SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XII. No. 286 



earnest, devoted : the virtue of a politician is to be stauncli and 

 zealous in the cause he attaches himself to; and that sort of cold 

 indifference which seems implied in impartiality appears not only 

 not a duty, but actually a sin, in politics. 



You do not mean, I am sure, when you undertake to be impar- 

 tial, that you will for the future cease to be earnest and eager 

 politicians ; that you will renounce all strong, clear, sharply cut 

 opinions ; or even that you will for the future regard the strife of 

 political parties with indifference, as if it no longer concerned you, 

 much less with contempt, as if you were raised above it. And yet 

 how can this be ? How can you be impartial and partial at the 

 same time .' How can you at once maintain the passionless ob- 

 jectivity that befits the student, and the ardor, the unflinching 

 decision, without which a politician is good for nothing? 



There is no real difficulty here, and yet there is so much appar- 

 ent difficulty that it is worth while to dwell for a moment upon the 

 point. By partiality we do not mean strong and decided opinions. 

 Of course, when you hear very unsparing and rancorous language 

 used, ver)' uncompromising courses recommended, you may sup- 

 pose that you are among strong partisans ; that is, partial people. 

 But it is not necessarily the case. Opinions formed with perfect 

 impartiality may be strong and uncompromising. The strongest 

 opinions are often the most impartial, even when such opinions are 

 most strongly and passionately expressed. I was surprised, the 

 other day, to hear a friend say of M. Taine's book on the French 

 Revolution that it was evidently partial. He said so because M. 

 Taine has taken a very unfavorable view of the Jacobin party, and 

 has spoken of them in very unsparing language. But does this, 

 by itself, prove him to be partial ? If so, what are we to do when 

 we have to deal with great crimes and great criminals ? Are we 

 not to describe, them as they are ? Partiality means a deviation 

 from the truth. When, then, the truth is extreme, terrible, mon- 

 strous, — and this is sometimes the case, — partiality would be 

 shown, not by strong, but by weak language. If the Jacobins 

 really were the monsters M. Taine believes them to have been, it 

 was impartiality, not partiality, to describe them as he has done. 

 Everything depends on the fact, on the evidence. Now my 

 friend put the question of fact entirely on one side. He inferred 

 the partiality of M. Taine immediately from the warmth of his 

 language. What struck me was that he did not profess to have 

 examined the evidence and found the charges brought against the 

 Jacobins groundless. He only argued : The picture is extreme, 

 therefore it must be partial. M. Taine writes with strong indigna- 

 tion, therefore we are not to trust him. 



Now, I say, indignation, strong feeling, is not necessarily partial- 

 ity, and therefore strong language is no proof of partiality. Par- 

 tiality is the sacrifice of truth to a party. In order, therefore, to 

 convict a writer of partiality, you must show that he was connected 

 with a party at the time when he made his investigation, and that 

 this has prevented him from discerning the facts or estimating 

 them accurately. And yet M. Taine tells us that when he formed 

 his estimate of the French Revolution he had no party connection. 

 All the passion he now shows has been aroused in him, so he says, 

 by the study of the facts, and therefore it cannot have prevented 

 him from studying them properly. Nor does it now prevent him 

 from seeing them ; on the contrary, he feels it precisely because he 

 sees them so clearly. Of course, my friend had a perfect right to 

 arrive at a different conclusion. But, even supposing M. Taine to 

 have made a great mistake about the Jacobin party, he would not, 

 I think, be fairly chargeable with partiality. For partiality does 

 not merely mean error or exaggeration ; it means specifically that 

 kind of error or exaggeration which is produced by judging of 

 things under a fixed prejudice, under a party bias. 



This, at any rate, is what you mean when you undertake to study 

 politics impartially. You mean merely that you will consider the 

 facts without bias. You do not undertake that when you have 

 considered them, no strong feeling or passion shall arise in your 

 mind. You will not begin your studies with a political bias, but 

 you do not undertake that your studies shall not give you a strong 

 political bias. Nay, your object is to acquire a firm political creed. 

 And what reason is there to think that this creed, when you have 

 found it, will not be as sharply cut and positive as those old party 

 creeds which you refuse to regard as authoritative } There is noth- 



ing in the impartiality you aim at which is inconsistent with the 

 strongest feeling or the most decisive action. 



In a country like this, where party passion has been so much in- 

 dulged and has burned so hotly, the opinion, the political creed, of 

 most people has been imposed upon them like the religion in which 

 they were born. They have lived in it as an atmosphere of which 

 they were scarcely conscious ; or, if they have become aware that 

 questions have another side, that opinions different from their own 

 are tenable and even plausible, they have soon found that it was 

 not so easy for them to change their atmosphere ; that they broke 

 ties, disappointed hopes, suffered inconvenience, perhaps incurred 

 serious loss, when they tried to establish an independent political 

 position for themselves. You do not, I suppose, complain of this. 

 You recognize that political activity imposes a certain amount of 

 restraint upon individual opinion. I, for my part, should go as far 

 as most people in admitting that there must be compromise, that 

 there must be party-subordination, that we must sometimes waive a 

 conviction, sometimes stifle a misgiving. Practical life has exigen- 

 cies which the theorist is slow to admit. It would be so delight- 

 ful if we could always act simply in accordance with our convic- 

 tions. But, alas! it happens sometimes — nay, my historical 

 studies lead me to think it most commonly happens — that men 

 have to act on the spur of the moment, and must act with decision,, 

 when they are tolerably well aware that they have no solid opinion. 

 Through the greater part of history, it seems to me, political action 

 has been a leap in the dark. And yet the leap had to be taken. 

 The problem has generally been, not, What is it right to do ? but. 

 Granted we do not know what is right, yet since we must do some- 

 thing, what will it be safest on the whole for us to do.' In such 

 circumstances the best course of action is but a make-shift, and a 

 rude organization is prepared to regulate it. We select a leader in 

 whom we hope we may confide, we rally round him and surrender 

 our opinions to his. He shapes for us a creed to which we resolve 

 to adhere, and which we try to regard as true enough for practical 

 purposes. And then it becomes a virtue to be loyal to our party, 

 and soon to be too nice about the party-creed, to indulge in inde- 

 pendent thought or in impartiality, — all this begins to seem un- 

 practical, perverse, fatal to party discipline, tending to confusion. 

 Is not this unavoidable ? Must we not make the best of it ? 



But now when such party-discipline is maintained for several 

 generations together, the alloy of falsehood that was there from 

 the beginning accumulates, until the quantity of it becomes prodi- 

 gious. In the end, the heady, drugged liquor that we drink mounts 

 to the brain ; the fog of falsehood that settles over us, fed con- 

 tinually by speeches in Parliament, speeches at the hustings,, 

 speeches and leading articles everywhere, begins to blot out the 

 very heavens, till we stagger, blinded and choking, in an atmos- 

 phere composed of the lies of many generations, which lie in layers 

 one above another, where no breath of fresh thought has been suf- 

 fered to disturb them. It is then that we begin, if we are wise, to 

 say to each other, ' Come and let us make an impartial study of 

 political questions.' 



Surely such a crisis has now come upon us. The portentous 

 disruption that we have just witnessed must surely give rise to a 

 certain amount of political scepticism, must lead us to revise our 

 method, and look with some little suspicion into the logic by which 

 we have been in the habit of ascertaining political truth. Misgiv- 

 ings were hushed in the triumphant years when Liberalism marched 

 from victory to victory. An observer, indeed, might find it hard to- 

 grasp the theory of the thing. By what process a new crop of 

 liberal doctrines always sprang up when Liberalism seemed ex- 

 hausted by success, how the new doctrines were so easily proved 

 to be truly liberal even when they appeared inconsistent with 

 the old, whether there was any limit to the power of develop- 

 ing new doctrines, similar to that which Father Newman attributed 

 to the Catholic Church, with which Liberalism was credited, — 

 these and a hundred other doubts occurred to the observer, but the 

 party was not troubled by them. For why ? The party was suc- 

 cessful. The prodigious agreement and enthusiasm with which 

 each new discovery was welcomed, the prodigious success which at- 

 tended each new development, seemed like signs of a divine inspira- 

 tion, and Liberalism, like Catholicism, — from which indeed it 

 borrowed much, — overwhelmed opposition by an appearance of 



