need of
comparing them with other trains of argument already in his mind. A
lawyer or a doctor will on quite general principles argue for the most
extreme trade-unionism in his own profession, while he thoroughly agrees
with a denunciation of trade-unionism addressed to him as a railway
shareholder or ratepayer. The same audience can sometimes be led by way
of 'parental rights' to cheer for denominational religious instruction,
and by way of 'religious freedom' to hoot it. The most skilled political
observer that I know, speaking of an organised newspaper attack, said,
'As far as I can make out every argument used in attack and in defence
has its separate and independent effect. They hardly ever meet, even if
they are brought to bear upon the same mind.' From the purely tactical
point of view there is therefore much to be said for Lord Lyndhurst's
maxim, 'Never defend yourself before a popular assemblage, except with
and by retorting the attack; the hearers, in the pleasure which the
assault gives them, will forget the previous charge.'[24]

[24] Morley's _Life of Gladstone_, vol. i. p. 122.

CHAPTER IV

THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING

But man is fortunately not wholly dependent in his political thinking
upon those forms of inference by immediate association which come so
easily to him, and which he shares with the higher brutes. The whole
progress of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages has been made
possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to
interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we
could if we merely followed the line of least resistance in the use of
our minds.

These methods, however, when applied in politics, still represent a
difficult and uncertain art rather than a science producing its effects
with mechanical accuracy.

When the great thinkers of Greece laid down rules for valid reasoning,
they had, it is true, the needs of politics specially in their minds.
After the prisoners in Plato's cave of illusion should be unbound by
true philosophy it was to the service of the State that they were to
devote themselves, and their first triumph was to be the control of
passion by reason in the sphere of government. Yet if Plato could visit
us now, he would learn that while our glass-makers proceed by rigorous
and confident processes to exact results, our statesmen, like the
glass-makers of ancient Athens, still trust to empirical maxims