TRAVELLED STATESMEN.
WE have dealt elsewhere with Mr. Chamberlain's mission to South Africa, but may discuss here the old question as to the advantages which Kings and statesmen derive from travel. The tendency is to say that it must increase efficiency, and even to demand that no politician who through life has remained at home should be selected for the Cabinet. The Foreign Secretary, it is said, ought to have seen all Courts, the Colonial Secretary should have visited all Colonies, the Indian Secretary should have travelled in India, and the Minister of Commerce should have exchanged ideas on the spot with the merchants of all countries. It is a plausible theory, and in harmony with the new habit of wandering in search of culture ; but we are inclined to doubt, perhaps even to disbelieve, its accuracy as a general, proposition • though, as we have said in another place, we heartily approve in the specific instance of Mr. Chamberlain's visit to South Africa. The globe-trotters do not estab- lish a conviction of their fitness for the Cabinet. Anglo-Indians say that no one is quite so ignorant of India as Padgett, M.P., who "has been there," that Sir Henry Fowler makes a much wiser Great Mogul than any keen observer who has spent a winter or two winters within the tropics. Mr. Chamberlain has been a great Colonial Secretary, though he " knows " only America and the West Indies ; and Sir Robert Peel would have made admirable commercial treaties with countries in which he had never set his foot. Of all men com- petent to govern, the regular " cosmopolitan " would be chosen last ; and the Kings who have "gadded " much have rarely been wise men. Few men who have read attentively the story of Charles V. will doubt that his powerful mind was confused by the width of the know- ledge of many lands which he had compulsorily acquired ; and the Hapsburgs, who know of necessity so many civilisa- tions, have hardly been wiser men than the Hohenzollerns, who hitherto have always stopped at home. Ambassadors have not, as a rule, shone as ruling men, even Bismarck deriving his strength rather from his profound apprecia- tion of the strength of Germany than from his acquaint- ance with the ruling persons of Europe, which once or twice, notably as regards Russia and Great Britain, deceived him in forming his estimate of the strength those ruling persons wielded. It is very doubtful whether William III., who knew so many lands, was more com- petent to govern than Louis XIV., who knew only one ; and quite certain that Richelieu, who had not wandered afield, was a more successful ruler than Mazarin, who had. Of the two greatest Proconsuls who ever entered India, Clive knew nothing of any Indian tongue, and Lord Dalhousie had never been east of Suez when he com- menced at thirty-five the career which made it natural and reasonable that Queen Victoria should be proclaimed Empress of India.
The truth seems to be that while foreign travel may diminish prejudice of the ignorant kind, it often replaces it by a half or quarter knowledge which for practical purposes is more dangerous than ignorance. The ignorant statesman consults all the experts he can reach, weighs their conflicting views, and frequently arrives at mar- vellously accurate conclusions ; while the traveller trusts the superficial knowledge he has picked up, and finds when his decision is arrived at that he has failed to per- ceive most of the conditions of his problem. He has, as it were, seen many post-offices, but has gained no idea of what correspondents really ask for. Even if he is "well situated " —that is, has good introductions—he hears only individual opinions, one half of which, if he is a person of importance, are deliberately intended to force his con- clusions in a particular direction. Even retired Governors are often surprised by explosions of feeling in their Colonies, and discover with annoyance how much had been concealed from them ; and the mere traveller has not the opportunities of the Governor, who hears not only the confidential opinions of his officials, but the confidential whispers of the men who would like to supersede them. The travelling statesman is very apt to fall exclusively into the hands of the contented, or if he avoids that blunder, to give exaggerated importance to the views of their oppo- nents. We have ourselves met travellers who are abso- lutely convinced that Particularism is still a living force in Germany, and others who " know " that the very idea is dead. There are many accounts by American and French travellers of the condition of Ireland, but we cannot remember one which can fairly be called a revealing book, much less one which can be placed by the side of that wonderful production, the "Agricultural Survey of France" by Arthur Young, who because he thoroughly understood only one subject predicted accurately the coming French Revolution. Very few men understand a foreign people, even if they live among them; and very few travellers learn anything except from a single caste, which probably, like the intigth of 1790, does not understand in the least the convictions or grievances or hopes of its own countrymen. That is why Foreign Secretaries are often ignorant after reading reports by many Ambassadors of dangers which are patent to the remainder of the world, and why Kings, who ought to know everything, so often commit grand blunders. The impressions of a traveller may be sound, but they must be superficial. What sort of opinion, for instance, would foreign travellers in England have formed as to the chances of the Education Bill ? They would inevitably have reported that the country was furious against it, and that Mr. Balfour would be shipwrecked on his first great measure. How were they to know how much of the opposition was political and how much religious, or to feel what the silent majority felt about it ?
Do we, then, object to statesmen travelling ? Not a bit of it, any more than we object to their reading novels, if only they will regard both those occupations as recrea- tions—unless, of course, they travel to accomplish some clearly understood and specific object, as will Mr. Chamber- lain—sometimes a little enlightening, sometimes not, but in neither case a substitute for serious study. It is through that, and. conversation with experts, and the careful watching of men—who are much alike in all countries, except in the matter of truthfulness—and, above all, by reflection, that statesmen become enlightened. It was not by travelling in Syria that Lord Beaconsfield became the man he was, though his travels produced " Tancred," but by omnivorous reading in his father's library, by talk with the men of genius who flocked to his father's table, and by watchfulness, continued for years, of the picked men of Great Britain who argued and con- tended and intrigued on the floor and in the lobbies of the House of Commons. The way to train a statesman, so far as he can be trained at all, is to strengthen his mind, to educate him in great principles, to compel him to see his adversary's case—a practice which of itself doubles his mental resources—and not to send him gadding about to gather up from lips, most of them interested, little snippets of indigestible "information." The great warriors of history—Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon—have known thoroughly one army apiece ; and though von Moltke knew two, it was not from Turkish methods that he acquired the ideas of organisation whi.-h turned the Army of Prussia into a bar of steel. We would trust Sir H. Fowler or Mr. Asquith, who have hardly quitted England, much sooner than the young men who, in pure impatience of painful study, have sought experience by wandering for years across the globe.
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