“In fact, you prefer the abstract to the concrete,” said Lady Massingberd.
He gave them a charming smile.
“Apart from the people I am privileged to call my friends, I certainly do,” said he. “It is delightful to sit here and discuss Helen’s snobbishness, because she’s a friend. But I have not the slightest desire to discuss Mr. Stoughton’s inconsistency. It doesn’t seem to me to matter whether he is inconsistent or not. All Socialists, I am aware, are very muddle-headed, and, indeed, have no constructive scheme to propose. Mr. Stoughton seems to me a very ordinary representative of the class without any clear ideas to lay before us, beyond the notion that we are thieves. I think that possibly we are, but he could tell us no more than that our goods ought to belong to the State. He hadn’t the slightest notion of how the State would dispose of them. He didn’t see that if A., for instance, is industrious and frugal, he will, though all property is equally distributed to-day, be richer at the end of the year than B., who is idle and spendthrift. Eventually he admitted that, but when I asked him if he proposed to have further distributions of property annually, he had nothing better to say than that this was a detail which could be worked out. It isn’t a detail: it lies at the root of the whole affair. The clever, the frugal and the industrious will always amass property, and periodical distributions of wealth would only put a premium on idleness and extravagance. How far the fact that our great-grandfathers were hard-working justifies our being rich to-day is, of course, a totally different question.”
He sat there gently tapping the knuckles of one hand with the pince-nez he held in the other, looking dreamily out over the sunny lawn. Then suddenly he seemed to recollect himself, and glanced from one to the other of his companions.
“Dear me, I have been bringing principles into this very charming discussion on personalities,” he said. “Naturally, I grant you that to arrive at principles, you must study persons. They must be analysed and dissected: all principles are the spirit distilled from persons. But I am more concerned really with the result of that distillation than with the individual grapes that have gone to it.”
“But, then, why did you adopt politics as your profession?” asked Lady Massingberd. “I always wanted to know that. Surely in a political career you are entirely concerned with persons as individuals.”
“Not in my view of it. Indeed, I should say precisely the opposite. Anyone who attempts to be a constructive politician deals entirely with forces and tendencies, with the evolution of the nation’s collective mind. Of course, there are tub-thumpers and rhetoricians of the new order who attack individuals, and tell us what they have seen in one particular Staffordshire potter’s house, and contrast it with the deer-park and the Vandycks of somebody else. Mr. Stoughton—was that his name?—was of that class. But the man whose ideas deal with big movements does not concern himself with isolated and probably misleading phenomena. He does not have to see a thing for himself and tell everybody what he has seen. You need not go to Australia, in fact, in order to learn to think imperially. Who coined that phrase, by the way?”
He turned to Lady Grote, as he spoke. She knew as much about politics as she knew about the lunar theory, and very wisely hazarded no conjectures on the subject.
“You are very suggestive,” she said. “But I think what you say is completely wrong from beginning to end. All the heads of different professions just now, like you Ministers of State, and the heads of the Church, like bishops, know nothing at all of what is really going on. Public opinion isn’t made in Whitehall, any more than Christianity is made in cathedrals. And anyone who professes to control the course of either must have first-hand knowledge of the subject. Why is the Church out of touch with the people? Simply because bishops live in palaces. And why is the State out of touch with the people? Simply because Ministers sit in their offices, in an academic manner, and are unacquainted with what public opinion is. You and they have not the smallest idea what individuals want: you have no first-hand information. Was there ever a more ridiculous assembly than the House of Commons, unless it is the House of Lords? A man is elected to the House of Commons, let us say, by the majority of one vote. He represents half of the constituents who elect him, plus one man. It is no answer to say that somebody else is elected with a majority of three thousand. He only represents the majority of the electorate. It doesn’t come out square; there is no use in saying it does. And, good Lord, the House of Lords!”
Lord Thorley had adjusted his pince-nez again, and looked at her as through a microscope.