of its effect on human welfare.


THE SCIENCE AND ART OF POLITICS

Political Science means nothing else than the devizing of the best
ways of fulfilling the will of the world; and, I repeat, it is
skilled work. Once the way is discovered, the methods laid down,
and the machinery provided, the work of the statesman is done, and
that of the official begins. To illustrate, there is no need for
the police officer who governs the street traffic to be or to know
any better than the people who obey the wave of his hand. All
concerted action involves subordination and the appointment of
directors at whose signal the others will act. There is no more
need for them to be superior to the rest than for the keystone of
an arch to be of harder stone than the coping. But when it comes
to devizing the directions which are to be obeyed: that is, to
making new institutions and scraping old ones, then you need
aristocracy in the sense of government by the best. A military
state organized so as to carry out exactly the impulses of the
average soldier would not last a year. The result of trying to
make the Church of England reflect the notions of the average
churchgoer has reduced it to a cipher except for the purposes of a
petulantly irreligious social and political club. Democracy as to
the thing to be done may be inevitable (hence the vital need for a
democracy of supermen); but democracy as to the way to do it is
like letting the passengers drive the train: it can only end in
collision and wreck. As a matter of act, we obtain reforms (such
as they are), not by allowing the electorate to draft statutes,
but by persuading it that a certain minister and his cabinet are