14 SEPTEMBER 1901, Page 20

A PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS.*

Ma. CROZIER in the Pursuit of his great design has reached the political world and the problem of statesmanship. In no branch of human activity can his special method be more valuable. He seeks to bring politics into line with other forms of speculative thought, to provide a synoptic view in place of a hand-to-mouth opportunism, and from a survey of history and a consideration of the evolution of civilisation to deduce conceptions which may inform and enlighten state- craft. In the desert of unilluminating political treatises Mr. Crozier's work stands out as something clear, fresh, and posi- tive; perhaps the most important contribution to the phil- osophy of the subject since Mr. Bagehot's Physics and Politics. The policy of the Present is conditioned at every point by the evolution of the Past, and history is the best commentary on current politics. If the world has developed on certain lines, certain synthetic principles will have survived which may be used as a guide for the future. Politics in such a view will cease to be a casual atomic activity, dependent on a breath of popular feeling or an accident of fate, and will become a science, not indeed fully developed, but based on principles and advancing on intelligible lines. The a priori theorist will provide us with a science, but a science which is wholly divorced from facts. It is Mr. Crozier's aim to hug the shore closely, and leave the windy deeps untried; sufficient for him if from the development of the past he can deduce certain broad practical truths which will provide a standpoint for the present.

The two chief dangers in politics spring from an absence of theory, or from too much of it. The plain man, without any sense of the continuity of history or any suspicion that his world has had a long ancestry, lives in a cave, and any sudden crisis upturns the foundations of his belief. "In the mere present," says Mr. Crozier finely, " when cut off from all that has gone before, there is as much uncertainty and illusion as there is in a twilight seen through a window on suddenly awakening, and which may be either a joyous herald of the dawn or a foreboding of the approach of night." On the

• History of Intellectual Development on the Lines of Modern Evolution. By John Beattie Crozier. Vol. III. London : Longmans and Co. Ms. 6d.)

other hand, the theorist pure and simple, having learned that civilisation advances by means of a series of great abstract ideals, makes such ideals ends in themselves, and hardens into an absolute dogma what is only a temporary expedient. It is not Mr. Crozier's aim to belittle such potent dogmas. They were in their time the heaven-sent inspiration of the world, the fountain of progress, the solvent of older tyrannies.

But their virtue departed when their work was done, and instead of being regarded in their true light as temporary solutions of the world's problems, they were consolidated by their devotees into a tyranny as great as the tyrannies they overthrew. They became the pillars of cheap statesmanship, and the point of view which sees in them the last word of human wisdom is precisely the point of view most alien to true statesmanlike foresight. Mr. Crozier examines with much fairness and acumen four of such abstractions,—the Christian spiritual ideal, the medimval, ascetic ideal, the Reformation moral ideal, and the modern

political ideal. As a means each has been the salvation of the world ; as an end, worshipped blindly and unintelligently,

each has been one of its enslavers :—

" The sublime spirituality and ethics of Jesus, with its peace- at-any-price Gospel, if one may call it so, could only work its regenerating leaven through society while the tramp of the legions was heard on the frontiers preserving the material peace and security of the Empire. The world could well afford the monks and nuns, the anchorites and begging friars, who in their best and purest times sought to keep alive the ideals of chastity, purity, and peace; the world could well afford to allow them their prayers, their vigils, and their fasts, as knowing well that the lusty worldlings around them might be depended on to continue both the population and the work of the world. The wintry rigours of the Calvinistic theology, again, which otherwise would have passed over civilisation with the grinding devastation of a glacier, might, in consideration of the precious cargo of morality which they carried, be safely pushed to their extreme in countries where there was always sufficient amenity, refine- ment, and polite culture in Courts and in society to protect and nourish the arts of civilised life, and to balance the Puritan harshness and sourness of the great body of the people; while the fiery propaganda of the French Revolution even might be trusted not to become a universal conflagration, when most of the great countries of Europe still bent beneath the yoke of despotism."

So, too, with the fetishes of economics. Laisser-faire, Trade- -Unionism, the Free-trade of the Manchester School, Protec-

tion, State interference,—all were real and fruitful conceptions, and all have been exalted into impotent abstractions by foolish devotees. And here precisely is the rock on which the so. called practical, unphilosophical statesman shipwrecks. He glories in being without political scholarship, in being a plain man of business who can face and control facts as they turn up. But he is helpless in the presence of abstract ideals. He is inevitably driven to take sides, and be becomes in time a partisan none the less violent because he is not in nature a theorist at all. Mr. Crozier takes John Bright as an instance of the practical statesman who when he once becomes possessed of new-born political abstractions, treats them as if they were coeval with the world. What, then, is the solution of the difficulty ? The practical man must be taught not the windy generalities of the idealist; but a sane and philosophical doctrine of the evolution of civilisation. He must be provided with a scientific chart of progress, wherein he will learn the genesis and historical setting of the ideals which perplex him. You cannot divorce practical politics from speculative political thought; the important thing is to provide a genuine speculative system, and not isolated dogmas. Such an equipment would not free the statesman from every danger; there are many departments where history is no guide, and the future is wholly uncertain. But, in Mr. Crozier's words, it would free him from illusions "in all that domain of domestic policy where statesmanship consists in not mistaking political means for political ends, political abstractions for political realities, the political methods adapted to one generation for the methods adapted to the changed conditions of another."

Such being Mr. Crozier's basis, be proceeds to apply his principle to the politics of the modern world. He selects England, France, and America; he makes an analysis of the condition of each, states the problem and suggests a solution.

We do not propose to follow him into this department of his work. His analysis is always acute, his proposals invariably wise and suggestive; but the whole section is more in the

nature of examples to illustrate his cardinal principle than a

systematic treatise. It is all done on too small a scale, much should be added both to the analysis and the synthesis, and

Mr. Crozier is apt to apply the "evolution of civilisation" doc- trine too readily as a direct remedy, whereas it is not a practical expedient but a mental attitude, a philosophy not a scheme, a point of view and not a method. But he lays down incidentally certain rules of practical statesmanship, deduced from his survey of history, which seem to us worthy of the most serious consideration. Such are :—

'' The preservation of the organic type of any given historic society or people; the reforming of that society, and securing its progress, not by abstract ideals imposed on it in full panoply from without as in the French Revolution, but by modification of its existing institutions in the direction of the ideal by gradual increments and stages ; the keeping society all of a piece as it were, and without the deep gaps and trenches made in its ranks by caste, monopoly, and other causes, a free passage being secured everywhere and for all; and lastly the concentration of attention primarily on those material, social, and industrial conditions which keep open these rents and divisions, rather than on the people who profit or suffer by them."

Such are not the maxims of any creed, Conservative or Radical, but of that hinterland of political wisdom which goes

to the making of every statesman.

Mr. Crozier's volume is a valuable counteractive to many of the political tendencies of our day. The cheap moral fervour with which fads are advocated, the narrowness of academic politics, the rhetoric of the false Imperialist and the Little Englander alike, cannot live before the sane and healthy spirit which from a survey of the world's history sees the transiency of dogmas and the true scope of the practical man. For politics is one of. those intel- lectual half-way houses where a crude absolutism is an im- pertinence. But on the other hand, Mr. Crozier is equally far from the crude opportunist who, despising theory, stumbles from one blind alley to another till Nemesis over- takes him, and he falls bodily into the power of an abstrac-

tion. The writing is always dignified and clear, and at times is full of a serious eloquence. Few writers, too, can rival Mr. Crozier in the aptness and picturesqueness of his illustrations. Sometimes he is tempted to a too great cleverness, and becomes fanciful; sometimes his analysis is a little arbitrary,

and his synthesis too facile. But his faults are so few and his merits so great that we have little hesitation in recom- mending his book as the wisest and freshest of recent guides to political philosophy.