June 15, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
15 
A Bad School for Statesmen 
By Professor h. P. Jacks 
MR. LESLIE STEPHEN, in his essay on 
Disraeli's Novels, rebukes the people who extol 
the man of deeds above the man of \\ ords. True 
to his profession as a man of letters, Mr. Stephen 
believes there is nothing like literature. " I will con- 
fess," he says, " to piTferring the men who have sown 
some new seed of thought above the heroes whose names 
mark epochs in history. I would rather . . . leaven 
a country with new ideas than translate them into facts, 
inevitably mangling and distorting them in the process. 
. . .1 would rather have been Voltaire or (ioethe 
than Frederick or Napoleon ; and I suspect that the 
historian of the nineteenth century will attribute more 
importance to two or three recent English writers than 
to all the English statesmen who have been strutting 
and fretting their little hour at Westminster." 
If the different clauses of this statement are put 
together it will be seen that Mr. Stephen's examples are 
somewhat confusing, and that he is not quite consistent 
with himself. He begins by preferring the man of words 
to the man of deeds, and ends by preferring the position, of 
a writer to that of a Member of Parliament. The latter 
person Mr. Stephen, by a perverse change in his angle 
of vision, chooses to regard as a man of deeds. This is 
gravely open to doubt. To be sure, the statesmen who 
strut and fret their little hour at Westminster are engaged 
in talking or making speeches about action to be taken. 
But talking about deeds is a very different thing from 
performing them. By confusing the two things Mr. 
Stephen unconsciously becomes the ally of the most 
dangerous delusion of our times. The delusion is that 
talk will do the business, or in the more concrete form, 
that I am a man of action because I spend my time in 
making speeches, or even in preaching sermons, about 
actions that have to be performed by other men. 
Houses of Verbiage 
Because seven hundred gentlemen are discussing how- 
children ought to be educated or drunkards reformed, 
it does not follow that any child is being taught what he 
needs to know or that any drunkard is being saved from 
■ his doom — nor indeed that they ever will be. The con- 
trary is often the truth. All the time these gentlemen 
are making speeches the children and the drunkards are 
passing beyond their reach ; the children by growing 
up into men and women, the drunkards by drinking 
themselves to death. When the speeches are prolonged 
through several generations, as they have been in both 
the instances given, the net loss is very serious. It may 
suit the politicians to " wait and see " and talk about 
it in the meantime ; but the children and the drunkards, 
to say nothing of the great currents of history, neither 
wait nor see. The result is that the people in whose 
interests action was first proposed are in their graves 
before the seven hundred are ready to act. Others no 
doubt will have taken their place, but if those who have 
been lost in the intervals could be summoned from their 
resting place I doubt if they would agree with Mr. Stephen 
in classing the seven hundred as men of action. They 
would rather support Carlyle, who regarded the Houses 
of Parliament as essentially Houses of Verbiage, and they 
would have told Mr. Stephen, who preferred the man o'f 
vords above the man of deeds, that with such a preference 
Parliament was undoubtedly his proper place. 
The truth is, of course, that Mr. Stephen and many 
others who talk about " ideas ruling the world " and 
" words being mightier than deeds " have in mind a very 
particular class of ideas and a sort of words which is by 
no means common. There is a story about the Shah of 
Persia which illustrates the point. "Somebody had pro- 
posed to this potentate that he should go to "the Derb\-. 
The Shah refused. 
" Do you suppose," he said, " that I am so ignorant 
as not to know that one horse can run faster than 
another ? " 
The answer, though interesting, was irrelevant. ' For 
the object of the Derby is not to demonstrate that one 
horse can run faster than another, but to show which 
horse can run faster than which. In the sajue way the 
statement that ideas rule the world is irrelevant as ap 
answer to the man who is inquiring whether this world is 
well governed or ill. Little is gained by knowing that 
ideas rule the world until you know further whether the 
ideas in question are good or bad. The worst kind of 
world, in my opinion, would be a world ruled by an idea 
— and that idea a bad one. Nor is there any consolation 
in learning that words are mightier than deeds. What 
words ? " The pen is mightier than the sword." Well, 
what if it is ? I would rather live vmder the might of a 
sword that is clean than under the might of a pen that 
is dipped in lies and venom. 
Foolish Idolatry 
One may carry the idolatry of " ideas " and " words " 
a httle too far. One may carry it to the length of not, 
knowing a good idea from a bad one, or of taking every 
windbag for a prophet, or of thinking ourselves men of 
action because we buy the Daily Mail. 
If our legislators spent their time in legislating there 
would be some justification for classing them, with Mr. 
Leslie Stephen, as men of action. But a scrutiny of their 
proceedings soon reveals the fact that they do nothing 
of the kind. Tlie legislator, if he happens to be a promi- 
nent man, spends much of his time, probably the greater 
part of it, in repulsing the attacks of his opponents and 
in counter-attacking. This process is dignified by the 
name of " debating " ; one might almost sa\' it is canonised 
under that name, for there cannot be a doubt that " de- 
bating " is regarded by most EngHshmen as a holy 
occupation. Now, nobody, not even the most abandoned 
heretic, would rail upon debating, if the object kept in 
view during the debate were the merits of the measure 
under consideration. But in the ordinary course of our 
Parliamentary procedure this is not always the case. 
The debate becomes a war of minds, conducted for its 
own sake in the first degree and for the public good only 
in the second. The interests of the debaters, their seats 
and their reputations, are the interests primarily at 
stake, while the public has to content itself with the 
residual policy which is left in being when the various 
warring factions have settled their accounts and reduced 
each others forces, so far as possible, to immobility. 
To say that the remnant of wisdom thus left over repre- 
sents the popular will is a transparent fiction which 
deceives only those persons who are bemused by phrases. 
Instead of being what everybody wants the result is 
often what nobody wants or ever wanted. 
The truth is that the people have in Parliament a 
big Debating Society, not always of the first class, in 
which debating has become an end in itself, and where 
Sovtcs Sbahcspcaviana: 
By SIR SIDNEY LEE 
To the Russians. 
Goal and your arms be praised, victorious 
friends ! 
Richard III., V., v., 1. 
The Economic Conference. 
It is like we skat I have good tradiv^r 
that way. 
1 Henry IV.. II.. iv., «1. 
Kino- Constantine and his Mini s te rs . 
To wiljul men. 
The injuries that they themselves procure 
Must be their schoolmasters. 
Kins Lear, II., iv.. .'iOS-?. 
