After a time the politician may cease even to desire to reason with his constituents, and may come to regard them as purely irrational creatures of feeling and opinion, and himself as the purely rational 'over-man' who controls them. It is at this point that a resolute and able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous. Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his 'Patriot King' how to govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of 'that staring timid creature man.'[[51]] A century before Darwin he, like Swift and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few 'among the societies of men ... who engross almost the whole reason of the species, who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, who are designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind.'[[52]] For the rest, 'Reason has small effect upon numbers: a turn of imagination, often as violent and as sudden as a gust of wind, determines their conduct.'[[53]]
The greatest of Bolingbroke's disciples was Disraeli, who wrote, 'We are not indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress.... Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon accounts more votaries than Bentham.'[[54]] It was Disraeli who treated Queen Victoria 'like a woman,' and Gladstone, with the Oxford training from which he never fully recovered, who treated her 'like a public meeting.'
In spite of Disraeli's essentially kindly spirit, his calculated play upon the instincts of the nation which he governed seemed to many in his time to introduce a cold and ruthless element into politics, which seemed colder and more ruthless when it appeared in the less kindly character of his disciple Lord Randolph Churchill. But the same ruthlessness is often found now, and may perhaps be more often found in the future, whenever any one is sufficiently concentrated on some political end to break through all intellectual or ethical conventions that stand in his way. I remember a long talk, a good many years ago, with one of the leaders of the Russian terrorist movement. He said, 'It is no use arguing with the peasants even if we were permitted to do so. They are influenced by events not words. If we kill a Tzar, or a Grand Duke, or a minister, our movement becomes something which exists and counts with them, otherwise, as far as they are concerned, it does not exist at all.'
In war, the vague political tradition that there is something unfair in influencing the will of one's fellow-men otherwise than by argument does not exist. This was what Napoleon meant when he said, 'À la guerre, tout est moral, et le moral et l'opinion font plus de la moitié de la réalité.'[[55]] And it is curious to observe that when men are consciously or half-consciously determining to ignore that tradition they drop into the language of warfare. Twenty years ago, the expression 'Class-war' was constantly used among English Socialists to justify the proposal that a Socialist party should adopt those methods of parliamentary terrorism (as opposed to parliamentary argument) which had been invented by Parnell. When Lord Lansdowne in 1906 proposed to the House of Lords that they should abandon any calculation of the good or bad administrative effect of measures sent to them from the Liberal House of Commons, and consider only the psychological effect of their acceptance or rejection on the voters at the next general election, he dropped at once into military metaphor. 'Let us' he said, 'be sure that if we join issue we do so upon ground which is as favourable as possible to ourselves. In this case I believe the ground would be unfavourable to this House, and I believe the juncture is one when, even if we were to win for the moment, our victory would be fruitless in the end.'[[56]]
At first sight, therefore, it might appear that the change in political science which is now going on will simply result in the abandonment by the younger politicians of all ethical traditions, and the adoption by them, as the result of their new book-learning, of those methods of exploiting the irrational elements of human nature which have hitherto been the trade secret of the elderly and the disillusioned.
I have been told, for instance, that among the little group of women who in 1906 and 1907 brought the question of Women's Suffrage within the sphere of practical politics, was one who had received a serious academic training in psychology, and that the tactics actually employed were in large part due to her plea that in order to make men think one must begin by making them feel.[[57]]
A Hindoo agitator, again, Mr. Chandra Pal, who also had read psychology, imitated Lord Lansdowne a few months ago by saying, 'Applying the principles of psychology to the consideration of political problems we find it is necessary that we ... should do nothing that will make the Government a power for us. Because if the Government becomes easy, if it becomes pleasant, if it becomes good government, then our signs of separation from it will be gradually lost.'[[58]] Mr. Chandra Pal, unlike Lord Lansdowne, was shortly afterwards imprisoned, but his words have had an important political effect in India.
If this mental attitude and the tactics based on it succeed, they must, it may be argued, spread with constantly increasing rapidity; and just as, by Gresham's Law in commerce, base coin, if there is enough of it, must drive out sterling coin, so in politics, must the easier and more immediately effective drive out the more difficult and less effective method of appeal.
One cannot now answer such an argument by a mere statement that knowledge will make men wise. It was easy in the old days to rely on the belief that human life and conduct would become perfect if men only learnt to know themselves. Before Darwin, most political speculators used to sketch a perfect polity which would result from the complete adoption of their principles, the republics of Plato and of More, Bacon's Atlantis, Locke's plea for a government which should consciously realise the purposes of God, or Bentham's Utilitarian State securely founded upon the Table of the Springs of Action. We, however, who live after Darwin, have learnt the hard lesson that we must not expect knowledge, however full, to lead us to perfection. The modern student of physiology believes that if his work is successful, men may have better health than they would have if they were more ignorant, but he does not dream of producing a perfectly healthy nation; and he is always prepared to face the discovery that biological causes which he cannot control may be tending to make health worse. Nor does the writer on education now argue that he can make perfect characters in his schools. If our imaginations ever start on the old road to Utopia, we are checked by remembering that we are blood-relations of the other animals, and that we have no more right than our kinsfolk to suppose that the mind of the universe has contrived that we can find a perfect life by looking for it. The bees might to-morrow become conscious of their own nature, and of the waste of life and toil which goes on in the best ordered hive. And yet they might learn that no greatly improved organisation was possible for creatures hampered by such limited powers of observation and inference, and enslaved by such furious passions. They might be forced to recognise that as long as they were bees their life must remain bewildered and violent and short. Political inquiry deals with man as he now is, and with the changes in the organisation of his life that can be made during the next few centuries. It may be that some scores of generations hence, we shall have discovered that the improvements in government which can be brought about by such inquiry, are insignificant when compared with the changes which will be made possible when, through the hazardous experiment of selective breeding, we have altered the human type itself.