Merivale saw that the political philosophy
which his teachers studied in their closets was inadequate, and because
he had nothing to substitute for it, he frankly abandoned any attempt
at valid thought on so difficult a question as the relation of the white
colonies to the rest of the British Empire. He therefore decided in
effect that it ought to be settled by the rule-of-thumb method of
'cutting the painter'; and, since he was the chief official in the
Colonial Office at a critical time, his decision, whether it was right
or wrong, was not unimportant.

Mr. Bryce has been perhaps prevented by the presence in his mind of such
a half-belief from making that constructive contribution to general
political science for which he is better equipped than any other man of
his time. 'I am myself,' he says in the same Introduction, 'an optimist,
almost a professional optimist, as indeed politics would be intolerable
were not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the blue
sky he can.'[37] Imagine an acknowledged leader in chemical research who,
finding that experiment did not bear out some traditional formula,
should speak of himself as nevertheless 'grimly resolved' to see things
from the old and comfortable point of view!

[37] _Loc. cit._, p. xliii.

The next step in the course of political training which I am advocating
would be the quantitative study of the inherited variations of
individual men when compared with the 'normal' or 'average' man who had
so far served for the study of the type.

How is the student to approach this part of the course? Every man
differs quantitatively from every other man in respect of every one
of his qualities. The student obviously cannot carry in his mind or
use for the purposes of thought all the variations even of a single
inherited quality which are to be found among the fifteen hundred
millions or so of human beings who even at any one moment are in
existence. Much less can he ascertain or remember the inter-relation
of thousands of inherited qualities in the past history of a race in
which individuals are at every moment dying and being born.

Mr. H.G. Wells faces this fact in that extremely stimulating essay on
'Scepticism of the Instrument,' which he has appended to his _Modern
Utopia_. His answer is that the difficulty is 'of the very smallest
importance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed in relation
to anything but philosophy and wide generalisations. B