Some political questions can obviously be argued quantitatively. Others are less obviously quantitative. But even on the most complex political issues experienced and responsible statesmen do in fact think quantitatively, although the methods by which they reach their results are often unconscious.

When, however, all politicians start with intellectualist assumptions, though some half-consciously acquire quantitative habits of thought, many desert politics altogether from disillusionment and disgust. What is wanted in the training of a statesman is the fully conscious formulation and acceptance of those methods which will not have to be unlearned.

Such a conscious change is already taking place in the work of Royal Commissions, International Congresses, and other bodies and persons who have to arrange and draw conclusions from large masses of specially collected evidence. Their methods and vocabulary, even when not numerical, are nowadays in large part quantitative.

In parliamentary oratory, however, the old tradition of over-simplification is apt to persist.

(PART II.—Chapter I.—Political Morality, page 167)

But in what ways can such changes in political science affect the actual trend of political forces?

In the first place, the abandonment by political thinkers and writers of the intellectualist conception of politics will sooner or later influence the moral judgments of the working politician. A young candidate will begin with a new conception of his moral relation to those whose will and opinions he is attempting to influence. He will start, in that respect, from a position hitherto confined to statesmen who have been made cynical by experience.

If that were the only result of our new knowledge, political morality might be changed for the worse. But the change will go deeper. When men become conscious of psychological processes of which they have been unconscious or half-conscious, not only are they put on their guard against the exploitation of those processes in themselves by others, but they become better able to control them from within.

If, however, a conscious moral purpose is to be strong enough to overcome, as a political force, the advancing art of political exploitation, the conception of control from within must be formed into an ideal entity which, like 'Science,' can appeal to popular imagination, and be spread by an organised system of education. The difficulties in this are great (owing in part to our ignorance of the varied reactions of self-consciousness on instinct), but a wide extension of the idea of causation is not inconsistent with an increased intensity of moral passion.

(Chapter II.—Representative Government, page 199)

The changes now going on in our conception of the psychological basis of politics will also re-open the discussion of representative democracy.

Some of the old arguments in that discussion will no longer be accepted as valid, and it is probable that many political thinkers (especially among those who have been educated in the natural sciences) will return to Plato's proposal of a despotic government carried on by a selected and trained class, who live apart from the 'ostensible world'; though English experience in India indicates that even the most carefully selected official must still live in the 'ostensible world,' and that the argument that good government requires the consent of the governed does not depend for its validity upon its original intellectualist associations.

Our new way of thinking about politics will, however, certainly change the form, not only of the argument for consent, but also of the institutions by which consent is expressed. An election (like a jury-trial) will be, and is already beginning to be, looked upon rather as a process by which right decisions are formed under right conditions, than as a mechanical expedient by which decisions already formed are ascertained.

Proposals for electoral reform which seem to continue the old intellectualist tradition are still brought forward, and new difficulties in the working of representative government will arise from the wider extension of political power. But that conception of representation may spread which desires both to increase the knowledge and public spirit of the voter and to provide that no strain is put upon him greater than he can bear.

(Chapter III.—Official Thought, page 241)

A quantitative examination of the political force created by popular election shows the importance of the work of non-elected officials in any effective scheme of democracy.

What should be the relation between these officials and the elected representatives? On this point English opinion already shows a marked reaction from the intellectualist conception of representative government. We accept the fact that most state officials are appointed by a system uncontrolled either by individual members of parliament or by parliament as a whole, that they hold office during good behaviour, and that they are our main source of information as to some of the most difficult points on which we form political judgments. It is largely an accident that the same system has not been introduced into our local government.

But such a half-conscious acceptance of a partially independent Civil Service as an existing fact is not enough. We must set ourselves to realise clearly what we intend our officials to do, and to consider how far our present modes of appointment, and especially our present methods of organising official work, provide the most effective means for carrying out that intention.

(Chapter IV.—Nationality and Humanity, page 269)

What influence will the new tendencies in political thought have on the emotional and intellectual conditions of political solidarity?

In the old city-states, where the area of government corresponded to the actual range of human vision and memory, a kind of local emotion could be developed which is now impossible in a 'delocalised' population. The solidarity of a modern state must therefore depend on facts not of observation but of imagination.

The makers of the existing European national states, Mazzini and Bismarck, held that the possible extent of a state depended on national homogeneity, i.e. on the possibility that every individual member of a state should believe that all the others were like himself. Bismarck thought that the degree of actual homogeneity which was a necessary basis for this belief could be made by 'blood and iron'; Mazzini thought that mankind was already divided into homogeneous groups whose limits should be followed in the reconstruction of Europe. Both were convinced that the emotion of political solidarity was impossible between individuals of consciously different national types.

During the last quarter of a century this conception of the world as composed of a mosaic of homogeneous nations has been made more difficult (a) by the continued existence and even growth of separate national feelings within modern states, and (b) by the fact that the European and non-European races have entered into closer political relationships. The attempt, therefore, to transfer the traditions of national homogeneity and solidarity either to the inhabitants of a modern world-empire as a whole, or to the members of the dominant