head; he has a reverence for what is old and beautiful, he hates to destroy and desires to preserve; he has a deep love for what has been built up by civilization in the primeval wilderness. He feels and does not think; he is afraid of people who think, because they so often think wrong. He believes that through him is transmitted the tradition of culture without which life is nothing and prosperity a snare. There is an infinite value in these beliefs if they are not combined with blind and obstinate obstruction. They are not dangerous to liberty, as is the static and philosophic political science that emanated from the narrow mind of Karl Marx, nor are they so essentially Conservative. They have not prevented the progress from pure monarchy to full Democracy which has been taking place since 1688, and which is now complete. They have given the Democracy an opportunity of preparing itself for the enjoyment of power.

The achievement of power, whether by an individual or a class, is not the end, but the beginning of political action. We must not be tempted to regard it like marriage in a fairystory, after which nothing is left but to record the inevitable happiness. How is that power going to be used? It is unfortunately just as easy for a majority as it used to be for a monarch to be tyrannical. A majority has to delegate

its power; to whom will that power be delegated? A majority that has not leisure to think and study may fall into the hands of rogues, of bureaucrats, of journalists, or, worst of all, of philosophers. Democracy has, in spite of its name, just as much tendency to divide into Liberal and Conservative Parties as any other repository of political power, and those who wish it to take a Conservative direction will, as they have in the past to others, tell Democracy that it can do no wrong. By use of the catchwords of liberty and progress they will try and convince the unlettered majority, first that the philosophers have discovered in Socialism the panacea of all evils, and then that the bureaucrats who are to run that scientific system are merely the obedient servants of Democracy. Just as patriotism was in the past the moral incentive by which men were made the tools of Conservative Imperialism, so in the future Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality are to be the moral incentive of Conservative Socialism. Democracy, like every other political device, has two roads on which it may travel, backwards towards State control, or forwards towards individual liberty. That is the issue between the Conservative and the Liberal mind. It is the business of Liberalism to see that Democracy makes the latter its choice.

CHAPTER VII

THE PHILOSOPHERS

THE English are a practical people, and one of the signs of their sound sense is their profound dislike of philosophers. They do not object to a man sitting at his desk and evolving out of his brain the solution of abstruse metaphysical problems; it is only when the same method is applied to what is called political philosophy that the Englishman becomes contemptuous and abusive. Political philosophy, or the science of politics, is a contradiction in terms, since politics is an art and not a science, and the attempt to make it a science has been responsible for all the evil that has resulted from philosophic speculation. If Rousseau had been content to attack the decayed monarchy of France and to sweep away its Conservative system; if he had been content to voice the bitter cry of humanity, born free, but groaning under its chains, then his voice would have been the voice of liberation, teaching truths that all communities must learn or perish.

But like all philosophers, he wished to replace the monarchical system by a system of his own. Apart from his system, his ideas were liberal enough, but it was the system and not the ideas that deluged France in blood. To him civilization was a disease; he wished to return to the simplicity that he falsely believed the life of the savage to be. Proclaiming the sovereignty of the people, he proposed that sovereignty should be used for the purpose of revolution, and that the objective of the revolution should be the return to an imaginary state of nature, a return to what the real science of anthropology teaches us to be the ignorance and poverty of primeval life.

The charming theory of the noble savage is admirably argued. The political philosopher, like the manipulator of statistics, can prove anything for you. Hobbes can prove Monarchy the best form of government quite as easily as Locke can Democracy, or Karl Marx Socialism. Machiavelli can argue you into tyranny as logically as Nietzsche can argue you into war. Yet the savage Robespierre did not appear so noble on close acquaintance, and the French got very tired of the "return to nature." The philosopher had never before taken a direct part in politics. The history of political philosophy, like every other product of the human mind, had its source in Greece,

and in Plato we find that combination between abtruse speculation and complete misunderstanding of human nature which is typical of the philosopher. Plato, like the Socialists, did not believe in property, and, being logical, he extended his communism to the wives and children of the citizens. He saw no reason why sexual intercourse should not be arranged and supervised by the State, and he considered it to be a practical suggestion that people should not know their own children. He believed, probably from profound contemplation of the domestic affairs of Socrates and his wife, that people would not quarrel so much if wives were held in common. And, on the strength of proposals showing so deep a knowledge of humanity, he actually suggests that government should be taken out of the hands of those who have it and entrusted to the philosophers. Fortunately it was only in the decline of Greek civilization that people listened to philosophy; it had had no influence on the political history of the great age of Athens.

It was not until the Renaissance that the curtain rose again on the scandalous history of political philosophy, and that the wise men sat over the midnight oil instructing us in the science of government. Machiavelli was a very different type from Plato, fitted to be the father of Treitschke rather than of Karl Marx. For