ance of the effect of our traditional course of study in politics.
No doctor would now begin a medical treatise by saying, 'the ideal man
requires no food, and is impervious to the action of bacteria, but this
ideal is far removed from the actualities of any known population.' No
modern treatise on pedagogy begins with the statement that 'the ideal
boy knows things without being taught them, and his sole wish is the
advancement of science, but no boys at all like this have ever existed.'

And what, in a world where causes have effects and effects causes, does
'intelligent independence' mean?

Mr. Herman Merivale, successively Professor of Political Economy at
Oxford, under-Secretary for the Colonies, and under-Secretary for India,
wrote in 1861:

'To retain or to abandon a dominion is not an issue which will ever be
determined on the mere balance of profit and loss, or on the more
refined but even less powerful motives supplied by abstract political
philosophy. The sense of national honour; the pride of blood, the
tenacious spirit of self-defence, the sympathies of kindred communities,
the instincts of a dominant race, the vague but generous desire to
spread our civilisation and our religion over the world; these are
impulses which the student in his closet may disregard, but the
statesman dares not....'[36]

[36] Herman Merivale, _Colonisation_, 1861, 2nd edition. The book is a
re-issue, largely re-written, of lectures given at Oxford in 1837. The
passage quoted forms part of the 1861 additions, p. 675.

What does 'abstract political philosophy' here mean? No medical writer
would speak of an 'abstract' anatomical science in which men have no
livers, nor would he add that though the student in his closet may
disregard the existence of the liver the working physician dares not.

Apparently Merivale means the same thing by 'abstract' political
philosophy that Mr. Bryce means by 'ideal' democracy. Both refer to a
conception of human nature constructed in all good faith by certain
eighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer exactly believed
in, but which, because nothing else has taken its place, still exercises
a kind of shadowy authority in a hypothetical universe.

The fact that this or that writer speaks of a conception of human nature
in which he is ceasing to believe as 'abstract' or 'ideal' may seem to
be of merely academic interest. But such half-beliefs produce immense
practical effects. Because