THE EXCELLENT PROFESSION OF POLITICS. The career of the professional politician has this great advantage over many others, that anybody can enter it at any time. It is, however, best to begin young. As in other callings, there is a certain apprenticeship to be served, and some years of waiting or poorly remunerated employment must be expected by everybody. But the period of probation is light, easy, and comparatively brief; and though, of course, everybody does not succeed in the business are there not failures at all trades? —yet, with industry, very moderate talents, and the requisite amount of pushfulness and assertion, success may be reasonably anticipated. The profession has this further great advantage over most others, that the practitioner requires little or no capital, and little or no knowledge. He need not encumber his mind either with the general acquirements of a liberal education or with the intricate details of a specific industry. He may be as ig He norant and as intellectually indolent as he pleases. must, of course, have certain qualifications for his chosen task, but these do not include a large allowance either of the learning which is derived from books and study, or of precise and accurate technical information. Herein, then, lies one of the great recommendations of politics as a business. The doctor, the lawyer, the engineer, the schoolmaster, are bound to prepare themselves for their duties by a severe course of study, and a more or less lengthy term of practical training. If they succeed in making their way, it can only be after strenuous competition with numerous rivals equally well equipped, against whom they can only prevail by superior ability. The author, the artist, or the actor must also obtain success by the exhibition of personal capacity. Nobody will buy their books, or look at their pictures, or pay to see them on the stage, unless he is pleased with their writing, painting, or acting. The politician is more comfortably situated. There is nothing in particular for him to learn, so that he need not devote his years and energies to the acquisition of knowledge. He may succeed with an intellectual and educational equipment which in most other occupations would barely provide him with a living tion even from its young aristocrats. wage. In these days a young intellectual ambitions, and it man can hardly obtain a decent demands a certain limited situation in a commercial office measure of academic distineunless he is acquainted with such things as shorthand and typewriting and commercial arithmetic, with perhaps a little smattering of French or German or Spanish. The exalted personage at the head of a department of State may know nothing of these subjects, and very little of any other. It is recorded that a Chancellor of the Exchequer on being confronted for the first time with a table of statistics in which the fractions were worked out in decimals, innocently inquired the meaning of "those d-d little dots." To this great statesman decimal fractions were a thing unknown. Ignorance, indeed, as we see continually, is no bar to the attainment of the highest political distinction and (which is for our present purpose more important) the highest political emolument. Take the case of the Right Honourable Augustus Blank, who has held one of the foremost positions in the British Empire, or the world, and has been rewarded therefor exceedingly. This eminent person, after an agreeable career of well-dressed idleness at Eton, passed on to St Issachar's College, Cambridge. Here he spent & couple of years in the pursuit of various sports and pastimes, and was esteemed alike for his gentlemanly bearing, his agree able manners, and his efficiency in several games of skill, including bridge. St Issachar's, however, is a college with As Mr Blank, after two comfortable years, had shown no sign of winning the humblest distinction in any of the University examinations, he was not regarded with any great respect by the college authorities; nor would his contemporaries have anticipated for him that career of public distinction he was destined to pursue. But they omitted to consider how easy it may be (for some people) to succeed in the profession of politics. Leaving the University with as moderate an educational endowment as any person could bring from that seat of learning, Mr Blank, with his money, good birth, youth, and pleasant appearance, found no difficulty in entering the House of Commons. In a year or two he became private secretary to a Minister, and so passed on easily and rapidly through the various official stages until he found himself, as aforesaid, in the Cabinet. There is no reason to suppose that in the intervening period he had amended the comprehensive ignorance he had brought with him from school and college. He has a reputation for high integrity and much force of character, a reputation which is no doubt deserved, though it is one much more difficult to test than specific acquirements or attainments. Of these latter, at any rate, the right honourable gentleman Morley; or, on the other side of the Channel, M. Hanotaux or M. Poincaré. But these are exceptions, and in England they belong rather to the old than to the new school. In any case it may be said that, though literature and culture are elegant adjuncts to a political career, they are by no means essential to its success. They do not count one way or the other. If the possesses far less than the Balfour, Mr Birrell, Lord majority of ordinarily welleducated persons whom you may meet travelling up to town from the suburbs any morning. He speaks his own language with a certain direct lucidity, but with no evidence of literary knowledge. There is no proof that he ever read a serious book in his life, or that he has the smallest tincture of acquaintance with literature, art, science, theology, juris- politician chooses to amuse prudence, or philosophy; and his linguistic accomplishments are limited to a slender knowledge of French insufficient to enable him to converse with ease in that tongue. Yet this gentleman is a brilliantly successful and extremely wellrewarded politician. In what other line of life could he have risen to the very topmost rung of the ladder with so little exertion of his powers of intellectual acquisition? Nor is this statesman exceptionally ill-informed among politicians of "Cabinet rank." There is the Right Hon. Ebenezer Jones, another very potent personage, who is understood to have read the works of Charles Dickens, but is not otherwise known to have any sort of familiarity with polite learning, or with more of the "humanities" than the preachers at the Nonconformist conventicles he frequents. And so it is with others who are high placed among the leaders of the great parties in a great country. Some, of course, are men of the highest culture and literary ability-like Mr himself with books and learning, he may do so without any particular disadvantage, but he derives no benefit from this taste. He can get on just as well without it; and it will be found that the majority of the younger professionals, and those who are just now doing best at the business, avoid wasting their time with any such unprofitable pursuits. Nor do they find that a lack of culture, or even & want of elementary knowledge, militates in any degree against their success. But it may be said that if the politician need not demand from nature the special talents bestowed upon the successful artist or author or musician, he must at least have some other gifts. This is true; but these are of a kind which is pretty widely diffused. Many people still imagine that the man who hopes to get to the front rank in our public life must have a native gift of eloquence. But this is a complete delusion. The brilliant orator is out of date, and very few of our leading in a way is put up to move a resolution at a public meeting, or to make an afterdinner speech. Their chief attainments are loudness of voice and extreme fluency, and these are accomplishments which come to almost anybody with sufficient practice. The young man who aspires to take up politics as a profession need not be deterred by the consideration that he is not not endowed by nature with the qualities of a Demosthenes or a Disraeli. He can do very well without them. When his time comes to make speeches, his audience will not expect from him graceful elocution, or ornate exposition, or passages instinct with force and fire. They will want him to speak plainly, and to speak a great deal; and they will want him to know what he is talking about, and to attack the other side with extreme violence, the maximum of effectiveness, and a judicious amount of vulgarity. And if he is reasonably intelligent, and takes pains, and has fairly good lungs, he may legitimately aspire to do all that is required of him in this respect. So much for the qualifica tions of the political aspirant; and now as to his chances. What are his prospects of doing well at the business? Some of us still cherish the archaic superstition that English public men devote themselves to the service of the nation with very little prospect of material emolument or reward. This is an error. Most of them, on the contrary, get something out of politics, and many of them get a good deal. It is customary to pass over the whole question of Ministerial salaries in discreet silence. Our convention is that the payment made from the Consolidated Fund to the honourable and right honourable gentlemen who sit on the front benches in turn is too unimportant to be worth consideration. But after all a remuneration of £5000 a-year, or £3000, or even £2000 or £1500, is not exactly a negligible quantity. In the old days when Cabinet Ministers were supposed to be grands seigneurs, or very rich men, perhaps the salary did not count for much. In these times, when some of our rulers are sprung from the back-parlour and some from the workman's cottage, it counts enormously. It is, no doubt, possible to earn such incomes in other walks of life. Some great lawyers make more money, and a few great doctors, and, of course, some great manufacturers and merchants and financiers. But then these men are either persons of quite exceptional personal capacity, or they have had to wait many years before arriving at the top of the tree, or they have started in life with a genius for commerce, or with a large capital. But the £5000-a-year Minister may be drawing his salary at the age of forty or so. He may have begun without interest or money; and he has in all probability never been tested by the searching competition survived by those who come through the ruck in the learned professions. In his own calling, other than politics, he may have been quite undistinguished. He may have been a small solicitor, whose professional earnings never amounted to more than a few hundreds a-year, or an exsubaltern of cavalry who gave no special promise of military distinction, or an artisan whose horizon, as long as he kept to the workshop, was bounded by a couple of pounds a week, Now an occupation which after a few years of agreeable excitement puts these gentlemen in possession of an income that would have seemed to them beyond the dreams of avarice in any other sphere of activity, cannot be called a bad one. And it must be remembered that the actual salary, ample as it is, constitutes only one portion of their reward. They get an unequalled amount of social prestige and enjoyment and notoriety. They are placed in the very centre of the most aristocratic and luxurious society of the world. They are received at Court, and they participate in levees and State balls and gala performances at the Opera. They hobnob with kings and dukes and lords and ladies; and they pass straight from their middle-class obscur VOL. CXCI.-NO. MCLVIII. ity to the enjoyments and pursuits of the votaries of wealth and fashion and leisure. It is taken as a matter of course that a Minister who, a few years ago, found his relaxation in a trip to Ramsgate or to Llandudno should spend his frequent holidays in yachting, or motoring, or in luxurious villas on the Riviera. And if he does not pass most of his week-ends at a fashionable country - house party, or in running down to the seaside to play golf, he would be considered quite out of the mode. However, it may be said that these amenities are only the guerdon of the great leaders, the men of genius or striking energy who have fought their way into the chosen circle of the Cabinet. Such men are no doubt to be found in our great Committee of Government; but who would venture to assert that it is entirely, or even largely, made up of persons of this kind? The average Minister is no more than an average party politician who has drifted into the Cabinet by long service, or who has found his way into it by sheer fluke or by sheer audacity. The whole thing is such an accident that any man of ordinary ability and ordinary industry who has served his time in Parliament and the committees of the caucus may well think that he has as good a chance of arriving as any of his fellows. Moreover, the commissioned officers of the Parliamentary ranks are not limited to the Cabinet. We are sometimes apt to forget 2 R |