[2] Address to the Social and Political Education League, 29th
March, 1892.

While, however, I frankly confess my hopeless incapacity for taking any
part in the process by which party platforms are constructed, I should
be ashamed to admit that I was not very keenly interested in political
discussions which seem to me to touch vitally important matters. And
fully recognising the vast superiority of the practical man in his own
world, I also hold that he should not treat me and my like as if we,
according to the famous comparison, were black beetles, and he at the
opposite pole of the universe. There exists, in books at least, such a
thing as political theory, apart from that claiming to underlie the
immediate special applications. Your practical man is given to
appealing to such theories now and then; though I confess that he too
often leaves the impression of having taken them up on the spur of the
moment to round a peroration and to give dignity to a popular cry; and
that, in his lips, they are apt to sound so crude and artificial that
one can only wonder at his condescending to notice them. He ridicules
them as the poorest of platitudes whenever they are used by an
antagonist, and one can only hope that his occasional homage implies
that he too has a certain belief that there ought to be, and perhaps may
somewhere be, a sound theory, though he has not paid it much attention.
Well, we, I take it, differ from him simply in this respect, that we
believe more decidedly that such theory has at least a potential
existence; and that if hitherto it is a very uncertain and ambiguous
guide, the mere attempt to work it out seriously may do something to
strengthen and deepen our practical political convictions. A man of real
ability, who is actively engaged in politics without being submerged by
merely political intrigues, can hardly fail to wish at least to
institute some kind of research into the principles which guide his
practice. To such a desire we may attribute some very stimulating books,
such, for example, as Bagehot's _Physics and Politics_ or Mr. Bryce's
philosophical study of the United States. What I propose to do is to
suggest a few considerations as to the real value and proper direction
of these arguments, which lie, as it were, on the borderland between the
immediate "platform" and the abstract theory.

Philosophers have given us the name "Sociology"--a barbarous name, say
some--for the science whic