THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

8

Late that night I found myselfalone with Margaret amid the debris

of the gathering.

I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white

and weary, came and leant upon the mantel.

"Oh, Lord!" said Margaret.

I agreed. Then I resumed my meditation.

"Ideas," I said, "count for more than I thought in the world."

Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she

was accustomed to wait for clues.

"When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of

the Socialist ideas, and see the men who are running them," I

explained… "A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out

of the obvious common sense of our present conditions. It's as

impersonal as science. All these men-They've given nothing to it.

They're just people who have pegged out claims upon a big

intellectual No-Man's-Land-and don't feel quite sure of the law.

There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness… If we professed

Socialism do you think they'd welcome us? Not a man of them!

They'd feel it was burglary…"

"Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire. "That is just what I

felt about them all the evening… Particularly Dr. Tumpany."

"We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists, I said; "that's

the moral of it. I suppose if God were to find He had made a

mistake in dates or something, and went back and annihilated

everybody from Owen onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist

leader or teacher, Socialism would be exactly where it is and what

it is to-day-a growing realisation of constructive needs in every

man's mind, and a little corner in party politics. So, I suppose,

it will always be… But they WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"

I looked up at the little noise she made. "TWICE!" she said,

smiling indulgently, "to-day!" (Even the smile was Altiora's.)

I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was an

excellent word in that connection…

But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's

brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great

brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking

them!…

"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is

trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is Featherstonehaugh."

I sat taking in this proposition.

"They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret.

"Us?"

"The Liberals."

"Oh, damn the Liberals!" I said. "They'll never even help

themselves."

"I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people,"

said Margaret, after a pause.

She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel,

perplexed by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I

did not look up, and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed

me and went rustling softly to her room.

I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts

crystallising out…

It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that

opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and

the mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social

affairs. The ideas go on-and no person or party succeeds in

embodying them. The reality of human progress never comes to the

surface, it is a power in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in

silence while men think, in studies where they write self-

forgetfully, in laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal

curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of

emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday

affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair,

are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,

interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation,

personal feeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his

immediate self and specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he

simply turns himself into something a little less than the common

man. He may have an immense hinterland, but that does not absolve

him from a frontage. That is the essential error of the specialist

philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist. They

repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland. That is what

bothered me about Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had

prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream of an

official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher in the

first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the

first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like

gifts to the pretence-a quack. These are attempts to live deep-

side shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To

understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to

join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not

even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for

which it stands…

I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had

taken me some years to realise the truerelation of the great

constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but

to myself. I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some one

party with social construction, and to regard the other as

necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow

the Baileys in the self-righteousness of supposing myself to be

wholly constructive. But I saw now that every man of intellectual

freedom and vigour is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and

that no man is disinterestedly so. Each one of us repeats in

himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its

possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be shaping

immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and

have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man

counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but

for his common workaday, selfishself; and political parties are

held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the

stabler bond of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for

progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change,

except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular

method of living and behaviour. Every party stands essentially for

the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of

classes in the exciting community, and every party has its

scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-

defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public-

spiritedform, and its superficial-minded following confessing its

meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish

itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct

itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited

socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression

upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern

affairs. The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway

and struggle. The ideas and understandings march on and achieve

themselves for all-in spite of every one…

The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of

two great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends

in the event of a small Government majority. These two main parties

are more or less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has

certain necessary characteristics. The Conservative Party has

always stood quite definitely for the established propertied

interests. The land-owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church,

and latterly the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which has

been created by temperance legislation, are the essential

Conservatives. Interwoven now with the native wealthy are the

families of the great international usurers, and a vast

miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise. Outside the range of

resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has

always shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any

other party. The great landowners have been as well-disposed

towards the endowment of higher education, and as willing to co-

operate with the Church in protective and mildly educational

legislation for children and the working class, as any political

section. The financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager

for mechanical progress and technical efficiency. They are prepared

to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and

public communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organisation. A

certain rude benevolence of public intention is equally

characteristic of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leads to

no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see

the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar.

All sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably

inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised

population in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners

and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance,

jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the

power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party

as a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely

confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective

control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or

the nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended

municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of

property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine

bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement in

these affairs.

Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose

immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor,

increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man

tenant and working-man purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt

constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally

suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher

education, and-except for an obvious antagonism to employers and

property owners-almost destitute of ideas. What else can it be?

It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation and

difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and

organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and

capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process;

but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of

individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and

quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it. It is only in

recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the

huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a

very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous

assemblage.

For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.

Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified

crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these

other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests.

It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the

party of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and

planless association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so

constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to

hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state.

Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party. It is a

system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times

an elusive common soul. It is a gathering together of all the

smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against

the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as against the

landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the

moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small

employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man

without introductions and broad connections against the man who has

these things. It is the party of the many small men against the

fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for loving

the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer is

doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but it

resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages

common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the

king. The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege"

because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party

that is on the whole most set against Collective control because it

represents no established responsilibity. It is constructive only

so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than

its jealousy of the state. It organises only because organisation

is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries. It lapses

in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to

wealth and hostility to public expenditure…

Every modern European state will have in some form or other these

three parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and

unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party;

the confused, sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small,

struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a

third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes

reuniting with it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses,

the proletarians, Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to

Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in

the United States. The Crown or a dethroned dynasty, the

Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions,

the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and

confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in

the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the

less for that…

And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;-the ideas go

on-as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in

some great brain beyond our understanding…

So it was I sat and thought my problem out… I still remember

my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like

clouds dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course,

couldn't hold a party together alone, "interests and habits, not

ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of

Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily

claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this residuum of

disconnected and exceptional people. This was true not only of the

Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity-of

human confidence in humanity-of all that mattered in human life

outside the life of individuals… The only real party that

would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the

entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive

attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and

claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted

anything in the world.

Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it

before?… I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.

I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.