e shallow presumption
is that undomesticated impulses can be obliterated; that world-wide
economic inventions can be stamped out by jailing millionaires--and
acting in the spirit of Mr. Chesterton's man Fipps "who went mad and ran
about the country with an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever
there were not the same number on both sides." The routineer is, of
course, the first to decry every radical proposal as "against human
nature." But the stand-pat mind has forfeited all right to speak for
human nature. It has devoted the centuries to torturing men's instincts,
stamping on them, passing laws against them, lifting its eyebrows at the
thought of them--doing everything but trying to understand them. The same
people who with daily insistence say that innovators ignore facts are in
the absurd predicament of trying to still human wants with petty taboos.
Social systems like ours, which do not even feed and house men and women,
which deny pleasure, cramp play, ban adventure, propose celibacy and
grind out monotony, are a clear confession of sterility in statesmanship.
And politics, however pretentiously rhetorical about ideals, is
irrelevant if the only method it knows is to ostracize the desires it
cannot manage.

Suppose that statesmen transferred their reverence from the precedents
and mistakes of their ancestors to the human material which they have set
out to govern. Suppose they looked mankind in the face and asked
themselves what was the result of answering evil with a prohibition. Such
an exercise would, I fear, involve a considerable strain on what
reformers call their moral sensibilities. For human nature is a rather
shocking affair if you come to it with ordinary romantic optimism.
Certainly the human nature that figures in most political thinking is a
wraith that never was--not even in the souls of politicians. "Idealism"
creates an abstraction and then shudders at a reality which does not
answer to it. Now statesmen who have set out to deal with actual life
must deal with actual people. They cannot afford an inclusive pessimism
about mankind. Let them have the consistency and good sense to cease
bothering about men if men's desires seem intrinsically evil. Moral
judgment about the ultimate quality of character is dangerous to a
politician. He is too constantly tempted to call a policeman when he
disapproves.

We must study our failures. Gambling and drink, for example, produce much
misery. But what r