The Course of Social Reform and Political Psychology

Abstract

A little learning is dangerous, and superficial observation of political phenomena is equally dangerous. It tends to pessimism and misanthropy. A distinguished English churchman once said that he dreaded the approach of a political campaign, as the intellectual dishonesty, the hypocrisy, the melodramatic sensationalism which characterize campaigns caused one to despair of democracy, if not of human nature. Do not partisan orators recklessly bandy charges of corruption, selfishness, incapacity? Do not politicians construct platforms merely to catch votes, without any intention of carrying out their promises? Do not legislatures misrepresent and betray the people at the command of special interests? Are not good bills smothered and defeated, and bad bills enacted in spite of vehement protests from reformers? Are not bribes offered and accepted? Are not voters bought? Is not blackmail levied systematically? An appalling roll of exposed and disgraced legislators, a series of scandals and disclosures, would seem to leave no room for any but affirmative answers. What, then, are we to conclude? That all, or nearly all, politicians are liars and tricksters? Mr. H. Belloc, one of the younger, abler, and more independent of the British Radicals, recently wrote, apropos of the late general election on the issue of the peers and their veto, a very gloomy article on parliamentary government in England. We quote the following passage: Men do not only say (as they have always said) that the politician upon this side or that has in view some useful compromise when he uses such and such an argument; men go so far as to believe that the advocacy is merely advocacy without any principle whatever behind it; they are not surprised to see a direct revolution in a particular man's policy take place within twenty-four hours, and again another revolution within a month. Where raillery and a sort of good-humored cynicism used to be the salt of