[10] Politics, Book II. ch.  V.

The Charity Schools of 1700 to 1850 were experiments in the result of a complete refusal of scope, not only for the instinct of property, but for the entirely distinct instinct of privacy, and part of their disastrous nervous and moral effect must be put down to that.  The boys in the contemporary public boarding-schools secured a little privacy by the adoption of strange and sometimes cruel social customs, and more has been done since then by systems of ‘studies’ and ‘houses.’  Experience seems, however, to show that during childhood a day school with its alternation of home, class-room, and playing field, is better suited than a boarding-school to the facts of normal human nature.

This instinctive need of privacy is again a subject which would repay special and detailed study.  It varies very greatly among different races, and one supposes that the much greater desire for privacy which is found among Northern, as compared to Southern Europeans, may be due to the fact that races who had to spend much or little of the year under cover, adjusted themselves biologically to a different standard in this respect.  It is clear, also, that it is our emotional nature, and not the intellectual or muscular organs of talking, which is most easily fatigued.  Light chatter, even among strangers, in which neither party ‘gives himself away,’ is very much less fatiguing than an intimacy which makes some call upon the emotions.  An actor who accepts the second alternative of Diderot’s paradox, and feels his part, is much more likely to break down from overstrain, than one who only simulates feeling and keeps his own emotional life to himself.

It is in democratic politics, however, that privacy is most neglected, most difficult, and most necessary.  In America all observers are agreed as to the danger which results from looking on a politician as an abstract personification of the will of the people, to whom all citizens have an equal and inalienable right of access, and from whom every one ought to receive an equally warm and sincere welcome.  In England our comparatively aristocratic tradition as to the relation between a representative and his constituents has done something to preserve customs corresponding more closely to the actual nature of man.  A tired English statesman at a big reception is still allowed to spend his time rather in chaffing with a few friends in a distant corner of the room than in shaking hands and exchanging effusive commonplaces with innumerable unknown guests.  But there is a real danger lest this tradition of privacy may be abolished in English democracy, simply because of its connection with aristocratic manners.  A young labour politician is expected to live in more than American conditions of intimate publicity.  Having, perhaps, just left the working bench, and having to adjust his nerves and his bodily health to the difficult requirements of mental work,