Note (return) — Chapter IV

A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve the conception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in a separate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts of experience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not permitted to enter. Professor Ostrogorski published, for instance, in 1902, an important and extraordinarily interesting book on Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties, containing the results of fifteen years' close observation of the party system in America and England. The instances given in the book might have been used as the basis of a fairly full account of those facts in the human type which are of importance to the politician—the nature of our impulses, the necessary limitations of our contact with the external world, and the methods of that thinking brain which was evolved in our distant past, and which we have now to put to such new and strange uses. But no indication was given that Professor Ostrogorski's experience had altered in the least degree the conception of human nature with which he started. The facts observed are throughout regretfully contrasted with 'free reason,'[31] 'the general idea of liberty,'[32] 'the sentiments which inspired the men of 1848,'[33] and the book ends with a sketch of a proposed constitution in which the voters are to be required to vote for candidates known to them through declarations of policy 'from which all mention of party is rigorously excluded.'[34] One seems to be reading a series of conscientious observations of the Copernican heavens by a loyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy.