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.[[8]] The kindred emotion of personal and dynastic loyalty (whose origin is possibly to be found in the fact that the loosely organised companies of our prehuman ancestors could not defend themselves from their carnivorous enemies until the general instinct of affection was specialised into a vehement impulse to follow and protect their leader), 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 Mérite 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 (such as furniture and ornaments) 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 (with the part which it plays, together with affection and loyalty, in the formation of parties), 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.