PARTY SPIRIT.
ERE never can have been a time when it was more neces-
sary than in our own to give a ;past and candid apprecia- tion-to all that we sum up under the name of a party. It is not probable that the name had as much significance in any former day as it has in ours. The feelings which it calls up are cer- tainly more definite, and perhaps stronger, than anything that Englishmen, at all events, can associate with patriotism. They do not realise what they mean by their country, as they realise what they mean by their party. It would be otherwise if the existence of England as an independent nation were in any way threatened. The sense of corporate unity is always roused under pressure from without ; but as it is, the party forms, there is no doubt, a-much more obvious and sensible bond than the country does, and as an object of loyalty is brought far more distinctly before the eyes of every member of the political world. A few words at such a time on the claims and the dangers of political zeal can hardly be thrown away, unless they be them- selves idle and meaningless. We would invite our readers to consider, while the atmosphere of an impending election gives meaning and purpose to the phrase, alike the dangers and the advantages that belong to a strong spirit of party.
There are several reasons why this feeling should at the present day be roused to a peculiar vividness. It was formerly held in check by influences which are now comparatively feeble, and those which are most characteristic of our own time are adapted to stimulate and strengthen it. When the State recog- nises invisible power as its superior, there is a natural protest against the overwhelming sense of importance in any political principle ; and this recognition, as an actual force in poli- tical life, is growing feebler every day. It is not that religion is always an opponent of party spirit. High- Church feeling and Low - Church feeling have reinforced party zeal as much as any political view whatever. But still, in-former times, there was a dim sense of some stable element in human affairs, something which the efforts of politicians could not touch. Our ancestors recognised the Divine govern- ment of the world as one of those things which are to be taken forgmnted, and we, where we recognise it at all, require that it shall be a matter of individual conviction. There is great significance in that change. The conventional secular dialect of the past pointed to something that lay behind the differences of Whig and Tory, and in their relation to which they occupied common ground. Individuals believe in this just as firmly as ever they did ; but those who disbelieve it no longer feel that the weight of authority is against them. Quite the contrary. We are constantly reading fluent and vigorous political argument in which it is not urged, but assumed, that the difference between a Radical and Conservative Administration is conterminous with the wholedifference between good and evil for those who are sub-
jected to it. We may almost sa,y that Heaven and Hell have come down to earth. They are transplantedirom theology to politics. The hope of an infinite bliss, the dread of an infinite woe, has passed from the unseen to the seen order of things, and the efforts of those with whom it lies to bring about either, are flooded with an accession of zeal which formerly found other channels.
A somewhat similar change, though in a much less degree, has taken place with regard to patriotism, or to that sease of one's country for which it is desirable that we had some less ambitious name. It is feebler than it was, and has to some extent been replaced by the sense of class. The facilities of locomotion and the rapidity of communication have done much in the last half-century to soften the difference between one country and another, while nothing at all in the meantime has been done to soften the difference between one class and another; and now that the English tongue is spoken over 80 large a proportion of the earth's surface, the potent influence of language, as a bindiug power, is considerably weakened. A working. wan is a working- man first and an Englishman afterwards. All the elements af patriotism are absorbed into a feeling for the interests of those whose occupations .and difficulties are identical with his own. Class feeling contains in solution all the ,good and all the evil which party spirit displays. Apart from .a sympathy with the difficulties and sufferings of the lower class, from the sense of peculiar responsibility in the higher class, Radicalism and Conservatism alike would lack all that supplies their strongest ;impulse, even if their intellectual justification remained as it is.
That party spirit has been strengthened by-the decay of religion and of patriotism, or, at all events, that wherever. these deoayou
certain amount of energy is released for its service—this be readily granted. Perhaps it will seem fanciful to associate with these -manses the influence of physical science. But suppose there had been, when railroads were first thought of, a setof men who went about persuading people that the expansive force of aiteaai was a curious -delusion; grant them wealth, power, and in- fluence to communicate their unbelief to others, so that the rail- road system of the country had been set up much later, and then imagine the hostility which these persons would have muffed, when once their theory was exploded. Now something like that feeling has come over the world of politics with regard to all theory that is disbelieved. Men see before their eyes, daily and hourly, the illustrations which bring home to them the meaning of knowledge. They see that no injury that an enemy can do his fellow-men would be so great as that effected by the most devoted philanthropist who communicated some important and erroneous belief. Of course, we do not mean that this is-any discovery of our own time. It is a part of the very mean- ing of Truth ; but to apprehend the meaning of Truth is not an inheritance of every human being. That true thought means prosperous action is no revelation of physical science; but physical science has, aas it were, translated it into a language which all may read. People see—not thinkers, but average men and women—that life is made enormously easier for our generation than for that of our fathers because we know more. Knowledge has two foes—ignorance and error. Now certainly there could not be vehement opposition in matters of political principle if both ,parties were right. It is not impossible that both parties should be wrong. Truth may be nowhere, but error must be somewhere—error of -the most important nature, error affecting the welfare of millions—and this conviction is being propagated with all the energy that men have to bestow on what they care most about. Probably this was never felt quite in the same way in any previous age. It was formerly rather a question of what cause ought to prevail; of course it is that still, but it is also seen much more clearly that the question is whether a nation shall be prosperous or miserable. To have this brought home to the mind of the average man is to have all political feeling made keener, more polemic arid more intense— it is to quicken party spirit.
The ordinary associations of language turn this statement to an expression of regret. And yet, if we merely change the form of expression, and bay -that these changes have done much to quicken public spirit, we make our expression one of satisfaction. It is a pity that the English language is so much stamped with these associations ; we should be better off if we could sometimes describe a change -with- out either -approving or condemning it. On the whole, the advantages of party spirit may be left to speak for themselves. To care for the spread of principles which embody what seems
true is unquestionably the day of every one ; and though this is not the description of party spirit that will most com- mend itself to the reader of newspapers, it is a description of what is good in it. And so far as party spirit includes the sense of a strong bond with those who share our views, it is a gain. It may almost be said that the whole moral progress of mankind lies in the spirit of association. The deliverance-from selfishness, at all events, we firmly believe, lies not in altruism, but in a right apprehension and application of the corporate spirit. Not in the balance of land he, but in the exchange of for we, lies the way to a true human rightness. Every bond, therefore, which makes a man feel for a few other people as he feels for himself, forms a stage in that process of moral develop- ment by which he is at last trained to feel for all. To love one's neighbour as oneself, not to live for others, is the right starting- point for perfect unselfishness ; and to imagine that to love one's neighbour is to bate one's enemy, in spite of the long tradition of the belief, is a great error. Nevertheless, it has never yet happened in the history of this world that any bond failed to divide as well as to join. Every " we " creates a "they," and in some ways the antagonism thus implied is a more dangerous one than that of mere selfishness. All low motives strengthen those antagonisms which belong to sel- fishness, but all low and many high motives strengthen those antagonisms which belong to corporate unity. There is no bond, how sacred soever, that may not become mainly a source of opposition to those who do not share it. The strength of ancient life was closely allied with that hateful spirit which found its extreme exhibition in slavery ; that reverence for the State which was the religion of the old world was inextricably intertwined with hostility to those whom the State excluded; and. the latter is much the most obvious element to the student of history. In the development of modern life perhaps there is no more important crisis than that change by which the class rather than the nation has tended to become the unit in the grouping of human sympathies, a transition which made itself manifest in the great crisis known as the French Revolution, a crisis to which we stand too near to estimate it with perfect impartiality. Its dangers are obvious. The sympathy with a class, how large so ever be that class, is apt to be a more narrowing influence than the sympathy with a nation, how small soever be that nation. A nation is a great thing—it is historic, elevating, remote from anything vulgar. A class is suggestive of prejudice, of pettiness ; it embodies all those sympathies which a man should indulge warily. But considerations like these are confessedly one-sided. Perhaps class sympathy may, in the education of mankind, prove nearer a true human sympathy than even national feeling is. Its present aspect is unlovely and often vulgar ; but if it is purified and refined from selfishness, if it become symiiathy not with a man's own class, but with the class which most needs sympathy, it will be the love of the neighbour, not as it was understood by him who "desired to justify himself," by them who "passed by on the other side," but as it was understood by Christ.
Still, it is an important truth that the love of the nation em- bodies that love of kindred. which is, on the whole, the safest form of the corporate spirit, and the love of the party embodies that electivelove which is the element of danger in this spiritnalgroup- ing. Oar party embodies all that makes up the most cherished possessions of self. Our tastes, our prejudices, our preferences, —all are woven in with the web of a party ; it embodies all that we choose. We do not, it may be said, choose our convictions. We do not choose them in the sense that we choose a curtain or a carpet ; we are not aware of a particular moment at which they become ours, while before that time they stood outside of us. In this sense we make hardly any important decision of life. But we choose them in the sense that our whole individuality—all that a man means when he says "I "—goes out to grasp them, in the sense that they bear the strongest stamp of our idiosyn- crasies, of everything that makes up character. Is there no danger here of the antipathy becoming the stronger element ? Men being what they are, is it not probable that all the tempta- tions which go to make men selfish will tend to make them partisans ?
Many would. answer with a negative. Of course, there is such a thing as interested and insincere adherence to a party. This man may adopt Conservatism because he sees that it will bring him into good society ; that man may become &Radical be- cause he finds that he can gain influence with the masses, and thus acquire another sort of importance. But how, it may be urged, can a man who is sincerely convinced that the furtherance of either the Conservative or the Radical interest is for the welfare of mankind, care too much for the success of his party P We cannot surely overrate the welfare of mankind. We cannot do too much and wish too much that that cause should prevail which seems to us the best for every human being. Let us allow that it is impossible to feel too much desire for the welfare of mankind ; and that if the welfare of mankind. does de- pend wholly on political arrangements, then that we cannot indeed say that there is no danger in party spirit, for it will sometimes be found that in the struggle for power the principles of a party are sacrificed to the interests of the men who compose that party ; but that we may say that these dangers are of a perfectly plain and open kind, and just as palpable as human selfish- ness. Now, what we would urge is not only that party spirit should be true to its principles, but that it should keep a certain proportion and subordination in the hierarchy of moral claim ; that it should be on its guard against its own temptations, as well as those which come to it from the selfishness of individuals. All duty is the choice of the nobler. Hardly anything that seems good to one human being seems bad. to another. Where human beings differ is in the scale of subordination which they are ready to apply to good things when only one can be chosen. The problem of the legislator is always how to do the least harm. An ideal for a nation must always partake of the aature of a compromise ; and we are not undervaluing the objects of party when we urge that they may be bought too dear. The best things that the legislator can give mankind are inferior to some things which may be sacrificed to obtain them. Nothing that Conservative or Radical can gain for Englishmen is so important as the habit of seeing that those who disagree with us are not all fools and. liars. There is no rule more absolute than that the principles which concern the welfare of all, should take precedence of those which concern the welfare of some. Even the welfare of the poor—the most sacred cause, it may seem, that can engage the sympathies of man, the cause which appeals with special force to all that is best in our day—even this should be subordinated to considerations that are absolutely universal in their scope. The poor have the first right on our sympathies, no doubt ; but the first thing in them we mast care for is what they share with all mankind.
The claims of party spirit are obvious and unquestionable. There is so much to be said for it, that on that side we need say nothing. A party is a group of men who have the same ideal, the same outlook towards the future, the same backward gaze at the past, who are appointed co-operators in that work which is one of the most important, certainly one of the most interesting, that men are called upon to achieve. Our sym- pathy with those who share all that is stamped most indelibly with the impress of our own personality, needs no advocate. What we need when that sympathy carries us away is a curb, and a spur. We need the recollection that there is nothing more allied to a man's self than his opinions, that the sincere and. disinterested effort to benefit others may be curiously tangled with a care for the interests of self,—above all, we need that warning expressed in the quaint saying of Plato, that it is "the art of measurement which would save the soul ;" that it is not the estimate of what is good, but the estimate of what is best, which holds the key of political wisdom, and guides us to all that makes a nation blest.
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