AY, 31, 1919. What is wrong with our statesmen? I think the answer is
simple. Success in a political career can be understood by all of us. It
attracts the attention which applauds the owner of a Derby winner, or the
Bishop who began as a poor, industrious, but tactful child. John the
Baptist failed to attract the publicity he desired; and Christ drew it as
a criminal, for the religious and political leaders of his day recognized
what his teaching would lead to as easily as would any magistrate to-day
who had before him a carpenter accused of persuading soldiers that
killing is murder. Politicians move on the level of the common
intelligence, and compete there with each other in charging the ignorance
of the commonalty with emotion. A politician need be no more than
something between a curate and a card-sharper. If he knows anything of
the arts, of history, of economics, or of science, he had better forget
it, or else use it as a forestaller would a knowledge of the time when
prices should be raised. A confident man with a blood-shot voice and a
gift for repartee is sure to make a success of politics, especially if he
is not too particular. This did not matter once, perhaps, when politics
merely afforded excitement for taverns and a career for the avid and
meddlesome. The country was prosperous, and so it was difficult to do it
serious harm.

But to-day, just when we must have the leading of moral, judicious, and
well-informed minds, or perish, we have only our statesmen. It never
occurs to the crowd that its business would be more successfully
transacted by a chance group, say of headmasters of elementary schools,
than by the statesmen who, at Versailles recently, dared not face the
shocking realities because these could not be squared with a Treaty which
had to frame the figments of the hustings. The trouble with our statesmen
is that they have been concerned hitherto merely to attend to the
machinery, running freely and with little friction, of industrial
society. They did not create that machinery. They but took it over. They
knew nothing of the principles which motived it. Our statesmen were only
practical politicians and business men. They held in contempt the fine
abstract theories of physics, mechanics, and dynamics. It was safe for
them to do so. The machinery went on running, apparently of its own
volition. All went well until the War. Now the propeller-shaft of
industrial society is fractured, our ship is wall