essentially disparate. How is
one, it is asked, to balance the marginal unit of national honour
involved in the continuance of a war with that marginal unit of extra
taxation which is supposed to be its exact equivalent? How is one to
balance the final sovereign spent on the endowment of science with the
final sovereign spent on a monument to a deceased scientist, or on the
final detail in a scheme of old age pensions? The obvious answer is that
statesmen have to act, and that whoever acts does somehow balance all
the alternatives which are before him. The Chancellor of the Exchequer
in his annual allocation of grants and remissions of taxation balances
no stranger things than does the private citizen, who, having a pound or
two to spend at Christmas, decides between subscribing to a Chinese
Mission and providing a revolving hatch between his kitchen and his
dining-room.

A more serious objection is that we ought not to allow ourselves to
think quantitatively in politics, that to do so fritters away the plain
consideration of principle. 'Logical principles' may be only an
inadequate representation of the subtlety of nature, but to abandon them
is, it is contended, to become a mere opportunist.

In the minds of these objectors the only alternative to deductive
thought from simple principles seems to be the attitude of Prince
Buelow, in his speech in the Reichstag on universal suffrage. He is
reported to have said:--'Only the most doctrinaire Socialists still
regarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish and as an infallible
dogma. For his own part he was no worshipper of idols, and he did not
believe in political dogmas. The welfare and the liberty of a country
did not depend either in whole or in part upon the form of its
Constitution or of its franchise. Herr Bebel had once said that on the
whole he preferred English conditions even to conditions in France. But
in England the franchise was not universal, equal, and direct. Could it
be said that Mecklenburg, which had no popular suffrage at all, was
governed worse than Haiti, of which the world had lately heard such
strange news, although Haiti could boast of possessing universal
suffrage?'[48]

[48] _Times_, March 27, 1908.

But what Prince Buelow's speech showed, was that he was either
deliberately parodying a style of scholastic reasoning with which he did
not agree, or he was incapable of grasping the first conception of
quantitative political thought. If