A cynic has observed that “politics are a salad, in which office is the oil, opposition the vinegar, and the people the thing to be devoured.” But to approach public affairs from that point, and to judge them solely on that principle, is as reasonable as to use green spectacles and complain of the colour of the sky. Politics should be looked at without prejudice, but with the recollection that in them are concerned many of our best and wisest men. If that be done, and the mind kept open for the reception of facts, there is little doubt of the admission that there is a deep reality in politics, and a reality in which every one is concerned.
II.—IS THERE ANYTHING PRACTICAL IN POLITICS?
All will possibly admit that, in conceivable circumstances, a vote may be useful, but many will not be prepared to allow that politics are an important factor in our daily life. War, they would urge, is a remote contingency, and a conscription is, of all unlikely things, the most unlikely; our liberties have been won, and there is no chance of a despot sitting on the throne; and, even if taxes are high, what can any one member of Parliament, much less any one elector, do to bring them down? From which questions, and from the answers they think must be made to them, they would draw the conclusion that, whatever might have been the case formerly, there is nothing practical in the politics of to-day.
It would not be hard to show that a conscription is by no means an impossibility; that our liberties demand constant vigilance; and that individual effort may greatly affect taxation. But even if the answer desired were given to each question, the points raised, except the last, are admittedly remote from daily life; and, if politics are to be considered practical, they must concern affairs nearer to us. This they do; and if they affected only the greater issues of State, they would not be practical in the sense they now are. It is the small troubles, whether public or private, which worry us most. The dust in one’s eye may be only a speck, but, measured by misery, it is colossal.
The law touches us upon every side, and the law is the outcome of politics in having been enacted by Parliament. From the smallest things to the greatest, the Legislature interferes. A man cannot go into a public-house after a certain hour because of one Act of Parliament; he cannot deal with a bank upon specified days because of another. One Act of Parliament orders him, if a householder, to clean his pavement; another prohibits him from building a house above a given height in streets of a certain width. And while the law takes care of one’s neighbour by affixing a well-known penalty to murder, it is so regardful of oneself that it absolutely prohibits suicide. We are surrounded, in fact, by a network of regulations provided by Parliament. We are no sooner born than the law insists upon our being registered; we cannot marry without the interference of the same august power; and when we die, those who are left behind must comply with the formalities the law demands.
It may be answered that this does not sound like politics; that there is nothing of Liberal or Tory in all this; but there is. Liberals, for instance, have been mainly identified with the demand for the better regulation of public-houses; it is to the Liberals that we owe a long-called-for reform in the burial laws; and it is due to the Liberals that a change in the marriage regulations, particularly affecting Nonconformists, is on the eve of being adopted. Social questions are not necessarily divorced from party concerns, and the moment Parliament touches them they become political. If one looks down a list of the measures presented to the House of Commons he will see that from the purity of beer to the protection of trade-marks, from the enactment of a close-time for hares to the provision of harbours of refuge, from a declaration of the size of saleable crabs to the disestablishment of a Church—every subject which concerns a man’s external affairs, political, social, or religious, is dealt with by Parliament.
Even if only those political matters are regarded which have a distinctly partisan aspect, there is more that is practical in them than would at first be perceived. “What,” it may be asked, “is local option, or county councils, or ‘three acres and a cow’ to me? I have no particular liking for drink; I have not the least ambition to become a combination of guardian and town councillor; and I am in no way interested in agricultural concerns. When you require me to take an active part in promoting the measures here indicated, how, I want to know, am I concerned in any one of them?”
The answer is that any and all of them should concern the questioner a great deal. He imagines he is not directly interested because of the reasons put forward. Is he certain those reasons cover the whole case? He has “no particular liking for drink,” and, therefore, would not trouble himself to obtain local option. But has he not been a sufficiently frequent witness of the crime and misery caused by drink to be persuaded that it is the duty of every good citizen to do all that in him lies to lessen the evil effects? And as such good results have flowed from the stricter regulation of the sale of intoxicating liquors, ought it not to be his endeavour to place a further power of regulation in the hands of those most interested—the people themselves?