The Press Monday, August 15, 1932. Graham Wallas.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20625, 15 August 1932, Page 8

The Press Monday, August 15, 1932. Graham Wallas.

Graham Wallas, whose death is reported in the cable news this morning, had a fame and an influence which are not easy to explain. In bulk his literary output was insignificant: a biography, four not very long treatises, and a few essays. Nor was his share of what are to men of learning the " glittering prizes " of their calling an impressive one. For most of his life he was a lecturer in political science at a miserable salary and no University, not even his own Oxford, gave him an honorary degree. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that among students of sociology and politics in England and America no name is better known than his. The reason for this neglect lay partly in his own character. He was one of those unhappy people who value distinctions and yet are restrained by pride from seeking them. But to a greater extent it was due to the fact that the academic world, at the time he was doing his best work, had no place for a man of his bent and methods. His thinking was of the patient, unhurried, dispassionate type that is liked and encouraged by the older Universities; but bis subject was unrecognised in the Oxford of his day and even now has only a precarious footing thei*e. It was only natural that the London School of Economics, with its pioneering enthusiasm for the social sciences, should attract him, and that its bustle, its tendenciousnesa, and its too often slipshod thinking should make him unhappy. Yet it is perhaps the secret of his greatness that in a crowded political and academic life he never lost that blend of humanism and intellectual integrity which was part temperament and part Oxford. His queer partnership with Sidney Webb and Shaw in the gallant youth of the Fabian Society drew him into a political career as crowded and useful as it was obscure. Ten years on the London School Board and six on the London County Council gave him a practical knowledge of electoral and administrative problems far too rare in political theorists, while his habits of thought enabled him to sift that knowledge without the bias generally associated with personal experience. It has been said by someone who intended to be unkind that Human Nature and Politics is the political philosophy of the London School Board. The statement is both true and flattering. To those who knew Wallas, parts of this work were almost autobiography; yet the book stands as the best analysis of the-" psychology " j of democracy ever written. And if proof is needed of the soundness of his method, it will be found in the uncanny accuracy of his prophecies. Writing in 1908, when democracy seemed to have'won its final triumph over all other forms of government, Wallas laid his finger on the very weaknesses which are now threatening its existence: He was able to do so because he saw that political truths emerged more easily from a study ef human nature in politics than from a study of institutions, and that human nature in London was not greatly different from human nature in Berlin or Paris.

The democratic movement which produced the constitutions under which most civilised nations now live [he pointed out] was inspired by a purely intellectual conception of human nature which is becoming every year more unreal to us.

At the present time this insistence that institutions must be based on the ascertained facts of human nature seems the labouring of an obvious truth. It is too easily forgotten that Mr Gladstone used to talk confidently of "the "grand and eternal commonplaces of "liberty and self-government" and that twenty years ago the quantitative method was unknown to political theorists. Wallas found political theory a branch of philosophy, and has left it a branch of social science. Or perhaps it would be truer, to say that he has shown how an idealistic political philosophy can be grounded on the hard rock of fact. Wallas was one of those rare spirits who could probe the depths of human weakness and avarice and yet retain his faith in the limitless possibilities of the human mind.