A Preface to Politics | Page 2

average man
is entirely to blame because he smiles a bit at Armageddon and refuses
to take the politician at his own rhetorical valuation. If men find
statecraft uninteresting, may it not be that statecraft is uninteresting? I
have a more or less professional interest in public affairs; that is to say,
I have had opportunity to look at politics from the point of view of the
man who is trying to get the attention of people in order to carry
through some reform. At first it was a hard confession to make, but the
more I saw of politics at first-hand, the more I respected the
indifference of the public. There was something monotonously trivial
and irrelevant about our reformist enthusiasm, and an appalling justice
in that half-conscious criticism which refuses to place politics among
the genuine, creative activities of men. Science was valid, art was valid,
the poorest grubber in a laboratory was engaged in a real labor, anyone
who had found expression in some beautiful object was truly centered.
But politics was a personal drama without meaning or a vague
abstraction without substance.

Yet there was the fact, just as indisputable as ever, that public affairs do
have an enormous and intimate effect upon our lives. They make or
unmake us. They are the foundation of that national vigor through
which civilizations mature. City and countryside, factories and play,
schools and the family are powerful influences in every life, and
politics is directly concerned with them. If politics is irrelevant, it is
certainly not because its subject matter is unimportant. Public affairs
govern our thinking and doing with subtlety and persistence.
The trouble, I figured, must be in the way politics is concerned with the
nation's interests. If public business seems to drift aimlessly, its results
are, nevertheless, of the highest consequence. In statecraft the penalties
and rewards are tremendous. Perhaps the approach is distorted. Perhaps
uncriticised assumptions have obscured the real uses of politics.
Perhaps an attitude can be worked out which will engage a fresher
attention. For there are, I believe, blunders in our political thinking
which confuse fictitious activity with genuine achievement, and make it
difficult for men to know where they should enlist. Perhaps if we can
see politics in a different light, it will rivet our creative interests.
These essays, then, are an attempt to sketch an attitude towards
statecraft. I have tried to suggest an approach, to illustrate it concretely,
to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the title "A Preface to
Politics," I have wished to stamp upon the whole book my own sense
that it is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have wished to emphasize
that there is nothing in this book which can be drafted into a legislative
proposal and presented to the legislature the day after to-morrow. It
was not written with the notion that these pages would contain an
adequate exposition of modern political method. Much less was it
written to further a concrete program. There are, I hope, no
assumptions put forward as dogmas.
It is a preliminary sketch for a theory of politics, a preface to thinking.
Like all speculation about human affairs, it is the result of a grapple
with problems as they appear in the experience of one man. For though
a personal vision may at times assume an eloquent and universal
language, it is well never to forget that all philosophies are the

language of particular men.
W. L.
46 East 80th Street, NEW YORK CITY, January 1913.

A PREFACE TO POLITICS
CHAPTER I
ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
Politics does not exist for the sake of demonstrating the superior
righteousness of anybody. It is not a competition in deportment. In fact,
before you can begin to think about politics at all you have to abandon
the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. That is
one of the great American superstitions. More than any other fetish it
has ruined our sense of political values by glorifying the pharisee with
his vain cruelty to individuals and his unfounded approval of himself.
You have only to look at the Senate of the United States, to see how
that body is capable of turning itself into a court of preliminary
hearings for the Last Judgment, wasting its time and our time and
absorbing public enthusiasm and newspaper scareheads. For a hundred
needs of the nation it has no thought, but about the precise morality of
an historical transaction eight years old there is a meticulous interest.
Whether in the Presidential Campaign of 1904 Roosevelt was aware
that the ancient tradition of corporate subscriptions had or had not been
followed, and the exact and ultimate measure of the guilt that
knowledge would have implied--this in the year 1912