ABSTRACT

The Englishman's nature is to do first, to think afterwards; and he is generally surer of what he has done than of what he has thought. We are not an intellectually speculative race. The scorn of theory is written all over our political history. “Give me facts, feed me on facts,” is a genuine cry of the national heart. There have been exceptions. In earlier chapters I have spoken of the vogue of the twin doctrines of Surplus Population and Laisser Faire; but even there the real force lay in the facts behind the doctrine. The dominant feature of British public life has been the growth not of philosophic schools, but of political parties and social expedients. We have had no Rousseau or Condorcet, no Marx, no List, no Henry George, no Tolstoy. Our parties express a difference of temper and interest rather than of principle—hence their loose governance and frequent transformation. Simple, clear-cut dogma is not favoured by this moist, mild climate. The business of public life goes on amid a welter of apparently incompatible ideas—very old ideas perpetually modified—of which now one, now another, is seized upon in a frankly utilitarian spirit. Many of them have been dragged into politics from the spheres of morals and science. Godwin's extraordinary faith in the rapid perfectibility of ordinary men had a powerful effect in the last years of the eighteenth century, left strong traces in the minds of the Radicals of the next generation, and then disappeared. The rise of chemistry and physics strongly affected political life. Opposite deductions were confidently drawn from Darwinian biology—the principle of universal strife, and that of a social organism. Orthodox Nonconformity, Unitarianism, Positivism, and Secularism have at times been important factors in political development. This confusion of influences is not to be explained as an intellectual process, but rather as a reflection of the changing circumstances of society. It is those circumstances with which we are here concerned; but, by a reversal of the method of the political theorist, we may again, in passing, use the process of thought to throw light upon the process of fact—remembering that the latter is the substantial reality, and guarding ourselves from the folly of taking names at their face value.