POLITICAL SUPERSTITIONS. T HE discussion in the United States as to
the proposal to put up President Cleveland for a third term, contrary, it is alleged, to Washington's obiter dictum that a third term should never be thought of for the President, interests us rather as showing the tenacity of political superstition, than in its bearing on the issue of the Presidential election itself. We suppose that General Washington's remark was made in the interest of that fresh blood which he thought the great office of President of the Republic required in order to prevent the Republic from falling under the sway of a sort of elective Monarch. But there are surely cases in which an elective Monarch is just what might best suit a Republic that had settled down into quiet and orderly grooves of political habit. What should we say to a constitutional principle rendering it impossible to have any particular Prime Minister for more than eight years at most ? Should we not regard it as a political superstition, and get rid of it as soon as we could ? What would the Gladstonians have thought of a constitutional principle which would have rendered it essential for Mr. Gladstone to resign in 1882 because eight years of his office of Premier would then have run out ? Unionists might have said, that in that case we should have been spared the sudden right-about-face of 1885. But there are very few great men who grow more audacious and revolutionary as they grow older, and Washington's objection to a third term was, we suspect, founded on a fear not of too revolutionary a President, but of a much too cautious and conservative President. At all events, in relation to minor matters no English con- stituency ever rejected a representative because he was too old. Wolverhampton is as proud, in a modest way, of its Villiers as the Liberal party was of its Gladstone. And the longer a Member has sat for a particular constituency, so much the longer, as a general rule, is he likely to sit, unless his politics change, or his health breaks down. Constituencies at least are not afraid of giving their Members third or fourth or fifth terms, nor are parties afraid of seeing the same leaders in Office year after year and Parliament after Parliament. If it is different in the United States, it is not so much because the people desire change as because they cling with a sort of superstitious tenacity to George Washington's authority on a question of this sort. If he had said just the contrary,—that a good servant, when thoroughly proved, should be preferred to any servant who had not been proved,— his authority would have had more weight for that conclusion than for the other. It is the Conservatism of the people of the United States, not their love of change, which enshrines General Washington's probably rather hasty counsel in the unwritten law of the United States.
For our own part, we do not like those hard and fast rules which deprive a nation of the liberty of choice where they would otherwise have grasped at the chance of showing the loyalty and confidence with which a particular Minister had inspired them. Even the rule that superannuates great administrative officers at a certain age, which has much more to be said for it, for age does undoubtedly impair the elasticity and vigour of all but the strongest characters, is a dangerous one, when you happen to be dealing with those select lives which are often much more energetic at seventy or eighty, than others less vigorous are at fifty or sixty. General von Moltke or Marshal Radetzky were better soldiers in old age than most of their brother officers were when twenty years younger. And Germany would certainly have had reason to regret bitterly any bard and fast rule which would have deprived her of the great leader who directed her armies in the war of 1870. The best that can be said for hard and fast rules of superannuation is that they give excellent opportunities for change where a man, though he is gaining experience, is losing force, with age, and perhaps also losing that vivacity of memory which is essential to the happiest use of long experience. Worn-out men do not really profit by experience, and perhaps in the case of appoint- ments, where you must look to the average effect of a rule rather than to all its individual effects, a law of super- annuation is required. But this should never be of the cast-iron kind, which renders it impossible to choose the best man for a very high office merely because he does not satisfy all the requirements of a rule made for its general usefulness rather than for its effect on the selection of a great leader in war or peace. In reality, there is no region in which superstition is more influential and more often injurious than in politics. We were very near committing a most fatal blunder, when we were urged to apply the principle of competitive examinations to the native races in India, and to fill our higher services there with men whose memories are crammed with European facts and dates and axioms, but whose nerve and instinct and presence of mind in moments of danger, can no more be tested by competi- tive examinations, than by the agility of their movements or the regularity of their features. Again, what could have been a greater folly than to hasten on the conces- sion of representative institutions to a number of peoples who know no more of constitutional habits of mind and principle, than they know of Egyptian hieroglyphics, or of the other side of the moon. Lord Salisbury was wrong in suggesting that the Irish people at all resemble Hottentots in their incapacity for representative institutions, for up to a certain point the Irish are perhaps as skilful in wielding political institutions as any people on earth ; indeed, a great deal too skilful, for they make them first- rate instruments of attack rather than first-rate instru- ments of self-regulation. But it is quite certain that we could not do the natives of India a greater mischief than by trying to endow them with representative institutions before they have learned either what to combine for, or how to combine. You might as well try to teach wingless birds to fly, or a blind man to be a marksman. Political super- stition shows itself in nothing so much as in putting full confidence in general principles which are really useful for one stage of political education, without taking care that the people to whom you apply them have reached that stage. It is like recommending Lord Bacon's or La Rochefou- cauld's worldly apophthegms to a child of four, or distri- buting Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Maxims" to an Eskimo tribe. By people of very narrow experience political wisdom,—real political wisdom for themselves,— is treated as a sort of charm or amulet for all nations, which will bring political salvation to those nations, just as a lucky stone is supposed to save a man from drowning. And indeed this was the kind of political superstition which was not far, a few years ago, from undermining all the practical usefulness of our rule in India. But even in Matters affecting their own interest, nations of great political experience are by no means free from this sort of superstition. When Artemus Ward said that the earth continued its revolution on its axis " subject to the Constitution of the United States," he touched the weak point in the American mind, which makes a sort of fetish of a wise political arrangtment, and elevates it to the same level as a law of nature. And our own supreme confidence in Parliamentary pre- cedent, in the positive moral duty of reading Bill three times, and discussing it over and over again in Committee and on the Report, was till lately hardly less of a super- stition than the American reverence for their written Constitution ; though of late years we have begun to have our doubts of the almost divine authority of these long-winded methods of procedure. The introduction of the Closure was a great blow at this almost abject constitutional superstition, and now there is perhaps more danger of our disregarding precedent too much, than of our holding by it too anxiously. Still, both we and our cousins in the United States should remember that the Constitution (both written and unwritten) was made for men, and not men for the Constitution, and that it is very unwise to commit ourselves too far to Hiles of thumb,— for they are little more, which sometimes 'deprive us of a first-rate ruler by their rigidity, whom it would be im- possible to pass over if we had not thiown dust in our own eyes by consecrating so elaborately the wisdom of Washington or the statesmanship of Gladstone.
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