HE MAKING OF "POLITICIANS"

"The way the authors wish to realise their ideal would, I fear, merely
increase the output of politicians and political journalists, of whom
an adequate supply already exists."--Mr. E. B. Osborn, in _The Morning
Post_.

Sharp-wittedness playing on ignorance to the end of personal
advancement--so dominant a feature has this become of our political
life, that any protest against the misuse of a noble word, when men
speak contemptuously of politics, is no doubt quite untimely.
Untimely, because it is too early, not because it is too late. We
retain the word ourselves, and call the kind of education we advocate
political education; appropriately it seems to us, for we believe that
its wide adoption would remove the root cause which has made such a
stigma possible, and free the very name of politics from the
indignities it now justly suffers.

Nothing, indeed, could be wider of the mark than the notion that a
system of political education would increase the number of
self-seeking, power-hunting "politicians." Such men are the product,
not of political education, but of the lack of it. What is the present
situation? To the ordinary boy, politics, when it first obtrudes
itself on his attention, appears under one or other of two aspects. If
he is clever, or is imagined to be so by ambitious parents, or again,
if, though stupid, he happens to belong to a political family, the air
begins to be thick with talk of his "going into" politics. He is to
"go into" politics in the same way as men "go into" the Stock Exchange
or the law; by virtue either of birth or brains he is to enter one of
those little strongholds of his class, and earn his living there by
playing the appropriate game.

This is the guise under which politics appears to one type of boy. The
other type, hears in some quarter or other a babble about income-tax
and little navies and big loans; and either dismisses the whole thing
as "absolute rot," which can have no possible meaning for him, or
imbibes the ideas and prejudices of the people whose talk he is
listening to, without in the least understanding their implications.

From these two types is developed the great bulk of the population,
considered under its political aspect. On the one side, politicians,
whether clever or stupid; on the other, the electorate, ignorant and
apathetic, or prejudiced and inflammable, as the case may be. There
are, of course, other classes to