If he is of an expansive temperament, and it is such men who become politicians, he must take his mates in the shop and his neighbours in the tenement house as he finds them—­and he sees them at very close range.  The social virtue therefore which is almost a necessity of his existence is a good-humoured tolerance of the defects of average human nature.  He is keenly aware of the uncertainty of his own industrial position, accustomed to give and receive help, and very unwilling to ‘do’ any man ‘out of his job.’  His parents and grandparents read very little and he was brought up in a home with few books.  If, as he grows up, he does not himself read, things beyond his direct observation are apt to be rather shadowy for him, and he is easily made suspicious of that which he does not understand.  If, on the other hand, he takes to reading when he is already a grown man, words and ideas are apt to have for him a kind of abstract and sharply outlined reality in a region far removed from his daily life.

Now the first virtue required in government is the habit of realising that things whose existence we infer from reading are as important as the things observed by our senses, of looking, for instance, through a list of candidates for an appointment and weighing the qualifications of the man whom one has never met by the same standard as those of the man whom one has met, and liked or pitied, the day before; or of deciding on an improvement with complete impartiality as between the district one knows of on the map and the district one sees every morning.  If a representative elected to govern a large area allows personal acquaintance and liking to influence his decisions, his acquaintance and liking will he schemed for and exploited by those who have their own ends to gain.  The same difficulty arises in matters of discipline, where the interests of the unknown thousands who will suffer from the inefficiency of an official have to be balanced against those of the known official who will suffer by being punished or dismissed; as well as in those numerous cases in which a working man has to balance the dimly realised interests of the general consumer against his intimate sympathy with his fellow-craftsmen.

The political risk arising from these facts is not, at present, very great in the parliamentary Labour Party.  The working men who have been sent to parliament have been hitherto, as a rule, men of picked intelligence and morale and of considerable political experience.  But the success or failure of any scheme aiming at social equality will depend chiefly on its administration by local bodies, to which the working classes must necessarily send men of less exceptional ability and experience.  I have never myself served on an elected local body the majority of whose members were weekly wage earners.  But I have talked with men, both of working-class and middle-class origin, who have been in that position.  What they say confirms that which I have inferred from my own observation, that on such a body one finds a high level of enthusiasm, of sympathy, and of readiness to work, combined with a difficulty in maintaining a sufficiently rigorous standard in dealing with sectional interests and official discipline.