IITHE STUDY OF POLITICS

Ithas long been an open secret that there is war among the political economists. John Stuart Mill no longer receives universal homage, but has to bear much irreverent criticism; even Adam Smith might be seriously cavilled at were not the habit of praise grown too old in his case. He is still ‘the father of political economy;’ but, like other fathers of his day, he seems to us decidedly old fashioned. The fact is, that these older writers, who professed to point out the laws of human business, are accused of leaving out of view a full half of human nature; in insisting that men love gain, they are said to have quite forgotten that men sometimes love each other, that they are not only prehensile, but also a great many other things less aggressive and less selfish.

Those who make these charges want toleave nothing human out of their reckonings; they want to know ‘all the facts,’ and are ready, if necessary, to reduce every generalization of the older writers to the state—the whollyexceptionalstate—of a rule in German grammar. Their protest is significant, their purpose heroic, beyond a doubt; and what interesting questions are not raised by their programme! How is the world to contain the writings, statistical, historical, critical, which must be accumulated ere this enormous diagnosis of trade and manufacture shall be completed in its details? And after it shall have been completed in detail who is to be born great enough in genius and patience to reduce the mass to a system comprehensible by ordinary mortals? Moreover, who is going surety that these new economists will not be dreadful defaulters before they get through handling these immense assets of human nature, which Mill confessed himself unable to handle without wrecking his bookkeeping? Are they assured of the eventual collaboration of some Shakespeare who will set before the world all the standard types of economic character?Let the world hope so. Even those who cannot answer the questions I have broached ought to bid such sturdy workers ‘God speed!’

The most interesting reflection suggested by the situation is, that political economists are being harassed by the same discipline of experience that, one day or another, sobers all constructors of systems. They cannot build in the air and then escape chagrin because men only gaze at their structures, and will not live in them. Closet students of politics are constantly undergoing new drill in the same lesson: the world is an inexorable schoolmaster; it will have none of any thought which does not recognize it. Sometimes theorists like Rousseau, being near enough the truth to deceive even those who know something of it, are so unfortunate as to induce men to rear fabrics of government after their aerial patterns out of earth’s stuffs, with the result of bringing every affair of weight crashing about their ears, to the shaking of the world. But there are not many such coincidences as Rousseau and his times, happily; and other closet politicians,more commonly cast and more ordinarily placed than he, have had no such perilous successes.

There is every reason to believe that in countries where men vote as well as write books, political writers at any rate give an honest recognition of act to these facts. They do not vote their opinions, they vote their party tickets; and they are the better citizens by far for doing so. Inside their libraries they go with their masters in thought—mayhap go great lengths with Adolph Wagner, or hold stiffly back, “manversusthe state,” with Spencer; outside their libraries they ‘go with their party.’ In a word, like sensible men, they frankly recognize the difference between what is possible in thought and what is practicable in action.

But the trouble is, that when they turn from voting to writing they call many of their abstract reflections on government studies ofpolitics, and thereby lose the benefit of some very wholesome aids to just thought. Even when they draw near the actual life of living governments, as they frequently do, and read and compare statutes and constitutions, they stop shortof asking and ascertaining what the men of the street think and say of institutions and laws; what little, as well as what big, influences brought particular laws into existence; how much of each law actually lives in the regulation of public function or private activity, how much of it has degenerated into ‘dead letter;’ in brief, just what things it is—what methods, what habits, what human characteristics and social conditions—that make the appearance of politics outside the library so different from its appearance inside that quiet retreat; what it is that constitutes ‘practical politics’ a peculiar province. And yet these are the questions most necessary to be answered in order to reach the heart of their study.

Every one who has read great treatises on government which were not merely speculative in their method must have been struck by their exhaustive knowledge of statutes, of judicial precedents, and of legal and constitutional history; and equally by their tacit ignorance of anything more than this gaunt skeleton of institutions. Their best pages are often those on which a modest asterisk, an unobtrusivenumeral, or a tiny dagger sticking high in the stately text, carries the eye down to a foot-note, packed close in small print, in which some hint is let drop of the fact that institutions have adailyas well as an epochal life, from which the student might ‘learn something to his advantage.’

The inherent weakness of such a method is shown by the readiness with which it is discredited when once a better one is put beside it. What modern writer on political institutions has not felt, either directly or indirectly, the influence of de Tocqueville and Bagehot? Both these inimitable writers were men of extraordinary genius, and, whatever they might have written about, their writings would have been admiringly preserved, if only for the wonder of their luminous qualities. But their political works live, not only as models of effective style, but also as standards of stimulating wisdom; because Bagehot and de Tocqueville were not merely students, but alsomen of the world, for whom the only acceptable philosophy of politics was a generalization from actual daily observation of men and things.They could see institutions writ small in the most trivial turns of politics, and read constitutions more clearly in a biography than in a statute-book. They were men who, had they written history, would have written the history of peoples, and not of courts or parliaments merely. Their methods have, therefore, because of their essential sanity, gone far toward discrediting all others; they have leavened the whole mass of political literature. Was it not Bagehot, for instance, who made it necessary for Professor Dicey to entitle his recent admirable work “The Law of the Constitution,” that no one might think he mistook it for theLifeof the Constitution?

Who has not wished that Burke had fused the permanent thoughts of his splendid sentences of wisdom together into a noble whole, an incomparable treatise whereby every mind that loved liberty might be strengthened and fertilized? He had handled affairs, and could pluck out the heart of their mystery with a skill that seldom blundered; he spoke hardly a word of mere hearsay or speculation. He, it would seem, better than anyother, could have shown writers on politics the difference between knowledge and insight, between an acquaintance with public law and a real mastery of the principles of government.

Not that all ‘practical politicians’ would be the best instructors in the deep—though they might be in the hidden—things of politics. Far from it. They are too thickly crowded by daily detail to see permanent outlines, too much pushed about by a thousand little influences to detect accurately the force or the direction of the big and lasting influences. They ‘cannot see the forest for the trees.’ They are no more fitted to be instructorsbecausethey are practical politicians than lawyers are fitted to fill law-school chairs because they are active practitioners. They must be something else besides to qualify them for the high function of teaching, and must be that something else in so masterful a fashion that no distraction of active politics can for a moment withdraw their vision from the great and continuous principles of their calling.

The active statesman is often an incomparable teacher, however, when he is himselfleast conscious that he is teaching at all, when he has no thought of being didactic, but has simply a heart full of the high purpose of leading his fellow-countrymen to do those things which he conceives to be right. Read the purposes of men like Patrick Henry and Abraham Lincoln, men untutored of the schools—read their words of leadership, and say whether there be anything wiser than their home-made wisdom.

It is such reflections as these—whether my examples be well chosen or not—which seem to me to lead directly to the right principle of study for every one who would go beyond the law and know the life of States. Not every State lets statutes die by mere disuse, as Scotland once did; and if you are going to read constitutions with only lawyers for your guides, be they never so learned, you must risk knowing only the anatomy of institutions, never learning anything of their biology.

“Men of letters and of thought,” says Mr. Sidney Colvin, where one would least expect to find such a remark—in a “Life of Walter SavageLandor”—

“Men of letters and of thought are habitually too much given to declaiming at their ease against the delinquencies of men of action and affairs. The inevitable friction of practical politics generates heat enough already, and the office of the thinker and critic should be to supply not heat, but light. The difficulties which attend his own unmolested task, the task of seeking after and proclaiming salutary truths, should teach him to make allowance for the still more urgent difficulties which beset the politician—the man obliged, amidst the clash of interests and temptations, to practise from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most uncertain and at the same time the most indispensable of the experimental arts.”

Excellent! But why stop there? Must the man of letters and of thought observe the friction of politics only to make due allowance for the practical politician, only to keep his own placid conclusions free from any taint of scorn or cavil at men whose lives are thrown amidst affairs to endure the buffetings of interest and resist the tugs of temptation? Is not a just understanding of the conditions of practical politics also an indispensable prerequisite to the discovery and audible proclamation of his own “salutary truths?” No truth which does not on allits sides touch human life can ever reach the heart of politics; and men of ‘unmolested tasks,’ of mere library calm, simply cannot think the thoughts which will tell amidst the noise of affairs. An alert and sympathetic perception of the infinite shifts of circumstance and play of motive which control the actual conduct of government ought to permeate the thinking, as well as check the criticisms, of writers on politics.

In a word, ought not the ‘man of the world’ and the ‘man of books’ to be merged in each other in the student of politics? Was not John Stuart Mill the better student for having served the East India Company and sat in the House of Commons? Are not Professor Bryce and Mr. John Morley more to be trusted in their books because they have proved themselves worthy to be trusted in the Cabinet?

The success of great popular preachers contains a lesson for students of politics who would themselves convert men to a saving doctrine. The preacher has, indeed, an incalculable advantage over the student of politics in having as his text-book that Bible which speaks of thehuman heart with a Maker’s knowledge of the thing He has made; by knowing his book he knows the deepest things of daily life. But the great preacher reaches the heart of his hearers not by knowledge, but by sympathy—by showing himself a brother-man to his fellow-men. And this is just the principle which the student of politics must heed. He must frequent the street, the counting-house, the drawing-room, the club-house, the administrative offices, the halls—yes, and the lobbies—of legislatures. He must cross-examine the experience of government officials; he must hear the din of conventions, and see their intrigues; he must witness the scenes of election day. He must know how men who are not students regard government and its affairs. He will get many valuable suggestions from such men on occasion; better than that, he will learn the available approaches to such men’s thoughts. Government is meant for the good of ordinary people, and it is for ordinary people that the student should elucidate its problems; let him be anxious to keep within earshot of such.

This is not to commend the writer onpolitics to narrow ‘practical’ views and petty comment; it is not to ask him to find a philosophy of government which will fit the understanding and please the taste of the ‘ward politician:’ it is only to ask him to keep his generalizations firmly bottomed on fact and experience. His philosophy will not overshoot the hearts of men because it is feathered with high thought, unless it be deliberately shot in air. Thoughts do not fail of acceptance because they are not commonplace enough, but because they are not true enough; and, in the sort of writing about which we are here speaking, truth is a thing which can be detected better by the man who knows life than by the man who knows only logic. You cannot lift truth so high that men cannot reach it; the only caution to be observed is, that you do not ask them to climb where they cannot go without leavingterra firma.

Nor is the student, who naturally and properly loves books, to leave books and sit all his time in wiseacre observation amidst busy men. His books are his balance—or, rather, his ballast. And of course the men of his own day are notthe only men from whom he can learn politics. Government is as old as man; men have always been politicians; the men of to-day are only politicians of a particular school; the past furnishes examples of politicians of every other school, and there is as much to be learned about government from them as from their successors.

Carlyle had the sort of eye for which one should pray when seeking to find men alive and things actual in the records left of them. Who has not profited by his humorous familiarity with the foibles and personal habits of the men who lived about the court of the Hohenzollerns? Who has not learned more than any other man could have told him of Prussian administration under its first great organizer by looking with Carlyle into the sociable informalities of Frederick William’s ‘tobacco parliament?’ Carlyle knew these men well enough to joke with and rail at them. He twitted them with their family secrets, and, knowing what clay they were of, was not awed by their state ceremonials. Yet he saw them, as he himself bitterly complains, only throughthe medium of crabbed documents and dry-as-dust books, with no seer like himself to help him in his interpretations. It was hard straining of the eyes to see so far back through the dense and murky atmosphere of formal record and set history; but he saw, nevertheless, because he did not need to be told all in order to know all; the dryest of historians could hardly avoid dropping some hint which would suffice Carlyle more than would tomes of ‘profane history.’

If you know what you are looking for and are not expecting to find it advertised in the newspapers, but lying somewhere beneath the surface of things, the dullest fool may often help you to its discovery. It needs a good nose to do the thing, but look how excellent is the game to which a casual scent may bring you in such a domain as the study of politics. There are whole worlds of fact waiting to be discovered by inference. Do not expect to find the life of constitutions painted in the great ‘standard authorities,’ but, following with becoming patience their legal anatomy of institutions, watch their slightest movement toward an illustrativefoot-note, and try to find under that the scent you are in quest of. If they cite an instance, seek the recital of the same case elsewhere, where it is told with a different purpose; if it promise well there, hunt it further still, and make sure you catch every glimpse it affords of men’s actual dealings with government. If your text mention names of consequence, seek them out in biographies, and scan there the personal relations of men with affairs, for hints of the methods by which governments are operated from day to day. You will not need any incentive to read all their gossip, in letters and journals, and so see governors as men; but do more: endure official interviews and sessions of Parliament with them; collate their private letters and their public despatches—there’s no telling when or where you shall strike fresh trails of the game you seek. Interview judges off the bench, courtiers away from court, officers off duty. Go to France and live next door a prefect in the provinces; go to London and try to find out how things of weight are talked about in the smoking-room of the House of Commons.

Such excursions must, of course, lead the student far afield; he will often get quite out of sight of his starting-point, the ‘standard authority;’ but he will not on that account be lost. The fact is, that all literature teems with suggestions on this topic of politics. Just as the chance news item, the unstudied traveller’s reminiscence, the passing social or financial scandal,Aand every hint of any present contact of men with law or authority, illuminates directly, or by inference, the institutions of our own day, similar random rays thrown across the pages of old books by the unpremeditated words of writers quite guiltless of such instructive intent may light up, for those who are alert to see such things, the most intimate secrets of state. If it be beyond hoping for to find awholeGreville for every age of government, there may be found Grevillian scraps, at least, in the literature of almost every time. From men as far back and as well remembered as Cicero, down to men as recent and as easily forgottenas several who might be named, politicians have loved to explain to posterity the part they took in conspicuous affairs; and that portion of posterity which studies politics by inference ought to be profoundly thankful to them for yielding to the taste.

ADid not the Dilke trial in London, for instance, help us to understand at least one influence that may sometimes make a lawyer Home Secretary?

Approach the life of States by such avenues, and you shall be convinced of the organic nature of political society. View society from what point you will, you always catch sight of some part of government; man is so truly a ‘political animal’ that you cannot examine him at all without seeing the points—points of his very structure—whereat he touches and depends upon, or upholds, the State.

In 1850, while Governor-General of Canada, Lord Elgin writes to Lord Grey:

“Our Reciprocity measure was pressed by us in Washington last session, just as a railway bill, in 1845 or 1846, would have been passed in Parliament. There was no Government to deal with, ... it was all a matter of canvassing this member of Congress or the other.”B

BLetters and Journals of Lord Elgin, p. 121.

What? “No Government to deal with?”Here’s a central truth to be found in none of the ‘standard authorities,’ and yet to be seen by a practised diplomatist all the way from Canada. About the same date M. Bacourt came to this country to represent the French Government and be made wretched by the crude deportment of the Americans. His chief concern was to get away to some country where people were less unconventionally at their ease in drawing-rooms; but he turned, when necessary, to the business of his legation; and whenever he did so he found that “here diplomatic affairs are not treated as everywhere else, where we communicate with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and arrange the matter with him alone.” He must ‘arrange’ the matter with several committees of Congress. He must go to see Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Winthrop, whose “husbands are members of the House of Representatives, and on the committee having charge of commercial affairs, in which” he “is interested,” for “they say that these gentlemen are very particular about visits from foreign ministers to their wives.”CJust Lord Elgin’stestimony. Again the ‘standard authorities’ are added to, and that in a quarter where we should least expect to find them supplemented. We need despair of no source.

CSouvenirs of a Diplomat, pp. 189, 281.

These are only near and easily recognized illustrations of the errant mode of study I am expounding and advocating. Other systems besides our own receive similar chance illumination in the odd corners of all sorts of books. Now and again you strike mines like the “Mémoires of Madame de Rémusat,” the “Letters” of Walpole, or the “Diary” of a Pepys or an Evelyn; at other periods you must be content to find only slender veins of the ore of familiar observation and intimate knowledge of affairs for which you are delving; but your search will seldom be altogether futile. Some newly opened archive office may offercahiers, such as revealed to de Tocqueville, more than all other records, theancien régime. Some elder Hamerton may tell you of the significant things to be seen ‘round his house.’ All correspondence and autobiography will repay perusal, even when not so soaked in affairs as the letters of Cromwell,or so reminiscent of politics as the “Memoirs of Samuel Romilly.”

Politics is the life of the State, and nothing which illustrates that life, nothing which reveals any habit contracted by man as a political animal, comes amiss in the study of politics. Public law is the formal basis of the political life of society, but it is not always an expression of its vital principle. We are inclined, oftentimes, to take laws and constitutions too seriously, to put implicit faith in their professions without examining their conduct. Do they affect to advance liberty, for instance? We ought to go, in person or in imagination, amongst the people whom they command, and see for ourselves whether those people enjoy liberty. With reference to laws and constitutions of our own day, we can learn such things best by supplementing books and study by travel and observation. The best-taught class in modern public law would be a travelling class. Other times than our own we must perforce be content to see through other men’s eyes.

In other words, statute books and legal commentaries are all very well in thestudy of politics, if only you quite thoroughly understand that they furnish only the crude body-colors for your picture of the State’s life, upon which all your finer luminous and atmospheric effects are afterwards to be worked. It is high time to recognize the fact that politics can be effectually expounded only by means of the highest literary methods. Only master workers in language and in the grouping and interpretation of heterogeneous materials can achieve the highest success in making realin wordsthe complex life of States. If I might act as the interpreter of the new-school economists of whom I have already spoken, I trust with due reverence, I should say that this is the thought which, despite their too frequent practical contempt for artistic literary form, is possessing them. John Stuart Mill and Ricardo made a sort of logic of political economy; in order to simplify their processes, they deliberately stripped man of all motives save self-interest alone, and the result was evidently ‘doctrinaire’—was not a picture of life, but a theorem of trade. Hence “the most dismal of all sciences;” hence SidneySmith’s exhortation to his friend not to touch the hard, unnatural thing. The new-school economists revolt, and say they want “a more scientific method.” What they really want is a higher literary method. They want to take account of how a man’s wife affects his trade, how his children stiffen his prudence, how his prejudices condition his enterprise, how his lack of imagination limits his market, how strongly love of home holds him back from the good wages that might be had by emigration, how despotically the opinion of his neighbors forbids his insisting upon a cash business, how his position in local society prescribes the commodities he isnotto deal in; in brief, how men actually do labor, plan, and get gain. They are, therefore, portentously busy amassing particulars about the occupations, the habits, the earnings, the whole economic life of all classes and conditions of men. But these things are only the raw material of poetry and the literary art, and without the intervention of literary art must remain raw material. To make anything of them, the economist must become a literary artist and bringhis discoveries home to our imaginations—make these innumerable details of his pour in a concentrated fire upon the central citadels of men’s understandings. A single step or two would then bring him within full sight of the longed for time when political economy is to dominate legislation.

It has fallen out that, by turning its thoughts toward becoming a science, politics, like political economy, has joined its literature to those books ofnaturalscience which boast a brief authority, and then make way for what is ‘latest.’ Unless it be of the constitution of those rare books which mark an epoch in scientific thought, a ‘scientific work’ may not expect to outlive the prevailing fashion in ladies’ wraps. But books on politics are in the wrong company when they associate with works among which so high a rate of mortality obtains. The ‘science’ proper to them, as distinguished from that which is proper to the company they now affect, is a science whose very expositions are as deathless as itself. It is the science of the life of man in society. Nothing which elucidates that life oughtto be reckoned foreign to its art; and no true picture of that life can ever perish out of literature. Ripe scholarship in history and jurisprudence is not more indispensable to the student of politics than are a constructive imagination and a poet’s eye for the detail of human incident. The heart of his task is insight and interpretation; no literary power that he can bring to bear upon it will be greater than he needs. Arthur Young’s way of observing, Bagehot’s way of writing, and Burke’s way of philosophizing would make an ideal combination for the work he has to do. His materials are often of the most illusive sort, the problems which he has to solve are always of the most confounding magnitude and variety.

It is easy for him to say, for instance, that the political institutions of one country will not suit another country; but how infinitely difficult is it to answer the monosyllables How? and Why? To reply to the Why he must make out all the contrasts in the histories of the two countries. But it depends entirely upon what sort of eye he has whether those contrastswill contain for him vital causes of the effect he is seeking to expound. He may let some anecdote escape him which gleams with the very spark needed to kindle his exposition. In looking only for grave political facts he may overlook some apparently trivial outlying detail which contains the very secret he would guess. He may neglect to notice what men are most talked about by the people; whose photographs are most frequently to be seen on the walls of peasant cottages; what books are oftenest on their shelves. Intent upon intrigue and legislation, he may pass over with only a laugh some piquant gossip about legislator or courtier without the least suspicion that it epitomizes a whole scheme of government. He may admire self-government so much as to forget that it is a very coarse, homely thing when alive, and so may really never know anything valuable about it. The man who thinks the polls disagreeable and uninteresting places has no business taking up a pen to write about government. The man who despises the sheriff because he is coarse and uncouth, and who studies the sheriff’sfunctions only from the drawing-room or the library, will realize the life of government no better than he realizes the vanity of ‘good form.’

If politics were to be studied as a great department of human conduct, not to be understood by a scholar who is not also a man of the world, its literature might be made as imperishable as that of the imagination. There might then enter into it that individuality which is immortality. That personal equation which constitutes the power of all books which have aught of force in them would then rescue books on politics from the dismal category of ‘treatises,’ and exalt them to the patriciate of literature. The needed reaction against the still ‘orthodox’ methods of discoursing upon laws and constitutions, like that already set afoot against the ‘orthodox’ political economists, should be a ‘literary movement’—a movement from formalism to life. In order really to know anything about government, you mustsee it alive; and the object of the writer on politics should be nothing less than this, to paint government to the life, to make it live again upon his page.

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