience of its actual working are often disappointed and apprehensive. Democracy has not been extended to non-European races, and during the last few years many democratic movements have failed.

This dissatisfaction has led to much study of political institutions; but little attention has been recently given in works on politics to the facts of human nature. Political science in the past was mainly based, on conceptions of human nature, but the discredit of the dogmatic political writers of the early nineteenth century has made modern students of politics over-anxious to avoid anything which recalls their methods. That advance therefore of psychology which has transformed pedagogy and criminology has left politics largely unchanged.

The neglect of the study of human nature is likely, however, to prove only a temporary phase of political thought, and there are already signs that it, is coming to an end.

Any examination of human nature in politics must begin with an attempt to overcome that 'intellectualism' which results both from the traditions of political science and from the mental habits of ordinary men.

Political impulses are not mere intellectual inferences from calculations of means and ends; but tendencies prior to, though modified by, the thought and experience of individual human beings. This may be seen if we watch the action in politics of such impulses as personal affection, fear, ridicule, the desire of property, etc.

All our impulses and instincts are greatly increased in their immediate effectiveness if they are 'pure,' and in their more permanent results if they are 'first hand' and are connected with the earlier stages of our evolution. In modern politics the emotional stimulus which reaches us through the newspapers is generally 'pure,' but 'second hand,' and therefore is both facile and transient.

The frequent repetition of an emotion or impulse is often distressing. Politicians, like advertisers, must allow for this fact, which again is connected with that combination of the need of privacy with intolerance of solitude to which we have to adjust our social arrangements.

Political emotions are sometimes pathologically intensified when experienced simultaneously by large numbers of human beings in physical association, but the conditions of political life in England do not often produce this phenomenon.

The future of international politics largely depends on the question whether we have a specific instinct of hatred for human beings of a different racial type from ourselves. The point is not yet settled, but many facts which are often explained as the result of such an instinct seem to be due to other and more general instincts modified by association.

Political acts and impulses are the result of the contact between human nature and its environment. During the period studied by the politician, human nature has changed very little, but political environment has changed with ever-increasing rapidity.

Those facts of our environment which stimulate impulse and action reach us through our senses, and are selected from the mass of our sensations and memories by our instinctive or acquired knowledge of their significance. In politics the things recognised are, for the most part, made by man himself, and our knowledge of their significance is not instinctive but acquired.

Recognition tends to attach itself to symbols, which take the place of more complex sensations and memories. Some of the most difficult problems in politics result from the relation between the conscious use in reasoning of the symbols called words, and their more or less automatic and unconscious effect in stimulating emotion and action. A political symbol whose significance has once been established by association, may go through a psychological development of its own, apart from the history of the facts which were originally symbolised by it. This may be seen in the case of the names and emblems of nations and parties; and still more clearly in the history of those commercial entities--'teas' or 'soaps'--which are already made current by advertisement before any objects to be symbolised by them have been made or chosen. Ethical difficulties are often created by the relation between the quickly changing opinions of any individual politician and such slowly changing entities as his reputation, his party name, or the traditional personality of a newspaper which he may control.

Intellectualist political thinkers often assume, not only that political action is necessarily the result of inferences as to means and ends, but that all inferences are of the same 'rational' type.

It is difficult to distinguish sharply between rational and non-rational inferences in the stream of mental experience, but it is clear that many of the half-conscious processes by which men form their political opinions are non-rational. We can generally trust non-rational inferences in ordinary life because they do not give rise to conscious opinions until they have been strengthened by a large number of undesigned coincidences. But conjurers and others who study our non-rational mental processes can so play upon them as to make us form absurd beliefs. The empirical art of politics consists largely in the creation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of subconscious non-rational inference. The process of inference may go on beyond the point desired by the politician who started it, and is as likely to take place in the mind of a passive newspaper-reader as among the members of the most excited crowd.

But men can and do reason, though reasoning is only one of their mental processes. The rules for valid reasoning laid down by the Greeks were intended primarily for use in politics, but in politics reasoning has in fact proved to be more difficult and less successful than in the physical sciences. The chief cause of this is to be found in the character of its material. We have to select or create entities to reason about, just as we select or create entities to stimulate our impulses and non-rational inferences. In the physical sciences these selected entities are of two types, either concrete things made exactly alike, or abstracted qualities in respect of which things otherwise unlike can be exactly compared. In politics, entities of the first type cannot be created, and political philosophers have constantly sought for some simple entity of the second type, some fact or quality, which may serve as an exact 'standard' for political calculation. This search has hitherto been unsuccessful, and the analogy of the biological sciences suggests that politicians are most likely to acquire the power of valid reasoning when they, like doctors, avoid the over-simplification of their material, and aim at using in their reasoning as many facts as possible about the human type, its individual variations, and its environment. Biologists have shown that large numbers of facts as to individual variations within any type can be remembered if they are arranged as continuous curves rather than as uniform rules or arbitrary exceptions. On the other hand, any attempt to arrange the facts of environment with the same approach to continuity as is possible with the facts of human nature is likely to result in error. The study of history cannot be assimilated to that of biology.

The method of political reasoning has shared the traditional over-simplification of its subject-matter.

In Economics, where both method and subject-matter were originally still more completely simplified, 'quantitative' methods have since Jevons's time tended to take the place of 'qualitative'. How far is a similar change possible in politics?

Some political questions can obviously be argued quantitatively. Others are less obviously quantitative. But even on the most complex political issues experienced and responsible statesmen do in fact think quantitatively, although the methods by which they reach their results are often unconscious.

When, however, all politicians start with intellectualist assumptions, though some half-consciously acquire quantitative habits of thought, many desert politics altogether from disillusionment and disgust. What is wanted in the training of a statesman is the fully conscious formulation and acceptance of those methods which will not have to be unlearned.

Such a conscious change is already taking place in the work of Royal Commissions, International Congresses, and other bodies and persons who have to arrange and draw conclusions from large masses of specially collected evidence. Their methods and vocabulary, even when not numerical, are nowadays in large part quantitative.

In parliamentary oratory, however, the old tradition of over-simplification is apt to persist.

But in what ways can such changes in political science affect the actual trend of political forces?

In the first place, the abandonment by political thinkers and writers of the intellectualist conception of politics will sooner or later influence the moral judgments of the working politician. A young candidate will begin with a new conception of his moral relation to those whose will and opinions he is attempting to influence. He will start, in that respect, from a position hitherto confined to statesmen who have been made cynical by experience.

If that were the only result of our new knowledge, political morality might be changed for the worse. But the change will go deeper. When men become conscious of psychological processes of which they have been unconscious or half-conscious, not only are they put on their guard against the exploitation of those processes in themselves by others, but they become better able to control them from within.

If, however, a conscious moral purpose is to be strong enough to overcome, as a political force, the advancing art of political exploitation, the conception of control from within must be formed into an ideal entity which, like 'Science,' can appeal to popular imagination, and be spread by an organised system of education. The difficulties in this are great , but a wide extension of the idea of causation is not inconsistent with an increased intensity of moral passion.

The changes now going on in our conception of the psychological basis of politics will also re-open the discussion of representative democracy.

Some of the old arguments in that discussion will no longer be accepted as valid, and it is probable that many political thinkers will return to Plato's proposal of a despotic government carried on by a selected and trained class, who live apart from the 'ostensible world'; though English experience in India indicates that even the most carefully selected official must still live in the 'ostensible world,' and that the argument that good government requires the consent of the governed does not depend for its validity upon its original intellectualist associations.

Our new way of thinking about politics will, however, certainly change the form, not only of the argument for consent, but also of the institutions by which consent is expressed. An election will be, and is already beginning to be, looked upon rather as a process by which right decisions are formed under right conditions, than as a mechanical expedient by which decisions already formed are ascertained.

Proposals for electoral reform which seem to continue the old intellectualist tradition are still brought forward, and new difficulties in the working of representative government will arise from the wider extension of political power. But that conception of representation may spread which desires both to increase the knowledge and public spirit of the voter and to provide that no strain is put upon him greater than he can bear.

A quantitative examination of the political force created by popular election shows the importance of the work of non-elected officials in any effective scheme of democracy.

What should be the relation between these officials and the elected representatives? On this point English opinion already shows a marked reaction from the intellectualist conception of representative government. We accept the fact that most state officials are appointed by a system uncontrolled either by individual members of parliament or by parliament as a whole, that they hold office during good behaviour, and that they are our main source of information as to some of the most difficult points on which we form political judgments. It is largely an accident that the same system has not been introduced into our local government.

But such a half-conscious acceptance of a partially independent Civil Service as an existing fact is not enough. We must set ourselves to realise clearly what we intend our officials to do, and to consider how far our present modes of appointment, and especially our present methods of organising official work, provide the most effective means for carrying out that intention.

What influence will the new tendencies in political thought have on the emotional and intellectual conditions of political solidarity?

In the old city-states, where the area of government corresponded to the actual range of human vision and memory, a kind of local emotion could be developed which is now impossible in a 'delocalised' population. The solidarity of a modern state must therefore depend on facts not of observation but of imagination.

During the last quarter of a century this conception of the world as composed of a mosaic of homogeneous nations has been made more difficult by the continued existence and even growth of separate national feelings within modern states, and by the fact that the European and non-European races have entered into closer political relationships. The attempt, therefore, to transfer the traditions of national homogeneity and solidarity either to the inhabitants of a modern world-empire as a whole, or to the members of the dominant race in it, disguises the real facts and adds to the danger of war.

Can we, however, acquire a political emotion based, not upon a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but upon the recognition of their unlikeness? Darwin's proof of the relation between individual and racial variation might have produced such an emotion if it had not been accompanied by the conception of the 'struggle for life' as a moral duty. As it is, inter-racial and even inter-imperial wars can be represented as necessary stages in the progress of the species. But present-day biologists tell us that the improvement of any one race will come most effectively from the conscious co-operation, and not from the blind conflict of individuals; and it may be found that the improvement of the whole species will also come rather from a conscious world-purpose based upon a recognition of the value of racial as well as individual variety, than from mere fighting.

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

INTRODUCTION

The study of politics is just now in a curiously unsatisfactory position.

At first sight the main controversy as to the best form of government appears to have been finally settled in favour of representative democracy. Forty years ago it could still be argued that to base the sovereignty of a great modern nation upon a widely extended popular vote was, in Europe at least, an experiment which had never been successfully tried. England, indeed, by the 'leap in the dark' of 1867, became for the moment the only large European State whose government was democratic and representative. But to-day a parliamentary republic based upon universal suffrage exists in France without serious opposition or protest. Italy enjoys an apparently stable constitutional monarchy. Universal suffrage has just been enacted in Austria. Even the German Emperor after the election of 1907 spoke of himself rather as the successful leader of a popular electoral campaign than as the inheritor of a divine right. The vast majority of the Russian nation passionately desires a sovereign parliament, and a reactionary Duma finds itself steadily pushed by circumstances towards that position. The most ultramontane Roman Catholics demand temporal power for the Pope, no longer as an ideal system of world government, but as an expedient for securing in a few square miles of Italian territory liberty of action for the directors of a church almost all of whose members will remain voting citizens of constitutional States. None of the proposals for a non-representative democracy which were associated with the communist and anarchist movements of the nineteenth century have been at all widely accepted, or have presented themselves as a definite constructive scheme; and almost all those who now hope for a social change by which the results of modern scientific industry shall be more evenly distributed put their trust in the electoral activity of the working classes.

And yet, in the very nations which have most whole-heartedly accepted representative democracy, politicians and political students seem puzzled and disappointed by their experience of it. The United States of America have made in this respect by far the longest and most continuous experiment. Their constitution has lasted for a century and a quarter, and, in spite of controversy and even war arising from opposing interpretations of its details, its principles have been, and still are, practically unchallenged. But, as far as an English visitor can judge, no American thinks with satisfaction of the electoral 'machine' whose power alike in Federal, State, and Municipal politics is still increasing.

In England not only has our experience of representative democracy been much shorter than that of America, but our political traditions have tended to delay the full acceptance of the democratic idea even in the working of democratic institutions. Yet, allowing for differences of degree and circumstance, one finds in England among the most loyal democrats, if they have been brought into close contact with the details of electoral organisation, something of the same disappointment which has become more articulate in America. I have helped to fight a good many parliamentary contests, and have myself been a candidate in a series of five London municipal elections. In my last election I noticed that two of my canvassers, when talking over the day's work, used independently the phrase, 'It is a queer business.' I have heard much the same words used in England by those professional political agents whose efficiency depends on their seeing electoral facts without illusion. I have no first-hand knowledge of German or Italian electioneering, but when a year ago I talked with my hosts of the Paris Municipal Council, I seemed to detect in some of them indications of good-humoured disillusionment with regard to the working of a democratic electoral system.

In England and America one has, further, the feeling that it is the growing, and not the decaying, forces of society which create the most disquieting problems. In America the 'machine' takes its worst form in those great new cities whose population and wealth and energy represent the goal towards which the rest of American civilisation is apparently tending. In England, to any one who looks forward, the rampant bribery of the old fishing-ports, or the traditional and respectable corruption of the cathedral cities, seem comparatively small and manageable evils. The more serious grounds for apprehension come from the newest inventions of wealth and enterprise, the up-to-date newspapers, the power and skill of the men who direct huge aggregations of industrial capital, the organised political passions of working men who have passed through the standards of the elementary schools, and who live in hundreds of square miles of new, healthy, indistinguishable suburban streets. Every few years some invention in political method is made, and if it succeeds both parties adopt it. In politics, as in football, the tactics which prevail are not those which the makers of the rules intended, but those by which the players find that they can win, and men feel vaguely that the expedients by which their party is most likely to win may turn out not to be those by which a State is best governed.

More significant still is the fear, often expressed as new questions force themselves into politics, that the existing electoral system will not bear the strain of an intensified social conflict. Many of the arguments used in the discussion of the tariff question in England, or of the concentration of capital in America, or of social--democracy in Germany, imply this. Popular election, it is said, may work fairly well as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and industrial power to make full use of their opportunities. But if the rich people in any modern state thought it worth their while, in order to secure a tariff, or legalise a trust, or oppose a confiscatory tax, to subscribe a third of their income to a political fund, no Corrupt Practices Act yet invented would prevent them from spending it. If they did so, there is so much skill to be bought, and the art of using skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so advanced, that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the future. No existing party, unless it enormously increased its own fund or discovered some other new source of political strength, would have any chance of permanent success.

The appeal, however, in the name of electoral purity, to protectionists, trust-promoters, and socialists that they should drop their various movements and so confine politics to less exciting questions, falls, naturally enough, on deaf ears.

The proposal, again, to extend the franchise to women is met by that sort of hesitation and evasion which is characteristic of politicians who are not sure of their intellectual ground. A candidate who has just been speaking on the principles of democracy finds it, when he is heckled, very difficult to frame an answer which would justify the continued exclusion of women from the franchise. Accordingly a large majority of the successful candidates from both the main parties at the general election of 1906 pledged themselves to support female suffrage. But, as I write, many, perhaps the majority, of those who gave that pledge seem to be trying to avoid the necessity of carrying it out. There is no reason to suppose that they are men of exceptionally dishonest character, and their fear of the possible effect of a final decision is apparently genuine. They are aware that certain differences exist between men and women, though they do not know what those differences are, nor in what way they are relevant to the question of the franchise. But they are even less steadfast in their doubts than in their pledges, and the question will, in the comparatively near future, probably be settled by importunity on the one side and mere drifting on the other.

This half conscious feeling of unsettlement on matters which in our explicit political arguments we treat as settled, is increased by the growing urgency of the problem of race. The fight for democracy in Europe and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was carried on by men who were thinking only of the European races. But, during the extension of democracy after 1870, almost all the Great Powers were engaged in acquiring tropical dependencies, and improvements in the means of communication were bringing all the races of the world into close contact. The ordinary man now finds that the sovereign vote has been in fact confined to nations of European origin. But there is nothing in the form or history of the representative principle which seems to justify this, or to suggest any alternative for the vote as a basis of government. Nor can he draw any intelligible and consistent conclusion from the practice of democratic States in giving or refusing the vote to their non-European subjects. The United States, for instance, have silently and almost unanimously dropped the experiment of negro suffrage. In that case, owing to the wide intellectual gulf between the West African negro and the white man from North-West Europe, the problem was comparatively simple; but no serious attempt has yet been made at a new solution of it, and the Americans have been obviously puzzled in dealing with the more subtle racial questions created by the immigration of Chinese and Japanese and Slavs, or by the government of the mixed populations in the Philippines.

England and her colonies show a like uncertainty in the presence of the political questions raised both by the migration of non-white races and by the acquisition of tropical dependencies. Even when we discuss the political future of independent Asiatic States we are not clear whether the principle, for instance, of 'no taxation without representation' should be treated as applicable to them. Our own position as an Asiatic power depends very largely on the development of China and Persia, which are inhabited by races who may claim, in some respects, to be our intellectual superiors. When they adopt our systems of engineering, mechanics, or armament we have no doubt that they are doing a good thing for themselves, even though we may fear their commercial or military rivalry. But no follower of Bentham is now eager to export for general Asiatic use our latest inventions in political machinery. We hear that the Persians have established a parliament, and watch the development of their experiment with a complete suspension of judgment as to its probable result. We have helped the Japanese to preserve their independence as a constitutional nation, and most Englishmen vaguely sympathise with the desire of the Chinese progressives both for national independence and internal reform. Few of us, however, would be willing to give any definite advice to an individual Chinaman who asked whether he ought to throw himself into a movement for a representative parliament on European lines.

Within our own Empire this uncertainty as to the limitations of our political principles may at any moment produce actual disaster. In Africa, for instance, the political relationship between the European inhabitants of our territories and the non-European majority of Kaffirs, Negroes, Hindoos, Copts, or Arabs is regulated on entirely different lines in Natal, Basutoland, Egypt, or East Africa. In each case the constitutional difference is due not so much to the character of the local problem as to historical accident, and trouble may break out anywhere and at any time, either from the aggression of the Europeans upon the rights reserved by the Home Government to the non-Europeans, or from a revolt of the non-Europeans themselves. Blacks and whites are equally irritated by the knowledge that there is one law in Nairobi and another in Durban.

This position is, of course, most dangerous in the case of India. For two or three generations the ordinary English Liberal postponed any decision on Indian politics, because he believed that we were educating the inhabitants for self-government, and that in due time they would all have a vote for an Indian parliament. Now he is becoming aware that there are many races in India, and that some of the most important differences between those races among themselves, and between any of them and ourselves, are not such as can be obliterated by education. He is told by men whom he respects that this fact makes it certain that the representative system which is suitable for England will never be suitable for India, and therefore he remains uneasily responsible for the permanent autocratic government of three hundred million people, remembering from time to time that some of those people or their neighbours may have much more definite political ideas than his own, and that he ultimately may have to fight for a power which he hardly desires to retain.

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