ven more than a field of
public service. No doubt the two aims are, to a great extent,
compatible, but, even so, no one expects the ordinary party politician
to have the faith that goes to the stake for a conviction. Labour, on
the other hand, in so far as it is articulate, does demand faith of
this kind from its leaders. If they do not possess it already it is
prepared to thump it into them with a big stick.

The difficulty is to retain this faith after one has been, as it were,
inside politics. One goes into politics believing in the faith that
will remove mountains: one remains in politics believing in the
machine that will remove mole-hills. It is only the rare politician
who does not ultimately succumb to the fatal fascination of the
machine. It may be the party machine or the Parliamentary machine or
the administrative machine. In any case, and to whatever party he
belongs, he soon comes to take it for granted, not that the machine
must be made to do what the people want, but that the people must
learn to be patient, even to the point of reverence, with the machine,
and must be careful to keep it supplied, not with the vinegar of
criticism, but with the oil of agreement, which alone enables its
wheels to run smoothly. Democracy has again and again had to rise up
and smash its machines, just because they had become idols in this
way. No doubt, even were Socialism in full swing, the idolatry of
machinery would still, to some extent, continue, and new machines
would constantly have to be invented to take the place of the old as
soon as the latter began to acquire this pseudo-religious sanction.
There will probably still also be people who will go about wanting to
destroy machinery from a rather illogical idea that anything which is
even capable of being turned into an idol must be evil. The
politicians and the anti-politicians will always stand to each other
in the relation of priests and iconoclasts. "Priests of machinery,"
indeed, would be a much more realistic description of most politicians
than Mr Lloyd George's phrase, "priests of humanity."

There you have the politician's doom. There you have the real terror
for the good man going into politics. He dreads not that he will be
called names so much as that he will deserve them. Office, he knows,
is as perilous a gift as riches, and the temptation to be a tyrant, if
it is only in a committee room down a side street, has destroyed men
who stood out like heroes a