while belief must never be fixed,
must indeed always be kept open for the least indication of new
evidence, action, where action is necessary, must be taken as resolutely
on imperfect knowledge, if that is the best available, as on the most
perfect demonstration. The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical will
leave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out
in long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organic
evolution. Mental habits count for more in politics than do the
acceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences. When an English
clergyman sits at his breakfast-table reading his _Times_ or _Mail_, his
attitude towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his belief or
doubt that he who uttered certain commandments about non-resistance and
poverty was God Himself, but by the degree to which he has been trained
to watch the causation of his opinions. As it is, Dr. Jameson's prepared
manifesto on the Johannesburg Raid stirred most clergymen like a
trumpet, and the suggestion that the latest socialist member of
Parliament is not a gentleman, produces in them a feeling of genuine
disgust and despair.

It may be therefore that the effective influence in politics of new
ideals of intellectual conduct will have to wait for a still wider
change of mental attitude, touching our life on many sides. Some day the
conception of a harmony of thought and passion may take the place, in
the deepest regions of our moral consciousness, of our present dreary
confusion and barren conflicts. If that day comes much in politics which
is now impossible will become possible. The politician will be able not
only to control and direct in himself the impulses of whose nature he is
more fully aware, but to assume in his hearers an understanding of his
aim. Ministers and Members of Parliament may then find their most
effective form of expression in that grave simplicity of speech which in
the best Japanese State papers rings so strangely to our ears, and
citizens may learn to look to their representatives, as the Japanese
army looked to their generals, for that unbought effort of the mind by
which alone man becomes at once the servant and the master of nature.

CHAPTER II

REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

But our growing knowledge of the causation of political impulse, and of
the conditions of valid political reasoning, may be expected to change
not only our ideals of political conduct but al