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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.

Meanwhile, the existence of the Indian problem loosens half-consciously his grip upon democratic principle in matters nearer home. Newspapers and magazines and steamships are constantly making India more real to him, and the conviction of a Liberal that Polish immigrants or London 'latch-key' lodgers ought to have a vote is less decided than it would have been if he had not acquiesced in the decision that Rajputs, and Bengalis, and Parsees should be refused it.

Practical politicians cannot, it is true, be expected to stop in the middle of a campaign merely because they have an uncomfortable feeling that the rules of the game require re-stating and possibly re-casting. But the winning or losing of elections does not exhaust the whole political duty of a nation, and perhaps there never has been a time in which the disinterested examination of political principles has been more urgently required. Hitherto the main stimulus to political speculation has been provided by wars and revolutions, by the fight of the Greek States against the Persians, and their disastrous struggle for supremacy among themselves, or by the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century. The outstanding social events in Europe in our own time have, however, been so far the failures rather than the successes of great movements; the apparent wasting of devotion and courage in Russia, owing to the deep-seated intellectual divisions among the reformers, and the military advantage which modern weapons and means of communication give to any government however tyrannous and corrupt; the baffling of the German social-democrats by the forces of religion and patriotism and by the infertility of their own creed; the weakness of the successive waves of American Democracy when faced by the political power of capital.

But failure and bewilderment may present as stern a demand for thought as the most successful revolution, and, in many respects, that demand is now being well answered. Political experience is recorded and examined with a thoroughness hitherto unknown. The history of political action in the past, instead of being left to isolated scholars, has become the subject of organised and minutely subdivided labour. The new political developments of the present, Australian Federation, the Referendum in Switzerland, German Public Finance, the Party system in England and America, and innumerable others, are constantly recorded, discussed and compared in the monographs and technical magazines which circulate through all the universities of the globe.

It is easy to understand how this has come about. Political science is just beginning to regain some measure of authority after the acknowledged failure of its confident professions during the first half of the nineteenth century. Bentham's Utilitarianism, after superseding both Natural Right and the blind tradition of the lawyers, and serving as the basis of innumerable legal and constitutional reforms throughout Europe, was killed by the unanswerable refusal of the plain man to believe that ideas of pleasure and pain are the only sources of human motive. The 'classical' political economy of the universities and the newspapers, the political economy of MacCulloch and Senior and Archbishop Whately, was even more unfortunate in its attempt to deduce a whole industrial polity from a 'few simple principles' of human nature. It became identified with the shallow dogmatism by which well-to-do people in the first half of Queen Victoria's reign tried to convince working men that any change in the distribution of the good things of life was 'scientifically impossible.' Marx and Buskin and Carlyle were masters of sarcasm, and the process is not yet forgotten by which they slowly compelled even the newspapers to abandon the 'laws of political economy' which from 1815 to 1870 stood, like gigantic stuffed policemen, on guard over rent and profits.

For the moment, therefore, nearly all students of politics analyse institutions and avoid the analysis of man. The study of human nature by the psychologists has, it is true, advanced enormously since the discovery of human evolution, but it has advanced without affecting or being affected by the study of politics. Modern text-books of psychology are illustrated with innumerable facts from the home, the school, the hospital, and the psychological laboratory; but in them politics are hardly ever mentioned. The professors of the new science of sociology are beginning, it is true, to deal with human nature in its relation not only to the family and to religion and industry, but also to certain political institutions. Sociology, however, has had, as yet, little influence on political science.

I believe myself that this tendency to separate the study of politics from that of human nature will prove to be only a momentary phase of thought, that while it lasts its effects, both on the science and the conduct of politics, are likely to be harmful, and that there are already signs that it is coming to an end.

In the other sciences which deal with human actions, this division between the study of the thing done and the study of the being who does it is not found. In criminology Beccaria and Bentham long ago showed how dangerous that jurisprudence was which separated the classification of crimes from the study of the criminal. The conceptions of human nature which they held have been superseded by evolutionary psychology, but modern thinkers like Lombroso have brought the new psychology into the service of a new and fruitful criminology.

In pedagogy also, Locke, and Rousseau, and Herbart, and the many-sided Bentham, based their theories of education upon their conceptions of human nature. Those conceptions were the same as those which underlay their political theories, and have been affected in the same way by modern knowledge. For a short time it even looked, as if the lecturers in the English training colleges would make the same separation between the study of human institutions and human nature as has been made in politics. Lectures on School Method were distinguished during this period from those on the Theory of Education. The first became mere descriptions and comparisons of the organisation and teaching in the best schools. The second consisted of expositions, with occasional comment and criticism of such classical writers as Comenius, or Locke, or Rousseau; and were curiously like those informal talks on Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which, under the name of the Theory of Politics, formed in my time such a pleasant interlude in the Oxford course of Humaner Letters. But while the Oxford lecture-courses still, I believe, survive almost unchanged, the Training College lectures on the Theory of Education are beginning to show signs of a change as great as that which took place in the training of medical students, when the lecturers on anatomy, instead of expounding the classical authorities, began to give, on their own responsibility, the best account of the facts of human structure of which they were capable.

The reason for this difference is, apparently, the fact that while Oxford lecturers on the Theory of Politics are not often politicians, the Training College lecturers on the Theory of Teaching have always been teachers, to whom the question whether any new knowledge could be made useful in their art was one of living and urgent importance. One finds accordingly that under the leadership of men like Professors William James, Lloyd Morgan, and Stanley Hall, a progressive science of teaching is being developed, which combines the study of types of school organisation and method with a determined attempt to learn from special experiments, from introspection, and from other sciences, what manner of thing a child is.

Modern pedagogy, based on modern psychology, is already influencing the schools whose teachers are trained for their profession. Its body of facts is being yearly added to; it has already caused the abandonment of much dreary waste of time; has given many thousands of teachers a new outlook on their work, and has increased the learning and happiness of many tens of thousands of children.

This essay of mine is offered as a plea that a corresponding change in the conditions of political science is possible. In the great University whose constituent colleges are the universities of the world, there is a steadily growing body of professors and students of politics who give the whole day to their work. I cannot but think that as years go on, more of them will call to their aid that study of mankind which is the ancient ally of the moral sciences. Within every great city there are groups of men and women who are brought together in the evenings by the desire to find something more satisfying than current political controversy. They have their own unofficial leaders and teachers, and among these one can already detect an impatience with the alternative offered, either of working by the bare comparison of existing institutions, or of discussing the fitness of socialism or individualism, of democracy or aristocracy for human beings whose nature is taken for granted.

If my book is read by any of those official or unofficial thinkers, I would urge that the study of human nature in politics, if ever it comes to be undertaken by the united and organised efforts of hundreds of learned men, may not only deepen and widen our knowledge of political institutions, but open an unworked mine of political invention.

PART I

IMPULSE AND INSTINCT IN POLITICS

Whoever sets himself to base his political thinking on a re-examination of the working of human nature, must begin by trying to overcome his own tendency to exaggerate the intellectuality of mankind.

We are apt to assume that every human action is the result of an intellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end which he desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can be attained. An investor, for instance, desires good security combined with five per cent interest. He spends an hour in studying with an open mind the price-list of stocks, and finally infers that the purchase of Brewery Debentures will enable him most completely to realise his desire. Given the original desire for good security, his act in purchasing the Debentures appears to be the inevitable result of his inference. The desire for good security itself may further appear to be merely an intellectual inference as to the means of satisfying some more general desire, shared by all mankind, for 'happiness,' our own 'interest,' or the like. The satisfaction of this general desire can then be treated as the supreme 'end' of life, from which all our acts and impulses, great and small, are derived by the same intellectual process as that by which the conclusion is derived from the premises of an argument.

If he had been pressed, Macaulay would probably have admitted that there are cases in which human acts and impulses to act occur independently of any idea of an end to be gained by them. If I have a piece of grit in my eye and ask some one to take it out with the corner of his handkerchief, I generally close the eye as soon as the handkerchief comes near, and always feel a strong impulse to do so. Nobody supposes that I close my eye because, after due consideration, I think it my interest to do so. Nor do most men choose to run away in battle, to fall in love, or to talk about the weather in order to satisfy their desire for a preconceived end. If, indeed, a man were followed through one ordinary day, without his knowing it, by a cinematographic camera and a phonograph, and if all his acts and sayings were reproduced before him next day, he would be astonished to find how few of them were the result of a deliberate search for the means of attaining ends. He would, of course, see that much of his activity consisted in the half-conscious repetition, under the influence of habit, of movements which were originally more fully conscious. But even if all cases of habit were excluded he would find that only a small proportion of the residue could be explained as being directly produced by an intellectual calculation. If a record were also kept of those of his impulses and emotions which did not result in action, it would be seen that they were of the same kind as those which did, and that very few of them were preceded by that process which Macaulay takes for granted.

If Macaulay had been pressed still further, he would probably have admitted that even when an act is preceded by a calculation of ends and means, it is not the inevitable result of that calculation. Even when we know what a man thinks it his interest to do, we do not know for certain what he will do. The man who studies the Stock Exchange list does not buy his Debentures, unless, apart from his intellectual inference on the subject, he has an impulse to write to his stockbroker sufficiently strong to overcome another impulse to put the whole thing off till the next day.

Macaulay might even further have admitted that the mental act of calculation itself results from, or is accompanied by, an impulse to calculate, which impulse may have nothing to do with any anterior consideration of means and ends, and may vary from the half-conscious yielding to a train of reverie up to the obstinate driving of a tired brain onto the difficult task of exact thought.

The text-books of psychology now warn every student against the 'intellectualist' fallacy which is illustrated by my quotation from Macaulay. Impulse, it is now agreed, has an evolutionary history of its own earlier than the history of those intellectual processes by which it is often directed and modified. Our inherited organisation inclines us to re-act in certain ways to certain stimuli because such reactions have been useful in the past in preserving our species. Some of the reactions are what we call specifically 'instincts,' that is to say, impulses towards definite acts or series of acts, independent of any conscious anticipation of their probable effects. Those instincts are sometimes unconscious and involuntary; and sometimes, in the case of ourselves and apparently of other higher animals, they are conscious and voluntary. But the connection between means and ends which they exhibit is the result not of any contrivance by the actor, but of the survival, in the past, of the 'fittest' of many varying tendencies to act. Indeed the instinct persists when it is obviously useless, as in the case of a dog who turns round to flatten the grass before lying down on a carpet; and even when it is known to be dangerous, as when a man recovering from typhoid hungers for solid food.

The fact that impulse is not always the result of conscious foresight is most clearly seen in the case of children. The first impulses of a baby to suck, or to grasp, are obviously 'instinctive.' But even when the unconscious or unremembered condition of infancy has been succeeded by the connected consciousness of childhood, the child will fly to his mother and hide his face in her skirts when he sees a harmless stranger. Later on he will torture small beasts and run away from big beasts, or steal fruit, or climb trees, though no one has suggested such actions to him, and though he may expect disagreeable results from them.

The pre-rational character of many of our impulses is, however, disguised by the fact that during the lifetime of each individual they are increasingly modified by memory and habit and thought. Even the non-human animals are able to adapt and modify their inherited impulses either by imitation or by habits founded on individual experience. When telegraph wires, for instance, were first put up many birds flew against them and were killed. But although the number of those that were killed was obviously insufficient to produce a change in the biological inheritance of the species, very few birds fly against the wires now. The young birds must have imitated their elders, who had learnt to avoid the wires; just as the young of many hunting animals are said to learn devices and precautions which are the result of their parents' experience, and later to make and hand down by imitation inventions of their own.

Many of the directly inherited impulses, again, appear both in man and other animals at a certain point in the growth of the individual, and then, if they are checked, die away, or, if they are unchecked, form habits; and impulses, which were originally strong and useful, may no longer help in preserving life, and may, like the whale's legs or our teeth and hair, be weakened by biological degeneration. Such temporary or weakened impulses are especially liable to be transferred to new objects, or to be modified by experience and thought.

With all these complicated facts the schoolmaster has to deal. In Macaulay's time he used to be guided by his 'common-sense,' and to intellectualise the whole process. The unfortunate boys who acted upon an ancient impulse to fidget, to play truant, to chase cats, or to mimic their teacher, were asked, with repeated threats of punishment,'why' they had done so. They, being ignorant of their own evolutionary history, were forced to invent some far-fetched lie, and were punished for that as well. The trained schoolmaster of to-day takes the existence of such impulses as a normal fact; and decides how far, in each case, he shall check them by relying on that half-conscious imitation which makes the greater part of class-room discipline, and how far by stimulating a conscious recognition of the connection, ethical or penal, between acts and their consequences. In any case his power of controlling instinctive impulse is due to his recognition of its non-intellectual origin. He may even be able to extend this recognition to his own impulses, and to overcome the conviction that his irritability during afternoon school in July is the result of an intellectual conclusion as to the need of special severity in dealing with a set of unprecedentedly wicked boys.

The politician, however, is still apt to intellectualise impulse as completely as the schoolmaster did fifty years ago. He has two excuses, that he deals entirely with adults, whose impulses are more deeply modified by experience and thought than those of children, and that it is very difficult for any one who thinks about politics not to confine his consideration to those political actions and impulses which are accompanied by the greatest amount of conscious thought, and which therefore come first into his mind. But the politician thinks about men in large communities, and it is in the forecasting of the action of large communities that the intellectualist fallacy is most misleading. The results of experience and thought are often confined to individuals or small groups, and when they differ may cancel each other as political forces. The original human impulses are, with personal variations, common to the whole race, and increase in their importance with an increase in the number of those influenced by them.

It may be worth while, therefore, to attempt a description of some of the more obvious or more important political impulses, remembering always that in politics we are dealing not with such clear-cut separate instincts as we may find in children and animals, but with tendencies often weakened by the course of human evolution, still more often transferred to new uses, and acting not simply but in combination or counteraction.

Aristotle, for instance, says that it is 'affection' which 'makes political union possible,' and 'which law-givers consider more important than justice.' It is, he says, a hereditary instinct among animals of the same race, and particularly among men. If we look for this political affection in its simplest form, we see it in our impulse to feel 'kindly' towards any other human being of whose existence and personality we become vividly aware. This impulse can be checked and overlaid by others, but any one can test its existence and its prerationality in his own case by going, for instance, to the British Museum and watching the effect on his feelings of the discovery that a little Egyptian girl baby who died four thousand years ago rubbed the toes of her shoes by crawling upon the floor.

The tactics of an election consist largely of contrivances by which this immediate emotion of personal affection may be set up. The candidate is advised to 'show himself continually, to give away prizes, to 'say a few words' at the end of other people's speeches--all under circumstances which offer little or no opportunity for the formation of a reasoned opinion of his merits, but many opportunities for the rise of a purely instinctive affection among those present. His portrait is periodically distributed, and is more effective if it is a good, that is to say, a distinctive, than if it is a flattering likeness. Best of all is a photograph which brings his ordinary existence sharply forward by representing him in his garden smoking a pipe or reading a newspaper.

A simple-minded supporter whose affection has been so worked up will probably try to give an intellectual explanation of it. He will say that the man, of whom he may know really nothing except that he was photographed in a Panama hat with a fox-terrier, is 'the kind of man we want,' and that therefore he has decided to support him; just as a child will say that he loves his mother because she is the best mother in the world, or a man in love will give an elaborate explanation of his perfectly normal feelings, which he describes as an intellectual inference from alleged abnormal excellences in his beloved. The candidate naturally intellectualises in the same way. One of the most perfectly modest men I know once told me that he was 'going round' a good deal among his future constituents 'to let them see what a good fellow I am.' Unless, indeed, the process can be intellectualised, it is for many men unintelligible.

A rather unusually reflective little girl of my acquaintance, felt, one day, while looking at her mother, a strong impulse of affection. She first gave the usual intellectual explanation of her feeling, 'Mummy, I do think you are the most beautiful Mummy in the whole world,' and then, after a moment's thought, corrected herself by saying, 'But there, they do say love is blind.'

A monarch is a life-long candidate, and there exists a singularly elaborate traditional art of producing personal affection for him. It is more important that he should be seen than that he should speak or act. His portrait appears on every coin and stamp, and apart from any question of personal beauty, produces most effect when it is a good likeness. Any one, for instance, who can clearly recall his own emotions during the later years of Queen Victoria's reign, will remember a measurable increase of his affection for her, when, in 1897, a thoroughly life-like portrait took the place on the coins of the conventional head of 1837-1887, and the awkward compromise of the first Jubilee year. In the case of monarchy one can also watch the intellectualisation of the whole process by the newspapers, the official biographers, the courtiers, and possibly the monarch himself. The daily bulletin of details as to his walks and drives is, in reality, the more likely to create a vivid impression of his personality, and therefore to produce this particular kind of emotion, the more ordinary the events described are in themselves. But since an emotion arising out of ordinary events is difficult to explain on a purely intellectual basis, these events are written about as revealing a life of extraordinary regularity and industry. When the affection is formed it is even sometimes described as an inevitable reasoned conclusion arising from reflection upon a reign during which there have been an unusual number of good harvests or great inventions.

Sometimes the impulse of affection is excited to a point at which its non-rational character becomes obvious. George the Third was beloved by the English people because they realised intensely that, like themselves, he had been born in England, and because the published facts of his daily life came home to them. Fanny Burney describes, therefore, how when, during an attack of madness, he was to be taken in a coach to Kew, the doctors who were to accompany him were seriously afraid that the inhabitants of any village who saw that the King was under restraint would attack them. The kindred emotion of personal and dynastic loyalty , has again and again produced destructive and utterly useless civil wars.

Fear often accompanies and, in politics, is confused with affection. A man, whose life's dream it has been to get sight and speech of his King, is accidentally brought face to face with him. He is 'rooted to the spot,' becomes pale, and is unable to speak, because a movement might have betrayed his ancestors to a lion or a bear, or earlier still, to a hungry cuttlefish. It would be an interesting experiment if some professor of experimental psychology would arrange his class in the laboratory with sphygmographs on their wrists ready to record those pulse movements which accompany the sensation of 'thrill,' and would then introduce into the room without notice, and in chance order, a bishop, a well-known general, the greatest living man of letters, and a minor member of the royal family. The resulting records of immediate pulse disturbances would be of real scientific importance, and it might even be possible to continue the record in each case say, for a quarter of a minute, and to trace the secondary effects of variations in political opinions, education, or the sense of humour among the students.

At present almost the only really scientific observation on the subject from its political side is contained in Lord Palmerston's protest against a purely intellectual account of aristocracy: 'there is no damned nonsense about merit,' he said, 'in the case of the Garter.' Makers of new aristocracies are still, however, apt to intellectualise. The French government, for instance, have created an order, 'Pour le M?rite Agricole,' which ought, on the basis of mere logic, to be very successful; but one is told that the green ribbon of that order produces in France no thrill whatever.

The impulse to laugh is comparatively unimportant in politics, but it affords a good instance of the way in which a practical politician has to allow for pre-rational impulse. It is apparently an immediate effect of the recognition of the incongruous, just as trembling is of the recognition of danger. It may have been evolved because an animal which suffered a slight spasm in the presence of the unexpected was more likely to be on its guard against enemies, or it may have been the merely accidental result of some fact in our nervous organisation which was otherwise useful. Incongruity is, however, so much a matter of habit and association and individual variation, that it is extraordinarily difficult to forecast whether any particular act will seem ridiculous to any particular class, or how long the sense of incongruity will in any case persist. Acts, for instance, which aim at producing exalted emotional effect among ordinary slow-witted people--Burke's dagger, Louis Napoleon's tame eagle, the German Kaiser's telegrams about Huns and mailed fists--may do so, and therefore be in the end politically successful, although they produce spontaneous laughter in men whose conception of good political manners is based upon the idea of self-restraint.

Again, almost the whole of the economic question between socialism and individualism turns on the nature and limitations of the desire for property. There seem to be good grounds for supposing that this is a true specific instinct, and not merely the result of habit or of the intellectual choice of means for satisfying the desire of power. Children, for instance, quarrel furiously at a very early age over apparently worthless things, and collect and hide them long before they can have any clear notion of the advantages to be derived from individual possession. Those children who in certain charity schools are brought up entirely without personal property, even in their clothes or pocket-handkerchiefs, show every sign of the bad effect on health and character which results from complete inability to satisfy a strong inherited instinct. The evolutionary origin of the desire for property is indicated also by many of the habits of dogs or squirrels or magpies. Some economist ought therefore to give us a treatise in which this property instinct is carefully and quantitatively examined. Is it, like the hunting instinct, an impulse which dies away if it is not indulged? How far can it be eliminated or modified by education? Is it satisfied by a leasehold or a life-interest, or by such an arrangement of corporate property as is offered by a collegiate foundation, or by the provision of a public park? Does it require for its satisfaction material and visible things such as land or houses, or is the holding, say, of colonial railway shares sufficient? Is the absence of unlimited proprietary rights felt more strongly in the case of personal chattels than in the case of land or machinery? Does the degree and direction of the instinct markedly differ among different individuals or races, or between the two sexes?

Pending such an inquiry my own provisional opinion is that, like a good many instincts of very early evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied by an avowed pretence; just as a kitten which is fed regularly on milk can be kept in good health if it is allowed to indulge its hunting instinct by playing with a bobbin, and a peaceful civil servant satisfies his instinct of combat and adventure at golf. If this is so, and if it is considered for other reasons undesirable to satisfy the property instinct by the possession, say, of slaves or of freehold land, one supposes that a good deal of the feeling of property may in the future be enjoyed even by persons in whom the instinct is abnormally strong, through the collection of shells or of picture postcards.

The property instinct is, it happens, one of two instances in which the classical economists deserted their usual habit of treating all desires as the result of a calculation of the means of obtaining 'utility' or 'wealth.' The satisfaction of the instinct of absolute property by peasant proprietorship turned, they said, 'sand to gold,' although it required a larger expenditure of labour for every unit of income than was the case in salaried employment. The other instance was the instinct of family affection. This also still needs a special treatise on its stimulus, variation, and limitations. But the classical economists treated it as absolute and unvarying. The 'economic man,' who had no more concern than a lone wolf with the rest of the human species, was treated as possessing a perfect and permanent solidarity of feeling with his 'family.' The family was apparently assumed as consisting of those persons for whose support a man in Western Europe is legally responsible, and no attempt was made to estimate whether the instinct extended in any degree to cousins or great uncles.

A treatise on political impulses which aimed at completeness would further include at least the fighting instinct , and the instincts of suspicion, curiosity, and the desire to excel.

All these primary impulses are greatly increased in immediate effectiveness when they are 'pure,' that is to say, unaccompanied by competing or opposing impulses; and this is the main reason why art, which aims at producing one emotion at a time, acts on most men so much more easily than does the more varied appeal of real life. I once sat in a suburban theatre among a number of colonial troopers who had come over from South Africa for the King's Coronation. The play was 'Our Boys,' and between the acts my next neighbour gave me, without any sign of emotion, a hideous account of the scene at Tweefontein after De Wet had rushed the British camp on the Christmas morning of 1901--the militiamen slaughtered while drunk, and the Kaffir drivers tied to the blazing waggons. The curtain rose again, and, five minutes later, I saw that he was weeping in sympathy with the stage misfortunes of two able-bodied young men who had to eat 'inferior Dorset' butter. My sympathy with the militiamen and the Kaffirs was 'pure,' whereas his was overlaid with remembered race-hatred, battle-fury, and contempt for British incompetence. His sympathy, on the other hand, with the stage characters was not accompanied, as mine was, by critical feelings about theatrical conventions, indifferent acting, and middle-Victorian sentiment.

This greater immediate facility of the emotions set up by artistic presentment, as compared with those resulting from concrete observation has, however, to be studied in its relation to another fact--that impulses vary, in their driving force and in the depth of the nervous disturbance which they cause, in proportion, not to their importance in our present life, but to the point at which they appeared in our evolutionary past. We are quite unable to resist the impulse of mere vascular and nervous reaction, the watering of the mouth, the jerk of the limb, the closing of the eye which we share with some of the simplest vertebrates. We can only with difficulty resist the instincts of sex and food, of anger and fear, which we share with the higher animals. It is, on the other hand, difficult for us to obey consistently the impulses which attend on the mental images formed by inference and association. A man may be convinced by a long train of cogent reasoning that he will go to hell if he visits a certain house; and yet he will do so in satisfaction of a half conscious craving, whose existence he is ashamed to recognise. It may be that when a preacher makes hell real to him by physical images of fire and torment his conviction will acquire coercive force. But that force may soon die away as his memory fades, and even the most vivid description has little effect as compared with a touch of actual pain. At the theatre, because pure emotion is facile, three-quarters of the audience may cry, but because second-hand emotion is shallow, very few of them will be unable to sleep when they get home, or will even lose their appetite for a late supper. My South African trooper probably recovered from his tears over 'Our Boys' as soon as they were shed. The transient and pleasurable quality of the tragic emotions produced by novel reading is well known. A man may weep over a novel which he will forget in two or three hours, although the same man may be made insane, or may have his character changed for life, by actual experiences which are far less terrible than those of which he reads, experiences which at the moment may produce neither tears nor any other obvious nervous effect.

Both those facts are of first-rate political importance in those great modern communities in which all the events which stimulate political action reach the voters through newspapers. The emotional appeal of journalism, even more than that of the stage, is facile because it is pure, and transitory because it is second-hand. Battles and famines, murders and the evidence of inquiries into destitution, all are presented by the journalist in literary form, with a careful selection of 'telling' detail. Their effect is therefore produced at once, in the half-hour that follows the middle-class breakfast, or in the longer interval on the Sunday morning when the workman reads his weekly paper. But when the paper has been read the emotional effect fades rapidly away.

Any candidate at an election feels for this reason the strangeness of the conditions under which what Professor James calls the 'pungent sense of effective reality,' reaches or fails to reach, mankind, in a civilisation based upon newspapers. I was walking along the street during my last election, thinking of the actual issues involved, and comparing them with the vague fog of journalistic phrases, the half-conscious impulses of old habit and new suspicion which make up the atmosphere of electioneering. I came round a street corner upon a boy of about fifteen returning from work, whose whole face lit up with genuine and lively interest as soon as he saw me. I stopped, and he said: 'I know you, Mr. Wallas, you put the medals on me.' All that day political principles and arguments had refused to become real to my constituents, but the emotion excited by the bodily fact that I had at a school ceremony pinned a medal for good attendance on a boy's coat, had all the pungency of a first-hand experience.

Throughout the contest the candidate is made aware, at every point, of the enormously greater solidity for most men of the work-a-day world which they see for themselves, as compared with the world of inference and secondary ideas which they see through the newspapers. A London County Councillor, for instance, as his election comes near, and he begins to withdraw from the daily business of administrative committees into the cloud of the electoral campaign, finds that the officials whom he leaves behind, with their daily stint of work, and their hopes and fears about their salaries, seem to him much more real than himself. The old woman at her door in a mean street who refuses to believe that he is not being paid for canvassing, the prosperous and good-natured tradesman who says quite simply,' I expect you find politics rather an expensive amusement,' all seem to stand with their feet upon the ground. However often he assures himself that the great realities are on his side, and that the busy people round him are concerned only with fleeting appearances, yet the feeling constantly recurs to him that it is he himself who is living in a world of shadows.

This feeling is increased by the fact that a candidate has constantly to repeat the same arguments, and to stimulate in himself the same emotions, and that mere repetition produces a distressing sense of unreality. The preachers who have to repeat every Sunday the same gospel, find also that 'dry times' alternate with times of exaltation. Even among the voters the repetition of the same political thoughts is apt to produce weariness. The main cause of the recurring swing of the electoral pendulum seems to be that opinions which have been held with enthusiasm become after a year or two stale and flat, and that the new opinions seem fresh and vivid.

A treatise is indeed required from some trained psychologist on the conditions under which our nervous system shows itself intolerant of repeated sensations and emotions. The fact is obviously connected with the purely physiological causes which produce giddiness, tickling, sea-sickness, etc. But many things that are 'natural,' that is to say, which we have constantly experienced during any considerable part of the ages during which our nervous organisation was being developed, apparently do not so affect us. Our heartbeats, the taste of water, the rising and setting of the sun, or, in the case of a child, milk, or the presence of its mother, or of its brothers, do not seem to become, in sound health, distressingly monotonous. But 'artificial' things, however pleasant at first--a tune on the piano, the pattern of a garment, the greeting of an acquaintance--are likely to become unbearable if often exactly repeated. A newspaper is an artificial thing in this sense, and one of the arts of the newspaper-writer consists in presenting his views with that kind of repetition which, like the phrases of a fugue, constantly approaches, but never oversteps the limit of monotony. Advertisers again are now discovering that it pays to vary the monotony with which a poster appeals to the eye by printing in different colours those copies which are to hang near each other, or still better, by representing varied incidents in the career of 'Sunny Jim' or 'Sunlight Sue.'

A candidate is also an artificial thing. If he lives and works in his constituency, the daily vision of an otherwise admirable business man seated in a first-class carriage on the 8.47 A.M. train in the same attitude and reading the same newspaper may produce a slight and unrecognised feeling of discomfort among his constituents, although it would cause no such feeling in the wife whose relation to him is 'natural.' For the same reason when his election comes on, although he may declare himself to be the 'old member standing on the old platform,' he should be careful to avoid monotony by slightly varying his portrait, the form of his address, and the details of his declaration of political faith.

Another fact, closely connected with our intolerance of repeated emotional adjustment, is the desire for privacy, sufficiently marked to approach the character of a specific instinct, and balanced by a corresponding and opposing dread of loneliness. Our ancestors in the ages during which our present nervous system became fixed, lived, apparently, in loosely organised family groups, associated for certain occasional purposes, into larger, but still more loosely organised, tribal groups. No one slept alone, for the more or less monogamic family assembled nightly in a cave or 'lean-to' shelter. The hunt for food which filled the day was carried on, one supposes, neither in complete solitude nor in constant intercourse. Even if the female were left at home with the young, the male exchanged some dozen times a day rough greetings with acquaintances, or joined in a common task. Occasionally, even before the full development of language, excited palavers attended by some hundreds would take place, or opposing tribes would gather for a fight.

It is still extremely difficult for the normal man to endure either much less or much more than this amount of intercourse with his fellows. However safe they may know themselves to be, most men find it difficult to sleep in an empty house, and would be distressed by anything beyond three days of absolute solitude. Even habit cannot do much in this respect. A man required to submit to gradually increasing periods of solitary confinement would probably go mad as soon as he had been kept for a year without a break. A settler, though he may be the son of a settler, and may have known no other way of living, can hardly endure existence unless his daily intercourse with his family is supplemented by a weekly chat with a neighbour or a stranger; and he will go long and dangerous journeys in order once a year to enjoy the noise and bustle of a crowd.

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

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