A Preface to Politics

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But a suggestion like this is sure to be met with the argument which
Woodrow Wilson has in mind when he says that the "questions involved are
social and moral and are not susceptible of being made parts of a party
program." He voices a common belief when he insists that there are moral
and social problems, "essentially non-political." Innocent as it looks at
first sight this plea by Woodrow Wilson is weighted with the tradition of
a century and a half. To my mind it symbolizes a view of the state which
we are outgrowing, and throws into relief the view towards which we are
struggling. Its implications are well worth tracing, for through them I
think we can come to understand better the method of Twentieth Century
politics.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It
is equally true that that government is best which provides most. The
first truth belongs to the Eighteenth Century: the second to the
Twentieth. Neither of them can be neglected in our attitude towards the
state. Without the Jeffersonian distrust of the police we might easily
grow into an impertinent and tyrannous collectivism: without a vivid
sense of the possibilities of the state we abandon the supreme instrument
of civilization. The two theories need to be held together, yet clearly
distinguished.

Government has been an exalted policeman: it was there to guard property
and to prevent us from quarreling too violently. That was about all it
was good for. Yet society found problems on its hands--problems which
Woodrow Wilson calls moral and social in their nature. Vice and crime,
disease, and grinding poverty forced themselves on the attention of the
community. A typical example is the way the social evil compelled the
city of Chicago to begin an investigation. Yet when government was asked
to handle the question it had for wisdom an ancient conception of itself
as a policeman. Its only method was to forbid, to prosecute, to jail--in
short, to use the taboo. But experience has shown that the taboo will not
solve "moral and social questions"--that nine times out of ten it
aggravates the disease. Political action becomes a petty, futile, mean
little intrusion when its only method is prosecution.

No wonder then that conservatively-minded men pray that moral and social
questions be kept out of politics; no wonder that more daring souls begin
to hate the whole idea of government and take to anarchism. So long as
the state is conceived merely as an agent of repression, the less it
interferes with our lives, the better. Much of the horror of socialism
comes from a belief that by increasing the functions of government its
regulating power over our daily lives will grow into a tyranny. I share
this horror when certain socialists begin to propound their schemes.
There is a dreadful amount of forcible scrubbing and arranging and
pocketing implied in some socialisms. There is a wish to have the state
use its position as general employer to become a censor of morals and
arbiter of elegance, like the benevolent employers of the day who take an
impertinent interest in the private lives of their workers. Without any
doubt socialism has within it the germs of that great bureaucratic
tyranny which Chesterton and Belloc have named the Servile State.

So it is a wise instinct that makes men jealous of the policeman's power.
Far better we may say that moral and social problems be left to private
solution than that they be subjected to the clumsy method of the taboo.
When Woodrow Wilson argues that social problems are not susceptible to
treatment in a party program, he must mean only one thing: that they
cannot be handled by the state as he conceives it. He is right. His
attitude is far better than that of the Vice Commission: it too had only
a policeman's view of government, but it proceeded to apply it to
problems that are not susceptible to such treatment. Wilson, at least,
knows the limitations of his philosophy.

But once you see the state as a provider of civilizing opportunities, his
whole objection collapses. As soon as government begins to supply
services, it is turning away from the sterile tyranny of the taboo. The
provision of schools, streets, plumbing, highways, libraries, parks,
universities, medical attention, post-offices, a Panama Canal,
agricultural information, fire protection--is a use of government totally
different from the ideal of Jefferson. To furnish these opportunities is
to add to the resources of life, and only a doctrinaire adherence to a
misunderstood ideal will raise any objection to them.

When an anarchist says that the state must be abolished he does not mean
what he says. What he wants to abolish is the repressive, not the
productive state. He cannot possibly object to being furnished with the
opportunity of writing to his comrade three thousand miles away, of
drinking pure water, or taking a walk in the park. Of course when he
finds the post-office opening his mail, or a law saying that he must
drink nothing but water, he begins to object even to the services of the
government. But that is a confusion of thought, for these tyrannies are
merely intrusions of the eighteenth century upon the twentieth. The
postmaster is still something of a policeman.

Once you realize that moral and social problems must be treated to fine
opportunities, that the method of the future is to compete with the devil
rather than to curse him; that the furnishing of civilized environments
is the goal of statecraft, then there is no longer any reason for keeping
social and moral questions out of politics. They are what politics must
deal with essentially, now that it has found a way. The policeman with
his taboo did make moral and social questions insusceptible to treatment
in party platforms. He kept the issues of politics narrow and irrelevant,
and just because these really interesting questions could not be handled,
politics was an over-advertised hubbub. But the vision of the new
statecraft in centering politics upon human interests becomes a creator
of opportunities instead of a censor of morals, and deserves a fresh and
heightened regard.

The party platform will grow ever more and more into a program of
services. In the past it has been an armory of platitudes or a forecast
of punishments. It promised that it would stop this evil practice, drive
out corruption here, and prosecute this-and-that offense. All that
belongs to a moribund tradition. Abuse and disuse characterize the older
view of the state: guardian and censor it has been, provider but
grudgingly. The proclamations of so-called progressives that they will
jail financiers, or "wage relentless warfare" upon social evils, are
simply the reiterations of men who do not understand the uses of the
state.

A political revolution is in progress: the state as policeman is giving
place to the state as producer.

CHAPTER IX

REVOLUTION AND CULTURE

There is a legend of a peasant who lived near Paris through the whole
Napoleonic era without ever having heard of the name of Bonaparte. A
story of that kind is enough to make a man hesitate before he indulges in
a flamboyant description of social changes. That peasant is more than a
symbol of the privacy of human interest: he is a warning against the
incurable romanticism which clings about the idea of a revolution.
Popular history is deceptive if it is used to furnish a picture for
coming events. Like drama which compresses the tragedy of a lifetime into
a unity of time, place, and action, history foreshortens an epoch into an
episode. It gains in poignancy, but loses reality. Men grew from infancy
to old age, their children's children had married and loved and worked
while the social change we speak of as the industrial revolution was
being consummated. That is why it is so difficult for living people to
believe that they too are in the midst of great transformations. What
looks to us like an incredible rush of events sloping towards a great
historical crisis was to our ancestors little else than the occasional
punctuation of daily life with an exciting incident. Even to-day when we
have begun to speak of our age as a transition, there are millions of
people who live in an undisturbed routine. Even those of us who regard
ourselves as active in mothering the process and alert in detecting its
growth are by no means constantly aware of any great change. For even the
fondest mother cannot watch her child grow.

I remember how tremendously surprised I was in visiting Russia several
years ago to find that in Moscow or St. Petersburg men were interested in
all sorts of things besides the revolution. I had expected every Russian
to be absorbed in the struggle. It seemed at first as if my notions of
what a revolution ought to be were contradicted everywhere. And I assure
you it wrenched the imagination to see tidy nursemaids wheeling
perambulators and children playing diavolo on the very square where
Bloody Sunday had gone into history. It takes a long perspective and no
very vivid acquaintance with revolution to be melodramatic about it. So
much is left out of history and biography which would spoil the effect.
The anti-climax is almost always omitted.

Perhaps that is the reason why Arnold Bennett's description of the siege
of Paris in "The Old Wives' Tale" is so disconcerting to many people. It
is hard to believe that daily life continues with its stretches of
boredom and its personal interests even while the enemy is bombarding a
city. How much more difficult is it to imagine a revolution that is to
come--to space it properly through a long period of time, to conceive
what it will be like to the people who live through it. Almost all social
prediction is catastrophic and absurdly simplified. Even those who talk
of the slow "evolution" of society are likely to think of it as a series
of definite changes easily marked and well known to everybody. It is what
Bernard Shaw calls the reformer's habit of mistaking his private emotions
for a public movement.

Even though the next century is full of dramatic episodes--the collapse
of governments and labor wars--these events will be to the social
revolution what the smashing of machines in Lancashire was to the
industrial revolution. The reality that is worthy of attention is a
change in the very texture and quality of millions of lives--a change
that will be vividly perceptible only in the retrospect of history.

The conservative often has a sharp sense of the complexity of revolution:
not desiring change, he prefers to emphasize its difficulties, whereas
the reformer is enticed into a faith that the intensity of desire is a
measure of its social effect. Yet just because no reform is in itself a
revolution, we must not jump to the assurance that no revolution can be
accomplished. True as it is that great changes are imperceptible, it is
no less true that they are constantly taking place. Moreover, for the
very reason that human life changes its quality so slowly, the panic over
political proposals is childish.

It is obvious, for instance, that the recall of judges will not
revolutionize the national life. That is why the opposition generated
will seem superstitious to the next generation. As I write, a convention
of the Populist Party has just taken place. Eight delegates attended the
meeting, which was held in a parlor. Even the reactionary press speaks in
a kindly way about these men. Twenty years ago the Populists were hated
and feared as if they practiced black magic. What they wanted is on the
point of realization. To some of us it looks like a drop in the bucket--a
slight part of vastly greater plans. But how stupid was the fear of
Populism, what unimaginative nonsense it was to suppose twenty years ago
that the program was the road to the end of the world.

One good deed or one bad one is no measure of a man's character: the Last
Judgment let us hope will be no series of decisions as simple as that.
"The soul survives its adventures," says Chesterton with a splendid sense
of justice. A country survives its legislation. That truth should not
comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that
public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try
big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation
could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in
them. Mistakes do not affect us so deeply as we imagine. Our prophecies
of change are subjective wishes or fears that never come to full
realization.

Those socialists are confused who think that a new era can begin by a
general strike or an electoral victory. Their critics are just a bit more
confused when they become hysterical over the prospect. Both of them
over-emphasize the importance of single events. Yet I do not wish to
furnish the impression that crises are negligible. They are extremely
important as symptoms, as milestones, and as instruments. It is simply
that the reality of a revolution is not in a political decree or the
scarehead of a newspaper, but in the experiences, feelings, habits of
myriads of men.

No one who watched the textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the
winter of 1912 can forget the astounding effect it had on the complacency
of the public. Very little was revealed that any well-informed social
worker does not know as a commonplace about the mill population. The
wretchedness and brutality of Lawrence conditions had been described in
books and magazines and speeches until radicals had begun to wonder at
times whether the power of language wasn't exhausted. The response was
discouragingly weak--an occasional government investigation, an
impassioned protest from a few individuals, a placid charity, were about
all that the middle-class public had to say about factory life. The
cynical indifference of legislatures and the hypocrisy of the dominant
parties were all that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike touched
the most impervious: story after story came to our ears of hardened
reporters who suddenly refused to misrepresent the strikers, of
politicians aroused to action, of social workers become revolutionary.
Daily conversation was shocked into some contact with realities--the
newspapers actually printed facts about the situation of a working class
population.

And why? The reason is not far to seek. The Lawrence strikers did
something more than insist upon their wrongs; they showed a disposition
to right them. That is what scared public opinion into some kind of
truth-telling. So long as the poor are docile in their poverty, the rest
of us are only too willing to satisfy our consciences by pitying them.
But when the downtrodden gather into a threat as they did at Lawrence,
when they show that they have no stake in civilization and consequently
no respect for its institutions, when the object of pity becomes the
avenger of its own miseries, then the middle-class public begins to look
at the problem more intelligently.

We are not civilized enough to meet an issue before it becomes acute. We
were not intelligent enough to free the slaves peacefully--we are not
intelligent enough to-day to meet the industrial problem before it
develops a crisis. That is the hard truth of the matter. And that is why
no honest student of politics can plead that social movements should
confine themselves to argument and debate, abandoning the militancy of
the strike, the insurrection, the strategy of social conflict.

Those who deplore the use of force in the labor struggle should ask
themselves whether the ruling classes of a country could be depended upon
to inaugurate a program of reconstruction which would abolish the
barbarism that prevails in industry. Does anyone seriously believe that
the business leaders, the makers of opinion and the politicians will, on
their own initiative, bring social questions to a solution? If they do it
will be for the first time in history. The trivial plans they are
introducing to-day--profit-sharing and welfare work--are on their own
admission an attempt to quiet the unrest and ward off the menace of
socialism.

No, paternalism is not dependable, granting that it is desirable. It will
do very little more than it feels compelled to do. Those who to-day bear
the brunt of our evils dare not throw themselves upon the mercy of their
masters, not though there are bread and circuses as a reward. From the
groups upon whom the pressure is most direct must come the power to deal
with it. We are not all immediately interested in all problems: our
attention wanders unless the people who are interested compel us to
listen.

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of
progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them
and it is weak. Often in the course of these essays I have quoted from H.
G. Wells. I must do so again: "Every party stands essentially for the
interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of classes in
the exciting community, and every party has its scientific minded and
constructive leading section, with well defined hinterlands formulating
its social functions in a public spirited form, and its
superficial-minded following confessing its meannesses and vanities and
prejudices. No class will abolish itself, materially alter its way of
living, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is indisposed
to co-operate in the unlimited socialization of any other class. In that
capacity for aggression upon other classes lies the essential driving
force of modern affairs."

The truth of this can be tested in the socialist movement. There is a
section among the socialists which regards the class movement of labor as
a driving force in the socialization of industry. This group sees clearly
that without the threat of aggression no settlement of the issues is
possible. Ordinarily such socialists say that the class struggle is a
movement which will end classes. They mean that the self-interest of
labor is identical with the interests of a community--that it is a kind
of social selfishness. But there are other socialists who speak
constantly of "working-class government" and they mean just what they
say. It is their intention to have the community ruled in the interests
of labor. Probe their minds to find out what they mean by labor and in
all honesty you cannot escape the admission that they mean industrial
labor alone. These socialists think entirely in terms of the factory
population of cities: the farmers, the small shop-keepers, the
professional classes have only a perfunctory interest for them. I know
that no end of phrases could be adduced to show the inclusiveness of the
word labor. But their intention is what I have tried to describe: they
are thinking of government by a factory population.

They appeal to history for confirmation: have not all social changes,
they ask, meant the emergence of a new economic class until it dominated
society? Did not the French Revolution mean the conquest of the feudal
landlord by the middle-class merchant? Why should not the Social
Revolution mean the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie? That
may be true, but it is no reason for being bullied by it into a tame
admission that what has always been must always be. I see no reason for
exalting the unconscious failures of other revolutions into deliberate
models for the next one. Just because the capacity of aggression in the
middle class ran away with things, and failed to fuse into any decent
social ideal, is not ground for trying as earnestly as possible to repeat
the mistake.

The lesson of it all, it seems to me, is this: that class interests are
the driving forces which keep public life centered upon essentials. They
become dangerous to a nation when it denies them, thwarts them and
represses them so long that they burst out and become dominant. Then
there is no limit to their aggression until another class appears with
contrary interests. The situation might be compared to those hysterias in
which a suppressed impulse flares up and rules the whole mental life.

Social life has nothing whatever to fear from group interests so long as
it doesn't try to play the ostrich in regard to them. So the burden of
national crises is squarely upon the dominant classes who fight so
foolishly against the emergent ones. That is what precipitates violence,
that is what renders social co-operation impossible, that is what makes
catastrophes the method of change.

The wisest rulers see this. They know that the responsibility for
insurrections rests in the last analysis upon the unimaginative greed and
endless stupidity of the dominant classes. There is something pathetic in
the blindness of powerful people when they face a social crisis. Fighting
viciously every readjustment which a nation demands, they make their own
overthrow inevitable. It is they who turn opposing interests into a class
war. Confronted with the deep insurgency of labor what do capitalists and
their spokesmen do? They resist every demand, submit only after a
struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the death. When far-sighted
men appear in the ruling classes--men who recognize the need of a
civilized answer to this increasing restlessness, the rich and the
powerful treat them to a scorn and a hatred that are incredibly bitter.
The hostility against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan,
Lloyd-George is enough to make an observer believe that the rich of
to-day are as stupid as the nobles of France before the Revolution.

It seems to me that Roosevelt never spoke more wisely or as a better
friend of civilization than the time when he said at New York City on
March 20, 1912, that "the woes of France for a century and a quarter have
been due to the folly of her people in splitting into the two camps of
unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism. Had
pre-Revolutionary France listened to men like Turgot and backed them up
all would have gone well. But the beneficiaries of privilege, the Bourbon
reactionaries, the short-sighted ultra-conservatives, turned down Turgot;
and then found that instead of him they had obtained Robespierre. They
gained twenty years' freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of
the whirlwind of the red terror; and in their turn the unbridled
extremists of the terror induced a blind reaction; and so, with
convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alterations
of violent radicalism and violent Bourbonism, the French people went
through misery to a shattered goal."

Profound changes are not only necessary, but highly desirable. Even if
this country were comfortably well-off, healthy, prosperous, and
educated, men would go on inventing and creating opportunities to amplify
the possibilities of life. These inventions would mean radical
transformations. For we are bent upon establishing more in this nation
than a minimum of comfort. A liberal people would welcome social
inventions as gladly as we do mechanical ones. What it would fear is a
hard-shell resistance to change which brings it about explosively.

Catastrophes are disastrous to radical and conservative alike: they do
not preserve what was worth maintaining; they allow a deformed and often
monstrous perversion of the original plan. The emancipation of the slaves
might teach us the lesson that an explosion followed by reconstruction is
satisfactory to nobody.

Statesmanship would go out to meet a crisis before it had become acute.
The thing it would emphatically not do is to dam up an insurgent current
until it overflowed the countryside. Fight labor's demands to the last
ditch and there will come a time when it seizes the whole of power, makes
itself sovereign, and takes what it used to ask. That is a poor way for a
nation to proceed. For the insurgent become master is a fanatic from the
struggle, and as George Santayana says, he is only too likely to redouble
his effort after he has forgotten his aim.

Nobody need waste his time debating whether or not there are to be great
changes. That is settled for us whether we like it or not. What is worth
debating is the method by which change is to come about. Our choice, it
seems to me, lies between a blind push and a deliberate leadership,
between thwarting movements until they master us, and domesticating them
until they are answered.

When Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party on a platform of social
reform he crystallized a deep unrest, brought it out of the cellars of
resentment into the agora of political discussion. He performed the real
task of a leader--a task which has essentially two dimensions. By
becoming part of the dynamics of unrest he gathered a power of
effectiveness: by formulating a program for insurgency he translated it
into terms of public service.

What Roosevelt did at the middle-class level, the socialists have done at
the proletarian. The world has been slow to recognize the work of the
Socialist Party in transmuting a dumb muttering into a civilized program.
It has found an intelligent outlet for forces that would otherwise be
purely cataclysmic. The truth of this has been tested recently in the
appearance of the "direct actionists."

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