An objection has been urged against the adoption of political reasoning either implicitly or explicitly quantitative, that it involves the balancing against each other of things essentially disparate.  How is one, it is asked, to balance the marginal unit of national honour involved in the continuance of a war with that marginal unit of extra taxation which is supposed to be its exact equivalent?  How is one to balance the final sovereign spent on the endowment of science with the final sovereign spent on a monument to a deceased scientist, or on the final detail in a scheme of old age pensions?  The obvious answer is that statesmen have to act, and that whoever acts does somehow balance all the alternatives which are before him.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer in his annual allocation of grants and remissions of taxation balances no stranger things than does the private citizen, who, having a pound or two to spend at Christmas, decides between subscribing to a Chinese Mission and providing a revolving hatch between his kitchen and his dining-room.

A more serious objection is that we ought not to allow ourselves to think quantitatively in politics, that to do so fritters away the plain consideration of principle.  ‘Logical principles’ may be only an inadequate representation of the subtlety of nature, but to abandon them is, it is contended, to become a mere opportunist.

In the minds of these objectors the only alternative to deductive thought from simple principles seems to be the attitude of Prince Buelow, in his speech in the Reichstag on universal suffrage.  He is reported to have said:—­’Only the most doctrinaire Socialists still regarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish and as an infallible dogma.  For his own part he was no worshipper of idols, and he did not believe in political dogmas.  The welfare and the liberty of a country did not depend either in whole or in part upon the form of its Constitution or of its franchise.  Herr Bebel had once said that on the whole he preferred English conditions even to conditions in France.  But in England the franchise was not universal, equal, and direct.  Could it be said that Mecklenburg, which had no popular suffrage at all, was governed worse than Haiti, of which the world had lately heard such strange news, although Haiti could boast of possessing universal suffrage?’[48]

[48] Times, March 27, 1908.

But what Prince Buelow’s speech showed, was that he was either deliberately parodying a style of scholastic reasoning with which he did not agree, or he was incapable of grasping the first conception of quantitative political thought.  If the ‘dogma’ of universal suffrage means the assertion that all men who have votes are thereby made identical with each other in all respects, and that universal suffrage is the one condition of good government, then, and then only, is his attack on it valid.  If, however, the desire for universal suffrage is based on the belief that a wide extension of political power is one of the most important elements in the conditions of good government—­racial aptitude, ministerial responsibility, and the like, being other elements—­then the speech is absolutely meaningless.