Human Nature in Politics Part 2

ou ponon en anthropois alla ka en ornisi ka tois pleistois ton zoon, ka tois h.o.m.oethnesi prs allela, ka malista tois anthropois ... eoike de ka tas poleis synechein he philia, ka hoi nomothetai mallon per auten spoudazein e ten dikaiosnen].

The tactics of an election consist largely of contrivances by which this immediate emotion of personal affection may be set up. The candidate is advised to 'show himself continually, to give away prizes, to 'say a few words' at the end of other people's speeches--all under circ.u.mstances which offer little or no opportunity for the formation of a reasoned opinion of his merits, but many opportunities for the rise of a purely instinctive affection among those present. His portrait is periodically distributed, and is more effective if it is a good, that is to say, a distinctive, than if it is a flattering likeness. Best of all is a photograph which brings his ordinary existence sharply forward by representing him in his garden smoking a pipe or reading a newspaper.

A simple-minded supporter whose affection has been so worked up will probably try to give an intellectual explanation of it. He will say that the man, of whom he may know really nothing except that he was photographed in a Panama hat with a fox-terrier, is 'the kind of man we want,' and that therefore he has decided to support him; just as a child will say that he loves his mother because she is the best mother in the world,[7] or a man in love will give an elaborate explanation of his perfectly normal feelings, which he describes as an intellectual inference from alleged abnormal excellences in his beloved. The candidate naturally intellectualises in the same way. One of the most perfectly modest men I know once told me that he was 'going round' a good deal among his future const.i.tuents 'to let them see what a good fellow I am.' Unless, indeed, the process can be intellectualised, it is for many men unintelligible.

[7] A rather unusually reflective little girl of my acquaintance, felt, one day, while looking at her mother, a strong impulse of affection. She first gave the usual intellectual explanation of her feeling, 'Mummy, I do think you are the most beautiful Mummy in the whole world,' and then, after a moment's thought, corrected herself by saying, 'But there, they do say love is blind.'

A monarch is a life-long candidate, and there exists a singularly elaborate traditional art of producing personal affection for him. It is more important that he should be seen than that he should speak or act.

His portrait appears on every coin and stamp, and apart from any question of personal beauty, produces most effect when it is a good likeness. Any one, for instance, who can clearly recall his own emotions during the later years of Queen Victoria's reign, will remember a measurable increase of his affection for her, when, in 1897, a thoroughly life-like portrait took the place on the coins of the conventional head of 1837-1887, and the awkward compromise of the first Jubilee year. In the case of monarchy one can also watch the intellectualisation of the whole process by the newspapers, the official biographers, the courtiers, and possibly the monarch himself. The daily bulletin of details as to his walks and drives is, in reality, the more likely to create a vivid impression of his personality, and therefore to produce this particular kind of emotion, the more ordinary the events described are in themselves. But since an emotion arising out of ordinary events is difficult to explain on a purely intellectual basis, these events are written about as revealing a life of extraordinary regularity and industry. When the affection is formed it is even sometimes described as an inevitable reasoned conclusion arising from reflection upon a reign during which there have been an unusual number of good harvests or great inventions.

Sometimes the impulse of affection is excited to a point at which its non-rational character becomes obvious. George the Third was beloved by the English people because they realised intensely that, like themselves, he had been born in England, and because the published facts of his daily life came home to them. f.a.n.n.y Burney describes, therefore, how when, during an attack of madness, he was to be taken in a coach to Kew, the doctors who were to accompany him were seriously afraid that the inhabitants of any village who saw that the King was under restraint would attack them.[8] The kindred emotion of personal and dynastic loyalty (whose origin is possibly to be found in the fact that the loosely organised companies of our prehuman ancestors could not defend themselves from their carnivorous enemies until the general instinct of affection was specialised into a vehement impulse to follow and protect their leader), has again and again produced destructive and utterly useless civil wars.

[8] _Diary of Madame D'Arblay_, ed. 1905, vol. iv. p. 184, 'If they even attempted force, they had not a doubt but his smallest resistance would call up the whole country to his fancied rescue.'

Fear often accompanies and, in politics, is confused with affection. A man, whose life's dream it has been to get sight and speech of his King, is accidentally brought face to face with him. He is 'rooted to the spot,' becomes pale, and is unable to speak, because a movement might have betrayed his ancestors to a lion or a bear, or earlier still, to a hungry cuttlefish. It would be an interesting experiment if some professor of experimental psychology would arrange his cla.s.s in the laboratory with sphygmographs on their wrists ready to record those pulse movements which accompany the sensation of 'thrill,' and would then introduce into the room without notice, and in chance order, a bishop, a well-known general, the greatest living man of letters, and a minor member of the royal family. The resulting records of immediate pulse disturbances would be of real scientific importance, and it might even be possible to continue the record in each case say, for a quarter of a minute, and to trace the secondary effects of variations in political opinions, education, or the sense of humour among the students.

At present almost the only really scientific observation on the subject from its political side is contained in Lord Palmerston's protest against a purely intellectual account of aristocracy: 'there is no d.a.m.ned nonsense about merit,' he said, 'in the case of the Garter.'

Makers of new aristocracies are still, however, apt to intellectualise.

The French government, for instance, have created an order, 'Pour le Merite Agricole,' which ought, on the basis of mere logic, to be very successful; but one is told that the green ribbon of that order produces in France no thrill whatever.

The impulse to laugh is comparatively unimportant in politics, but it affords a good instance of the way in which a practical politician has to allow for pre-rational impulse. It is apparently an immediate effect of the recognition of the incongruous, just as trembling is of the recognition of danger. It may have been evolved because an animal which suffered a slight spasm in the presence of the unexpected was more likely to be on its guard against enemies, or it may have been the merely accidental result of some fact in our nervous organisation which was otherwise useful. Incongruity is, however, so much a matter of habit and a.s.sociation and individual variation, that it is extraordinarily difficult to forecast whether any particular act will seem ridiculous to any particular cla.s.s, or how long the sense of incongruity will in any case persist. Acts, for instance, which aim at producing exalted emotional effect among ordinary slow-witted people--Burke's dagger, Louis Napoleon's tame eagle, the German Kaiser's telegrams about Huns and mailed fists--may do so, and therefore be in the end politically successful, although they produce spontaneous laughter in men whose conception of good political manners is based upon the idea of self-restraint.

Again, almost the whole of the economic question between socialism and individualism turns on the nature and limitations of the desire for property. There seem to be good grounds for supposing that this is a true specific instinct, and not merely the result of habit or of the intellectual choice of means for satisfying the desire of power.

Children, for instance, 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. The evolutionary origin of the desire for property is indicated also by many of the habits of dogs or squirrels or magpies.

Some economist ought therefore to give us a treatise in which this property instinct is carefully and quant.i.tatively examined. Is it, like the hunting instinct, an impulse which dies away if it is not indulged?

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 s.e.xes?

Pending such an inquiry my own provisional opinion is that, like a good many instincts of very early evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied by an avowed pretence; 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. If this is so, and if it is considered for other reasons undesirable to satisfy the property instinct by the possession, say, of slaves or of freehold land, one supposes that a good deal of the feeling of property may in the future be enjoyed even by persons in whom the instinct is abnormally strong, through the collection of sh.e.l.ls or of picture postcards.

The property instinct is, it happens, one of two instances in which the cla.s.sical economists deserted their usual habit of treating all desires as the result of a calculation of the means of obtaining 'utility' or 'wealth.' The satisfaction of the instinct of absolute property by peasant proprietors.h.i.+p turned, they said, 'sand to gold,' although it required a larger expenditure of labour for every unit of income than was the case in salaried employment. The other instance was the instinct of family affection. This also still needs a special treatise on its stimulus, variation, and limitations. But the cla.s.sical economists treated it as absolute and unvarying. The 'economic man,' who had no more concern than a lone wolf with the rest of the human species, was treated as possessing a perfect and permanent solidarity of feeling with his 'family.' The family was apparently a.s.sumed as consisting of those persons for whose support a man in Western Europe is legally responsible, and no attempt was made to estimate whether the instinct extended in any degree to cousins or great uncles.

A treatise on political impulses which aimed at completeness would further include at least the fighting instinct (with the part which it plays, together with affection and loyalty, in the formation of parties), and the instincts of suspicion, curiosity, and the desire to excel.

All these primary impulses are greatly increased in immediate effectiveness when they are 'pure,' that is to say, unaccompanied by competing or opposing impulses; and this is the main reason why art, which aims at producing one emotion at a time, acts on most men so much more easily than does the more varied appeal of real life. I once sat in a suburban theatre among a number of colonial troopers who had come over from South Africa for the King's Coronation. The play was 'Our Boys,'

and between the acts my next neighbour gave me, without any sign of emotion, a hideous account of the scene at Tweefontein after De Wet had rushed the British camp on the Christmas morning of 1901--the militiamen slaughtered while drunk, and the Kaffir drivers tied to the blazing waggons. The curtain rose again, and, five minutes later, I saw that he was weeping in sympathy with the stage misfortunes of two able-bodied young men who had to eat 'inferior Dorset' b.u.t.ter. My sympathy with the militiamen and the Kaffirs was 'pure,' whereas his was overlaid with remembered race-hatred, battle-fury, and contempt for British incompetence. His sympathy, on the other hand, with the stage characters was not accompanied, as mine was, by critical feelings about theatrical conventions, indifferent acting, and middle-Victorian sentiment.

It is this greater immediate effect of pure and artificial as compared with mixed and concrete emotion which explains the traditional maxim of political agents that it is better that a candidate should not live in his const.i.tuency. It is an advantage that he should be able to represent himself as a 'local candidate,' but his local character should be _ad hoc_, and should consist in the hiring of a large house each year in which he lives a life of carefully dramatised hospitality. Things in no way blameworthy in themselves--his choice of tradesmen, his childrens'

hats and measles, his difficulties with his relations--will be, if he is a permanent resident, 'out of the picture,' and may confuse the impression which he produces. If one could, by the help of a time-machine, see for a moment in the flesh the little Egyptian girl who wore out her shoes, one might find her behaving so charmingly that one's pity for her death would be increased. But it is more probable that, even if she was, in fact, a very nice little girl, one would not.

This greater immediate facility of the emotions set up by artistic presentment, as compared with those resulting from concrete observation has, however, to be studied in its relation to another fact--that impulses vary, in their driving force and in the depth of the nervous disturbance which they cause, in proportion, not to their importance in our present life, but to the point at which they appeared in our evolutionary past. We are quite unable to resist the impulse of mere vascular and nervous reaction, the watering of the mouth, the jerk of the limb, the closing of the eye which we share with some of the simplest vertebrates. We can only with difficulty resist the instincts of s.e.x and food, of anger and fear, which we share with the higher animals. It is, on the other hand, difficult for us to obey consistently the impulses which attend on the mental images formed by inference and a.s.sociation. A man may be convinced by a long train of cogent reasoning that he will go to h.e.l.l if he visits a certain house; and yet he will do so in satisfaction of a half conscious craving, whose existence he is ashamed to recognise. It may be that when a preacher makes h.e.l.l real to him by physical images of fire and torment his conviction will acquire coercive force. But that force may soon die away as his memory fades, and even the most vivid description has little effect as compared with a touch of actual pain. At the theatre, because pure emotion is facile, three-quarters of the audience may cry, but because second-hand emotion is shallow, very few of them will be unable to sleep when they get home, or will even lose their appet.i.te for a late supper. My South African trooper probably recovered from his tears over 'Our Boys' as soon as they were shed. The transient and pleasurable quality of the tragic emotions produced by novel reading is well known. A man may weep over a novel which he will forget in two or three hours, although the same man may be made insane, or may have his character changed for life, by actual experiences which are far less terrible than those of which he reads, experiences which at the moment may produce neither tears nor any other obvious nervous effect.

Both those facts are of first-rate political importance in those great modern communities in which all the events which stimulate political action reach the voters through newspapers. The emotional appeal of journalism, even more than that of the stage, is facile because it is pure, and transitory because it is second-hand. Battles and famines, murders and the evidence of inquiries into dest.i.tution, all are presented by the journalist in literary form, with a careful selection of 'telling' detail. Their effect is therefore produced at once, in the half-hour that follows the middle-cla.s.s breakfast, or in the longer interval on the Sunday morning when the workman reads his weekly paper.

But when the paper has been read the emotional effect fades rapidly away.

Any candidate at an election feels for this reason the strangeness of the conditions under which what Professor James calls the 'pungent sense of effective reality,'[9] reaches or fails to reach, mankind, in a civilisation based upon newspapers. I was walking along the street during my last election, thinking of the actual issues involved, and comparing them with the vague fog of journalistic phrases, the half-conscious impulses of old habit and new suspicion which make up the atmosphere of electioneering. I came round a street corner upon a boy of about fifteen returning from work, whose whole face lit up with genuine and lively interest as soon as he saw me. I stopped, and he said: 'I know you, Mr. Wallas, you put the medals on me.' All that day political principles and arguments had refused to become real to my const.i.tuents, but the emotion excited by the bodily fact that I had at a school ceremony pinned a medal for good attendance on a boy's coat, had all the pungency of a first-hand experience.

[9] 'The moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision of the truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to certain ideas.' W. James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p. 547.

Throughout the contest the candidate is made aware, at every point, of the enormously greater solidity for most men of the work-a-day world which they see for themselves, as compared with the world of inference and secondary ideas which they see through the newspapers. A London County Councillor, for instance, as his election comes near, and he begins to withdraw from the daily business of administrative committees into the cloud of the electoral campaign, finds that the officials whom he leaves behind, with their daily stint of work, and their hopes and fears about their salaries, seem to him much more real than himself. The old woman at her door in a mean street who refuses to believe that he is not being paid for canva.s.sing, the prosperous and good-natured tradesman who says quite simply,' I expect you find politics rather an expensive amus.e.m.e.nt,' all seem to stand with their feet upon the ground. However often he a.s.sures himself that the great realities are on his side, and that the busy people round him are concerned only with fleeting appearances, yet the feeling constantly recurs to him that it is he himself who is living in a world of shadows.

This feeling is increased by the fact that a candidate has constantly to repeat the same arguments, and to stimulate in himself the same emotions, and that mere repet.i.tion produces a distressing sense of unreality. The preachers who have to repeat every Sunday the same gospel, find also that 'dry times' alternate with times of exaltation.

Even among the voters the repet.i.tion of the same political thoughts is apt to produce weariness. The main cause of the recurring swing of the electoral pendulum seems to be that opinions which have been held with enthusiasm become after a year or two stale and flat, and that the new opinions seem fresh and vivid.

A treatise is indeed required from some trained psychologist on the conditions under which our nervous system shows itself intolerant of repeated sensations and emotions. The fact is obviously connected with the purely physiological causes which produce giddiness, tickling, sea-sickness, etc. But many things that are 'natural,' that is to say, which we have constantly experienced during any considerable part of the ages during which our nervous organisation was being developed, apparently do not so affect us. Our heartbeats, the taste of water, the rising and setting of the sun, or, in the case of a child, milk, or the presence of its mother, or of its brothers, do not seem to become, in sound health, distressingly monotonous. But 'artificial' things, however pleasant at first--a tune on the piano, the pattern of a garment, the greeting of an acquaintance--are likely to become unbearable if often exactly repeated. A newspaper is an artificial thing in this sense, and one of the arts of the newspaper-writer consists in presenting his views with that kind of repet.i.tion which, like the phrases of a fugue, constantly approaches, but never oversteps the limit of monotony.

Advertisers again are now discovering that it pays to vary the monotony with which a poster appeals to the eye by printing in different colours those copies which are to hang near each other, or still better, by representing varied incidents in the career of 'Sunny Jim' or 'Sunlight Sue.'

A candidate is also an artificial thing. If he lives and works in his const.i.tuency, the daily vision of an otherwise admirable business man seated in a first-cla.s.s carriage on the 8.47 A.M. train in the same att.i.tude and reading the same newspaper may produce a slight and unrecognised feeling of discomfort among his const.i.tuents, although it would cause no such feeling in the wife whose relation to him is 'natural.' For the same reason when his election comes on, although he may declare himself to be the 'old member standing on the old platform,'

he should be careful to avoid monotony by slightly varying his portrait, the form of his address, and the details of his declaration of political faith.

Another fact, closely connected with our intolerance of repeated emotional adjustment, is the desire for privacy, sufficiently marked to approach the character of a specific instinct, and balanced by a corresponding and opposing dread of loneliness. Our ancestors in the ages during which our present nervous system became fixed, lived, apparently, in loosely organised family groups, a.s.sociated for certain occasional purposes, into larger, but still more loosely organised, tribal groups. No one slept alone, for the more or less monogamic family a.s.sembled nightly in a cave or 'lean-to' shelter. The hunt for food which filled the day was carried on, one supposes, neither in complete solitude nor in constant intercourse. Even if the female were left at home with the young, the male exchanged some dozen times a day rough greetings with acquaintances, or joined in a common task. Occasionally, even before the full development of language, excited palavers attended by some hundreds would take place, or opposing tribes would gather for a fight.

It is still extremely difficult for the normal man to endure either much less or much more than this amount of intercourse with his fellows.

However safe they may know themselves to be, most men find it difficult to sleep in an empty house, and would be distressed by anything beyond three days of absolute solitude. Even habit cannot do much in this respect. A man required to submit to gradually increasing periods of solitary confinement would probably go mad as soon as he had been kept for a year without a break. A settler, though he may be the son of a settler, and may have known no other way of living, can hardly endure existence unless his daily intercourse with his family is supplemented by a weekly chat with a neighbour or a stranger; and he will go long and dangerous journeys in order once a year to enjoy the noise and bustle of a crowd.

But, on the other hand, the nervous system of most men will not tolerate the frequent repet.i.tion of that adjustment of the mind and sympathies to new acquaintances.h.i.+p, a certain amount of which is so refres.h.i.+ng and so necessary. One can therefore watch in great modern cities men half consciously striving to preserve the same proportion between privacy and intercourse which prevailed among their ancestors in the woods, and one can watch also the constant appearance of proposals or experiments which altogether ignore the primary facts of human nature in this respect. The habitual intellectualism of the writers of political Utopias prevents them from seeing any 'reason' why men should not find happiness as well as economy in a sort of huge extension of family life. The writer himself at his moments of greatest imaginative exaltation does not perhaps realise the need of privacy at all. His affections are in a state of expansion which, without fancifulness, one may refer back to the emotional atmosphere prevalent in the screaming a.s.semblies of his prehuman ancestors; and he is ready, so long as this condition lasts, to take the whole world almost literally to his bosom. What he does not realise is that neither he nor any one else can keep himself permanently at this level. In William Morris's _News from Nowhere_ the customs of family life extend to the streets, and the tired student from the British Museum talks with easy intimacy to the thirsty dustman. I remember reading an article written about 1850 by one of the early Christian Socialists. He said that he had just been riding down Oxford Street in an omnibus, and that he had noticed that when the omnibus pa.s.sed over a section of the street in which macadam had been subst.i.tuted for paving, all the pa.s.sengers turned and spoke to each other. 'Some day,' he said, 'all Oxford Street will be macadamised, and then, because men will be able to hear each other's voices, the omnibus will become a delightful informal club.' Now nearly all London is paved with wood, and people as they sit in chairs on the top of omnibuses can hear each other whispering; but no event short of a fatal accident is held to justify a pa.s.senger who speaks to his neighbour.

Clubs were established in London, not so much for the sake of the cheapness and convenience of common sitting-rooms and kitchens, as to bring together bodies of men, each of whom should meet all the rest on terms of unrestrained social intercourse. One can see in Thackeray's _Book of Sn.o.bs_, and in the stories of Thackeray's own club quarrels, the difficulties produced by this plan. Nowadays clubs are successful exactly because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of them that no member must speak to any other who is not one of his own personal acquaintances. The innumerable communistic experiments of Fourier, Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially because of the want of privacy. The a.s.sociates got on each other's nerves. In those confused pages of the _Politics_, in which Aristotle criticises from the point of view of experience the communism of Plato, the same point stands out: 'It is difficult to live together in community,' communistic colonists have always 'disputed with each other about the most ordinary matters'; 'we most often disagree with those slaves who are brought into daily contact with us.'[10]

[10] _Politics_, Book II. ch. V.

The Charity Schools of 1700 to 1850 were experiments in the result of a complete refusal of scope, not only for the instinct of property, but for the entirely distinct instinct of privacy, and part of their disastrous nervous and moral effect must be put down to that. The boys in the contemporary public boarding-schools secured a little privacy by the adoption of strange and sometimes cruel social customs, and more has been done since then by systems of 'studies' and 'houses.' Experience seems, however, to show that during childhood a day school with its alternation of home, cla.s.s-room, and playing field, is better suited than a boarding-school to the facts of normal human nature.

This instinctive need of privacy is again a subject which would repay special and detailed study. It varies very greatly among different races, and one supposes that the much greater desire for privacy which is found among Northern, as compared to Southern Europeans, may be due to the fact that races who had to spend much or little of the year under cover, adjusted themselves biologically to a different standard in this respect. It is clear, also, that it is our emotional nature, and not the intellectual or muscular organs of talking, which is most easily fatigued. Light chatter, even among strangers, in which neither party 'gives himself away,' is very much less fatiguing than an intimacy which makes some call upon the emotions. An actor who accepts the second alternative of Diderot's paradox, and _feels_ his part, is much more likely to break down from overstrain, than one who only simulates feeling and keeps his own emotional life to himself.

It is in democratic politics, however, that privacy is most neglected, most difficult, and most necessary. In America all observers are agreed as to the danger which results from looking on a politician as an abstract personification of the will of the people, to whom all citizens have an equal and inalienable right of access, and from whom every one ought to receive an equally warm and sincere welcome. In England our comparatively aristocratic tradition as to the relation between a representative and his const.i.tuents has done something to preserve customs corresponding more closely to the actual nature of man. A tired English statesman at a big reception is still allowed to spend his time rather in chaffing with a few friends in a distant corner of the room than in shaking hands and exchanging effusive commonplaces with innumerable unknown guests. But there is a real danger lest this tradition of privacy may be abolished in English democracy, simply because of its connection with aristocratic manners. A young labour politician is expected to live in more than American conditions of intimate publicity. Having, perhaps, just left the working bench, and having to adjust his nerves and his bodily health to the difficult requirements of mental work, he is expected to receive every caller at any hour of the day or night with the same hearty good will, and to be always ready to share or excite the enthusiasm of his followers. After a year or two, in the case of a man of sensitive nervous organisation, the task is found to be impossible. The signs of nervous fatigue are at first accepted by him and his friends as proofs of his sincerity. He begins to suffer from the curate's disease, the bright-eyed, hysterical condition in which a man talks all day long to a succession of sympathetic hearers about his own overwork, and drifts into actual ill-health, though he is not making an hour's continuous exertion in the day. I knew a young agitator in that state who thought that he could not make a propagandist speech unless the deeply admiring pitman, in whose cottage he was staying, played the Ma.r.s.eillaise on a harmonium before he started. Often such a man takes to drink. In any case he is liable, as the East End clergymen who try to live the same life are liable, to the most pitiable forms of moral collapse.

Such men, however, are those who being unfit for a life without privacy, do not survive. Greater political danger comes perhaps from those who are comparatively fit. Any one who has been in America, who has stood among the crowd in a Philadelphian law-court during the trial of a political case, or has seen the thousands of cartoons in a contest in which Tammany is concerned, will find that he has a picture in his mind of one type at least of those who do survive.

Powerfully built, with the big jaw and loose mouth of the dominant talker, practised by years of sitting behind saloon bars, they have learnt the way of 'selling cheap that which should be most dear.' But even they generally look as if they drank, and as if they would not live to old age.

Other and less dreadful types of politicians without privacy come into one's mind, the orator who night after night repeats the theatrical success of his own personality, and, like the actor, keeps his recurring fits of weary disgust to himself; the busy organising talkative man to whom it is a mere delight to take the chair at four smoking concerts a week. But there is no one of them who would not be the better, both in health and working power, if he were compelled to retire for six months from the public view, and to produce something with his own hand and brain, or even to sit alone in his own house and think.

These facts, in so far as they represent the nervous disturbance produced by certain conditions of life in political communities, are again closely connected with the one point in the special psychology of politics which has as yet received any extensive consideration--the so-called 'Psychology of the Crowd,' on which the late M. Tarde, M. Le Bon, and others have written. In the case of human beings, as in the case of many other social and semi-social animals, the simpler impulses--especially those of fear and anger--when they are consciously shared by many physically a.s.sociated individuals, may become enormously exalted, and may give rise to violent nervous disturbances. One may suppose that this fact, like the existence of laughter, was originally an accidental and undesirable result of the mechanism of nervous reaction, and that it persisted because when a common danger was realised (a forest fire, for instance, or an attack by beasts of prey), a general stampede, although it might be fatal to the weaker members of the herd, was the best chance of safety for the majority.

My own observation of English politics suggests that in a modern national state, this panic effect of the combination of nervous excitement with physical contact is not of great importance. London in the twentieth century is very unlike Paris in the eighteenth century, or Florence in the fourteenth, if only because it is very difficult for any considerable proportion of the citizens to be gathered under circ.u.mstances likely to produce the special 'Psychology of the Crowd.' I have watched two hundred thousand men a.s.sembled in Hyde Park for a Labour Demonstration. The scattered platforms, the fresh air, the wide gra.s.sy s.p.a.ce, seemed to be an unsuitable environment for the production of purely instinctive excitement, and the att.i.tude of such an a.s.sembly in London is good-tempered and lethargic. A crowd in a narrow street is more likely to get 'out of hand,' and one may see a few thousand men in a large hall reach a state approaching genuine pathological exaltation on an exciting occasion, and when they are in the hands of a practised speaker. But as they go out of the hall they drop into the cool ocean of London, and their mood is dissipated in a moment. The mob that took the Bastille would not seem or feel an overwhelming force in one of the business streets of Manchester. Yet such facts vary greatly among different races, and the exaggeration which one seems to notice when reading the French sociologists on this point may be due to their observations having been made among a Latin and not a Northern race.

So far I have dealt with the impulses ill.u.s.trated by the internal politics of a modern State. But perhaps the most important section in the whole psychology of political impulse is that which is concerned not with the emotional effect of the citizens of any state upon each other, but with those racial feelings which reveal themselves in international politics. The future peace of the world largely turns on the question whether we have, as is sometimes said and often a.s.sumed, an instinctive affection for those human beings whose features and colour are like our own, combined with an instinctive hatred for those who are unlike us. On this point, pending a careful examination of the evidence by the psychologists, it is difficult to dogmatise. But I am inclined to think that those strong and apparently simple cases of racial hatred and affection which can certainly be found, are not instances of a specific and universal instinct but the result of several distinct and comparatively weak instincts combined and heightened by habit and a.s.sociation. I have already argued that the instinct of political affection is stimulated by the vivid realisation of its object. Since therefore it is easier, at least for uneducated men, to realise the existence of beings like than of beings unlike themselves, affection for one's like would appear to have a natural basis, but one likely to be modified as our powers of realisation are stimulated by education.

Again, since most men live, especially in childhood, among persons belonging to the same race as themselves, any markedly unusual face or dress may excite the instinct of fear of that which is unknown. A child's fear, however, of a strangely shaped or coloured face is more easily obliterated by familiarity than it would be if it were the result of a specific instinct of race-hatred. White or Chinese children show, one is told, no permanent aversion for Chinese or white or Hindoo or negro nurses and attendants. s.e.x love, again, even when opposed by social tradition, springs up freely between very different human types; and widely separated races have been thereby amalgamated. Between some of the non-human species (horses and camels, for instance) instinctive mutual hatred, as distinguished from fear, does seem to exist, but nowhere, as far as I know, is it found between varieties so nearly related to each other and so readily interbreeding as the various human races.

Anglo-Indian officials sometimes explain, as a case of specific instinct, the fact that a man who goes out with an enthusiastic interest in the native races often finds himself, after a few years, unwillingly yielding to a hatred of the Hindoo racial type. But the account which they give of their sensations seems to me more like the nervous disgust which I described as arising from a constantly repeated mental and emotional adjustment to inharmonious surroundings. At the age when an English official reaches India most of his emotional habits are already set, and he makes, as a rule, no systematic attempt to modify them.

Therefore, just as the unfamiliarity of French cookery or German beds, which at the beginning of a continental visit is a delightful change, may become after a month or two an intolerable _gene,_ so the servility and untruthfulness, and even the patience and cleverness of those natives with whom he is brought into official contact, get after a few years on the nerves of an Anglo-Indian. Intimate and uninterrupted contact during a long period, after his social habits have been formed, with people of his own race but of a different social tradition would produce the same effect.

Perhaps, however, intellectual a.s.sociation is a larger factor than instinct in the causation of racial affection and hatred. An American working man a.s.sociates, for instance, the Far Eastern physical type with that lowering of the standard wage which overshadows as a dreadful possibility every trade in the industrial world. Fifty years ago the middle cla.s.s readers to whom _Punch_ appeals a.s.sociated the same type with stories of tortured missionaries and envoys. After the battle of the Sea of j.a.pan they a.s.sociated it with that kind of heroism which, owing to our geographical position, we most admire; and drawings of the unmistakably Asiatic features of Admiral Togo, which would have excited genuine and apparently instinctive disgust in 1859, produced a thrill of affection in 1906.

But at this point we approach that discussion of the objects, sensible or imaginary, of political impulse (as distinguished from the impulses themselves), which must be reserved for my next chapter.