HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS



INTRODUCTION


The study of politics is just now (1908) in a curiously unsatisfactory
position.

At first sight the main controversy as to the best form of government
appears to have been finally settled in favour of representative
democracy. Forty years ago it could still be argued that to base the
sovereignty of a great modern nation upon a widely extended popular vote
was, in Europe at least, an experiment which had never been successfully
tried. England, indeed, by the 'leap in the dark' of 1867, became for
the moment the only large European State whose government was democratic
and representative. But to-day a parliamentary republic based upon
universal suffrage exists in France without serious opposition or
protest. Italy enjoys an apparently stable constitutional monarchy.
Universal suffrage has just been enacted in Austria. Even the German
Emperor after the election of 1907 spoke of himself rather as the
successful leader of a popular electoral campaign than as the inheritor
of a divine right. The vast majority of the Russian nation passionately
desires a sovereign parliament, and a reactionary Duma finds itself
steadily pushed by circumstances towards that position. The most
ultramontane Roman Catholics demand temporal power for the Pope, no
longer as an ideal system of world government, but as an expedient for
securing in a few square miles of Italian territory liberty of action