A Preface to Politics | Page 5

that is stamped upon us. It may be the governing
of a city, or teaching school, or running a business. We do not get out

of bed in the morning because we are eager for the day; something
external--we often call it our duty--throws off the bed-clothes,
complains that the shaving water isn't hot, puts us into the subway and
lands us at our office in season for punching the time-check. We
revolve with the business for three or four hours, signing letters,
answering telephones, checking up lists, and perhaps towards twelve
o'clock the prospect of lunch puts a touch of romance upon life. Then
because our days are so unutterably the same, we turn to the
newspapers, we go to the magazines and read only the "stuff with
punch," we seek out a "show" and drive serious playwrights into the
poorhouse. "You can go through contemporary life," writes Wells,
"fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor
frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere
sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and
elementary necessities the sweat of your death-bed."
The world grinds on: we are a fly on the wheel. That sense of an
impersonal machine going on with endless reiteration is an experience
that imaginative politicians face. Often as not they disguise it under
heroic phrases and still louder affirmation, just as most of us hide our
cowardly submission to monotony under some word like duty, loyalty,
conscience. If you have ever been an office-holder or been close to
officials, you must surely have been appalled by the grim way in which
committee-meetings, verbose reports, flamboyant speeches, requests,
and delegations hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp. Perhaps
this is the reason why it has been necessary to retire Theodore
Roosevelt from public life every now and then in order to give him a
chance to learn something new. Every statesman like every professor
should have his sabbatical year.
The revolt against the service of our own mechanical habits is well
known to anyone who has followed modern thought. As a sharp
example one might point to Thomas Davidson, whom William James
called "individualist à outrance".... "Reprehending (mildly) a certain
chapter of my own on 'Habit,' he said that it was a fixed rule with him
to form no regular habits. When he found himself in danger of settling
into even a good one, he made a point of interrupting it."

Such men are the sparkling streams that flow through the dusty
stretches of a nation. They invigorate and emphasize those times in
your own life when each day is new. Then you are alive, then you drive
the world before you. The business, however difficult, shapes itself to
your effort; you seem to manage detail with an inferior part of yourself,
while the real soul of you is active, planning, light. "I wanted thought
like an edge of steel and desire like a flame." Eager with sympathy, you
and your work are reflected from many angles. You have become
luminous.
Some people are predominantly eager and wilful. The world does not
huddle and bend them to a task. They are not, as we say, creatures of
environment, but creators of it. Of other people's environment they
become the most active part--the part which sets the fashion. What they
initiate, others imitate. Theirs is a kind of intrinsic prestige. These are
the natural leaders of men, whether it be as head of the gang or as
founder of a religion.
It is, I believe, this power of being aggressively active towards the
world which gives man a miraculous assurance that the world is
something he can make. In creative moments men always draw upon
"some secret spring of certainty, some fundamental well into which no
disturbing glimmers penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy, for the
chance is denied by which we can lie back upon the perfection of some
mechanical contrivance. Yet in the light of it government becomes alert
to a process of continual creation, an unceasing invention of forms to
meet constantly changing needs.
This philosophy is not only difficult to practice: it is elusive when you
come to state it. For our political language was made to express a
routine conception of government. It comes to us from the Eighteenth
Century. And no matter how much we talk about the infusion of the
"evolutionary" point of view into all of modern thought, when the test
is made political practice shows itself almost virgin to the idea. Our
theories assume, and our language is fitted to thinking of government
as a frame--Massachusetts, I believe, actually calls her fundamental law
the Frame of Government. We picture political institutions as

mechanically constructed contrivances within which the nation's life is
contained and compelled to approximate