ON POLITICAL LIFE

SERVICE

AT THE LEEDS LUNCHEON CLUB

13th March, 1925

I want to begin by going back a few years and trying to voice to this room thoughts that perhaps have not been expressed in public, but which were common to a vast number of thinking men during the years of the war. I am one of those (of whom there are many here) who when the war broke out were too old for active service, but who were possessed in those days of the war with a consuming desire to do something for our country, and to look round to find where we could most usefully give service.

I think probably everybody here, members of such a club as yours, found their vocation at that time. But as the war went on, the effect of it psychologically was curious. Many of the things that had played a large part in our lives before shrank into insignificance, and we felt that the world could never be the same again to us who had grown to maturity in the years of peace. I think some of us found that we were getting to cling much more loosely to material wealth, and to realise that wealth was made to be a servant and not a master—that as a servant it had a most useful function to perform, that as a master it meant damnation.

I think, too, we felt this: we were not peculiarly impressed with speeches that talked of the glorious time that was coming after the war. We realised what the war meant in the world. We felt the foundations of civilisation in Europe cracking. We knew as business men that for a generation this country and the world would be as a whole far, far poorer, and we realised early the struggle that must result to repair the cracks in the foundations of our civilisation and to restore to the country that level of prosperity which she had enjoyed before the war. I think, too, many of us had little faith in supermen. I think that our experience in business had taught us that, as a matter of fact, there are no such things as supermen, and that we should have to rely on the innate common-sense, integrity, courage and faith of the common men and women of this country if we were to make good.

I think probably those thoughts which I certainly had, and which, I gather, you had, were pretty common throughout the country. It was for that reason, feeling as I did, that I was driven into the course which I embraced in December, 1916, when I accepted Mr. Bonar Law's offer to serve as his Parliamentary Secretary. I did that deliberately, because I believed that at my time of life, having already sufficient means to be independent of the active business in which I had passed my life up to then, I had the opportunity of giving my services to the country without any feeling that it was necessary to be remunerated for them.

There is nothing singular in that. There must have been millions of men who felt as I did. I have never said, or believed, that that service which I had the opportunity of rendering was one whit higher or better than any other. All service ranks the same, according to the spirit in which it is performed.

One of the sources of the great strength of our country in every part of the kingdom is that there are men who have no personal ambition for themselves to get where the limelight is brightest and publicity is greatest. And as long as our country can go on producing that type, which I am thankful to say it is producing from all classes of the community—so long as that is the case, I should never despair of England.

There is another observation I would like to make about the war before I pass on. It became evident to me long before the war was over that the effect of it, which would hit this country hardest in the years immediately succeeding, was the tragedy of the loss of the men who were just qualifying and getting ready to be the leaders of our younger men—the men who had already been at work in the factory and the mill, in all kinds of business and in the professions, who were just beginning to be masters of their own work—men of about thirty years of age, who by now would have been qualified to be leaders in their respective spheres.

There is nothing in the first twenty years after the war that can make good to this country the loss of so many men of that age. And that was an additional reason why we men who were middle-aged already when the war began should have banded ourselves together by the time the war ended under a vow to our better selves that we would give for the rest of our lives, as a thank-offering to the dead, nothing but the best services we could render to our country. It has become our lot not to seek the ease that we might legitimately seek, but to carry on to the end and help the next generation that is coming along—the generation that was too young to fight—help that to take its place as and when the time comes. It is, and it will be, a tremendous burden on the older men, but it is their proud contribution—the giving of the best they can to help a broken and a shattered world.

Among the problems that we have to face to-day there are some with which you are peculiarly fitted to deal, and where your advice, knowledge, understanding and enthusiasm may be of the greatest service to your country. In few things is it more difficult to make sufficiently rapid progress than in the problem of housing, and that problem in the big towns and cities of our country is linked up with kindred and greater problems of the planning of our cities. I spoke last night (not for the first time) of the rapidity with which the change had transformed our country, the change wrought by the growth of our industrial system. It was so unexpected, so unforeseen, and so incalculable in its effects that men were unable, and they had not the imagination, to plan and to look forward. If they had only done so how much easier our task would have been! But we to-day not only have to devote ourselves to undoing the evil effects of things left undone by those who went before us; we in our time must look ahead to plan that we do not leave problems for our descendants as grave as have been left for us.

In the growth of our big industrial centres to-day let us, while there is yet time, look forward and plan to see where the factories of the future are to be, and where the houses of the future are to be, and where the open spaces and the playing fields are to be, and how people are to be got to and from their work—that complicated system of transport. All these things need thought, sympathy, imagination and vision. In a gathering like this there are men who are capable of doing most useful work of this kind.

One centre after another of the big populations in this country can make its own plans and contribution to the common stock of knowledge and enter into a glorious competition to make in the progress of years their city more beautiful, more convenient, more commodious, and happier for the human beings who live in it.

In the same way in a city like this, where the intelligence and the moving spirits of industry meet round this table, what an opportunity you have for making your contribution to the solving of the most difficult problem we have to face to-day! There are few here, probably, who believe that the industrial system is static and here for all time. You are all mainly engaged, as I have been, in industry, and have gone through the mill, and we have to move on and realise, as I do, that so far from industry being static it is dynamic. We have to move on into a state of things that has yet to be a better one both for efficiency and in its spirit than anything else that we have yet come through. There will have to be much hard thinking on the part of all who are engaged in industry, whether they be masters or whether they be men; and it will be impossible for the change that I believe to be necessary in the future to come about until there is a very different atmosphere in which to discuss and negotiate those changes than has been the case in the last twenty years.

The atmosphere in those years has been, in many parts of the country, poisoned. I do not wish to say anything here about where the faults may lie. But I do want to say that I realise, as you do, that a great deal of the propaganda which has been done during the last twenty years—the propaganda of a kind that teaches class hatred—has in many places done its evil and its poisonous work.

I am thankful to say that I see signs throughout the country to-day that those who believe that permanent progress can be made by that method are not an increasing number, but the work that has been done in that direction cannot be undone in a moment. And it will mean the utmost goodwill, the utmost force of example to bring about, to any great extent, something better and something on which we may erect a permanent and stable building. In industrial matters I believe in publicity. I believe, in spite of much that we fear, that the agreement that was made in the mining industry has taught the country a great deal. As you pass away from the days of small businesses into the days of big limited liability companies, your problem is completely altered, and what we have to do—and here nothing can be done without your help—is to humanise the system of limited liability. That is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, but after all, let us remember publicity. Where there is ignorance there is always suspicion, and until you on your side—I will say we on our side—get the men who work for us to understand our problems, as they do not understand them to-day, you can never hope for progress.

I have often said I regard it of the greatest importance for workmen in industry, and particularly their leaders, to have what some of them already have, a knowledge of the industry that they are in—a knowledge of the finances of that industry, a knowledge of the costs of that industry, a knowledge of the costs of that industry abroad (that they may understand what competition means), a knowledge of the methods of marketing those commodities abroad. It is far more important for them to have that knowledge than to have even the amount of knowledge that may be accumulated after six weeks' sojourn in a foreign country of the language of which they are ignorant.

I am catholic in my views. I would exempt no class to-day from working hard at their own problems. I think those who lead Labour and those who lead the employers have got to work harder at their task of comprehension and of explanation than they have ever worked before.

There is one thing that I have always felt as an employer, and it is this. A good employer is very apt to devote his whole time to his own works, and to refrain from coming out into public life, because he has not time for it, and it perhaps does not attract him, and for some reason he is often reluctant to leave his own place of work. There is one cause in which he should be prepared to sacrifice himself—and it is a sacrifice. I want to see the ranks of employers throw up a man who will lead his men, making it the principal task of his life to be the mediator in all subjects affecting their work, whilst standing up, as he is entitled to do, for the order he represents. There can be no finer career for a young man than to go into business, not with the object only of making a fortune, as he probably would—for any man is worthy of his hire—but with the idea of making his contribution towards getting the whole of these relations on a firmer footing.

There can be no finer work for men who, as boys, went out to France, and learnt what a British regiment was, than to try to get something of the spirit of the British regiment into their industry.

DEMOCRACY AND THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE

FROM A SPEECH AT THE ALBERT HALL

4th December, 1924

The responsibility for progress rests not only on the Government, but on every man and woman in the country. The Government can go no faster in progress than the people will allow them to do. Willing co-operation in new methods is essential, and without the will to work progress is not possible, and with constant stoppages of industry progress is not possible. Progress can be obtained by the people of this country if they have the will to obtain it. But just as it can be helped by them, so it can be impeded and retarded and stopped altogether. The ultimate responsibility is with the people more even than with the Government. It is a testing time for democracy. Many are those who would pay, and do pay, lip service to it. But I remember that democracy is after all but the government of the people by the people through their freely elected representatives, and unless the responsibility for that government is felt throughout the length and breadth of the country, from top to bottom, by men and women alike, democracy itself will fail.

Democracy, democratic government, calls for harder work, for higher education, for further vision than any form of government known in this world. It has not lasted long yet in the West, and it is only by those like ourselves who believe in it making it a success that we can hope to see it permanent and yielding those fruits which it ought to yield. The assertion of people's rights has never yet provided that people with bread. The performance of their duties, and that alone, can lead to the successful issue of those experiments in government which we have carried further than any other people in this world. Democracy can rise to great heights; it can also sink to great depths. It is for us so to conduct ourselves, and so to educate our own people, that we may achieve the heights and avoid the depths.

Closely akin to that comes the subject of our great Empire, on which I would say a word or two. When we speak of Empire, it is in no spirit of flag-wagging. What we feel, I think, is this: we feel that in this great inheritance of ours, separated as it is by the seas, we have yet one home and one people, and we want the realisation of that to be so vivid to our own people that men may ask themselves, as they come to manhood, "Where, in this great inherited estate, can I do best for myself? Where have I a better opportunity of bringing up my family? Where can I do best for the Empire?" When the answer given is "overseas," let us do everything we can to see that the path is made easy for those who desire it, that we may help to spread the peoples of our Empire, the ideals of our Empire, the trade of our Empire from one side of the world to the other. After all, great as the material benefits are, we do not look primarily to them. I think deep down in all our hearts we look to the Empire as the means by which we may hope to see that increase of our race which we believe to be of such inestimable benefit to the world at large; the spread abroad of people to whom freedom and justice are as the breath of their nostrils, of people distinguished, as we would fain hope and believe, above all things, by an abiding sense of duty. If ever the day should come when an appeal to that sense of duty falls on deaf ears among our own kin, that day indeed would be the end of our country and of our Empire, to which you and I have dedicated our very lives.

And, if I may, a few words in conclusion to you workers from all over the country and to the new members of Parliament who sit behind me. We have to-day perhaps the most magnificent opportunity of service to our country that has ever been given to any party. You who have just been elected to the House of Commons are, by the testimony of your fellow-countrymen, their natural leaders for the next four or five years. It is your duty, your primary duty, to educate that great democracy of which we are all a part. Let me put this to you, to all of us who have passed through the experience of the recent election. Can there be anything that stands before us more clearly or poignantly than the groups of our fellow-countrymen who listened in faith to what we had to say, who trusted us and have given us their confidence, and who believe in their hearts that we have come to London to do what we can to right those things that are hard and difficult for them, and to help them in what is always the difficult struggle that they have in life? Don't ever lose touch with your constituency; don't ever mistake the voice of the clubman and the voice of the Pressman in London for the voice of the country. It is the country that has returned you; it is the country which will judge you.

I was struck two or three days ago by reading the words of an old Oxford economist, with whom I disagree in almost everything else that he ever wrote. He said: "Consider not only the process by which the machinery of our social condition has been made, but much more the opinion and action which has developed and moulded the character of the English people." Do not ever forget the character of the English people, in which character and in love of which character pursue your work and help them.

I want to see the spirit of service to the whole nation the birthright of every member of the Unionist Party—Unionist in the sense that we stand for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago; union among our own people to make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world. I urge on you all as workers in that great Unionist Party to render all the service you can to the common weal in the districts in which you live. There is always work and to spare for human betterment in every parish in the country. And to all those workers for the Party and members of Parliament, I say this in conclusion: You cannot better serve your Party, and through the Party your country, than in dedicating your lives to that service.

TRUTH AND POLITICS

ON INAUGURATION AS LORD RECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

6th November, 1925

The first duty of a Lord Rector is to thank his constituents for the honour they have done him in electing him to that great and historic office.

But beyond the honour, of which they are no less conscious than he, lies the unique service unconsciously rendered to a Rector who is normally immersed in public affairs.

Though "to be at sea" is a phrase used by landsmen to denote instability of purpose and absence of sense of direction, it must be acknowledged that we landsmen have much to learn when we are at sea, if we will. We learn that there are two things on a ship that are not done. A sailor does not spit on the deck, thereby strengthening his self-control and saving unnecessary work for someone else; nor does he speak to the man at the wheel, thereby leaving him to devote his whole mind to his task and increasing the probability of the ship arriving at or near her destination. In matters of State, having selected a man for the wheel, we do everything we can to distract his attention and to prevent him, if possible, from having time in which he may consider for a moment where he is going.

Therein is the service of which I spoke, that you compel your Rector to make time, though it be out of fragments, in which he may reflect on the course of national affairs in a more objective and detached way than is usually possible for him. You force him to pause and ponder and present his reflections for your consideration. It is not surprising if the result is that his thoughts should turn towards you and that he should find himself driven to ask: what is the special contribution which men and women educated at our universities can make to the world?

You who are students in Edinburgh have a high reputation to maintain. It was of this University that it was once declared by a competent witness:

"I may truly say that it is not easy to conceive a university where industry is more general, where reading is more fashionable, where indolence and ignorance are more disreputable."

I hope you recognise yourselves to-day in the words of Sir James Macintosh, written a hundred years ago.

I shall not pitch my expectations too high. The fraction of life which you spend at the University is small, and there have been other forces continuously at work before you came here moulding your lives. It is the education received unconsciously that counts for most in the making of a man. The University can only work within the limits of the human material which it receives from the homes and schools of the country. It can provide a favourable soil for the developing intelligence under the supervision of expert gardeners, but it cannot grow figs from thistles.

The University is a rich storehouse of knowledge, and some fragments of its treasures do somehow find their way into the possession of the students. The University is also an instrument for increasing knowledge, and some students, a small proportion, do contrive to add to the accumulated learning of the ages. They settle "οτι's business, properly base ουν, and give us the doctrine of the enclitic γε."

But, besides, or rather in the process of, transmitting and increasing knowledge and training ability, the University is a school of character. That is true not only of the common room and the playing field; it is also true of the lecture room and laboratory.

The ideal character is a harmony of many virtues, and it is a tradition amongst us to give to truthfulness the position of the cardinal virtue. Hence, for example, the curious power of Lord Althorp, who was known to have said to the House of Commons, "I know this to be right. I cannot remember why—but you may take it that it is so," and they believed him. And if the noblest exercise of freedom is the pursuit of truth, the best equipment for the search is to be truthful. The inculcation of the practice of truthfulness, no less than the acquisition of knowledge, is the motive force of our educational system. The student is here to learn habits of accuracy in measurement, precision in statement, honesty in handling evidence, fairness in presenting a cause—in a word, to be true in word and deed. That is the goal of British education, because it is recognised that no man can be a worthy citizen whose word cannot be trusted and whose deed is compounded of deceit.

Men think by means of words and communicate with each other through their medium. This "most noble and profitable invention of speech is man's proudest triumph over nature, without which there had been amongst men neither commonwealth nor society, nor contract nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves."[1] Words are the currency of love and friendship, of making and marketing, of peace and war. Nations are bound and loosed by them. Three or four simple words can move waves of emotion through the hearts of multitudes like great tides of the sea: "Lest we forget." "Patriotism is not enough."

There is a well-known passage in the writings of John Stuart Mill, where he doubts whether all the inventions of machinery have on balance added to human happiness. I am always reminded by that passage of another in John Locke, where he is so impressed with the defects of language as to affirm that if anyone "shall well consider the errors and obscurity, the mistakes and confusion, that are spread in the world by an ill-use of words, he will find some reason to doubt whether language, as it has been employed, has contributed more to the improvement or hindrance of knowledge among mankind."[2]

The Scottish are cautious, it has been said, because they have lived with one another for so long. You are capable of practising great restraint and economy in the use of words, but I do not think that even you will go as far as Locke and wish to put us all into a Trappist monastery. Such knowledge as there is in the world has been built up by the help of words. A civilisation without words is perhaps conceivable, but under it the life of man would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But if we cannot go all the way with Locke, we can agree with his successor, Bentham, that "error is never so difficult to be destroyed as when it has its roots in language." "Improper terms are the chains which bind men to unreasonable practices. Every improper term contains the germ of fallacious propositions; it forms a cloud, which conceals the nature of the thing, and presents a frequently invincible obstacle to the discovery of truth."[3] It is in a similar mood that Mr. Wells complains of the fluidity of thought and the fixity of language. Master of English as he is, he finds its terms solid, opaque, and stable, and therefore "incurably inaccurate." That is not merely a defence of philosophic doubt, but a conclusion of despair which, if we accepted it literally, would close all universities to-morrow and destroy all foundations of belief.

No small part of education lies in learning the right use of words, in tracing their birth and behaviour, in fitting them closely to facts and ideas. That is why you are here invited to study the Humanities not only for their own fair sake, but for the discipline which is experienced in the manipulation of two of the finest instruments ever devised to express the minds of men. Through the Humanities you should learn not only something of the polity and law, the poetry and eloquence of the ancient world, but you should learn the value of the words of your own native tongue. No man who can do good Greek and Latin prose can deceive people with words except he sin against the light. He can no longer be deceived himself. He will know that to use words equivocally is prostitution. Nor does he need to use italics in speech or writing. Headlines cannot hypnotise him, and the latest sensation is already stale.

Through mathematics we learn on the very threshold a lesson which, if universally known and applied, would prevent most of the ills to which the world is heir. To know and realise that two and two make four and can in no circumstances make anything else is to be equipped with knowledge that will save us daily from mistakes, unpleasant to ourselves, and possibly disastrous to others. I know that some of Euclid's axioms, which appear to common sense to be necessary, are now declared by mathematicians "to derive their appearance of necessity from our mere familiarity with actual space, and not from any a priori logical foundation. By imagining worlds in which these axioms are false, the mathematicians have used logic to show the possibility of spaces differing from that in which we live."[4] But even these daring speculators assure us that in any possible world they feel that two and two would be four and that this is not a mere fact, but a necessity to which everything actual and possible must conform.[5] Whatever be the case in a world of Einsteins, or in Russia, over most part of the world two and two are still believed to make four. Without that knowledge or in the belief that two and two may in a certain environment make five, you may indeed upset a constitution, but you will never make an engine, nor, if you were in possession of a ship, could you bring it into any port in the world. Those, therefore, who would navigate the ship of State, if they would avoid shipwreck, had better base their sailing orders on this platitudinous verity.

Through all your studies of the physical sciences you are being taught a similar lesson. Principles are constantly being subjected to the test of fact, purified in the furnace of experiment. Working hypotheses are being confronted with masses of detail, and as a result are discarded, revised, or quickened. You strive to compel the material facts of the world to reveal their nature, you watch and record their behaviour, and truth is the accurate statement of the facts observed. By means of this discipline you learn that things are what they are and the consequences will be what they will be. In other words, that as you sow you will reap, and a wrong combination of elements will send you through the roof when your desire is to remain with your feet firmly planted on the earth.

Lastly, there is the study of the ultimate science, the science of sciences, of moral philosophy for which this University has been so justly famous. There was a time when it might be said that the chief export of Scotland, measured in values, was metaphysics. It was to this University that more than one Prime Minister came from England to sit at the feet of Dugald Stewart. The penetration of English practice by Scottish reflection was one of the most fruitful results of the Union, and is still happily proceeding in the person of our distinguished Chairman (the Earl of Balfour).

Philosophy forces the student to examine the assumptions on which all the other sciences rest, the hypotheses by which they all work. You ask not only How? but Why? You challenge all appearance; you doubt science itself in your search for reality. Magic, myth, ritual, religion; the mysterious and emotional story of human belief; the theological speculations of mankind; the very instrument by which man knows anything at all—all are cross-examined as facts of experience, and an attempt is made to interpret them and fit them into some coherent explanation of our life and destiny. You cannot go any distance on this road without arriving at the distinction between true assertions and false ones, and you will not need to travel much farther before reaching the distinction between right and wrong.

Throughout all these activities in which you are engaged in this University there is the double motive of acquiring knowledge and learning to think truly. The latter is the more important task. The greatest service this or any university can render the modern world is to discharge well this duty which is laid upon it, and to send forth year after year generations of young men and women who have not only a stock of ideas but minds which turn on the poles of truth. Ability to read is not synonymous with ability to reflect on what is read. Better to doubt methodically than to think capriciously. Education that has merely taught people to follow a syllogism without enabling them to detect a fallacy has left them in constant peril. And as with the fallacy so with its near relation, the half truth. For though it has been accepted through the ages that half a loaf is better than no bread, half a truth is not only not better than no truth, it is worse than many lies, and the slave of lies and half truths is ignorance. Ignorance, static and inert, is bad, but ignorance in motion, as Goethe once observed, is the most terrible force in nature, for it may destroy in its passage the accumulated mental and material capital of generations.

You will need this habit of truth when you leave this home of learning and reflection. It is our greatest national asset. The industries and commerce of this country, its enormous foreign trade, involving innumerable transactions with known and unknown customers, has been made possible not only by the enterprise of our merchants, but by their integrity. There is nowhere in the world, I believe, a higher standard of commercial honour than that which prevails in this country. And the same is true of our Courts of Law, which enjoy a world-wide prestige, nowhere better exemplified than in the Admiralty Court, to which shipowners from all over the world resort, even in cases where no British ship is in the collision or salvage operation.

Why is it, then, that when we turn to politics a lower standard of habitual truthfulness is alleged to prevail than in the world of science or of business? I am not now talking of this country more than another. I think our reputation is at least as good as that of any other country in this regard, and it has grown in the last 100 years, and is growing. The scientist is assumed to be a truth-lover; honesty is proverbially the best policy in business; but politicians have been despised for hypocrisy and dishonesty in all the literatures of the Old World and the New. I open the work of a brilliant Cambridge scholar and theologian, and this is what I read on the first page:

"In regard to truth, the more one reads of man's notions about the meaning and method of civil society, the more often is one inclined in despair to say that truth has as little to do with politics as it has with most politicians."[6]

And this is the verdict of a learned foreign observer at the end of an immense treatise on the pathology of party government: "To the low types which the human race has produced from Cain down to Tartuffe, the age of democracy has added a new one—the politician."

What is the explanation of this evil reputation which attaches not to politicians of one party, but to the whole race? Primarily, I suppose, it is due to the fact that ever since States began to be they have been in peril and have trusted to force for their safety. War has been their normal history. Savagery has never been far away from the realm of law. How long is it since that ceased to be true in Scotland? With war and the preparation for war go the stratagems of diplomacy, the dropping of the ordinary code of morals, a holiday for truth, and an aftermath of cynicism. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues, wrote the author of Leviathan. The statesman's goal is the preservation of the State, and reasons of State have been held to justify all policies whatsoever. In the arena of international rivalry and conflict men have placed patriotism above truthfulness as the indispensable virtue of statesmen. "When the entire safety of a country is at stake, no consideration of what is just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or shameful, must intervene,"[7] is a copybook maxim from the pages of a well-known exponent of the art of Government. And it was a statesman much nearer our own time who said to a group of friends: "If we had done for ourselves the things which we are doing for Italy, we should be great rascals."[8] That sounds less shocking to our ears to-day than it would have done a dozen years ago. Machiavelli's conception of mankind has not been dispelled or disproved. He is, as Lord Acton said, a constant and contemporary influence. He is in all our hearts.

We have recently been celebrating the tercentenary of the publication of the work of Grotius on International Law. Dr. Figgis, the Cambridge historian and divine, whom I quoted a moment ago, points out that the fundamental difference between Machiavelli and Grotius is concerned with the question before us. The contention of Grotius, which is denied by Machiavelli, is that human life is essentially a society, and that certain laws, of which fidelity to plighted word is the most important, are therefore as immutable as human nature. These two thinkers represent two tendencies in our public life. The principles of Machiavelli were accepted in Europe at any rate as late as the days of Cavour and Bismarck. I wish to avoid the twentieth century and examples from among the living. It was the prevailing view for centuries, openly avowed and defended, that you could have one code of morals among nations and another and much more exacting one among individuals, that you could be a Machiavellian abroad and a Christian at home. Whatever may have been our lapses we have never in this country accepted this view in the bald and summary form in which I am putting it. It was, nevertheless, a British Prime Minister who said that "No great country was ever saved by good men," which is perhaps why Lord Acton said that great men were nearly always bad men. But the shifts to which statesmen and diplomatists have resorted in the field of foreign affairs, especially in time of strain or open conflict, have helped to give all politicians a bad name.

The party system is perhaps a contributory cause. The system has its advantages, its team work, its loyalties, and others which I need not stop to describe, especially as the whole subject was most ably analysed by my colleague, Lord Cecil, in his address to the students at Aberdeen a few days ago. To our sporting countrymen it appears a game, and as such it has its rules, and these for the most part are honourably obeyed and are an important help to probity in our public life. But the party system does put a certain embargo on complete frankness of speech in the arena of debate.

But it is to a third explanation that I want to direct your attention for a few minutes more. There is a profound difference in the study of the physical and the human sciences, between the study of particles of matter and of men in society. You cannot measure and weigh, combine and distribute men as you do chemical elements. Spinoza tried something of the sort, but he did not succeed. You remember a famous passage, where he says how he had made it his especial care neither to mock, to bewail, nor to denounce men's actions, but to understand them, how he had tried to consider the emotions and agitations of men's minds, love and hatred, anger and envy, honour and pity, just as a scientist would regard heat and cold, storms and thunder. But though we sometimes speak of rhetoric as hot air, the state is not a cloud, nor, I fear, do we politicians often return in scientific showers the popular vapour which we are said to absorb.[9]

The material of politics is human nature, its motives honourable and base, its appetites for power and for service, its passions, its prejudices, its memories and aspirations. But the politician cannot work with scales and forceps, with test tube and mortar. His instruments are the written and spoken word. Politics can never be an exact science. Democracy is government by discussion, by talk. Politicians must talk, and they cannot to-day, like Pitt, confine their speeches to the House of Commons. The perils of the platform orator have been pointed out from the days of Cleon. Words have lost none of their equivocal character since his day. The difference between the Greek sophist and the modern demagogue, it is said, consists in this: the one displayed his ingenuity by appearing to prove that which his hearers knew to be false, the other displays it by appearing to prove that which his hearers wish to be true.[10] It is the business of the universities to change all this, and they are doing it.

The politician is much nearer in type to the barrister and advocate than to the scientist. The latter has no case to prove, he sits humbly before the facts and lets them speak. The advocate and the politician are more interested in persuasion than in proof. They have a client or a policy to defend. The political audience is not dishonest in itself, nor does it desire or approve dishonesty or misrepresentation in others, but it is an audience only imperfectly prepared to follow a close argument, and the speaker wishes to make a favourable impression, to secure support for a policy. It is easy to see how this may lead to the depreciation of the verbal currency and to the circulation of promises which cannot be cashed.

Closely allied with this is the pressure laid upon the politician in a democratic state to speak while important negotiations are in progress, however inconvenient the moment. The result once more is inevitably to place a veto on complete frankness, and to tempt recourse to words which are nebulous, hesitating, ambiguous, or misleading. Some of us have become as adept as the Prague poet who went to see Béranger in 1847, and had to answer a few questions. Was Prague in Hungary or in Poland? In neither one nor the other. Was Bohemia in Austria or in Germany? In both. Was the Prussian monarchy absolute or conditional? Partly one, partly the other. At last Béranger lost patience: "Frenchmen," he cried, "like things to be clear. What is not clear is not French."[11] If the subject is one of high foreign policy the wrong words may raise issues not settled by dropping pieces of paper in a ballot box but by dropping bombs on cities. That is the essential difference between the methods of politics and of business.

In these directions we may discover some mitigation of the harsh epithets used of the politician.

I come back to where I began. False words, said the dying Socrates, are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Although the use of words may be abused and the fight for their honour may at times seem hopeless, we must never give up the struggle to use them solely in the service of truth. Let us aim at meaning what we say, and saying what we mean. The price man has to pay for the good things he enjoys is constant watchfulness lest they be employed for evil. Has not this been the case from the dawn of history with drink, language, and liberty? Let us—in the language of Leviathan—use perspicuous words, having first snuffed and purged them from ambiguity and made them luminous. Let us take our stand on public right and a law of nations with Grotius rather than with Machiavelli; let us seek to moralise our public intercourse and reduce the area of casuistry and duplicity. That is not only the accepted principle of the best amongst us, but it is, I am sure, in harmony with a widespread instinct in the British people. It asserted itself in August 1914 when it was made plain that ethics was not a branch of politics, but the reverse. It is at the root of our support of the League of Nations at Geneva—a city with which Scotland has had spiritual ties for centuries, and from which your Churches derive their system of regulated freedom. It is truth alone that will "destroy the face of the covering cast over all people and the veil that is spread over all nations" (Isaiah xxv. 7). There is much that is profoundly wrong and remediable in our civilisation, but let us not lightly discard the gains so hardly won from the savagery which so readily besets us. In stretching forth our hands to the farther shore, let us realise that civilisation itself is but the ice formed in process of ages on the turbulent stream of unbridled human passions, and while this ice seemed to our fathers secure and permanent, it has rotted and cracked during the agony of the Great War, and in places the submerged torrent has broken through, leaving fragments in constant collision threatening by their attrition to diminish and ultimately disappear. The more need for you, the lampbearers of your generation, to guide your own steps by the truth, and to light the way for the wandering people of the world.

RHETORIC

AT THE CAMBRIDGE UNION

March, 1924

I sometimes think that possibly a man's views of rhetoric may be coloured according to whether he possesses it or is without it; this may be the reason why Mr. Mitchell Banks, who has made such an eloquent plea, finds himself in opposition to me. I have never been a rhetorician or an orator. I attribute this largely to the fact that, much as I used to enjoy reading speeches, I was greatly struck when I was about eighteen, at coming across a phrase in Froude, "Oratory is the harlot of the arts," illustrated, as Froude could illustrate it, with a wealth of eloquence! There is nothing odd about that, because you will remember that there was no one who fulminated more against rhetoric than Carlyle, probably the greatest rhetorician who ever put pen to paper. I was reading in him only the other day that the best thing man could do was to doom himself to eternal silence, which Carlyle never could do, except when he was smoking a pipe with Tennyson.

Mr. Theobald (the mover of the resolution) made a most characteristic remark in his definition of rhetoric, a definition on which a good deal depends. He defined it as a marshalling of facts which were likely to persuade people. I entirely agree with him, except that he has left out the other half of the sentence, which is the essence of my case: "Concealing the facts which are likely to dissuade people." There is a good deal more in rhetoric than the marshalling of facts, otherwise the Origin of Species would have been the greatest work of rhetoric the world has produced.

To tell the truth needs no art at all, and that is why I always believe in it. We have each attempted our own definition of rhetoric. I would rather define it by illustrations of what I mean by rhetoric, which I regard as one of the greatest dangers of modern civilization. I am going to give you two or three phrases which I call rhetorical phrases, and each of them, to my mind, is pregnant with darkness and confusion. Consider this one of three words from one of the greatest rhetoricians of the ages: "Bulging corn bins." "The democratic control of the means of production" is another. I tried in the House of Commons to get that last phrase translated from rhetorical English into English that I could understand, and the only answer I got was that it was impossible to produce rabbits from a top hat. "Self-determination" is another rhetorical term that may some day lead the nations into a bloody war. That is what rhetoric does. "Homes fit for heroes to live in," and "A world safe for democracy!" These, to my mind, are the quintessence of rhetoric, and it is against rhetoric in this sense that I am going to vote to-night.

I suppose every one will admit that a great rhetorician was Charles Fox, who said something which illustrates my point very clearly: "If a speech reads well it must be a damned bad speech." I mean by this that Mr. Mitchell Banks will read his speech to-morrow morning with less pleasure than that with which he heard the cheers for it to-night. Rhetoric is meant to get the vote of a division or at an election, but God help the man who tries to think on it!

Such speeches as have been quoted in support of rhetoric could not be delivered nowadays. The character and temper of the audience and the people have so changed that what may have been possible for Macaulay is impossible to-day. The rhetoric of to-day, the rhetoric we have to consider, is the rhetoric of the "Bulging corn bins." I suppose that this gift has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth than all the guns and explosives that have ever been invented. If we look back only over the last century, was there anything more responsible for the French Revolution than the literary rhetoric of Rousseau, fanned by the verbal rhetoric of Robespierre and others, just as the Russian Revolution was due to the rhetoric of Kerensky—flatulent rhetoric which filled the bellies of his people with the east wind?

That appalling twopenny-ha'penny gift of fluency, with the addition of a certain amount of training and of imagination in word-spinning, is the kind of rhetoric which stirs the emotions of the ignorant mob and sets it moving. It is because such forces can be set in motion by rhetoric that I have no regard for it, but a positive horror. Very rarely do we find the gift given to men who have wisdom and constructive power, and for the time being it would seem that it was in this world a force far beyond its merits, although in the more advanced countries I sometimes hope that it is past its prime. At least I believe that in England and Scotland at any rate rhetoric of the kind I have tried to describe no longer makes that appeal to the people.

I think it may be that the people of this country are getting just the least bit suspicious of the literary rhetoric of our Sunday Press, and of our daily Press, and that this very wholesome dread, this wholesome nervousness, is being transferred from the Press to the platform. I think that throughout this country there is to-day a far greater desire than there has ever been before to hear plain, unadorned statements of cases. I believe that anyone who has taken part in recent elections—a few constituencies excepted—will agree with me that one of the most remarkable features is the way in which large audiences all over the country will listen to a statement of a case, whether they agree with it or not, provided they feel that the statement is made honestly and fairly, and with due consideration for the opposite view.

Let us always remember this: when we come to big things we do not need rhetoric. Truth, we have always been told, is naked. She requires very little clothing. After all, St. Paul was no orator, and yet his speeches and his teaching seem to have spread and to have lasted a long time. I cannot help feeling that if we were to go back two thousand years I would back St. Paul and the results of his teaching against all the rhetoric of a Sunday paper or of the leading orators of the age.

If there is one thing which those who have been in any other profession than the Bar distrust more than another it is the eloquent man. In the business world, other things being equal, the man who has the power of talking is not the man who gets promotion. To be able to express oneself in business is always to be written down as being not quite first-class, and it is a joyous fact that in most of the towns of the kingdom we find that the men of business who talk most in such places as Chambers of Commerce are not the men who are making a success of the big businesses in the country. From this I argue that it is not necessarily the man most fluent of speech to whom we should entrust the destinies of the country.