Soon people forget what the man really wanted first; and after
a successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it himself.
The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests, a pandemonium
of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merely prevent any
heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practical compromise.
One can only find the middle distance between two points
if the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement
between two litigants who cannot both get what they want;
but not if they will not even tell us what they want.
The keeper of a restaurant would much prefer that each customer
should give his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis
or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer should
sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical
calculations about how much food there can be on the premises.
Most of us have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their
perverse unselfishness, give more trouble than the selfish; who almost
clamor for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat.
Most of us have known parties or expeditions full of this seething
fuss of self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such
admirable women, our practical politicians keep things in the same
confusion through the same doubt about their real demands.
There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle
of small surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians
who are in favor of secular education, but think it hopeless
to work for it; who desire total prohibition, but are certain
they should not demand it; who regret compulsory education,
but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant proprietorship
and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed and
floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything.
If our statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done.