POLITICAL. DIAGNOSIS.
[COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA EY THE Independent.] IT has been said in the realm of medicine that diagnosis is the only thing that matters. If you can come to know the nature of the patient's illness, you have placed yourself in a position to do for him all that science can do. In other words, the next step is merely to apply the remedies which experience and research point out as the way of cure. That is a generalization, and so, of course, not wholly correct ; but it has not more, but perhaps a smaller percentage of absolute error than most generalizations.
That diagnosis is the thing that matters most is as true in politics as in medicine. The statesman who succeeds is the statesman who best understands his patient's case. That done, the application of the most suitable of the available remedies is a comparatively easy task. To put it in another way, where the political physician generally goes wrong is in his understanding of what ails the State. When he is at fault as to the nature of the trouble no other qualities will make up for it. Constructive statesmanship, learning in social science, in jurisprudence, and in economics, oratorical power, the gift of managing men—none of these things, though all are, of course, important adjuncts, affords any substitute for the prime and essential gift of knowing what is the matter with the body corporate. You must understand before you can treat.
Plenty of good examples occur to me to support this theory, and to show that the man of genius without the gift of diagnosis fails in politics, while the much less inspired man succeeds just because he has this gift of diagnosis. Bacon, for example, as all his political writings show, failed because he did not instinctively understand. His observation of men, as of things, was quick and poignant, his power of ratiocination was unequalled, and there was a touch of magic in the pre- sentation of his case. Yet he was hopeless as a statesman. Read that marvellous piece of political dialectic, his treatise on whether there should or should not be a war with Spain—a treatise to which full justice has never been done—and you will see at once how little understanding there is of the mentality either of the Englishman or of the Spaniard. It is as divergent from reality as when a celibate ecclesiastic writes about marriage.
Burke is an even better example. He had each gift of nature and of art, a mighty brain, a glowing tongue, a power to touch every subject with passion. Yet there was no episode in his career in which he fully understood his countrymen. If he had understood he would have been the greatest of our statesmen. He was just wrong in his diagnosis of England during the war with America. He was almost equally wrong in his diagnosis of the Indian situation and the attitude of the country towards the East India Company and its policy. He was utterly wrong, though apparently nearly right, in his view of the country's feelings about the French Revolution. The letters on the Regicide Peace are in many ways full of brilliant insight. They are blows that are splendidly delivered except- for the one fact that they just miss the bar of white-hot metal and only hit the edge of the anvil.
Take two other men much inferior to Burke in intellect and insight—Walpole and Melbourne. Both of them had the gift of political diagnosis in a high degree, and both owed their success to that gift. But perhaps the crowning example in the English-speaking world is - Gladstone.. He had the great moral and intellectual qualities of Burke, and with them a much stronger judgment and a much nobler nature, and these high qualities gave him his tremendous position in his own country. Yet again and again he failed to understand the English people fully. It was only because of his supreme power of leadership and what the eighteenth . century would have called his " piety of purpose " that he did the great things that he did do. Yet one more. example may be pointed out. Jefferson was a man of extra- ordinary power and brilliance, and had the gift of political imagination wonderfully well developed. Yet, if judged at the bar of History on the issues of supreme statesmanship, he must be judged a defaulter, On the other hand, Mr. Lincoln might almost be cited as the supreme example of what the gift of political diagnosis will do for a man who possesses the other great qualities of eloquence, passion, purity of intent,. knowledge and judgment. Lincoln won in the terrific struggle of the Civil War because with an instinct that was almost supernatural he exactly diagnosed the. causes of the crisis in the common heart of the country. It was because of this accurate diagnosis that he saw. that, though the problem of slavery moved his own heart, and apparently that of the North also, far more than any other consideration, he must put. in the ,forefront of. the battle, not the question of slavery but the question of Unionism, and that as long as he could, or. perhaps L ought. to say, as long as it was necessary, he must keep the Union always to the front and the slavery problem in the background. In the last resort, no doubt, the question of Union involved, or rather included,. the question of the abolition of slavery. But there were plenty of people who did not realize this, though they did understand the problem of national unity, There- fore he made the question of the Union the supreme issue, knowing that his opponents, whose mood he. diagnosed as well.as that of bis own people, would find it hardest to fight against the dissolution of the Union. But, if they lost the fight over the Union, they would also have lost on the slavery issue. His accurate diagnosis. of the aspirations of both North and South made him fight on the ground where the North was bound ultimately to win. He set a magnificent example to the whole world. His was statesmanship in its very highest and most sublimated form. Walt Whitman in the later part of his life said that he had come to think that the greatest thing about Lincoln was that he discovered a new political virtue—that of Unionism. That was true ; but lie did not discover it in the abstract, but as the result of his accurate diagnosis. He found it in the hearts of people., and used it, like one of the modern " cultures," to raise the resisting power of the patient. against the terrible. sepsis of slavery.
And now for a modern instance, and one which is well worth noting. What has brought Mr. Ramsay MacDonald' and his Government to grief has been faulty diagnosis. Mr. MacDonald has great qualities of leadership, and he has also in many ways. the mind of the statesman, but it is, and here again he resembles Mr. Gladstone, the mind of a Celtic statesman. That special quality has given him, as it has given others, a certain power of fascination over the Englishman, for the Englishman, though his mind works so differently from that of the Celt, is always apt to be spellbound by a twilight inspiration. But, though in this respect the Celtic politician has an advan- tage, he has a very serious handicap in his want of under- standing the mind of the English people, that is, in his inability to diagnose their case. There could-not be a., better example of this than in Mr. Ramsay -MacDonald's, extraordinary blunder: Over the Campb.elLease.• To the ordinary Englishman, indeed, it seems so incredible that he looks for some unpleasant explanation of the incident, though probably none such really exists. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald actually refused an enquiry by the House of Commons ! But anyone who professes to know any- thing about our political conditions ought to know that if you are out, as every Prime Minister must be out, to gain the confidence of the electors, to refuse enquiry is the sure way to forfeit it. Enquiry is not merely the guiding principle of the British invention of " govern- ment by discussion," but is woven by a thousand threads into the tapestry of the Constitution. It is not for nothing that the House of Commons is called " the Grand Inquest of the Nation." Parliament's right to enquire into any- thing and everything from the income of the Sovereign to the luncheon interval allowed to junior clerks in public offices has never been challenged without damage to those who have refused it. As it was pointed out again and again to Mr. MacDonald before he finally refused an enquiry into the Government's handling of the Campbell case, the Unionist Government, though disliking it, granted an' enquiry into the Jameson case the moment it was asked for. The idea that it was dishonouring them, or doubting their word in asking for an enquiry, was never seriously raised. The same thing happened over the Marconi case. Mr. Asquith and his Government took it for granted that when once the question was raised seriously in the House of Commons the only course for the Government, like all Governments before it, was to say that there should be an enquiry. They knew either by precedent or instinctively that the refusal to submit to enquiry is always taken by the English people, though, no doubt, often quite unfairly, as an admission of guilt, or, at any rate, as an admission that there is something to conceal.
The British people have that true mark of masterfulness and sovereignty about them which is shown in the impera- tive demand to know the facts, and not to have anything kept from them. They may not want to interfere with or to dominate unfairly their instruments and agents, but they will not have concealment. This, by the way, was a notable fact about Queen Victoria, and showed her impersonification of her native country. She knew the limitations of her powers as a Constitutional Sovereign, and in the last resort never made any attempt to exag- gerate them, or to undermine the House of Commons and its supremacy in affairs. One thing, however, she always insisted upon, and that was to know the facts. She would not tolerate being kept in the dark. She claimed an indefeasible right to 'know what her Ministers were doing. In the same way, though with a more intense and greater sense of ultimate power, the British people refuse to allow concealment, however innocent the cause and however strong may seem a plea of injured amour propre.
In a sense that plea only makes the British people more angry. It wounds them at a very vital spot—their pride in their sense of justice. " You know, or ought to know, that we shall be perfectly just and fair to you when we know the facts. You are not being judged by your political opponents, but by us. We shall not bother much about the actual report or judgment one way or the other. We shall go by the facts disclosed at the enquiry. To say that we have no right to know them is a denial of our rights to which we will never submit." What is the lesson of this incursion of mine into political pathology ? It can, I think, be put in a sentence.
The statesman should look to the instincts of the people to whom he offers his guidance and governance, and not :to strict logic. .He must not, .of course, trust merely to his own instincts, unless he is very sure that his mind works like the mind of the majority of his countrymen. If he has the Celtic mood of mind, he must be particularly careful to cultivate as far as is possible the art of diagnosis- : for it is an art, and, like so many of the arts, is based on instinct. To cultivate it he cannot do better than study the political writings of the great Lord Halifax, the Trimmer. He never held a great office, but nevertheless he exercised immense influence, because he had in a high degree the gift for political diagnosis. In him, indeed, the art may be said to have reached its zenith.
J. ST. 1.0E STRACIIEY.
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