REASONABLENESS IN POLITICS.
PROFESSOR DICEY is always instructive and often very amusing as well. His lecture at Firth College this day week was full of humorous exaggeration. But for that very reason it was not the less instructive, but all the more so. He made great fun of the intrinsic un- reasonableness of taking a lot of totally different ques- tions,—questions as different as that concerning Home- rule for Ireland and that concerning the wisdom of keep- ing an army in Egypt,—mixing them all up together, and requiring a politician who supports the party view of one question to support the party view of all the other ques- tions too, instead of considering each on its own merits. But we observe that he also said: " Heaven forbid that I should even hint that the party system is unreasonable in itself. All I venture to say is that it stimulates irrationality." Very well, but if it is not unreasonable in itself, a man who tries to judge every political question on its own merits, and is in practice Conservative (say) on five burning questions and Liberal on four, or vice versa, will certainly run the risk of contributing materially to the defeat of his party by the refusal to support it on those issues on which he thinks it wrong; and the effect of that will be to break down a system which is " not un- reasonable in itself." The truth is that for the purposes of party combination men are bound to hold some of their most reasonable convictions in the form of latent conditions of thought, and not to parade them or push them into prominence. And we rather wish that Mr. Dicey had formulated distinctly some such rule as this,—that a man who by conviction finds one party more just and reasonable than the other, should confine his arguments against his own party, where he thinks it wrong, to discus- sions within the limits of that party itself, where he can plainly avow that he is not going to desert his party because he thinks it mistaken on one or two great issues, but that none the less he would desire his leaders to reconsider their position on these issues, and if they find that there is justice in his view, to open their minds to new light. That seems to us the only way in which the intrinsic reasonableness of the party system can be heartily supported and yet the danger of the crystallisation of prejudices and prepossessions into well- recognised party principles can be successfully avoided. Professor Dicey commented on the difficulty of saying, " Well, I am supporting the Conservative side or the Radical side on this one question, but you must remember that I think them totally wrong on five or six other questions.' Nobody can say that. And the things you can't say, you soon cease to be able to think." That is very just, but then you can say within the limits of your own party, that though you have no intention of desert- ing it for one or two even important differences, you nevertheless wish its leaders to reconsider some of its principles ; for in that way you not only keep up the habit of saying what you think, but you help to make the party more elastic and less disposed to crystallise in narrow and cut- and - dried grooves of traditional profession.
Professor Dicey was very wise in pointing out that politics are not really a science, and that " one political act does not differ from another by being the result of ignorance instead of the result of knowledge, but only by resulting from different degrees of ignorance. There is no man, be he the most sagacious of politicians or states- men, who knows as much more about politics than the ordinary man, as the captain of a ship knows more about navigation than the passengers do." That is very true, and shows conclusively how mischievous it would be if our half-ignorant leaders were given the power to dictate the politics of either party for all time to come. It is a matter of the greatest import to keep every party open to new light, but it can be only done effectually by free dis- cussion within the limits of party organisation, and not in the general way by large desertions of bodies of men. The effect of such desertions is very often to harden, in- stead of to widen, the creed of the party so deserted, and so to make it less useful than ever for the purpose of political progress. For example, we can hardly doubt that the Unionist split in the Liberal party,—a split which the Unionists had no power to prevent,—injured fatally the Liberal party which they left, and to some extent dried it up into a party of more numerous " dodges " and fewer principles. That was the mischief conse- quent on the too hasty adoption of Home-rule with- out any adequate previous discussion and considera- tion of that momentous step. What is desirable is, that within the limits of each party as much candid discussion as possible should go on, so that no party principles should be allowed to get too much cut and dried, and no party should allow itself to regard its main party doctrines as infallible and beyond the limits of free criticism. As Mr. Dicey said, there is too much tendency in party life, where partisans find reason opposed to them, immediately to oppose themselves to reason, and to go on making vindictive onslaughts on reason for having injured their cause. And that can only be prevented if each party regards its own principles as more or less tentative, and as profiting rather than suffering from the free internal criticisms of their own adherents. Discussion before the time for action has arrived is ten times as fruitful as the discussion which takes place when each side is committed to a particular formula. Mr. Dicey did not say so, but we take it that he really regards the controversy on the Home-rule question as all the worse and more sterile, for the premature way in which the issue was brought before an unprepared nation.
After all, a great deal of the apparent unreasonableness in politics is only a roundabout way of getting at the nearest approach to reasonableness possible in relation to an art so complex and so dependent on what may be called rule of thumb. When the very first condition of true reasonableness is to secure the willing assent and co-operation of vast multitudes of ignorant and more or less unreasonable people, we must expect a good deal of apparent paradox and anomaly. Indeed we may say that in such an art it is quite reasonable to embody a good deal of unreasonableness. If all our political provisions were octroy6d for us by thoughtful and sagacious men, who nevertheless did not take into account the great element of unreason in the mass of the people for whom they were legislating, we should have all sorts of diffi- culties and indeed impossibilities in getting the law obeyed. Half our political institutions are merely educative,—intended to teach the people to co-operate in what is done for them, and without these institutions there would be no reasonable allowance for the unreason amongst us. Professor Dicey has shown conclusively that from the point of view of such thinkers as himself, our politics are full of unreason. But in our opinion a great deal of that unreason is perfectly reasonable, in the same sense in which it is often in the highest degree reason- able to let children do unreasonable things that they may learn by experience the consequences of doing them.
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