THE PLACE OF IDEAS IN POLITICS.
MR HALDANE'S speech at Edinburgh this day week bore an encouraging unlikeness to the usual addresses of War Secretaries. He took for his subject the need of ideas in politics, and ideas are precisely the element which for some time past has been most wanting in our military administration. Other things we have had in abundance. Money has not been wanting. Schemes have not been wanting. We have assisted at an almost bewildering variety of experiments. But all these advantages combined, have not given us an Army. It is really interest- ing to note the innocent pleasure with which the public have welcomed the appointment of Mr. Haldane to this par- ticular office. It is such an agreeable surprise to them to think of Army problems as being in the way to receive a new kind of treatment,—treatment "with brains." More- over, this method has the advantage of not being limited in its application. Ideas are wanted—greatly wanted—in the Army ; but they are also wanted elsewhere. For the last twenty years they have either been missing from our affairs, or have played a wholly mischievous part in them. The last Liberal Government was too weak, too devoted to programme-making, and too distracted to give effect to such as it had. The Unionist Government, when its attention was not taken up by foreign and Colonial affairs, was led astray by dreams of Protection and Retalia- tion. The field consequently is clear. The nation has placed new men in power. It has given them a wonderful majority and a wonderful opportunity, and it waits to see the use they will make of them. A speech like Mr. Haldane's shows at least an appreciation of the situation. The new Government may not rise to the level of public expecta- tion, but it is something to know that it realises that there is such a level, and means to reach it if it can.
There is one point on which we may learn something even from the Tariff Reformer. Satisfactory as the con- dition of our trade mostly is, it is not so satisfactory as it might be. Our manufacturers let orders slip that they might secure. They do not acquaint themselves with the wants of their customers, and even when they are informed of them they do not go out of their way to consult them. The evidence of this has again and again been given us by an authority whose competence and absence of bias are beyond dispute, the Commercial Supplement of the Times. In the dark days before the Dissolution many a perplexed reader of Mr. Chamberlain's speeches found con- solation in these invaluable sheets. There he might read of the apparent inability of our manufacturers to make room for ideas that are strange to them. There is nothing wonderful in this. No man is disposed to recognise that the position of unquestioned command which he once enjoyed has passed away from him ; that in the markets in which he was once supreme he is now only one competitor among many ; that the fact that his goods come from England is no longer enough to command a sale; that for this purpose he must show a greater readiness than others to understand his customers' wants and meet his customers' wishes. This, however, is now the posi- tion to which English manufacturers find themselves reduced in foreign markets, and often in their own. They are only just beginning to learn that it is the user who educates the maker ; that the seller who succeeds is the man who gives the buyer exactly what he wants. This, of course, is only one aspect of the question, but it may serve to illustrate Mr. Haldane's lesson that what English trade most needs at the present time is ideas.
But the want is equally visible in other directions. It may come as a surprise to many of us that "the cause of the Labour Party is a suspicion that there has been in the past a lack of ideas in the Liberal Party," but, all the same, we believe that Mr. Haldane's diagnosis is substantially accurate. If we look back three-quarters of a century, we shall see the same suspicion operating to the disadvantage of the aristocracy which governed England down to 1832. It had, on the whole, deserved well of its countrymen. It had protected them against the infection of revolution. It had brought them triumphantly through a great war. It had delivered Europe from despotism. But when all these services had been rendered, and it sat down to govern England, it proved to have used up its store of ideas. It had none with which to meet the new classes, the new industries, the new opportunities, which were growing up on all sides. And for want of this equipment it had to make way for the middle-class Governments that have followed upon the first Reform Act. The point in the comparison between 1832 and 1906 lies in the blindness of the dispossessed forces to the fact that they had in any way contributed to their own fall. The ruling minds of the unreformed Parliaments could not see that the victory of the middle class had its origin in its grasp of ideas,—ideas which had to undergo much revision and reshaping before they became a permanent factor in English politics, but which had to have room found for them if England was to keep her place in the modern world. Probably many Englishmen regard the Labour Party of to-day very much as their grandfathers regarded the Reform Party of 1832. They cannot believe that it has anything to teach them, or that the changes it is supposed to desire can contain any particle of reason or justice. Here, therefore, there is a large field in which ideas may work their way,—in which, indeed, they must work their way if the dispossessed middle cleat; are to go on playing their part in English politics as the dispossessed aristocracy went on playing theirs. No doubt the Labour Party has its own lesson to learn. A class which has come late into its inheritance is naturally disposed to make full use of its new opportunity, and it may seem useless to preach to it that it should take warning by the history of those whose opportunity came earlier. They have seen their power taken from them, in part at least, because of their inability to recognise the limitations which attended the right use of it. The power of the State, as Mr. Hal- dane reminds us, may be used well or ill, in the interest of the whole community or in the interest of particular classes. And according as it is used in one or other of these ways it will in the long run benefit the class which so employs it. The Labour Party will have to learn its lesson as other parties have had to learn theirs, and it will maintain the parallel by making mistakes in the process. But we know of no reason why in the end those mistakes should be more disastrous or more irremediable than those which have been made by others in the past.
But the need for ideas is not confined to the relations of Labour and Capital. It is felt also in other departments. We have had in the legislation of the late Government a series of examples of the want of them. Their projects on education, on Chinese labour, on alien immigration, on the Army, were framed in great part on what they supposed• to be the line of least resistance. That is a dangerous line at best, and they made it more dangerous than it need have been by misapprehending the forces with which they had to deal. They drafted the religious clauses of the Education Act in accordance with what the clergy sup- posed to be the interest of Church schools. But the clergy proved to be quite wrong in their reading of that interest, and to have no electoral strength comparable to that of the opposition which their victory aroused. When the demand for Chinese labour became urgent they looked only to the demand of a single industry, without reference to the wishes of the Colony at large, and without the slightest appreciation of the hostility which it might arouse at home. If they had had ideas, they would have had, some imagination, and they might then have foreseen for themselves what sort of reception their project was likely to encounter at the hands of working men who had been assured that the war in South Africa was to extend the Empire for their special advantage. Ideas would at least have suggested that the support of the Rand would do little for them in a British General Election. They made the same mistake in regard to the Aliens' Immigration Bill. They passed it because it was popular in, a single London constituency, and no doubt it has kept that particular Unionist seat. But the belief that it was popular in working-class London as a whole has been conclusively disproved, and in the result of the Metropolitan elections we have the measure of Unionist knowledge of the actual feeling of the people for whom they were legislating. And as for the Army, we know but too well what share ideas had in their plans. It is an example by which the new Government ought to profit, and we both hope and believe that they will do so.
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