THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  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-

  spirited form, 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.

  9

  My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to

  the final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of

  my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and

  administered territories-the vision I had seen in the haze from

  that little church above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a

  more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my

  uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive

  Young Liberals. To get that ordered life I had realised the need of

  organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated

  methods. On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent

  industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my

  perception of these ends. I married Margaret and set to work. But

  something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these

  determinations as final. There was always a doubt lurking below,

  always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of

  vitally important omissions.

  I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political

  associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow,

  priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were

  attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own

  theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more

  than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was

  seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits

  of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his

  illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited

  triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to

  point my way to my present conclusions. I had been trying to deal

  all along with human progress as something immediate in life,

  something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups

  pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in

  my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-

  seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-

  consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely

  growing unpublished personality behind him-my hinterland, I have

  called it-so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is

  also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws

  continually upon human experience and influences human action more

  and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the

  stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it

  was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't

  understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying

  to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate,

  and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of

  silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most

  acutely under Britten's gibes, came in. They were neglecting human

  life altogether in social organisation.

  In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of

  statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and

  all organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange

  and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers,

  leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that

  they can think out the whole-or at any rate completely think out

  definite parts-of the purpose and future of man, clearly and

  finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that

  assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions

  of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training,

  pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-

  sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they

  have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush

  disturbing initi
atives and apparently detrimental desires. And so

  it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that

  any extension of social organisation is at present achieved.

  Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is

  grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less

  personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective

  mind in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman

  and his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and

  becomes accessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer

  to "fix up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces

  to the development of that needed intellectual life without which

  all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to

  build on the sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.

  You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and

  harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring

  only to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process

  fearless, critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give

  cities, harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality

  and in a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of

  a contemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion,

  vigour of thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity

  that lurks more or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt

  there must go an emotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last

  something of a refrain in my speech and writings, to convey the

  spirit that I felt was at the very heart of real human progress-

  love and fine thinking.

  (I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week

  without the repetition of that phrase.)

  My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The

  more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,

  the worse. And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I

  as a politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an

  adequate expression for all that was in me, for those forces that

  had rebelled at the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the

  secrecies and suppressions of my youth, at the dull unrealities of

  City Merchants, at the conventions and timidities of the Pinky