Professor Dicey delivered a very amusing lecture at Firth College,
Sheffield, this day week on " Reasonableness in Politics," in which he rather pleasantly exaggerated, perhaps, the unreasonableness of our political methods. You might say, for example, that it is not reasonable to go round two sides of a triangle to your objective point, rather than to go along the third aide, if both ways of going were equally open to you, but if in order to follow the third side you had to go through a stone wall or even to climb over a very high one, it might be in the highest degree reasonable to take the longer path. Well, in the same way, it is unreasonable to appeal to the feelings rather than directly to the reasoning faculty in order to convince an audience of the right course in politics; but as, at ter all, right feelings are a very large element in right reason, and a perfectly passionless man is a good deal more likely to miss the truth than a man who has feelings pre-engaged in favour of a reasonably just solution of any political course, it may well be that the speaker who speaks straight to the heart will after all be more reasonable as well as more persuasive than one who founds hie appeal wholly on well-reasoned inferences from inadequate premisses. Pro- fessor Dicey's ironical conclusion, that if a man wished to rise high in public life, he should before all things avoid the impartial study of political questions, cultivate carefully his powers "of lucid misrepresentation," take up with the party most popular in his neighbourhood, and trust to that party to carry him into power, is very happily expressed, and really conveys a very useful lesson. Bat the reader must not take it too literally. As things are in English political life. the power of appreciating fairly an opponent's arguments is really one of the most useful elements of political success. Have not both Mr. Balfour and Mr. Asquith risen on the whole by the candour and fairness of their political reasoning, and has not Mr. Labouehere failed by his great powers of " lucid misrepresentation" P
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