Page:The Hero in History.djvu/171

Rh other aspects of the behaviour of American citizens, for instance, their religious traditions and social prejudices.

What is the character of such a “law?” Note that at does not rule out the election of a Catholic or Jew as something literately impossible. It asserts not the impossibility but the unlikelihood of such an election. Second, the law does not assert that every Protestant will vote against the candidate or that every non-Protestant will vote for him, or that any particular person will vote in this way rather than in that. It states that a sufficient number of Protestants will vote against the candidate solely on the grounds of his religious faith to ensure his defeat. Third, it tells us something about patterns of distribution in a series of human choices or decisions. And we know that human choices or decisions are “influenceable” in certain ways, that they may be changed and modified by changing the conditions under which they have developed. Fourth, its validity is restricted to a certain historical domain. It would be false to apply it to the selection of presidents or prime ministers in countries like England, where the majority of the population is also of the Protestant faith.

Here we have a “law” which every realistic practitioner of politics must take into account. Nonetheless it would be foolish for those responsible for the nomination to accept the law as binding, or even as a decisive guide to action in all cases. The candidate may be a national military hero. His nomination may be pressed on the ground of another “law” that the American people are always grateful to successful military heroes and they show their gratitude by electing them to office. Under the circumstances, we may believe that the second law will be fulfilled rather than the first. Whichever “law” is invoked, if our decision were based on it alone, we would be assuming that the future of the election is determined by fixed patterns of behaviour that have operated in the past. We would be assuming that our decision and the actions following from it made no appreciable difference to the outcome, that the future is determined by the past and not by the past together with the intervening present. In the situation considered, of course, me assumptions would be obviously mistaken. The law that “Catholics and Jews cannot be elected to the highest national office” may cease to be true as a result of changes introduced by our efforts to elect one. The more we know about the conditions under which the attitudes of people have been set, the more