Nor is the student, who naturally and properly loves books, to leave books and sit all his time in wiseacre observation amidst busy men. His books are his balance—or, rather, his ballast. And of course the men of his own day are not the only men from whom he can learn politics. Government is as old as man; men have always been politicians; the men of to-day are only politicians of a particular school; the past furnishes examples of politicians of every other school, and there is as much to be learned about government from them as from their successors.
Carlyle had the sort of eye for which one should pray when seeking to find men alive and things actual in the records left of them. Who has not profited by his humorous familiarity with the foibles and personal habits of the men who lived about the court of the Hohenzollerns? Who has not learned more than any other man could have told him of Prussian administration under its first great organizer by looking with Carlyle into the sociable informalities of Frederick William’s ‘tobacco parliament?’ Carlyle knew these men well enough to joke with and rail at them. He twitted them with their family secrets, and, knowing what clay they were of, was not awed by their state ceremonials. Yet he saw them, as he himself bitterly complains, only through the medium of crabbed documents and dry-as-dust books, with no seer like himself to help him in his interpretations. It was hard straining of the eyes to see so far back through the dense and murky atmosphere of formal record and set history; but he saw, nevertheless, because he did not need to be told all in order to know all; the dryest of historians could hardly avoid dropping some hint which would suffice Carlyle more than would tomes of ‘profane history.’
If you know what you are looking for and are not expecting to find it advertised in the newspapers, but lying somewhere beneath the surface of things, the dullest fool may often help you to its discovery. It needs a good nose to do the thing, but look how excellent is the game to which a casual scent may bring you in such a domain as the study of politics. There are whole worlds of fact waiting to be discovered by inference. Do not expect to find the life of constitutions painted in the great ‘standard authorities,’ but, following with becoming patience their legal anatomy of institutions, watch their slightest movement toward an illustrative foot-note, and try to find under that the scent you are in quest of. If they cite an instance, seek the recital of the same case elsewhere, where it is told with a different purpose; if it promise well there, hunt it further still, and make sure you catch every glimpse it affords of men’s actual dealings with government. If your text mention names of consequence, seek them out in biographies, and scan there the personal relations of men with affairs, for hints of the methods by which governments are operated from day to day. You will not need any incentive to read all their gossip, in letters and journals, and so see governors as men; but do more: endure official interviews and sessions of Parliament with them; collate their private letters and their public despatches—there’s no telling when or where you shall strike fresh trails of the game you seek. Interview judges off the bench, courtiers away from court, officers off duty. Go to France and live next door a prefect in the provinces; go to London and try to find out how things of weight are talked about in the smoking-room of the House of Commons.
Such excursions must, of course, lead the student far afield; he will often get quite out of sight of his starting-point, the ‘standard authority;’ but he will not on that account be lost. The fact is, that all literature teems with suggestions on this topic of politics. Just as the chance news item, the unstudied traveller’s reminiscence, the passing social or financial scandal,[A] and every hint of any present contact of men with law or authority, illuminates directly, or by inference, the institutions of our own day, similar random rays thrown across the pages of old books by the unpremeditated words of writers quite guiltless of such instructive intent may light up, for those who are alert to see such things, the most intimate secrets of state. If it be beyond hoping for to find a whole Greville for every age of government, there may be found Grevillian scraps, at least, in the literature of almost every time. From men as far back and as well remembered as Cicero, down to men as recent and as easily forgotten as several who might be named, politicians have loved to explain to posterity the part they took in conspicuous affairs; and that portion of posterity which studies politics by inference ought to be profoundly thankful to them for yielding to the taste.
[A] Did not the Dilke trial in London, for instance, help us to understand at least one influence that may sometimes make a lawyer Home Secretary?
Approach the life of States by such avenues, and you shall be convinced of the organic nature of political society. View society from what point you will, you always catch sight of some part of government; man is so truly a ‘political animal’ that you cannot examine him at all without seeing the points—points of his very structure—whereat he touches and depends upon, or upholds, the State.
In 1850, while Governor-General of Canada, Lord Elgin writes to Lord Grey:
“Our Reciprocity measure was pressed by us in Washington last session, just as a railway bill, in 1845 or 1846, would have been passed in Parliament. There was no Government to deal with, ... it was all a matter of canvassing this member of Congress or the other.”[B]
[B] Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin, p. 121.
What? “No Government to deal with?” Here’s a central truth to be found in none of the ‘standard authorities,’ and yet to be seen by a practised diplomatist all the way from Canada. About the same date M. Bacourt came to this country to represent the French Government and be made wretched by the crude deportment of the Americans. His chief concern was to get away to some country where people were less unconventionally at their ease in drawing-rooms; but he turned, when necessary, to the business of his legation; and whenever he did so he found that “here diplomatic affairs are not treated as everywhere else, where we communicate with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and arrange the matter with him alone.” He must ‘arrange’ the matter with several committees of Congress. He must go to see Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Winthrop, whose “husbands are members of the House of Representatives, and on the committee having charge of commercial affairs, in which” he “is interested,” for “they say that these gentlemen are very particular about visits from foreign ministers to their wives.”[C] Just Lord Elgin’s testimony. Again the ‘standard authorities’ are added to, and that in a quarter where we should least expect to find them supplemented. We need despair of no source.