A Preface to Politics | Page 3

is enough to start
the Senate on a protracted man-hunt.
Now if one half of the people is bent upon proving how wicked a man
is and the other half is determined to show how good he is, neither half
will think very much about the nation. An innocent paragraph in the
New York Evening Post for August 27, 1912, gives the whole
performance away. It shows as clearly as words could how disastrous

the good-and-bad-man theory is to political thinking:
"Provided the first hearing takes place on September 30, it is expected
that the developments will be made with a view to keeping the Colonel
on the defensive. After the beginning of October, it is pointed out, the
evidence before the Committee should keep him so busy explaining
and denying that the country will not hear much Bull Moose doctrine."
Whether you like the Roosevelt doctrines or not, there can be no two
opinions about such an abuse of morality. It is a flat public loss,
another attempt to befuddle our thinking. For if politics is merely a
guerilla war between the bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not
a human service but a moral testing ground. It is a public amusement, a
melodrama of real life, in which a few conspicuous characters are tried,
and it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing which we are
told exists for the high purpose of detecting a "yellow streak." But even
though we desired it there would be no way of establishing any
clear-cut difference in politics between the angels and the imps. The
angels are largely self-appointed, being somewhat more sensitive to
other people's tar than their own.
But if the issue is not between honesty and dishonesty, where is it?
If you stare at a checkerboard you can see it as black on red, or red on
black, as series of horizontal, vertical or diagonal steps which recede or
protrude. The longer you look the more patterns you can trace, and the
more certain it becomes that there is no single way of looking at the
board. So with political issues. There is no obvious cleavage which
everyone recognizes. Many patterns appear in the national life. The
"progressives" say the issue is between "Privilege" and the "People";
the Socialists, that it is between the "working class" and the "master
class." An apologist for dynamite told me once that society was divided
into the weak and the strong, and there are people who draw a line
between Philistia and Bohemia.
When you rise up and announce that the conflict is between this and
that, you mean that this particular conflict interests you. The issue of
good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the exclusion of almost all

others. But experience shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict and
a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must be drawn if we are to
act at all in politics. With nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we
are merely neutral. This cleavage in public affairs is the most important
choice we are called upon to make. In large measure it determines the
rest of our thinking. Now some issues are fertile; some are not. Some
lead to spacious results; others are blind alleys. With this in mind I
wish to suggest that the distinction most worth emphasizing to-day is
between those who regard government as a routine to be administered
and those who regard it as a problem to be solved.
The class of routineers is larger than the conservatives. The man who
will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious
example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the
civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something
given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on
winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated
itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what
a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is
the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.
He is the slave of routine. He can boast of somewhat more spiritual
cousins in the men who reverence their ancestors' independence, who
feel, as it were, that a disreputable great-grandfather is necessary to a
family's respectability. These are the routineers gifted with historical
sense. They take their forefathers with enormous solemnity. But one
mistake is rarely avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing their
grandfather did, and ignore the originality which enabled him to do it.
If tradition were a reverent record of those crucial moments when men
burst through their habits, a love of the past would not be the butt on
which every sophomoric radical can practice his wit. But almost always
tradition is nothing but a