The facts when collected must, because they are many, be arranged. I believe that it would be found convenient by the political student to arrange them under three main heads: descriptive facts as to the human type; quantitative facts as to inherited variations from that type observed either in individuals or groups of individuals; and facts, both quantitative and descriptive, as to the environment into which men are born, and the observed effect of that environment upon their political actions and impulses.
A medical student already attempts to master as many as possible of those facts about the human type that are relevant to his science. The descriptive facts, for instance, of typical human anatomy alone which he has to learn before he can hope to pass his examinations must number many thousands. If he is to remember them so that he can use them in practice, they must be carefully arranged in associated groups. He may find, for instance, that he remembers the anatomical facts about the human eye most easily and correctly by associating them with their evolutionary history, or the facts about the bones of the hand by associating them with the visual image of a hand in an X-ray photograph.
The quantitative facts as to variations from the anatomical human type are collected for him in statistical form, and he makes an attempt to acquire the main facts as to hygienic environment when and if he takes the Diploma of Public Health.
The student teacher, too, during his period of training acquires a series of facts about the human type, though in his case they are as yet far less numerous, less accurate and less conveniently arranged than those in the medical text-books.
If the student of politics followed such an arrangement, he would at least begin his course by mastering a treatise on psychology, containing all those facts about the human type which have been shown by experience to be helpful in politics, and so arranged that the student's knowledge could be most easily recalled when wanted.
At present, however, the politician who is trained for his work by reading the best-known treatises on political theory is still in the condition of the medical student trained by the study of Hippocrates or Galen. He is taught a few isolated, and therefore distorted, facts about the human type, about pleasure and pain, perhaps, and the association of ideas, or the influence of habit. He is told that these are selected from the other facts of human nature in order that he may think clearly on the hypothesis of there being no others. What the others may be he is left to discover for himself; but he is likely to assume that they cannot be the subject of effective scientific thought. He learns also a few empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, after he has read a little of the history of institutions, his political education is complete. It is no wonder that the average layman prefers old politicians, who have forgotten their book-learning, and young doctors who remember theirs.[[30]]
A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve the conception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in a separate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts of experience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not permitted to enter. Professor Ostrogorski published, for instance, in 1902, an important and extraordinarily interesting book on Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties, containing the results of fifteen years' close observation of the party system in America and England. The instances given in the book might have been used as the basis of a fairly full account of those facts in the human type which are of importance to the politician—the nature of our impulses, the necessary limitations of our contact with the external world, and the methods of that thinking brain which was evolved in our distant past, and which we have now to put to such new and strange uses. But no indication was given that Professor Ostrogorski's experience had altered in the least degree the conception of human nature with which he started. The facts observed are throughout regretfully contrasted with 'free reason,'[[31]] 'the general idea of liberty,'[[32]] 'the sentiments which inspired the men of 1848,'[[33]] and the book ends with a sketch of a proposed constitution in which the voters are to be required to vote for candidates known to them through declarations of policy 'from which all mention of party is rigorously excluded.'[[34]] One seems to be reading a series of conscientious observations of the Copernican heavens by a loyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy.
Professor Ostrogorski was a distinguished member of the Constitutional Democratic Party in the first Duma of Nicholas II., and must have learnt for himself that if he and his fellows were to get force enough behind them to contend on equal terms with the Russian autocracy they must be a party, trusted and obeyed as a party, and not a casual collection of free individuals. Some day the history of the first Duma will be written, and we shall then know whether Professor Ostrogorski's experience and his faith were at last fused together in the heat of that great struggle.
The English translation of Professor Ostrogorski's book is prefaced by an introduction from Mr. James Bryce. This introduction shows that even in the mind of the author of The American Constitution the conception of human nature which he learnt at Oxford still dwells apart.
'In the ideal democracy,' says Mr. Bryce, 'every citizen is intelligent, patriotic, disinterested. His sole wish is to discover the right side in each contested issue, and to fix upon the best man among competing candidates. His common sense, aided by a knowledge of the constitution of his country, enables him to judge wisely between the arguments submitted to him, while his own zeal is sufficient to carry him to the polling booth.'[[35]]