When a favourable change due to economical causes took place in the position of the French peasantry, the peasants, says Michelet somewhere, called it "good king Henry". Carlyle's theory of hero worship is partly an application of the same mode of thought. You embody your principle in some concrete person; canonise him or damn him, as he represents truth or error; and take credit to yourself for insight and for a lofty morality. It becomes a kind of blasphemy to suggest that your great man, who thus stands for an inspired leader dropped straight out of heaven, was probably at best very imperfect, one-sided, and at least as much of a product as a producer. The crudity of the method is even regarded as a proof of its morality. Your common-place moralist likes to call everything black or white; he despises all qualifications as casuistical refinements, and plumes himself on the decisive verdict, saint or sinner, with which he labels the adherents and opponents of his party. And yet we know as a fact, how absurd are such judgments. We know how men are betrayed into bad causes from good motives, or put on the right side because it happens to harmonise with their lower interests. Saints—so we are told—have been the cruellest persecutors; and kings, acting from purely selfish ambition, have consolidated nations or crushed effete and mischievous institutions. If we can make up our minds as to which was, on the whole, the best cause—and, generally speaking, both sides represented some sound principle—it does not follow that it was also the cause of all the best men. Before we can judge of the individual, we must answer a hundred difficult questions: If he took the right side, did he take it from the right motives? Was it from personal ambition or pure patriotism? Did he see what was the real question at issue? Did he foresee the inevitable effect of the measures which he advocated? If he did not see, was it because he was human, and therefore short-sighted; or because he was brutal, and therefore wanting in sympathy; or because he had intellectual defects, which made it impossible for him to escape from the common illusions of the time? These, and any number of similar difficulties, arise when we try to judge of the great men who form landmarks in our history, from the time of Boadicea to that of Queen Victoria. They are always amusing, and sometimes important; but there is always a danger that they may warp our views of the vital facts. The beauty of Mary Queen of Scots still disqualifies many people from judging calmly the great issues of a most important historical epoch. I will leave it to you to apply this to our views of modern politics, and judge the value of the ordinary assumption which assumes that all good men must be on one side.
Now we may say that the remedy for such illusions points to the importance of a doctrine which is by no means new, but which has, I think, bearings not always recognised. We have been told, again and again, since Plato wrote his Republic, that society is an organism. It is replied that this is at best an analogy upon which too great stress must not be laid; and we are warned against the fanciful comparisons which some writers have drawn between the body corporate and the actual physical body, with its cells, tissues, nervous system, and so forth. Now, whatever may be the danger of that mode of reasoning, I think that the statement, properly understood, corresponds to a simple logical canon too often neglected in historical and political reasonings. It means, I take it, in the first place, that every man is a product as well as a producer; that there is no such thing as the imaginary individual with fixed properties, whom theorists are apt to take for granted as the base of their reasoning; that no man or group of men is intelligible without taking into account the mass of instincts transmitted through their predecessors, and therefore without referring to their position in the general history of human development. And, secondly, it is essential to remember in speaking of any great man, or of any institution, their position as parts of a complicated system of actions and emotions. The word "if," I may say, changes its meaning. "If" Harold had won the battle of Hastings, what would have been the result? The answer would be comparatively simple, if we could, in the old fashion, attribute to William the Conqueror all the results in which he played a conspicuous part: if, therefore, we could make out a definite list of effects of which he was the cause, and, by simply "deducting" them, after Coleridge's fashion, from the effects which actually followed, determine what was the precise balance. But when we consider how many causes were actually in operation, how impossible it is to disentangle and separate them, and say this followed from that, and that other from something else, we have to admit that the might have been is simply indiscoverable. The great man may have hastened what was otherwise inevitable; he may simply have supplied the particular point, round which a crystallisation took place of forces which would have otherwise discovered some other centre; and the fact that he succeeded in establishing certain institutions or laws may be simply a proof that he saw a little more clearly than others the direction towards which more general causes were inevitably propelling the nation. Briefly, we cannot isolate the particular "cause" in this case, and have to remember at every moment that it was only one factor in a vast and complex series of changes, which would no doubt have taken a different turn without it, but of which it may be indefinitely difficult to say what was the precise deflection due to its action.
In trying to indicate the importance, I have had to dwell upon the difficulty, of applying anything like scientific methods to political problems. I shall conclude by trying once more to indicate why, in spite of this, I hold that the attempt is desirable, and may be fruitful.
People sometimes say that scientific methods are inapplicable because we cannot try experiments in social matters. I remember being long ago struck by a remark of Dr. Arnold, which has some bearing upon this assertion. He observed upon the great advantage possessed by Aristotle in the vast number of little republics in his time, each of which was virtually an experiment in politics. I always thought that this was fallacious somehow, and I fancy that it is not hard to indicate the general nature of the fallacy. Freeman, upon whose services to thorough and accurate study of history I am unworthy to pronounce an eulogy, fell into the same fallacy, I fancy, when he undertook to write a history of Federal Governments. He fancied that because the Achæan League and the Swiss Cantons and the United States of America all had this point in common, and that they represented the combinations of partially independent States, their history would be in a sense continuous. The obvious consideration that the federations differed in every possible way, in their religions and state of civilisation and whole social structure, might be neglected. Freeman's tendency to be indifferent to everything which was not in the narrowest sense political led him to this—as it seems to me—pedantic conception. If the prosperity of a nation depended exclusively upon the form of its government, Aristotle, as Arnold remarks, would have had before him a greater number of experiments than the modern observer. But the assumption is obviously wrong. Every one of these ancient States depended for its prosperity upon a vast number of conditions—its race, its geographical position, its stage of development, and so forth, quite impossible to tabulate or analyse; and the form of government which suited one would be entirely inapplicable to another. To extricate from all these conflicting elements the precise influence due to any institutions would be a task beyond the powers of any number of philosophers; and indeed the perplexity would probably be increased by the very number of experiments. To make an experiment fruitful, it is necessary to eliminate all the irrelevant elements which intrude into the concrete cases spontaneously offered by nature, and, for example, to obtain two cases differing only in one element, to which we may therefore plausibly attribute other contrasts. Now, the history of a hundred or a thousand small States would probably only present the introduction of new and perplexing elements for every new case. The influence, again, of individuals, or accident of war, or natural catastrophes, is greater in proportion as the State is smaller, and therefore makes it more difficult to observe the permanent and underlying influences. It seems to me, therefore, that the study, say of English history, where we have a continuous growth over many centuries, where the disturbing influences of individuals or chance are in a greater degree cancelled by the general tendencies working beneath them, we have really a far more instructive field for political observation. This may help us to see what are the kinds of results which may be anticipated from sociological study undertaken in a serious spirit. The growth, for example, of the industrial system of England is a profoundly interesting subject of inquiry, to which we are even now only beginning to do justice. Historians have admitted, even from the time of Hume, that the ideal history should give less of mere battles and intrigues, and more account of those deeper and more continuous processes which lie, so to speak, beneath the surface. They have hardly, I think, even yet realised the full bearing and importance of this observation. Yet, of
