A Preface to Politics

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It is this weakness that Mr. Wallas comes to remedy. He has described
what political science must be like, and anyone who has absorbed his
insight has an intellectual groundwork for political observation. No one,
least of all Mr. Wallas, would claim anything like finality for the
essay. These labors are not done in a day. But he has deliberately
brought the study of politics to the only focus which has any rational
interest for mankind. He has made a plea, and sketched a plan which
hundreds of investigators the world over must help to realize. If
political science could travel in the direction suggested, its criticism
would be relevant, its proposals practical. There would, for the first
time, be a concerted effort to build a civilization around mankind, to
use its talent and to satisfy its needs. There would be no more empty
taboos, no erecting of institutions upon abstract and mechanical
analogies. Politics would be like education--an effort to develop, train
and nurture men's impulses. As Montessori is building the school around
the child, so politics would build all of social life around the human
being.

That practical issues hang upon these investigations can be shown by an
example from Mr. Wallas's book. Take the quarrel over socialism. You hear
it said that without the private ownership of capital people will lose
ambition and sink into sloth. Many men, just as well aware of present-day
evils as the socialists, are unwilling to accept the collectivist remedy.
G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc speak of the "magic of property" as
the real obstacle to socialism. Now obviously this is a question of
first-rate importance. If socialism will destroy initiative then only a
doctrinaire would desire it. But how is the question to be solved? You
cannot reason it out. Economics, as we know it to-day, is quite incapable
of answering such a problem, for it is a matter that depends upon
psychological investigation. When a professor says that socialism is
impracticable he begs the question, for that amounts to assuming that the
point at issue is already settled. If he tells you that socialism is
against human nature, we have a perfect right to ask where he proved the
possibilities of human nature.

But note how Mr. Wallas approaches the debate: "Children 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.... Some economist ought
therefore to give us a treatise in which this property instinct is
carefully and quantitatively examined.... 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?"

This puts the argument upon a plane where discussion is relevant. This is
no trumped-up issue: it is asked by a politician and a socialist seeking
for a real solution. We need to know whether the "magic of property"
extends from a man's garden to Standard Oil stocks as anti-socialists
say, and, conversely, we need to know what is happening to that mass of
proletarians who own no property and cannot satisfy their instincts even
with personal chattels.

For if ownership is a human need, we certainly cannot taboo it as the
extreme communists so dogmatically urge. "Pending ... an inquiry," writes
Mr. Wallas, "my own provisional opinion is that, like a good many
instincts of very early evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied by an
avowed pretense; 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."

Mr. Wallas takes exactly the same position as William James did when he
planned a "moral equivalent" for war. Both men illustrate the changing
focus of political thought. Both try to found statesmanship on human
need. Both see that there are good and bad satisfactions of the same
impulse. The routineer with his taboo does not see this, so he attempts
the impossible task of obliterating the impulse. He differs fundamentally
from the creative politician who devotes himself to inventing fine
expressions for human needs, who recognizes that the work of
statesmanship is in large measure the finding of good substitutes for the
bad things we want.

This is the heart of a political revolution. When we recognize that the
focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we
shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern
politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents
of our national life and explains the altering tasks of statesmanship.

The old effort was to harness mankind to abstract principles--liberty,
justice or equality--and to deduce institutions from these high-sounding
words. It did not succeed because human nature was contrary and restive.
The new effort proposes to fit creeds and institutions to the wants of
men, to satisfy their impulses as fully and beneficially as possible.

And yet we do not begin to know our desires or the art of their
satisfaction. Mr. Wallas's book and the special literature of the subject
leave no doubt that a precise political psychology is far off indeed. The
human nature we must put at the center of our statesmanship is only
partially understood. True, Mr. Wallas works with a psychology that is
fairly well superseded. But not even the advance-guard to-day, what we
may call the Freudian school, would claim that it had brought knowledge
to a point where politics could use it in any very deep or comprehensive
way. The subject is crude and fragmentary, though we are entitled to call
it promising.

Yet the fact had better be faced: psychology has not gone far enough, its
results are still too vague for our purposes. We know very little, and
what we know has hardly been applied to political problems. That the last
few years have witnessed a revolution in the study of mental life is
plain: the effects are felt not only in psychotherapy, but in education,
morals, religion, and no end of cultural interests. The impetus of Freud
is perhaps the greatest advance ever made towards the understanding and
control of human character. But for the complexities of politics it is
not yet ready. It will take time and endless labor for a detailed study
of social problems in the light of this growing knowledge.

What then shall we do now? Must we continue to muddle along in the old
ruts, gazing rapturously at an impotent ideal, until the works of the
scientists are matured?

CHAPTER IV

THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

It would indeed be an intolerably pedantic performance for a nation to
sit still and wait for its scientists to report on their labors. The
notion is typical of the pitfalls in the path of any theorist who does
not correct his logic by a constant reference to the movement of life. It
is true that statecraft must make human nature its basis. It is true that
its chief task is the invention of forms and institutions which satisfy
the inner needs of mankind. And it is true that our knowledge of those
needs and the technique of their satisfaction is hazy, unorganized and
blundering.

But to suppose that the remedy lies in waiting for monographs from the
research of the laboratory is to have lost a sense of the rhythm of
actual affairs. That is not the way things come about: we grow into a new
point of view: only afterwards, in looking back, do we see the landmarks
of our progress. Thus it is customary to say that Adam Smith dates the
change from the old mercantilist economy to the capitalistic economics of
the nineteenth century. But that is a manner of speech. The old
mercantilist policy was giving way to early industrialism: a thousand
unconscious economic and social forces were compelling the change. Adam
Smith expressed the process, named it, idealized it and made it
self-conscious. Then because men were clearer about what they were doing,
they could in a measure direct their destiny.

That is but another way of saying that great revolutionary changes do not
spring full-armed from anybody's brow. A genius usually becomes the
luminous center of a nation's crisis,--men see better by the light of
him. His bias deflects their actions. Unquestionably the doctrine-driven
men who made the economics of the last century had much to do with the
halo which encircled the smutted head of industrialism. They put the
stamp of their genius on certain inhuman practices, and of course it has
been the part of the academic mind to imitate them ever since. The
orthodox economists are in the unenviable position of having taken their
morals from the exploiter and of having translated them into the
grandiloquent language of high public policy. They gave capitalism the
sanction of the intellect. When later, Carlyle and Ruskin battered the
economists into silence with invective and irony they were voicing the
dumb protest of the humane people of England. They helped to organize a
formless resentment by endowing it with intelligence and will.

So it is to-day. If this nation did not show an unmistakable tendency to
put men at the center of politics instead of machinery and things; if
there were not evidence to prove that we are turning from the sterile
taboo to the creation of finer environments; if the impetus for shaping
our destiny were not present in our politics and our life, then essays
like these would be so much baying at the moon, fantastic and unworthy
pleas for some irrelevant paradise. But the gropings are there,--vastly
confused in the tangled strains of the nation's interests. Clogged by the
confusion, half-choked by stupid blockades, largely unaware of their own
purposes, it is for criticism, organized research, and artistic
expression to free and to use these creative energies. They are to be
found in the aspirations of labor, among the awakened women, in the
development of business, the diffusion of art and science, in the racial
mixtures, and many lesser interests which cluster about these greater
movements.

The desire for a human politics is all about us. It rises to the surface
in slogans like "human rights above property rights," "the man above the
dollar." Some measure of its strength is given by the widespread
imitation these expressions have compelled: politicians who haven't the
slightest intention of putting men above the dollar, who if they had
wouldn't know how, take off their hats to the sentiment because it seems
a key to popular enthusiasm. It must be bewildering to men brought up,
let us say, in the Hanna school of politics. For here is this nation
which sixteen years ago vibrated ecstatically to that magic word
"Prosperity"; to-day statistical rhetoric about size induces little but
excessive boredom. If you wish to drive an audience out of the hall tell
it how rich America is; if you wish to stamp yourself an echo of the past
talk to us young men about the Republican Party's understanding with God
in respect to bumper crops. But talk to us about "human rights," and
though you talk rubbish, we'll listen. For our desire is bent that way,
and anything which has the flavor of this new interest will rivet our
attention. We are still uncritical. It is only a few years since we began
to center our politics upon human beings. We have no training in that
kind of thought. Our schools and colleges have helped us hardly at all.
We still talk about "humanity" as if it were some strange and mystical
creature which could not possibly be composed of the grocer, the
street-car conductor and our aunts.

That the opinion-making people of America are more interested in human
welfare than in empire or abstract prosperity is an item that no
statesman can disregard in his thinking. To-day it is no longer necessary
to run against the grain of the deepest movements of our time. There is
an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be
measured in human happiness. This feeling has not always existed.
Historians tell us that the very idea of progress in well-being is not
much older than, say, Shakespeare's plays. As a general belief it is
still more recent. The nineteenth century may perhaps be said to mark its
popularization. But as a fact of immediate politics, as a touchstone
applied quickly to all the acts of statecraft in America it belongs to
the Twentieth Century. There were any number of people who long before
1900 saw that dollars and men could clash. But their insight had not won
any general acceptance. It is only within the last few years that the
human test has ceased to be the property of a small group and become the
convention of a large majority. A study of magazines and newspapers would
confirm this rather broad generalization. It would show, I believe, how
the whole quality of our most impromptu thinking is being influenced by
human values.

The statesman must look to this largely unorganized drift of desire. He
will find it clustering about certain big revolts--the unrest of women,
for example, or the increasing demands of industrial workers. Rightly
understood, these social currents would, I believe, lead to the central
issues of life, the vital points upon which happiness depends. They come
out of necessities. They express desire. They are power.

Thus feminism, arising out of a crisis in sexual conditions, has
liberated energies that are themselves the motors of any reform. In
England and America voting has become the symbol of an aspiration as yet
half-conscious and undefined. What women want is surely something a great
deal deeper than the privilege of taking part in elections. They are
looking for a readjustment of their relations to the home, to work, to
children, to men, to the interests of civilized life. The vote has become
a convenient peg upon which to hang aspirations that are not at all sure
of their own meaning. In no insignificant number of cases the vote is a
cover by which revolutionary demands can be given a conventional front.
The ballot is at the utmost a beginning, as far-sighted conservatives
have guessed. Certainly the elimination of "male" from the suffrage
qualifications will not end the feminist agitation. From the angle of
statecraft the future of the movement may be said to depend upon the wise
use of this raw and scattered power. I do not pretend to know in detail
how this can be done. But I am certain that the task of leadership is to
organize aspiration in the service of the real interests of life. To-day
women want--what? They are ready to want something: that describes fairly
the condition of most suffragettes. Those who like Ellen Key and Olive
Shreiner and Mrs. Gilman give them real problems to think about are
drafting that energy into use. By real problems I mean problems of love,
work, home, children. They are the real interests of feminism because
they have produced it.

The yearnings of to-day are the symptoms of needs, they point the course
of invention, they are the energies which animate a social program. The
most ideally conceived plan of the human mind has only a slight interest
if it does not harness these instinctive forces. That is the great lesson
which the utopias teach by their failure--that schemes, however nicely
arranged, cannot be imposed upon human beings who are interested in other
things. What ailed Don Quixote was that he and his contemporaries wanted
different things; the only ideals that count are those which express the
possible development of an existing force. Reformers must never forget
that three legs are a Quixotic ideal; two good legs a genuine one.

In actual life, yes, in the moil and toil of propaganda, "movements,"
"causes" and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political
psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business
of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid
people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the
ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but
rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked that
only superficial people disliked the superficial. Nothing, for example,
could on the surface be more trivial than an interest in baseball scores.
Yet during the campaign of 1912 the excitement was so great that Woodrow
Wilson said on the stump he felt like apologizing to the American people
for daring to be a presidential candidate while the Giants and the Red
Sox were playing for the championship. Baseball (not so much for those
who play it), is a colossal phenomenon in American life. Watch the crowds
in front of a bulletin board, finding a vicarious excitement and an
abstract relief from the monotony of their own lives. What a second-hand
civilization it is that grows passionate over a scoreboard with little
electric lights! What a civilization it is that has learned to enjoy its
sport without even seeing it! If ever there was a symptom that this
nation needed leisure and direct participation in games, it is that poor
scrawny substitute for joy--the baseball extra.

It is as symptomatic as the labor union. It expresses need. And
statesmanship would find an answer. It would not let that passion and
loyalty be frittered away to drift like scum through the nation. It would
see in it the opportunity of art, play, and religion. So with what looks
very different--the "syndicalist movement." Perhaps it seems preposterous
to discuss baseball and syndicalism in the same paragraph. But that is
only because we have not accustomed ourselves to thinking of social
events as answers to human needs. The statesman would ask, Why are there
syndicalists? What are they driving at? What gift to civilization is in
the impetus behind them? They are human beings, and they want human
things. There is no reason to become terror-stricken about them. They
seem to want things badly. Then ostriches disguised as judges cannot deal
with them. Anarchism--men die for that, they undergo intolerable insults.
They are tarred and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that
Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the wings more than free
spirits can allow? Is civilization perhaps too tightly organized? Have
the irreconcilables a soul audacious and less blunted than our
domesticated ones? To put it mildly, is it ever safe to ignore them
entirely in our thinking?

We shall come, I think, to a different appraisal of agitations. Our
present method is to discuss whether the proposals are right and
feasible. We do this hastily and with prejudice. Generally we decide that
any agitation foreign to our settled habits is wrong. And we bolster up
our satisfaction by pointing to some mistake of logic or some puerility
of statement. That done, we feel the agitation is deplorable and can be
ignored unless it becomes so obstreperous that we have to put it in jail.
But a genuine statecraft would go deeper. It would know that even God has
been defended with nonsense. So it could be sympathetic to agitations. I
use the word sympathetic literally. For it would try to understand the
inner feeling which had generated what looks like a silly demand. To-day
it is as if a hungry man asked for an indigestible food, and we let him
go hungry because he was unwise. He isn't any the less hungry because he
asks for the wrong food. So with agitations. Their specific plans may be
silly, but their demands are real. The hungers and lusts of mankind have
produced some stupendous follies, but the desires themselves are no less
real and insistent.

The important thing about a social movement is not its stated platform
but the source from which it flows. The task of politics is to understand
those deeper demands and to find civilized satisfactions for them. The
meaning of this is that the statesman must be more than the leader of a
party. Thus the socialist statesman is not complete if he is a good
socialist. Only the delusion that his truth is the whole truth, his party
the human race, and his program a panacea, will produce that singleness
of vision.

The moment a man takes office he has no right to be the representative of
one group alone. He has assumed the burden of harmonizing particular
agitations with the general welfare. That is why great agitators should
not accept office. Men like Debs understand that. Their business is to
make social demands so concrete and pressing that statesmen are forced to
deal with them. Agitators who accept government positions are a
disappointment to their followers. They can no longer be severely
partisan. They have to look at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and
the statesman are both needed. But they have different functions, and it
is unjust to damn one because he hasn't the virtues of the other.

The statesman to-day needs a large equipment. The man who comes forward
to shape a country's policy has truly no end of things to consider. He
must be aware of the condition of the people: no statesman must fall into
the sincere but thoroughly upper class blunder that President Taft
committed when he advised a three months' vacation. Realizing how men and
women feel at all levels and at different places, he must speak their
discontent and project their hopes. Through this he will get power.
Standing upon the prestige which that gives he must guide and purify the
social demands he finds at work. He is the translator of agitations. For
this task he must be keenly sensitive to public opinion and capable of
understanding the dynamics of it. Then, in order to fuse it into a
civilized achievement, he will require much expert knowledge. Yet he need
not be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in choosing experts. It
is better indeed that the statesman should have a lay, and not a
professional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity and empty
formalism are always near and always dangerous. The real political genius
stands between the actual life of men, their wishes and their needs, and
all the windings of official caste and professional snobbery. It is his
supreme business to see that the servants of life stay in their
place--that government, industry, "causes," science, all the creatures of
man do not succeed in their perpetual effort to become the masters.

I have Roosevelt in mind. He haunts political thinking. And indeed, why
shouldn't he? What reality could there be in comments upon American
politics which ignored the colossal phenomenon of Roosevelt? If he is
wholly evil, as many say he is, then the American democracy is
preponderantly evil. For in the first years of the Twentieth Century,
Roosevelt spoke for this nation, as few presidents have spoken in our
history. And that he has spoken well, who in the perspective of time will
deny? Sensitive to the original forces of public opinion, no man has had
the same power of rounding up the laggards. Government under him was a
throbbing human purpose. He succeeded, where Taft failed, in preventing
that drought of invention which officialism brings. Many people say he
has tried to be all things to all men--that his speeches are an attempt
to corral all sorts of votes. That is a left-handed way of stating a
truth. A more generous interpretation would be to say that he had tried
to be inclusive, to attach a hundred sectional agitations to a national
program. Crude: of course he was crude; he had a hemisphere for his
canvas. Inconsistent: yes, he tried to be the leader of factions at war
with one another. A late convert: he is a statesman and not an
agitator--his business was to meet demands when they had grown to
national proportions. No end of possibilities have slipped through the
large meshes of his net. He has said some silly things. He has not been
subtle, and he has been far from perfect. But his success should be
judged by the size of his task, by the fierceness of the opposition, by
the intellectual qualities of the nation he represented. When we remember
that he was trained in the Republican politics of Hanna and Platt, that
he was the first President who shared a new social vision, then I believe
we need offer no apologies for making Mr. Roosevelt stand as the working
model for a possible American statesman at the beginning of the Twentieth
Century.

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