MOTIVES IN POLITICS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21326, 29 October 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

MOTIVES IN POLITICS

SOCIAL IMPULSE

BY MATANGA

The whole world seems a-whirr with politics, big and little, from efforts to set Europe on its feet to paltry playing with wordy squibs in an odd place or two that need not be precisely named. Where to put the American battle of parties, in this gamut of noise, is so difficult that this instance is mentioned only to assure any anxious cousins among us that it is not quite overlooked. There is a very riot of schemes and counterschemes to get things ordered to taste, according to principles dear to the partisan heart. In all this pother it is hard to come at the real thing, yet a little patience will find it there. It is a matter of motives. How far these are rightly held and honoured is not easy to say, but a kindly tolerance will note a promising social impulse, narrow or comprehensive, in every motive thai is avowed or detected.

. Some are frankly identified with a party; some are " for the State;" some again have an outlook on a very wide world. Less or more, all discoverable motives seek the good of numbers, not persons. That may be a weakness, but it is pardonable, for mankind comes by w r ay of the group to uplands of endeavour. With varying clearness, but with unvarying persistence, the social impulse makes itself evident wherever statecraft exists. To have no politics is to have no civilisation, and for this reason any politics will be better than none. The whole development of democracy with all its faults and disappointments is, more or less consciously, toward the realisation of a political activity, free and full. It may sometimes mako much of individual rights and duties, but its ideal citizen is the man set in a wise and beneficent social order. Not the rescue of individuals, but the transformation of their lives' setting and relations, is the aim, whether it be darkly or clearly understood. As far as it goes—and it goes a long way—that is well. It would be wrong to try to treat man as a unit. Ho cannot live in a vacuum. Even the most enthusiastic of individualists Cannot be a consistent individualist. Conditions count. Environment is vastly active. The Egg and the Bird Chesterton characteristically says, discussing the eternal sequence of the hen and the egg, " the bird is the thing to be aimed at—not with a gun, but a life-bestowing wand." He is pleading for the paramount claims of the individual life. We nevertheless cannot ignore the process of the bird's breeding; and, if we wish to be practical breeders, not mere fanciers of brilliant literary paradoxes about hens, we must become experts in coops and corn, and study the enemies of the poultry yard and the common diseases of fowls, and have more than a nodding acquaintance with incubators and artificial mothers. Conditions count in the hen-house aS elsewhere, and their neglect means that the bird, however r< aimed at," may never even emerge from the egg. To order all so that the best individuals shall result is the wise way. Occasionally, some petty politician, forgetting that politics and society are inseparables notions when understood, will talk as if his - country's capital is a capital I. This is to deny the essence of his job. It is society as an organised whole, with no element negligible, with every letter a capital, that calls for service. It is society .as such, not conceived as a mass of separable units, but " bound in the bundle of life " by bonds of industry and commerce, bonds of communal interests in home and village, in town and country, and bonds of common law and institution and habit. Society so viewed is the whole setting in which human lives are placed, the matrix in which characters are impressed, the air in which spirits breathe, the soil in which even the least earthly grow. Widening Circles The politician's nearest duty may seem to be to his class, but that alone is a poor motive. For it cuts across national fraternity with an anti-social ruthlessness. To the whole nation he has responsibility. He will feel, if he be a politician in the old worthy sense, the urge of that larger imperative. If he knows his Blake the poet, not the admiral —he will cry:

Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear: 0 clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire! will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. Only for " England" he will put, regardful of reason more than rhythm, the name of his own land. But he will not be so foolish as toignore the historic and vital relation of his own to other lands. He will look further than its limits, for nations can no more live in a vacuum than can individuals. Set on making nationnl life worthy and strong, he will strive also to cement international friendships and t-tke a share in universal plans of social betterment. The world is no longer a chaos of selfcontained, competing, clashing units. _ With others we are subtly but surely linked. They without us, we without them, cannot be " made perfect." For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along, Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of right 01 wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame— In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim. Multiplying Social Ties Man has never been without social responsibilities. They have accompanied social enjoyments. Together, as inseparable twins, these two have grown. Once, when rural conditions predominated, and one half of the world did not know where the other half lived, social ties were intensely limited, but yet intensely real. They have multiplied and extended beyond calculation as international contact, for conflict or for commerce, has been perfected, and as the work of Columbus and Cook, Watt and Morse, Edison and Marconi, has brought together the ends of the earth. Now no life can be lived in conditions at all approaching splendid or sordid isolation. So the politician's duty, in an even greater measure than that which the common or garden variety of citizen must face, is to think in terms of others. He under- | takes supremely a mission to society. And by society is meant, at least, the whole corporate mass of ' his own countrypien. He must think for the unemployed, the houseless, the men and women m need of succour from fear of old age and its threatening hardships. Yet not only ot them. The " submerged tenth is but a fraction of the scope of the politician s service, although the problems of its housing and feeding and teaching press most prominently upon notice to-day. It is to the serving of all that the true politician addresses himself, obeying an impulse to social service that is coeval with man. Whatever party label he may bear, ever, if he abhor every party label ever invented, and thus become a party of one, he must look sometimes beyond party and he usually makes no secret about'it. Indeed, he is at pains to woo the suffrages of others by his protestations that he is out'for their benefit not his own; and if performance lag behind profession—alas and alack, we are all human ! —he has set the seal on the onl,y motive in politics that is worth a tinker s benediction.