The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/The Need of Personalities in Politics

The village I now inhabit (as a locum tenens in the temporary absence of the Village Beauty) was in a great stir last night, owing to the arrival of the Liberal Van, which was regarded with more gravity than I should have thought possible. It drew up on the village green; its speakers opened a meeting, and everything would have gone smoothly and respectably if it had not happened that among the promoters of the meeting, standing beside the van, was a man with that air of strained intellectuality which marks a reader of The Daily News. He heard my name by some social accident; and remembered seeing it in the paper. `I have read your articles,' said this excellent Liberal, with a friendly smile, while I faintly condoled with him. Then he said, after a pause of some length, `I think I know what some of them mean'. I implored him to share with me this secret and painful knowledge, but he refused, and I shall go to my grave without it. But my encounter with the man had drawn me into the dangerous circle. And when the Chairman, a local Liberal magnate, was obliged to leave halfway through the meeting, they hoisted me into the chair instead of him. The chair was a kind of wooden ledge a little way above the shafts; and I took the chair with so dignified a decisiveness as almost to wreck the van. Then, I regret to say, the proceedings took on a more turbulent character. My rising to say anything was greeted (I cannot explain this phenomenon) with loud shouts coming exclusively from little boys. I think I somehow stirred in them a sickening hope that after all it was going to be a circus.

Then there was a sombre Conservative on the outskirts of the crowd, who interrupted so consistently and continuously that it came to be a rather delicate logical question whether he was interrupting our speeches or we were interrupting his. But it was not so much the quantity as the quality of his interruptions that pleased and at the same time perplexed me. One thing was firmly embedded in his mind, the fruitful seed of continuously flowering satire. This was the conviction that all of us in the van were persons of enormous wealth. He even professed to know the sources of that wealth. When I was making some remarks about poverty, he hurled at my head, with a deadly aim, this mysterious sarcasm: 'Ha! We ain't all on the Civil List.' I made, of course, the somewhat obvious retort, that some of us seemed to be on the Uncivil List; but to this moment I cannot imagine what was the meaning of that unfathomable sneer. Is there something in my air and manner, something of official dignity and decorum, touched with a servile prosperity, that suggests that I am in receipt of a bloated pension? Or has somebody really given or left me some money (poignant and improbable thought) since I have been away from town?

Let us leave this merely personal enigma and pass on to the final development, which from a deeper point of view, at any rate, was the most interesting. The temperature of the meeting, I am proud to say, rose higher and higher: a perfect rattle of repartees, the sympathisers on each side rocked and roared, a large fat farmer of Conservative opinions was beginning with a dreadful and dangerous slowness to think of something to say; and when I wound up the meeting and thanked everybody for their patience, politeness, and good temper, they were ready to kick each other round the green.

And then an interesting thing happened. Ten minutes after the end of the meeting the large, deliberate farmer of Conservative opinions was delivered of the thing that he wanted to say; and eclipse and thunder accompanied that portentous birth. The thing he wanted to say was--Could anybody there say he'd ever cut down any man's wages? This seemed to me a very essential, a very serious, and a very manly challenge, immeasurably more important not only than anything said at our meeting, but than anything that is ever said in the House of Commons.

It was followed by a kind of restless silence, such as occurs in such mobs at such moments, and in the next instant there was drama. A pale, coarse-looking lad, his arm half out of his coat with eagerness and anger, thrust his face forward. His wages had been cut down, he said; he had been underpaid, and underpaid by this man. The farmer, staring at him through the darkness, at first denied all knowledge of his face. Then a voice broke out of him, a loud and wrathful and decisive voice, crying, `Why, I know yer now. I know yer now, I sacked yer for--'. Then the sense of English respectability awoke suddenly in everybody, and the men were torn apart and soothed wildly by their friends. Whatever happened, we must not be asked to decide on a matter of real and diurnal right and wrong. Whatever happened we must not have a plain personal challenge answered by a plain personal reply. The farmer went away, shaking with his furious secret; the lad went away shaking with his. Yet here was present on that dark green, in that dim group, what is often the eternal substance and whole meaning of society and government. Two men were calling upon their neighbours to give judgment on their wrongs. This is politics. We had fixed the frontiers of India; we had examined the imports of Canada; we had meditated on the quarrels between Dutchmen and German Jews; we had criticised kindly but firmly the condition of the Prussian working classes; we had thought imperially and also in continents; we had seen the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.

But this doing of justice between one angry man and another never crossed our minds as a public duty. This was the last business that could be expected of us-- this which would be the first business of a primitive community, this which would be the first business of a tribe of Zulus. Our politics for the night had ended. Our politics had ended exactly at the point where all politics ought to begin.

It seemed to me that on this little green, as on a green baize stage, was acted an allegory of the whole situation of our contemporary statesmanship. Everything goes on gaily as long as we are dealing with things. Everything stops abruptly the moment we come to men. We are allowed to say: 'The supporters of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act are corrupt scoundrels.' We are allowed to say, 'Sir William Guppy is a supporter of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act'. We are not allowed to complete the syllogism. Everybody says with one accord in our English Parliament: `Let us have no personalities in politics.' Every Briton says at his breakfast table: 'At least, we are not like the French and the Irish; we have no personalities in our politics.' And because we have no personalities we have no responsibilities.