Human Nature in Politics Part 1

Human Nature In Politics.

by Graham Wallas.

PREFACE

I offer my thanks to several friends who have been kind enough to read the proofs of this book, and to send me corrections and suggestions; among whom I will mention Professors John Adams and J.H. Muirhead, Dr.

A. Wolf, and Messrs. W.H. Winch, Sidney Webb, L. Pearsall Smith, and A.E. Zimmern. It is, for their sake, rather more necessary than usual for me to add that some statements still remain in the text which one or more of them would have desired to see omitted or differently expressed.

I have attempted in the footnotes to indicate those writers whose books I have used. But I should like to record here my special obligation to Professor William James's _Principles of Psychology_, which gave me, a good many years ago, the conscious desire to think psychologically about my work as politician and teacher.

I have been sometimes asked to recommend a list of books on the psychology of politics. I believe that at the present stage of the science, a politician will gain more from reading, in the light of his own experience, those treatises on psychology which have been written without special reference to politics, than by beginning with the literature of applied political psychology. But readers who are not politicians will find particular points dealt with in the works of the late Monsieur G. Tarde, especially _L'Opinion et la Foule_ and _Les Lois de l'Imitation_ and in the books quoted in the course of an interesting article on 'Herd Instinct,' by Mr. W. Trotter in the _Sociological Review_ for July 1908. The political psychology of the poorer inhabitants of a great city is considered from an individual and fascinating point of view by Miss Jane Addams (of Chicago) in her _Democracy and Social Ethics_.

GRAHAM WALLAS.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I have made hardly any changes in the book as it first appeared, beyond the correction of a few verbal slips. The important political developments which have occurred during the last eighteen months in the English Parliament, in Turkey, Persia, and India, and in Germany, have not altered my conclusions as to the psychological problems raised by modern forms of government; and it would involve an impossible and undesirable amount of rewriting to subst.i.tute 'up-to-date' ill.u.s.trations for those which I drew from the current events of 1907 and 1908. I should desire to add to the books recommended above Mr. W. M'Dougall's _Social Psychology_, with special reference to his a.n.a.lysis of Instinct.

G.W.

LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, CLARE MARKET, LONDON, W.C.,

_30th December 1909._

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (1920)

This edition is, like the second edition (1910), a reprint, with a few verbal corrections, of the first edition (1908). I tried in 1908 to make two main points clear. My first point was the danger, for all human activities, but especially for the working of democracy, of the 'intellectualist' a.s.sumption, 'that every human action is the result of an intellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end which he desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can be attained' (p. 21). My second point was the need of subst.i.tuting for that a.s.sumption a conscious and systematic effort of thought. 'The whole progress,' I argued, 'of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages, has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we could, if we merely followed the line of least resistance in the use of our minds' (p. 114).

In 1920 insistence on my first point is not so necessary as it was in 1908. The a.s.sumption that men are automatically guided by 'enlightened self-interest' has been discredited by the facts of the war and the peace, the success of an anti-parliamentary and anti-intellectualist revolution in Russia, the British election of 1918, the French election of 1919, the confusion of politics in America, the breakdown of political machinery in Central Europe, and the general unhappiness which has resulted from four years of the most intense and heroic effort that the human race has ever made. One only needs to compare the disillusioned realism of our present war and post-war pictures and poems with the nineteenth-century war pictures at Versailles and Berlin, and the war poems of Campbell, and Berenger, and Tennyson, to realise how far we now are from exaggerating human rationality.

It is my second point, which, in the world as the war has left it, is most important. There is no longer much danger that we shall a.s.sume that man always and automatically thinks of ends and calculates means. The danger is that we may be too tired or too hopeless to undertake the conscious effort by which alone we can think of ends and calculate means.

The great mechanical inventions of the nineteenth century have given us an opportunity of choosing for ourselves our way of living such as men have never had before. Up to our own time the vast majority of mankind have had enough to do to keep themselves alive, and to satisfy the blind instinct which impels them to hand on life to another generation. An effective choice has only been given to a tiny cla.s.s of hereditary property owners, or a few organisers of other men's labour. Even when, as in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, nature offered whole populations three hundred free days in the year if they would devote two months to ploughing and harvest, all but a fraction still spent themselves in unwilling toil, building tombs or palaces, or equipping armies, for a native monarch or a foreign conqueror. The monarch could choose his life, but his choice was poor enough. 'There is,' says Aristotle, 'a way of living so brutish that it is only worth notice because many of those who can live any life they like make no better choice than did Sardanapalus.'

The Greek thinkers started modern civilisation, because they insisted that the trading populations of their walled cities should force themselves to think out an answer to the question, what kind of life is good. 'The origin of the city-state,' says Aristotle, 'is that it enables us to live; its justification is that it enables us to live well.'

Before the war, there were in London and New York, and Berlin, thousands of rich men and women as free to choose their way of life as was Sardanapalus, and as dissatisfied with their own choice. Many of the sons and daughters of the owners of railways and coal mines and rubber plantations were 'fed up' with motoring or bridge, or even with the hunting and fishing which meant a frank resumption of palaeolithic life without the spur of palaeolithic hunger. But my own work brought me into contact with an unprivileged cla.s.s, whose degree of freedom was the special product of modern industrial civilisation, and on whose use of their freedom the future of civilisation may depend. A clever young mechanic, at the age when the Wanderjahre of the medieval craftsman used to begin, would come home after tending a 'speeded up' machine from 8 A.M., with an hour's interval, till 5 P.M. At 6 P.M. he had finished his tea in the crowded living-room of his mother's house, and was 'free' to do what he liked. That evening, perhaps, his whole being tingled with half-conscious desires for love, and adventure, and knowledge, and achievement. On another day he might have gone to a billiard match at his club, or have hung round the corner for a girl who smiled at him as he left the factory, or might have sat on his bed and ground at a chapter of Marx or Hobson. But this evening he saw his life as a whole.

The way of living that had been implied in the religious lessons at school seemed strangely irrelevant; but still he felt humble, and kind, and anxious for guidance. Should he aim at marriage, and if so should he have children at once or at all? If he did not marry, could he avoid self-contempt and disease? Should he face the life of a socialist organiser, with its strain and uncertainty, and the continual possibility of disillusionment? Should he fill up every evening with technical cla.s.ses, and postpone his ideals until he had become rich? And if he became rich what should he do with his money? Meanwhile, there was the urgent impulse to walk and think; but where should he walk to, and with whom?

The young schoolmistress, in her bed-sitting-room a few streets off, was in no better case. She and a friend sat late last night, agreeing that the life they were living was no real life at all; but what was the alternative? Had the 'home duties' to which her High Church sister devoted herself with devastating self-sacrifice any more meaning? Ought she, with her eyes open, and without much hope of spontaneous love, to enter into the childless 'modern' marriage which alone seemed possible for her? Ought she to spend herself in a reckless campaign for the suffrage? Meanwhile, she had had her tea, her eyes were too tired to read, and what on earth should she do till bedtime?

Such moments of clear self-questioning were of course rare, but the nerve-fretting problems always existed. Industrial civilisation had given the growing and working generation a certain amount of leisure, and education enough to conceive of a choice in the use of that leisure; but had offered them no guidance in making their choice.

We are faced, as I write, with the hideous danger that fighting may blaze up again throughout the whole Eurasian continent, and that the young men and girls of Europe may have no more choice in the way they spend their time than they had from 1914 to 1918 or the serfs of Pharaoh had in ancient Egypt. But if that immediate danger is avoided, I dream that in Europe and in America a conscious and systematic discussion by the young thinkers of our time of the conditions of a good life for an unprivileged population may be one of the results of the new vision of human nature and human possibilities which modern science and modern industry have forced upon us.

Within each nation, industrial organisation may cease to be a confused and wasteful struggle of interests, if it is consciously related to a chosen way of life for which it offers to every worker the material means. International relations may cease to consist of a constant plotting of evil by each nation for its neighbours, if ever the youth of all nations know that French, and British, and Germans, and Russians, and Chinese, and Americans, are taking a conscious part in the great adventure of discovering ways of living open to all, and which all can believe to be good.

GRAHAM WALLAS.

_August_ 1920.

HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

INTRODUCTION

The study of politics is just now (1908) in a curiously unsatisfactory position.

At first sight the main controversy as to the best form of government appears to have been finally settled in favour of representative democracy. Forty years ago it could still be argued that to base the sovereignty of a great modern nation upon a widely extended popular vote was, in Europe at least, an experiment which had never been successfully tried. England, indeed, by the 'leap in the dark' of 1867, became for the moment the only large European State whose government was democratic and representative. But to-day a parliamentary republic based upon universal suffrage exists in France without serious opposition or protest. Italy enjoys an apparently stable const.i.tutional monarchy.

Universal suffrage has just been enacted in Austria. Even the German Emperor after the election of 1907 spoke of himself rather as the successful leader of a popular electoral campaign than as the inheritor of a divine right. The vast majority of the Russian nation pa.s.sionately desires a sovereign parliament, and a reactionary Duma finds itself steadily pushed by circ.u.mstances towards that position. The most ultramontane Roman Catholics demand temporal power for the Pope, no longer as an ideal system of world government, but as an expedient for securing in a few square miles of Italian territory liberty of action for the directors of a church almost all of whose members will remain voting citizens of const.i.tutional States. None of the proposals for a non-representative democracy which were a.s.sociated with the communist and anarchist movements of the nineteenth century have been at all widely accepted, or have presented themselves as a definite constructive scheme; and almost all those who now hope for a social change by which the results of modern scientific industry shall be more evenly distributed put their trust in the electoral activity of the working cla.s.ses.

And yet, in the very nations which have most whole-heartedly accepted representative democracy, politicians and political students seem puzzled and disappointed by their experience of it. The United States of America have made in this respect by far the longest and most continuous experiment. Their const.i.tution has lasted for a century and a quarter, and, in spite of controversy and even war arising from opposing interpretations of its details, its principles have been, and still are, practically unchallenged. But, as far as an English visitor can judge, no American thinks with satisfaction of the electoral 'machine' whose power alike in Federal, State, and Munic.i.p.al politics is still increasing.

In England not only has our experience of representative democracy been much shorter than that of America, but our political traditions have tended to delay the full acceptance of the democratic idea even in the working of democratic inst.i.tutions. Yet, allowing for differences of degree and circ.u.mstance, one finds in England among the most loyal democrats, if they have been brought into close contact with the details of electoral organisation, something of the same disappointment which has become more articulate in America. I have helped to fight a good many parliamentary contests, and have myself been a candidate in a series of five London munic.i.p.al elections. In my last election I noticed that two of my canva.s.sers, when talking over the day's work, used independently the phrase, 'It is a queer business.' I have heard much the same words used in England by those professional political agents whose efficiency depends on their seeing electoral facts without illusion. I have no first-hand knowledge of German or Italian electioneering, but when a year ago I talked with my hosts of the Paris Munic.i.p.al Council, I seemed to detect in some of them indications of good-humoured disillusionment with regard to the working of a democratic electoral system.

In England and America one has, further, the feeling that it is the growing, and not the decaying, forces of society which create the most disquieting problems. In America the 'machine' takes its worst form in those great new cities whose population and wealth and energy represent the goal towards which the rest of American civilisation is apparently tending. In England, to any one who looks forward, the rampant bribery of the old fishing-ports, or the traditional and respectable corruption of the cathedral cities, seem comparatively small and manageable evils.

The more serious grounds for apprehension come from the newest inventions of wealth and enterprise, the up-to-date newspapers, the power and skill of the men who direct huge aggregations of industrial capital, the organised political pa.s.sions of working men who have pa.s.sed through the standards of the elementary schools, and who live in hundreds of square miles of new, healthy, indistinguishable suburban streets. Every few years some invention in political method is made, and if it succeeds both parties adopt it. In politics, as in football, the tactics which prevail are not those which the makers of the rules intended, but those by which the players find that they can win, and men feel vaguely that the expedients by which their party is most likely to win may turn out not to be those by which a State is best governed.

More significant still is the fear, often expressed as new questions force themselves into politics, that the existing electoral system will not bear the strain of an intensified social conflict. Many of the arguments used in the discussion of the tariff question in England, or of the concentration of capital in America, or of social--democracy in Germany, imply this. Popular election, it is said, may work fairly well as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and industrial power to make full use of their opportunities. But if the rich people in any modern state thought it worth their while, in order to secure a tariff, or legalise a trust, or oppose a confiscatory tax, to subscribe a third of their income to a political fund, no Corrupt Practices Act yet invented would prevent them from spending it.

If they did so, there is so much skill to be bought, and the art of using skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so advanced, that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the future. No existing party, unless it enormously increased its own fund or discovered some other new source of political strength, would have any chance of permanent success.

The appeal, however, in the name of electoral purity, to protectionists, trust-promoters, and socialists that they should drop their various movements and so confine politics to less exciting questions, falls, naturally enough, on deaf ears.

The proposal, again, to extend the franchise to women is met by that sort of hesitation and evasion which is characteristic of politicians who are not sure of their intellectual ground. A candidate who has just been speaking on the principles of democracy finds it, when he is heckled, very difficult to frame an answer which would justify the continued exclusion of women from the franchise. Accordingly a large majority of the successful candidates from both the main parties at the general election of 1906 pledged themselves to support female suffrage.

But, as I write, many, perhaps the majority, of those who gave that pledge seem to be trying to avoid the necessity of carrying it out.

There is no reason to suppose that they are men of exceptionally dishonest character, and their fear of the possible effect of a final decision is apparently genuine. They are aware that certain differences exist between men and women, though they do not know what those differences are, nor in what way they are relevant to the question of the franchise. But they are even less steadfast in their doubts than in their pledges, and the question will, in the comparatively near future, probably be settled by importunity on the one side and mere drifting on the other.

This half conscious feeling of unsettlement on matters which in our explicit political arguments we treat as settled, is increased by the growing urgency of the problem of race. The fight for democracy in Europe and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was carried on by men who were thinking only of the European races. But, during the extension of democracy after 1870, almost all the Great Powers were engaged in acquiring tropical dependencies, and improvements in the means of communication were bringing all the races of the world into close contact. The ordinary man now finds that the sovereign vote has (with exceptions numerically insignificant) been in fact confined to nations of European origin. But there is nothing in the form or history of the representative principle which seems to justify this, or to suggest any alternative for the vote as a basis of government. Nor can he draw any intelligible and consistent conclusion from the practice of democratic States in giving or refusing the vote to their non-European subjects. The United States, for instance, have silently and almost unanimously dropped the experiment of negro suffrage. In that case, owing to the wide intellectual gulf between the West African negro and the white man from North-West Europe, the problem was comparatively simple; but no serious attempt has yet been made at a new solution of it, and the Americans have been obviously puzzled in dealing with the more subtle racial questions created by the immigration of Chinese and j.a.panese and Slavs, or by the government of the mixed populations in the Philippines.

England and her colonies show a like uncertainty in the presence of the political questions raised both by the migration of non-white races and by the acquisition of tropical dependencies. Even when we discuss the political future of independent Asiatic States we are not clear whether the principle, for instance, of 'no taxation without representation'

should be treated as applicable to them. Our own position as an Asiatic power depends very largely on the development of China and Persia, which are inhabited by races who may claim, in some respects, to be our intellectual superiors. When they adopt our systems of engineering, mechanics, or armament we have no doubt that they are doing a good thing for themselves, even though we may fear their commercial or military rivalry. But no follower of Bentham is now eager to export for general Asiatic use our latest inventions in political machinery. We hear that the Persians have established a parliament, and watch the development of their experiment with a complete suspension of judgment as to its probable result. We have helped the j.a.panese to preserve their independence as a const.i.tutional nation, and most Englishmen vaguely sympathise with the desire of the Chinese progressives both for national independence and internal reform. Few of us, however, would be willing to give any definite advice to an individual Chinaman who asked whether he ought to throw himself into a movement for a representative parliament on European lines.

Within our own Empire this uncertainty as to the limitations of our political principles may at any moment produce actual disaster. In Africa, for instance, the political relationship between the European inhabitants of our territories and the non-European majority of Kaffirs, Negroes, Hindoos, Copts, or Arabs is regulated on entirely different lines in Natal, Basutoland, Egypt, or East Africa. In each case the const.i.tutional difference is due not so much to the character of the local problem as to historical accident, and trouble may break out anywhere and at any time, either from the aggression of the Europeans upon the rights reserved by the Home Government to the non-Europeans, or from a revolt of the non-Europeans themselves. Blacks and whites are equally irritated by the knowledge that there is one law in Nairobi and another in Durban.

This position is, of course, most dangerous in the case of India. For two or three generations the ordinary English Liberal postponed any decision on Indian politics, because he believed that we were educating the inhabitants for self-government, and that in due time they would all have a vote for an Indian parliament. Now he is becoming aware that there are many races in India, and that some of the most important differences between those races among themselves, and between any of them and ourselves, are not such as can be obliterated by education. He is told by men whom he respects that this fact makes it certain that the representative system which is suitable for England will never be suitable for India, and therefore he remains uneasily responsible for the permanent autocratic government of three hundred million people, remembering from time to time that some of those people or their neighbours may have much more definite political ideas than his own, and that he ultimately may have to fight for a power which he hardly desires to retain.