League.

5

Whether in this particular case the Senate was above or below its
normal standard, it is not necessary to decide. Nor whether the Senate
compares favorably with the House, or with other parliaments. At the
moment, I should like to think only about the world-wide spectacle of
men acting upon their environment, moved by stimuli from their
pseudo-environments. For when full allowance has been made for
deliberate fraud, political science has still to account for such
facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that it is
acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it
speaks for the common interest. They live, we are likely to say, in
different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but
they think and feel in different ones.

It is to these special worlds, it is to these private or group, or
class, or provincial, or occupational, or national, or sectarian
artifacts, that the political adjustment of mankind in the Great
Society takes place. Their variety and complication are impossible to
describe. Yet these fictions determine a very great part of men's
political behavior. We must think of perhaps fifty sovereign
parliaments consisting of at least a hundred legislative bodies. With
them belong at least fifty hierarchies of provincial and municipal
assemblies, which with their executive, administrative and legislative
organs, constitute formal authority on earth. But that does not begin
to reveal the complexity of political life. For in each of these
innumerable centers of authority there are parties, and these parties
are themselves hierarchies with their roots in classes, sections,