A Preface to Politics

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Critics have often suggested that Roosevelt stole Bryan's clothes. That
is perhaps true, and it suggests a comparison which illuminates both men.
It would not be unfair to say that it is always the function of the
Roosevelts to take from the Bryans. But it is a little silly for an
agitator to cry thief when the success of his agitation has led to the
adoption of his ideas. It is like the chagrin of the socialists because
the National Progressive Party had "stolen twenty-three planks," and it
makes a person wonder whether some agitators haven't an overdeveloped
sense of private property.

I do not see the statesman in Bryan. He has been something of a voice
crying in the wilderness, but a voice that did not understand its own
message. Many people talk of him as a prophet. There is a great deal of
literal truth in that remark, for it has been the peculiar work of Bryan
to express in politics some of that emotion which has made America the
home of new religions. What we know as the scientific habit of mind is
entirely lacking in his intellectual equipment. There is a vein of
mysticism in American life, and Mr. Bryan is its uncritical prophet. His
insights are those of the gifted evangelist, often profound and always
narrow. It is absurd to debate his sincerity. Mr. Bryan talks with the
intoxication of the man who has had a revelation: to skeptics that always
seems theatrical. But far from being the scheming hypocrite his enemies
say he is, Mr. Bryan is too simple for the task of statesmanship. No
bracing critical atmosphere plays about his mind: there are no cleansing
doubts and fruitful alternatives. The work of Bryan has been to express a
certain feeling of unrest--to embody it in the traditional language of
prophecy. But it is a shrewd turn of the American people that has kept
him out of office. I say this not in disrespect of his qualities, but in
definition of them. Bryan does not happen to have the naturalistic
outlook, the complete humanity, or the deliberative habit which modern
statecraft requires. He is the voice of a confused emotion.

Woodrow Wilson has a talent which is Bryan's chief defect--the scientific
habit of holding facts in solution. His mind is lucid and flexible, and
he has the faculty of taking advice quickly, of stating something he has
borrowed with more ease and subtlety than the specialist from whom he got
it. Woodrow Wilson's is an elegant and highly refined intellect, nicely
balanced and capable of fine adjustment. An urbane civilization produced
it, leisure has given it spaciousness, ease has made it generous. A mind
without tension, its roots are not in the somewhat barbarous
under-currents of the nation. Woodrow Wilson understands easily, but he
does not incarnate: he has never been a part of the protest he speaks.
You think of him as a good counsellor, as an excellent presiding officer.
Whether his imagination is fibrous enough to catch the inwardness of the
mutterings of our age is something experience alone can show. Wilson has
class feeling in the least offensive sense of that term: he likes a world
of gentlemen. Occasionally he has exhibited a rather amateurish effort to
be grimy and shirt-sleeved. But without much success: his contact with
American life is not direct, and so he is capable of purely theoretical
affirmations. Like all essentially contemplative men, the world has to be
reflected in the medium of his intellect before he can grapple with it.

Yet Wilson belongs among the statesmen, and it is fine that he should be
in public life. The weakness I have suggested is one that all statesmen
share in some degree: an inability to interpret adequately the world they
govern. This is a difficulty which is common to conservative and radical,
and if I have used three living men to illustrate the problem it is only
because they seem to illuminate it. They have faced the task and we can
take their measurement. It is no part of my purpose to make any judgment
as to the value of particular policies they have advocated. I am
attempting to suggest some of the essentials of a statesman's equipment
for the work of a humanly centered politics. Roosevelt has seemed to me
the most effective, the most nearly complete; Bryan I have ventured to
class with the men who though important to politics should never hold
high executive office; Wilson, less complete than Roosevelt, is worthy of
our deepest interest because his judgment is subtle where Roosevelt's is
crude. He is a foretaste of a more advanced statesmanship.

Because he is self-conscious, Wilson has been able to see the problem
that any finely adapted statecraft must meet. It is a problem that would
hardly occur to an old-fashioned politician: "Though he (the statesman)
cannot himself keep the life of the nation as a whole in his mind, he can
at least make sure that he is taking counsel with those who know...." It
is not important that Wilson in stating the difficulty should put it as
if he had in a measure solved it. He hasn't, because taking counsel is a
means to understanding the nation as a whole, and that understanding
remains almost as arduous and requires just as fibrous an imagination, if
it is gleaned from advisers.

To think of the whole nation: surely the task of statesmanship is more
difficult to-day than ever before in history. In the face of a clotted
intricacy in the subject-matter of politics, improvements in knowledge
seem meager indeed. The distance between what we know and what we need to
know appears to be greater than ever. Plato and Aristotle thought in
terms of ten thousand homogeneous villagers; we have to think in terms of
a hundred million people of all races and all traditions, crossbred and
inbred, subject to climates they have never lived in before, plumped down
on a continent in the midst of a strange civilization. We have to deal
with all grades of life from the frontier to the metropolis, with men who
differ in sense of fact, in ideal, in the very groundwork of morals. And
we have to take into account not the simple opposition of two classes,
but the hostility of many,--the farmers and the factory workers and all
the castes within their ranks, the small merchants, and the feudal
organization of business. Ours is a problem in which deception has become
organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which
the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered
people. Nor can we keep to the problem within our borders. Whether we
wish it or not we are involved in the world's problems, and all the winds
of heaven blow through our land.

* * * * *

It is a great question whether our intellects can grasp the subject. Are
we perhaps like a child whose hand is too small to span an octave on the
piano? Not only are the facts inhumanly complicated, but the natural
ideals of people are so varied and contradictory that action halts in
despair. We are putting a tremendous strain upon the mind, and the
results are all about us: everyone has known the neutral thinkers who
stand forever undecided before the complications of life, who have, as it
were, caught a glimpse of the possibilities of knowledge. The sight has
paralyzed them. Unless they can act with certainty, they dare not act at
all.

That is merely one of the temptations of theory. In the real world,
action and thought are so closely related that one cannot wait upon the
other. We cannot wait in politics for any completed theoretical
discussion of its method: it is a monstrous demand. There is no pausing
until political psychology is more certain. We have to act on what we
believe, on half-knowledge, illusion and error. Experience itself will
reveal our mistakes; research and criticism may convert them into wisdom.
But act we must, and act as if we knew the nature of man and proposed to
satisfy his needs.

In other words, we must put man at the center of politics, even though we
are densely ignorant both of man and of politics. This has always been
the method of great political thinkers from Plato to Bentham. But one
difference we in this age must note: they made their political man a
dogma--we must leave him an hypothesis. That is to say that our task is
to temper speculation with scientific humility.

A paradox there is here, but a paradox of language, and not of fact. Men
made bridges before there was a science of bridge-building; they cured
disease before they knew medicine. Art came before aesthetics, and
righteousness before ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each other.
Hypothesis is confirmed and modified by action, and action is guided by
hypothesis. If it is a paradox to ask for a human politics before we
understand humanity or politics, it is what Mr. Chesterton describes as
one of those paradoxes that sit beside the wells of truth.

* * * * *

We make our picture of man, knowing that, though it is crude and unjust,
we have to work with it. If we are wise we shall become experimental
towards life: then every mistake will contribute towards knowledge. Let
the exploration of human need and desire become a deliberate purpose of
statecraft, and there is no present measure of its possibilities.

In this work there are many guides. A vague common tradition is in the
air about us--it expresses itself in journalism, in cheap novels, in the
uncritical theater. Every merchant has his stock of assumptions about the
mental habits of his customers and competitors; the prostitute hers; the
newspaperman his; P. T. Barnum had a few; the vaudeville stage has a
number. We test these notions by their results, and even "practical
people" find that there is more variety in human nature than they had
supposed.

We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the
world--introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very
considerably--that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our
neighbors is to know ourselves. For after all, the only experience we
really understand is our own. And that, in the least of us, is so rich
that no one has yet exhausted its possibilities. It has been said that
every genuine character an artist produces is one of the characters he
might have been. By re-creating our own suppressed possibilities we
multiply the number of lives that we can really know. That as I
understand it is the psychology of the Golden Rule. For note that Jesus
did not set up some external fetich: he did not say, make your neighbor
righteous, or chaste, or respectable. He said do as you would be done by.
Assume that you and he are alike, and you can found morals on humanity.

But experience has enlarged our knowledge of differences. We realize now
that our neighbor is not always like ourselves. Knowing how unjust other
people's inferences are when they concern us, we have begun to guess that
ours may be unjust to them. Any uniformity of conduct becomes at once an
impossible ideal, and the willingness to live and let live assumes high
place among the virtues. A puzzled wisdom remarks that "it takes all
sorts of people to make a world," and half-protestingly men accept
Bernard Shaw's amendment, "Do not do unto others as you would that they
should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

We learn perhaps that there is no contradiction in speaking of "human
nature" while admitting that men are unique. For all deepening of our
knowledge gives a greater sense of common likeness and individual
variation. It is folly to ignore either insight. But it is done
constantly, with no end of confusion as a result. Some men have got
themselves into a state where the only view that interests them is the
common humanity of us all. Their world is not populated by men and women,
but by a Unity that is Permanent. You might as well refuse to see any
differences between steam, water and ice because they have common
elements. And I have seen some of these people trying to skate on steam.
Their brothers, blind in the other eye, go about the world so sure that
each person is entirely unique, that society becomes like a row of
packing cases, each painted on the inside, and each containing one ego
and its own.

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others. That
is not the only use of art, for its function is surely greater and more
ultimate than to furnish us with a better knowledge of human nature. Nor
is that its only use even to statecraft. I suggested earlier that art
enters politics as a "moral equivalent" for evil, a medium by which
barbarous lusts find civilized expression. It is, too, an ideal for
labor. But my purpose here is not to attempt any adequate description of
the services of art. It is enough to note that literature in particular
elaborates our insight into human life, and, therefore, enables us to
center our institutions more truly.

Ibsen discovers a soul in Nora: the discovery is absorbed into the common
knowledge of the age. Other Noras discover their own souls; the Helmers
all about us begin to see the person in the doll. Plays and novels have
indeed an overwhelming political importance, as the "moderns" have
maintained. But it lies not in the preaching of a doctrine or the
insistence on some particular change in conduct. That is a shallow and
wasteful use of the resources of art. For art can open up the springs
from which conduct flows. Its genuine influence is on what Wells calls
the "hinterland," in a quickening of the sense of life.

Art can really penetrate where most of us can only observe. "I look and I
think I see," writes Bergson, "I listen and I think I hear, I examine
myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart.... (But) my
senses and my consciousness ... give me no more than a practical
simplification of reality ... in short, we do not see the actual things
themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels
affixed to them." Who has not known this in thinking of politics? We talk
of poverty and forget poor people; we make rules for vagrancy--we forget
the vagrant. Some of our best-intentioned political schemes, like reform
colonies and scientific jails, turn out to be inhuman tyrannies just
because our imagination does not penetrate the sociological label. "We
move amidst generalities and symbols ... we live in a zone midway between
things and ourselves, external to things, external also to ourselves."
This is what works of art help to correct: "Behind the commonplace,
conventional expression that both reveals and conceals an individual
mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to which they attain
in its undefiled essence."

This directness of vision fertilizes thought. Without a strong artistic
tradition, the life and so the politics of a nation sink into a barren
routine. A country populated by pure logicians and mathematical
scientists would, I believe, produce few inventions. For creation, even
of scientific truth, is no automatic product of logical thought or
scientific method, and it has been well said that the greatest
discoveries in science are brilliant guesses on insufficient evidence. A
nation must, so to speak, live close to its own life, be intimate and
sympathetic with natural events. That is what gives understanding, and
justifies the observation that the intuitions of scientific discovery and
the artist's perceptions are closely related. It is perhaps not
altogether without significance for us that primitive science and poetry
were indistinguishable. Nor is it strange that latter-day research should
confirm so many sayings of the poets. In all great ages art and science
have enriched each other. It is only eccentric poets and narrow
specialists who lock the doors. The human spirit doesn't grow in
sections.

I shall not press the point for it would lead us far afield. It is enough
that we remember the close alliance of art, science and politics in
Athens, in Florence and Venice at their zenith. We in America have
divorced them completely: both art and politics exist in a condition of
unnatural celibacy. Is this not a contributing factor to the futility and
opacity of our political thinking? We have handed over the government of
a nation of people to a set of lawyers, to a class of men who deal in the
most verbal and unreal of all human attainments.

A lively artistic tradition is essential to the humanizing of politics.
It is the soil in which invention flourishes and the organized knowledge
of science attains its greatest reality. Let me illustrate from another
field of interests. The religious investigations of William James were a
study, not of ecclesiastical institutions or the history of creeds. They
were concerned with religious experience, of which churches and rituals
are nothing but the external satisfaction. As Graham Wallas is
endeavoring to make human nature the center of politics, so James made it
the center of religions. It was a work of genius, yet no one would claim
that it is a mature psychology of the "Varieties of Religious
Experience." It is rather a survey and a description, done with the eye
of an artist and the method of a scientist. We know from it more of what
religious feeling is like, even though we remain ignorant of its sources.
And this intimacy humanizes religious controversy and brings
ecclesiasticism back to men.

Like most of James's psychology, it opens up investigation instead of
concluding it. In the light even of our present knowledge we can see how
primitive his treatment was. But James's services cannot be
overestimated: if he did not lay even the foundations of a science, he
did lay some of the foundations for research. It was an immense
illumination and a warming of interest. It threw open the gates to the
whole landscape of possibilities. It was a ventilation of thought.
Something similar will have to be done for political psychology. We know
how far off is the profound and precise knowledge we desire. But we know
too that we have a right to hope for an increasing acquaintance with the
varieties of political experience. It would, of course, be drawn from
biography, from the human aspect of history and daily observation. We
should begin to know what it is that we ought to know. Such a work would
be stimulating to politician and psychologist. The statesman's
imagination would be guided and organized; it would give him a
starting-point for his own understanding of human beings in politics. To
the scientists it would be a challenge--to bring these facts under the
light of their researches, to extend these researches to the borders of
those facts.

The statesman has another way of strengthening his grip upon the
complexity of life. Statistics help. This method is neither so conclusive
as the devotees say, nor so bad as the people who are awed by it would
like to believe. Voting, as Gabriel Tarde points out, is our most
conspicuous use of statistics. Mystical democrats believe that an
election expresses the will of the people, and that that will is wise.
Mystical democrats are rare. Looked at closely an election shows the
quantitative division of the people on several alternatives. That choice
is not necessarily wise, but it is wise to heed that choice. For it is a
rough estimate of an important part of the community's sentiment, and no
statecraft can succeed that violates it. It is often immensely suggestive
of what a large number of people are in the future going to wish.
Democracy, because it registers popular feeling, is at least trying to
build truly, and is for that reason an enlightened form of government. So
we who are democrats need not believe that the people are necessarily
right in their choice: some of us are always in the minority, and not a
little proud of the distinction. Voting does not extract wisdom from
multitudes: its real value is to furnish wisdom about multitudes. Our
faith in democracy has this very solid foundation: that no leader's
wisdom can be applied unless the democracy comes to approve of it. To
govern a democracy you have to educate it: that contact with great masses
of men reciprocates by educating the leader. "The consent of the
governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an
insurance against benevolent despots as well. In a rough way and with
many exceptions, democracy compels law to approximate human need. It is a
little difficult to see this when you live right in the midst of one. But
in perspective there can be little question that of all governments
democracy is the most relevant. Only humane laws can be successfully
enforced; and they are the only ones really worth enforcing. Voting is a
formal method of registering consent.

But all statistical devices are open to abuse and require constant
correction. Bribery, false counting, disfranchisement are the cruder
deceptions; they correspond to those enrolment statistics of a large
university which are artificially fed by counting the same student
several times if his courses happen to span two or three of the
departments. Just as deceptive as plain fraud is the deceptive ballot. We
all know how when the political tricksters were compelled to frame a
direct primary law in New York they fixed the ballot so that it botched
the election. Corporations have been known to do just that to their
reports. Did not E. H. Harriman say of a well-known statistician that he
could make an annual report tell any story you pleased? Still subtler is
the seven-foot ballot of stupid, good intentions--the hyperdemocratic
ballot in which you are asked to vote for the State Printer, and succeed
only in voting under the party emblem.

Statistics then is no automatic device for measuring facts. You and I are
forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That
impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real
masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes
the results. For all the conclusions in the end rest upon their accuracy,
honesty, energy and insight. Of course, in an obvious census like that of
the number of people personal bias counts for so little that it is lost
in the grand total. But the moment you begin inquiries into subjects
which people prefer to conceal, the weakness of statistics becomes
obvious. All figures which touch upon sexual subjects are nothing but the
roughest guesses. No one would take a census of prostitution,
illegitimacy, adultery, or venereal disease for a statement of reliable
facts. There are religious statistics, but who that has traveled among
men would regard the number of professing Christians as any index of the
strength of Christianity, or the church attendance as a measure of
devotion? In the supremely important subject of literacy, what
classification yet devised can weigh the culture of masses of people? We
say that such a percentage of the population cannot read or write. But
the test of reading and writing is crude and clumsy. It is often
administered by men who are themselves half-educated, and it is shot
through with racial and class prejudice.

The statistical method is of use only to those who have found it out.
This is achieved principally by absorbing into your thinking a lively
doubt about all classifications and general terms, for they are the basis
of statistical measurement. That done you are fairly proof against
seduction. No better popular statement of this is to be found than H. G.
Wells' little essay: "Skepticism of the Instrument." Wells has, of
course, made no new discovery. The history of philosophy is crowded with
quarrels as to how seriously we ought to take our classifications: a
large part of the battle about Nominalism turns on this, the Empirical
and Rational traditions divide on it; in our day the attacks of James,
Bergson, and the "anti-intellectualists" are largely a continuation of
this old struggle. Wells takes his stand very definitely with those who
regard classification "as serviceable for the practical purposes of life"
but nevertheless "a departure from the objective truth of things."

"Take the word chair," he writes. "When one says chair, one thinks
vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, think of
armchairs and reading-chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs,
chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become
settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts,
those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and
Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is
this simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent
joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or
chairishness that you gave me." Think then of the glib way in which we
speak of "the unemployed," "the unfit," "the criminal," "the
unemployable," and how easily we forget that behind these general terms
are unique individuals with personal histories and varying needs.

Even the most refined statistics are nothing but an abstraction. But if
that truth is held clearly before the mind, the polygons and curves of
the statisticians can be used as a skeleton to which the imagination and
our general sense of life give some flesh and blood reality. Human
statistics are illuminating to those who know humanity. I would not trust
a hermit's inferences about the statistics of anything.

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