a middle-aged working man, living nearer than himself to the facts of life, and may find that this constituent of his has reasoned patiently and deeply on politics for thirty years, and that he himself is a rather absurd item in the material of that reasoning.  Or he may talk with a business man, and be forced to understand some one who sees perhaps more clearly than himself the results of his proposals, but who is separated from him by the gulf of a difference of desire:  that which one hopes the other fears.

[50] Plato, Republic, p. 493.

Yet however sincerely such a candidate may respect the process by which the more thoughtful both of those who vote for him and of those who vote against him reach their conclusions, he is still apt to feel that his own part in the election has little to do with any reasoning process at all.  I remember that before my first election my most experienced political friend said to me, ’Remember that you are undertaking a six weeks’ advertising campaign.’  Time is short, there are innumerable details to arrange, and the candidate soon returns from the rare intervals of mental contact with individual electors to that advertising campaign which deals with the electors as a whole.  As long as he is so engaged, the maxim that it is wrong to appeal to anything but the severest process of logical thought in his constituents will seem to him, if he has time to think of it, not so much untrue as irrelevant.

After a time the politician may cease even to desire to reason with his constituents, and may come to regard them as purely irrational creatures of feeling and opinion, and himself as the purely rational ‘over-man’ who controls them.  It is at this point that a resolute and able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous.  Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his ‘Patriot King’ how to govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of ’that staring timid creature man.’[51] A century before Darwin he, like Swift and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his fellow-men as animals.  He himself, he thought, was one of those few ’among the societies of men ... who engross almost the whole reason of the species, who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, who are designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind.’[52] For the rest, ’Reason has small effect upon numbers:  a turn of imagination, often as violent and as sudden as a gust of wind, determines their conduct.’[53]

[51] Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, etc. (ed. of 1785), p. 70.

[52] Ibid., p. 2.

[53] Ibid., p. 165.

The greatest of Bolingbroke’s disciples was Disraeli, who wrote, ’We are not indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress....  Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.  Even Mormon accounts more votaries than Bentham.’[54] It was Disraeli who treated Queen Victoria ’like a woman,’ and Gladstone, with the Oxford training from which he never fully recovered, who treated her ‘like a public meeting.’