§ 1

Politics, in its most general and fundamental character, is the strife of wills on the ground of social action. As international politics is the sum of the strifes and compromises of States, so home politics is the sum of the strifes and compromises of classes, interests, factions, sects, theorists, in all countries and in all ages. In studying it, then, we study the evolution of an aggregate, a quasi-organism, in terms of the clashing forces of its units and of their spontaneous combinations.

This may seem too obvious and simple a truth to need formal telling; and yet no truth is more often missed or set aside by writers who deal with political history. The past course of nations, when it is sought to be explained at all, is by two writers out of three accounted for by certain supposed qualities of character in the given nation as a whole, instead of by the specially conditioned play of forces common to all peoples.[1] For instance, M. Taine, in the preface to the first volume of his fascinating work, Les origines de la France contemporaine, goes about to justify his own political indifferentism by stating that in eighty years his country had thirteen times changed its constitution. "We," he says, have done this; and "we have not yet found that which suits us."[2] It is here implied that a body of men collectively and concurrently seeking for a fixed constitution have failed, and that the failure is discreditable—that those who thus seek and fail have been badly employed. It is by implication denied that successive changes of a constitution may fitly be regarded as a process of growth and healthy adjustment of parts: the ideal of political health is assumed to be a state of fixity. Thus does indifferentism, naturally if not necessarily, miss the point of view from which itself is to be studied as one of the forces whose conflict the true historian ought to analyse.

There is no national "we" aiming collectively at a fixed and final constitution; nor are the successive constitutions of France as such more significant of failure or permanent harm than the successive changes in the professedly unchanged constitution of Great Britain, though the violent kinds of change are as such harmful. If M. Taine had but applied with rigour the logic he once before prescribed, soundly if wittily, for all problems alike, he could not have begun his history with that delusive abstraction of a one-minded community, failing to achieve "their" or "its" purpose. "Je n'en sais rien," he remarks with a shrug, over the protest of M. Royer-Collard that certain scientific reasoning will make Frenchmen revolutionary; "est-ce qu'il y a des FranÇais?"[3] In dead earnest he now assumes that France consists just of the single species "Frenchmen," whose constitution-building is a corporate attempt to build a French house to live in; when all that is truly historical in his own book goes to show clearly enough that French constitutions, like all others, are products of ever-varying and conflicting passions and interests of sets of people in France who are "Frenchmen" merely when they happen to act in concert against other geographical groups. At no moment were all of the French people consenting parties to any one of the thirteen constitutions. Then there was no collective failure.

Of course M. Taine knew this well enough in his capacity of narrator; but as teacher he could not escape from the rut dug for his thought by his fatalism. He must needs make the synthetic abstraction of "we," which excludes the political analysis essential to any practical explanation; and it inevitably followed that his generalisations were merely pseudo-biological, and not what is most wanted in history—sociological truth rooted in psychology and biology. In denuding himself alike of hopes and fears, M. Taine really gave the great illustration of the truth of his own penetrating comment on MÉrimÉe,[4] that he who will be duped by nothing ends in being the dupe of his distrust. He will not be duped by this ideal or that; he will not care enough for any to have a strong wish to see it realised; and so he comes to be duped by the wish to disprove all, to work down all sociology to the plane of cynical pseudo-biology. The enthusiastic amateur can show it, can convict the critic of hearing only the devil's advocate in every moral process,[5] and of becoming at length the historic oracle of those, of all readers, who are most alien to his philosophy.

Such an outcome, in the work of such a critic, is vividly instructive. At worst, indeed, he has a positive value as the extremest reactionist against the merely partisan method of history, which is almost all we have had in England since the French Revolution, down to the other day. After M. Taine has passed, fools' paradises must needs fall in market value. But when the devil's advocate has made his round, we must still plough and eat, and the paradises must just be laid out for new sowing. The evil of theoretical extremes is not so much their falsehood as their irrelevance. If we are to instruct each other in conduct, it must be in terms of sympathies and antipathies; and if we are to profit by a study of politicians, who are among the most generally typical of men, and of politics, which is the expression of so much of life, we must go about it as humanists and not as fatalists.

§ 2

Humanity, however, will not suffice to save us from false philosophy if, as humanists, we seek to gain our polemical ends by M. Taine's didactic methods. He, naturally so much of an analyst, took to pseudo-synthesis when he wished with little labour to discredit certain popular aspirations. But pseudo-synthesis is the favourite expository process of many men with ardent aspirations, and of many writers who are friendly enough to the aspirations of their fellows. By pseudo-synthesis I mean that process, above exemplified, of "cooking" an intricate moral problem by setting up one or more imaginary entities, to whose volition or potency the result is attributed. It was the method of medieval science; and it is still popular among the experts as well as the amateurs of historical science. It was the ordinary expedient of Comte, in whose pages history becomes a Jonsonian masque of personified abstractions; and Buckle too often resorts to it. But hear a learned and judicious English Liberal, not to be suspected of doctrinary extravagance:—

The "she" of this passage I take to be as purely imaginary an entity as Phlogiston; and it is not easy to see how a method of explanation which in physical science is found worse than barren can give any edification in the study of history. To say nothing of the familiar explanation that Caracalla's sole motive in conferring the citizenship on the provincials was the desire to lay on them corresponding taxes,[7] the proposition has no footing in political actualities. "Rome's self-abnegation that she might Romanise the world"[8] expresses no fact in Roman volition, thought, or deed; it is not the mention of a sentiment which swayed men's action, but the attempt to reduce a medley of actions to the semblance of a joint volition. There was no "Rome" capable of "self-abnegation" and susceptible of "reward." Why, then, should it be said? It is said either because the writer permits himself to fill in a perspective with a kind of pigment which he would not employ in his foreground, or because he is still too much under the sway of old methods when he is generalising conventional knowledge instead of analytically reaching new.[9] Either way the lapse is only too intelligible. And if an innovating expert, dealing with old facts, runs such risks, great must be those run by plain people when they seek to attain a generalised knowledge of facts which are the battle-ground of current ideals. Only by perpetual analysis can we hope partly to escape the snare of the pseudo-synthetic, the traps of rhetoric and exegetic fiction.

§ 3

The term "pseudo-synthesis" implies, of course, that there may be a true synthesis. What is necessary to such synthesis is that there shall have been a preliminary analysis; but a synthesis once justly made is the greatest of helps to new analyses. Now there is one such which may safely be brought to bear on the study of practical politics, because it is an axiom alike of inorganic physics and of biology, and a commonplace of human science, though seldom used as a means of historic generalisation. This is the simple principle that all energy divides ostensibly into forces of attraction and of repulsion.

That principle obviously holds of the relations of men in society as it does of their muscular action and of their moral and intellectual life; and so fundamental is the fact that when we study human history in view of it, we find it more and more difficult to suppose that it will ever cease to hold. That is to say, it is almost impossible to conceive state of life in which the forces of attraction and repulsion shall not operate energetically in the moral and intellectual relations of human beings. From the primitive and the barbaric stages in which the sight of an alien moves the savage to such destructive rage as is seen in some dogs at the sight of others, or in which a difference of personal odour rouses a no less spontaneous repulsion—as in Chinese against Europeans, or in Europeans against Chinese[10]—down to the fierce battle in self-governing countries over every innovating law, or that strife of opinion in which these lines play their part, the clash of opposing tendencies is perpetual, ubiquitous, inevitable. And so difficult is it to conceive any cessation that at once many observers leap from the general principle to the particular conclusion that all the modes in which the action and reaction, the attractions and repulsions of individuals and groups, have operated in the past must needs operate in the future. They conclude, that is, that the particular phenomenon of WAR, above all, is chronic, and can never definitely disappear. Thus M. Zola, looking around him and finding strife everywhere, decides that all the past forms of strife are inevitably recurrent.[11] It may be well at the outset to insist that the general principle involves no such particular necessity.

War is simply a form in which the instincts of attraction and repulsion have operated in human societies during ages in which certain psychological and physiological types have been normal. It may very well recur, with growing infrequency, for a long time to come; but it is not rationally to be regarded as a necessary function of the grand biological forces. What does seem certain is a different thing—that the forces of attraction and repulsion will always operate in some form; and that the very fact of their finding less expression in the mode of physical strife will imply their coming into play in other modes, such as the strife of ideals, doctrines, and class interests as they are expressed in politics without bloodshed. The general law is that the forces of attraction and repulsion, as exhibited in human thought or feeling, run during the earlier stages of growth in channels which may be broadly regarded as animal; and that when altered political and social conditions partly or wholly close these channels, the biological forces open for themselves new ones.

War is precisely the blindest, the least rational, the least human of all the forms of human conflict, inasmuch as it is the collective clashing of communities whose members, divided among themselves by many real differences of interest, bias, and attraction, are set against each other, as wholes—if by anything higher than animal pugnacity—either by the mere ideals or appetites of rulers or leaders, or by more or less imaginary differences of interest, seen under the moral illusion of the most primitive of social instincts—the sensus gregis. As evolution proceeds, the blind form may be expected to disappear, and the more reasoned forms—that is, the inter-social and intellectual—to develop.