They express desire. They are power.

Thus feminism, arising out of a crisis In sexual
conditions, has liberated energies that are them-
selves the motors of any reform. In England
and America voting has become the symbol of an
aspiration as yet half-conscious and undefined.
What women want is surely something a great
deal deeper than the privilege of taking part In
elections. They are looking for a readjustment
of their relations to the home, to work, to chil-
dren, to men, to the interests of civilized life.

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The vote has become a convenient peg upon which
to hang aspirations that are not at all sure of
their own meaning. In no insignificant number
of cases the vote is a cover by which revolution-
ary demands can be given a conventional front.
The ballot is at the utmost a beginning, as far-
sighted conservatives have guessed. Certainly
the elimination of "male" from the suffrage quali-
fications will not end the feminist agitation. From
the angle of statecraft the future of the move-
ment may be said to depend upon the wise use of
this raw and scattered pov^^er. I do not pretend
to know in detail how this can be done. But I
am certain that the task of leadership is to or-
ganize aspiration in the service of the real in-
terests of life. To-day women want — what?
They are ready to want something: that describes
fairly the condition of most suffragettes. Those
who like Ellen Key and Olive Shreiner and Mrs.
Oilman give them real problems to think about
are drafting that energy into use. By real prob-
lems I mean problems of love, work, home, chil-
dren. They are the real interests of feminism
because they have produced it.

The yearnings of to-day are the symptoms of
needs, they point the course of invention, they
are the energies which animate a social program.

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THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

The most Ideally conceived plan of the human
mind has only a slight Interest If it does not har-
ness these Instinctive forces. That Is the great
lesson which the Utopias teach by their failure —
that schemes, however nicely arranged, cannot be
imposed upon human beings who are interested
in other things. What ailed Don Quixote was
that he and his contemporaries wanted different
things; the only Ideals that count are those which
express the possible development of an existing
force. Reformers must never forget that three
legs are a Quixotic ideal; two good legs a genuine
one.

In actual life, yes, in the moll and toil of propa-
ganda, ''movements," "causes" and agitations the
statesman-inventor and the political psychologist
find the raw material for their w^ork. It Is not
the business of the politician to preserve an Olym-
pian indifference to what stupid people call "popu-
lar whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad"
and the ephemeral outcry Is all very well in the
biographies of dead men, but rank nonsense in
the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once re-
marked that only superficial people disliked the
superficial. Nothing, for example, could on the
surface be more trivial than an interest in base-
ball scores. Yet during the campaign of 19 12

93



A PREFACE TO POLITICS

the excitement was so great that Woodrow Wil-
son said on the stump he felt like apologizing to
the American people for daring to be a presiden-
tial candidate while the Giants and the Red Sox
were playing for the championship. Baseball
(not so much for those who play it), is a colossal
phenomenon in American life. Watch the crowds
in front of a bulletin board, finding a vicarious
excitement and an abstract relief from the mo-
notony of their own lives. What a second-hand
civilization it is that grows passionate over a
scoreboard with little electric lights ! What a civ-
ilization it is that has learned to enjoy its sport
without even seeing it I If ever there was a symp-
tom that this nation needed leisure and direct
participation in games, it is that poor scrawny
substitute for joy — the baseball extra.

It is as symptomatic as the labor union. It ex-
presses need. And statesmanship would find an*
answer. It would not let that passion and loyalty
be frittered away to drift like scum through the
nation. It would see in it the opportunity of art,
play, and religion. So with what looks very dif-
ferent — the ^'syndicalist movement.'* Perhaps it
seems preposterous to discuss baseball and syn-
dicalism in the same paragraph. But that Is only
because we have not accustomed ourselves to

94.



THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

thinking of social events as answers to human
needs. The statesman would ask, Why are there
syndicalists? What are they driving at? What
gift to civilization is in the Impetus behind them?
They are human beings, and they want human
things. There is no reason to become terror-
stricken about them. They seem to want things
badly. Then ostriches disguised as judges cannot
deal with them. Anarchism — men die for that,
they undergo Intolerable insults. They are tarred
and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that
Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the
wings more than free spirits can allow? Is civi-
lization perhaps too tightly organized? Have
the Irreconcllables a soul audacious and less
blunted than our domesticated ones? To put It
mildly, is it ever safe to Ignore them entirely in
our thinking?

We shall come, I think, to a different apprai-
sal of agitations. Our present method is to dis-
cuss whether the proposals are right and feasible.
We do this hastily and with prejudice. Generally
we decide that any agitation foreign to our settled
habits is wrong. And we bolster up our satisfac-
tion by pointing to some mistake of logic or some
puerility of statement. That done, we feel the
agitation is deplorable and can be ignored unless

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

It becomes so obstreperous that we have to put it
in jail. But a genuine statecraft would go deeper.
It would know that even God has been defended
with nonsense. So it could be sympathetic to agi-
tations. I use the word sympathetic literally. For
it would try to understand the inner feeling which
had generated what looks like a silly demand.
To-day it is as if a hungry man asked for an in-
digestible food, and we let him go hungry because
he was unwise. He isn't any the less hungry be-
cause he asks for the wrong food. So with agi-
tations. Their specific plans may be silly, but
their demands are real. The hungers and lusts
of mankind have produced some stupendous fol-
lies, but the desires themselves are no less real
and insistent.

The important thing about a social movement
is not its stated platform but the source from
which it flows. The task of politics is to under-
stand those deeper demands and to find civilized
satisfactions for them. The meaning of this is
that the statesman must be more than the leader
of a party. Thus the socialist statesman is not
complete if he is a good socialist. Only the delu-
sion that his truth is the whole truth, his party
the human race, and his program a panacea, will
produce that singleness of vision.

96



THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

The moment a man takes office he has no right
to be the representative of one group alone. He
has assumed the burden of harmonizing particu-
lar agitations with the general welfare. That is
why great agitators should not accept office. Men
like Debs understand that. Their business is to
make social demands so concrete and pressing that
statesmen are forced to deal with them. Agita-
tors who accept government positions are a dis-
appointment to their followers. They can no
longer be severely partisan. They have to look
at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and the
statesman are both needed. But they have dif-
ferent functions, and It is unjust to damn one be-
cause he hasn't the virtues of the other.

The statesman to-day needs a large equipment.
The man who comes forward to shape a country's
policy has truly no end of things to consider. He
must be aware of the condition of the people: no
statesman must fall into the sincere but thor-
oughly upper class blunder that President Taft
committed when he advised a three months' va-
cation. Realizing how men and women feel at
all levels and at different places, he must speak
their discontent and project their hopes. Through
this he will get power. Standing upon the pres-
tige which that gives he must guide and purify

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the social demands he finds at work. He is the
translator of agitations. For this task he must
be keenly sensitive to public opinion and capable
of understanding the dynamics of it. Then, in or-
der to fuse it into a civilized achievement, he will
require much expert knowledge. Yet he need not
be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in
choosing experts. It is better indeed that the
statesman should have a lay, and not a profes-
sional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity
and empty formalism are always near and al-
ways dangerous. The real political genius stands
between the actual life of men, their wishes and
their needs, and all the windings of official caste
and professional snobbery. It is his supreme
business to see that the servants of life stay in
their place — that government, industry, ^'causes,"
science, all the creatures of man do not succeed in
their perpetual effort to become the masters.

I have Roosevelt in mind. He haunts political
thinking. And indeed, why shouldn't he? What
reality could there be in comments upon American
politics which ignored the colossal phenomenon of
Roosevelt? If he is wholly evil, as many say he
is, then the American democracy is preponder-
antly evil. For in the first years of the Twentieth
Century, Roosevelt spoke for this nation, as few

98



THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

presidents have spoken in our history. And
that he has spoken well, who in the perspective
of time will deny? Sensitive to the original forces
of public opinion, no man has had the same power
of rounding up the laggards. Government under
him was a throbbing human purpose. He succeeded,
where Taft failed, in preventing that drought of
Invention which officialism brings. Many people
say he has tried to be all things to all men — that
his speeches are an attempt to corral all sorts of
votes. That is a left-handed way of stating a
truth. A more generous interpretation would be
to say that he had tried to be inclusive, to attach
a hundred sectional agitations to a national pro-
gram. Crude: of course he was crude; he had a
hemisphere for his canvas. Inconsistent: yes, he
tried to be the leader of factions at war with one
another. A late convert: he is a statesman and
not an agitator — his business was to meet de-
mands when they had grown to national propor-
tions. No end of possibilities have slipped
through the large meshes of his net. He has said
some silly things. He has not been subtle, and he
has been far from perfect. But his success should
be judged by the size of his task, by the fierceness
of the opposition, by the intellectual qualities of
the nation he represented. When we remember

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7465i^3



A PREFACE TO POLITICS

that he was trained In the Republican politics of
Hanna and Piatt, that he was the first President
who shared a new social vision, then I believe we
need offer no apologies for making Mr. Roose-
velt stand as the working model for a possible
American statesman at the beginning of the
Twentieth Century.

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

I do not see the statesman in Bryan. He has
been something of a voice crying In the wilder-
ness, but a voice that did not understand its own
message. Many people talk of him as a prophet.
There Is a great deal of literal truth In that re-
mark, for it has been the peculiar work of Bryan
to express in politics some of that emotion which

100



THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

has made America the home of new religions.
What we know as the scientific habit of mind is
entirely lacking in his Intellectual equipment.
There is a vein of mysticism In American life,
and Mr. Bryan is its uncritical prophet. His in-
sights are those of the gifted evangelist, often
profound and always narrow. It Is absurd to
debate his sincerity. Mr. Bryan talks with the
Intoxication of the man who has had a revela-
tion: to skeptics that always seems theatrical. But
far from being the scheming hypocrite his ene-
mies say he Is, Mr. Bryan Is too simple for the
task of statesmanship. No bracing critical at-
mosphere plays about his mind: there are no
cleansing doubts and fruitful alternatives. The
work of Bryan has been to express a certain feel-
ing of unrest — to embody It in the traditional lan-
guage of prophecy. But it Is a shrewd turn of the
American people that has kept him out of office.
I say this not in disrespect of his qualities, but in
definition of them. Bryan does not happen to
have the naturalistic outlook, the complete hu-
manity, or the deliberative habit which modern
statecraft requires. He is the voice of a confused
emotion.

Woodrow Wilson has a talent which is Bryan's
chief defect — the scientific habit of holding facts

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

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



THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

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

Because he is self-conscious, Wilson has been
able to see the problem that any finely adapted
statecraft must meet It is a problem that would
hardly occur to an old-fashioned politician:

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

"Though he (the statesman) cannot himself keep
the life of the nation as a whole In his mind, he
can at least make sure that he Is taking counsel
with those who know. . . . " It Is not Im-
portant that Wilson In stating the difficulty should
put It as If he had In a measure solved It. He
hasn't, because taking counsel Is a means to un-
derstanding the nation as a whole, and that un-
derstanding remains almost as arduous and re-
quires just as fibrous an Imagination, If It Is
gleaned from advisers.

To think of the whole nation: surely the task
of statesmanship Is more difficult to-day than ever
before In history. In the face of a clotted Intri-
cacy In the subject-matter of politics, Improve-
ments In knowledge seem meager Indeed. The
distance between what we know and what we need
to know appears to be gij'eater than ever. Plato
and Aristotle thought In terms of ten thousand
homogeneous villagers; we have to think In terms
of a hundred million people of all races and all
traditions, crossbred and inbred, subject to cli-
mates they have never lived In before, plumped
down on a continent In the midst of a strange
civilization. We have to deal with all grades of
life from the frontier to the metropolis, with men
who differ In sense of fact, in Ideal, In the very

104



THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

groundwork of morals. And we have to take
into account not the simple opposition of two
classes, but the hostility of many, — the farmers
and the factory workers and all the castes within
their ranks, the small merchants, and the feudal
organization of business. Ours is a problem in
which deception has become organized and
strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one
in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is de-
voted to misleading a bewildered people. Nor
can we keep to the problem within our borders.
Whether we wish it or not we are involved in the
world's problems, and all the winds of heaven
blow through our land.

It is a great question whether our intellects can
grasp the subject. Are we perhaps like a child
whose hand is too small to span an octave on the
piano? Not only are the facts inhumanly compli-
cated, but the natural ideals of people are so
varied and contradictory that action halts in de-
spair. We are putting a tremendous strain upon
the mind, and the results are all about us : every-
one has known the neutral thinkers who stand
forever undecided before the complications of
life, who have, as it were, caught a glimpse of
the possibihties of knowledge. The sight has

106



A PREFACE TO POLITICS

paralyzed them. Unless they can act with cer-
tainty, they dare not act at all.

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

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

A paradox there is here, but a paradox of lan-
guage, and not of fact. Men made bridges be-
fore there was a science of bridge-building; they

X06



THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

cured disease before they knew medicine. Art
came before aesthetics, and righteousness before
ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each
other. Hypothesis Is confirmed and modified by
action, and action is guided by hypothesis. If It
is a paradox to ask for a human politics before
we understand humanity or politics, It is what
Mr. Chesterton describes as one of those para-
doxes that sit beside the wells of truth.

We make our picture of man, knowing that,
though it Is crude and unjust, we have to work
with it. If we are wise we shall become ex-
perimental towards life: then every mistake will
contribute towards knowledge. Let the explora-
tion of human need and desire become a delib-
erate purpose of statecraft, and there is no pres-
ent measure of Its possibilities.

In this work there are many guides. A vague
common tradition is In the air about us — it ex-
presses Itself in journalism, in cheap novels, in
the uncritical theater. Every merchant has his
stock of assumptions about the mental habits of
his customers and competitors; the prostitute
hers; the newspaperman his; P. T. Barnum had
a few; the vaudeville stage has a number. We
test these notions by their results, and even

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**practlcal people" find that there Is more variety
in human nature than they had supposed.

We forge gradually our greatest instrument
for understanding the world — Introspection. We
discover that humanity may resemble us very con-
siderably — that the best way of knowing the in-
wardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.
For after all, the only experience we really under-
stand is our own. And that, in the least of us,
is so rich that no one has yet exhausted Its possi-
bilities. It has been said that every genuine
character an artist produces Is one of the char-
acters he might have been. By re-creating our
own suppressed possibHIties we multiply the num-
ber of lives that we can really know. That as
I understand It is the psychology of the Golden
Rule. For note that Jesus did not set up some
external fetich: he did not say, make your neigh-
bor righteous, or chaste, or respectable. He said
do as you would be done by. Assume that you
and he are alike, and you can found morals on
humanity.

But experience has enlarged our knowledge of
differences. We realize now that our neighbor
is not always like ourselves. Knowing how un-
just other people's Inferences are when they con-
cern us, we have begun to guess that ours may

108



THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER

be unjust to them. Any uniformity of conduct
becomes at once an impossible ideal, and the
willingness to live and let live assumes high place
among the virtues. A puzzled wisdom remarks
that "it takes all sorts of people to make a
world," and half-protestingly men accept Bernard
Shaw's amendment, "Do not do unto others as
you would that they should do unto you. Their
tastes may not be the same."

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

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cases, each painted on the inside, and each con-
taining one ego and its own.

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the
inner life of others. That is not the only use of
art, for its function is surely greater and more
ultimate than to furnish us with a better knowl-
edge of human nature. Nor is that its only use
even to statecraft. I suggested earlier that art
enters politics as a ''moral equivalent" for evil,
a medium by which barbarous lusts find civilized
expression. It is, too, an ideal for labor. But
my purpose here Is not to attempt any adequate