AMBITION IN POLITICS. .
TO refer to a politician as devoid of ambition is to write him down a nobody offhand. Yet how seldom it happens that the epithet " ambitious," which ought to be, or at least might be,. complimentary, is applied to the character of a politician without a lurking or an openly expressed distrust and dislike. That, of course, is true of other epithets applied to politicians, but it' is peculiarly true of the assignment of ambition to political character, because ambition more often than not goes hand- in-hand with youth, and of all possessions of the would-be politician, youth is one which a very large number of people find it hardest to forgive. There is nothing difficult to understand in that, for youth dictating to age; and inexperience, even if illumined by genius, lecturing exrieri- once, can never be an agreeable picture. For theperpetual unpopularity of youth there can' be found, of course, a dozen reasons, some of thein good and all of them natural. There is, to begin with, the- fear of the 'rising generation ; the doubt in the minds of older men whether their time may not have come, whether they will not be thrust aside in the race. They are like Solness in The Master Builder ; they hear some one saying "Give me a chance," and are afraid, like him, that soon " all the rest will come clamouring after him, and will shake their fists at me and shout : Make room— make room—make room.' Presently the younger genera- tion will come knocking at my door." That is a fear natural to all men, unless they happen to be wisely tolerant, or possibly lazy, or unless they are themselves strong and successful. But it is not only his elders who cannot put up with youth in. a politician ; no one is more jealous of a young man than young men. For a young man with political ambition hot in him that is the first hard lesson to be learnt, that he cannot hope to avoid a declaration of war. He may not wish to.. declare. war -himself, but others will declare it on him. If his political instincts. are intensely strong, he will probably enjoy the fighting; but there are plenty of men who believe that they have real ambition to succeed in politics, yet who find that they are not strong enough, or are too gentle, to stand the strain of lengthened dislike or disparagement.
. Such dislike or disparagement, it may be argued, is in a sense fictitious. It falls into the same category as the heated condemnation of each other's methods by opposing counsel in a Court of Law, which does not prevent them from cracking jokes with each other in the corridor out of their clients' hearing ; it is part and parcel of forensic etiquette, and ought to disturb nobody's digestion. But political likes and dislikes, and sympathies and antipathies, ride a little deeper in the currents of life than the customary indulgences of prosecuting and defending counsel. A politician, to succeed with Englishmen, must be first and foremost sincere ; he must speak from a belief, not from a brief, and that is one of the reasons why lawyers will always find a little difficulty, in moving the House of Commons. They start handicapped by having to convince their hearers that they have the cause they are advocating genuinely at heart, and are not merely putting in a piece of 'special pleading. Notice bow when one of the great Parliamentary lawyers makes an effective fighting speech the accounts in the papers next day will be full of such phrases as, " Sir John Blank, with finely simulated indignation, upbraided the Government for their hypocrisy," or "Sir William, with a clever pretence, of uncontrollable anxiety," and so on. Doubtless the news- paper 'accounts are unjust, but the point to observe is that such 'simulation is seldom attributed to politicians who are not lawyers. There may be exceptional cases ; but generally speaking, a plain politician has to face plain opponents, and though the courtesies of .the House of Commons, not only in the case of the front or back benches, but throughout the House, admit of friendships between political opponents, and easy meetings at the same dinner-table, nobody who knows anything of Parliamentary life would deny that a man ;who takes his politics seriously, and means to let his ambitions have full play, must be prepared to encounter hatred occasionally, dislike often, intolerance more often, -and flat unreasoning opposition always. The more " ambitious " he gets the name of being, the flatter the opposition, and the greater the distrust.
Yet distrust and dislike of ambition, as per se a thing to be disliked, is clearly wrong-headed and foolish. In the first place, ambition in itself, so far from being a thing to be blamed, ,.may be praiseworthy, and is inevitable. Carlyle has summed up the matter once for all. " The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this : To unfold your self, to work for what thing you have the faculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of 'our existence Not the coveting Of the place alone, but the fitness of the man for the place withal : that is the question. Perhaps the place was his; perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation, to seek the place ! Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall we blame it, if he were ' the only man in France that could have done any good, there ' I " But not only can such ambition as drove Cromwell to " throw down his ploughs " for Parliament be argued to be merely laudable. Ambition in a young politician is surely some- thing more. It is one of the strongest antiseptics of public life, and it is also a great national safeguard. Look only at the influence which a desire " to work for what thing you have the faculty for " has on a man whose driving ambition it is to become a Minister under the Crown. He must become at once impressed with the urgent necessity of conducting his life with supreme circumspectness and care. All his actions must be coherent, consistent, and guided by singleness of purpose ; he is at once aware of the increased danger of a mistake, a slip, a miscalculation ; it may take him a year to retrieve the consequences of a minute's careless phrasing, an incautious " crystallisation " of immature opinion. The ice on which he has to skate is not only thin, but sloping. And if such is the intense care with which he must be occupied, almost obsessed, before attaining his first tangible success, how much greater must be his watchfulness if he is to retain any difficult position he may have won. Unless he is to slide back in the race with others as ambitious as he is, he can relax no single nerve to see that his life is as clean in its private and public record as it is absolutely and unassailably devoted heart and soul to the public service. There is the antiseptic, and that is the safeguard of public
interests. .
If that is still unconvincing, see what the public service loses if, in the difficult business of distributing political offices a Minister should be given a portfolio who is either devoid of ambition, or whose ambitions . have been already satisfied. That happens with most Governments ; it certainly happened with the last, and probably has happened with the present. The people, always watchful, suddenly realise that the reason why they have beard nothing of So-and-so for some time, or the reason why they have beard so much, is that he is no longer working as he should, and they are reminded of the remark of a Prime Minister of a former generation that "nobody gave him so much anxiety as his Dukes who had got the Garter." The Dukes had no further .political reward to look for. The truth is that Governments need never fear an excess, but must always deplore a lack, of ambition in their Ministers. It is still true, as Bacon wrote, that "to take a soldier without ambition is to pull off his spurs," and, though Bacon preferred an industrious to an ambitious states- man, times have changed since prominent politicians were- beheaded on Tower Green or gibbeted at Tyburn. Qf modern European States, perhaps France alone during the last twenty years could have been deeply moyed by a Boulanger, and then only if the public of the boulevards, wbo love a soldier on a big black horse, were dimly seeking an outlet for obscure political energies, or smarting under an insult. In the France of to-day, as most certainly in England, if there is one danger that need not be feared, it is from the neoterism of a modern Alcibiades.
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