Astute and amusing.
There is no doubt that, in popular governments resting on a wide suffrage, either without an army or having little reason to fear it, the leader, whether or not he be cunning, or eloquent, or well provided with commonplaces, will be the Wire-puller.
The process of cutting up political power into petty fragments has in him its most remarkable product.
The morsels of power are so small that men, if left to themselves, would not care to employ them.
In England, they would be largely sold, if the law permitted it; in the United States they are extensively sold in spite of the law; and in France, and to a less extent in England, the number of "abstentions" shows the small value attributed to votes.
But the political chifonnier who collects and utilises the fragments is the Wire-puller I think, however, that it is too much the habit in this country to describe him as a mere organiser, contriver, and manager.
The particular mechanism which he constructs is no doubt of much importance.
The form of this mechanism recently erected in this country has a close resemblance to the system of the Wesleyan Methodists; one system, however, exists for the purpose of keeping the spirit of Grace a-flame, the other for maintaining the spirit of Party at a white heat.
The Wire-puller is not intelligible unless we take into account one of the strongest forces acting on human nature-Party feeling.
Party feeling is probably far more a survival of the primitive combativeness of mankind than a consequence of conscious intellectual differences between man and man.
It is essentially the same sentiment which in certain states of society leads to civil, intertribal, or international war; and it is as universal as humanity.
It is better studied in its more irrational manifestations than in those to which we are accustomed.
It is said that Australian savages will travel half over the Australian continent to take in a fight the side of combatants who wear the same Totem as themselves.
Two Irish factions who broke one another's heads over the whole island are said to have orginated in a quarrel about the colour of a cow.
In Southern India, a series of dangerous riots are constantly arising through the rivalry of parties who know no more of one another than that some of them belong to the party of the right hand and others to that of the left hand.
Once a year, large numbers of English ladies and gentlemen, who have no serious reason for preferring one University to the other, wear dark or light blue colours to signify good wishes for the success of Oxford or Cambridge in a cricket-match or boat-race.
Party differences, properly so called, are supposed to indicate intellectual, or moral, or historical preferences; but these go a very little way down into the population, and by the bulk of partisans they are hardly understood and soon forgotten.
"Guelf" and "Ghibelline" had once a meaning, but men were under perpetual banishment from their native land for belonging to one or other of these parties long after nobody knew in what the difference consisted.
Some men are Tories or Whigs by conviction; but thousands upon thousands of electors vote simply for yellow, blue, or purple, caught at most by the appeals of some popular orator
It is through this great natural tendency to take sides that the Wire-puller works.
Without it he would be powerless
His business is to fan its flame; to keep it constantly acting upon the man who has once declared himself a partisan; to make escape from it difficult and distasteful.
His art is that of the Nonconformist preacher, who gave importance to a body of commonplace religionists by persuading them to wear a uniform and take a military title, or of the man who made the success of a Temperance Society by prevailing on its members to wear always and openly a blue ribbon
In the long-run, these contrivances cannot be confined to anyone party, and their effects on all parties and their leaders, and on the whole ruling democracy, must be in the highest degree serious and lasting.
The first of these effects will be, I think, to make all parties very like one another, and indeed in the end almost indistinguishable, however leaders may quarrel and partisan hate partisan.
In the next place, each party will probably become more and more homogeneous; and the opinions it professes, and the policy which is the outcome of those opinions, will less and less reflect the individual mind of any leader, but only the ideas which seem to that mind to be most likely to win favour with the greatest number of supporters.
Lastly, the wirepulling system, when fully developed, will infallibly lead to the constant enlargement of the area of suffrage.
What is called universal suffrage has greatly declined in the estimation, not only of philosophers who follow Bentham, but of the a priori theorists who assumed that it was the inseparable accompaniment of a Republic, but who found that in practice it was the natural basis of a tyranny.
But extensions of the suffrage, though no longer believed to be good in themselves, have now a permanent place in the armoury of parties, and are sure to be a favourite weapon of the Wire-puller.
The Athenian statesmen who, worsted in a quarrel of aristocratic cliques, "took the people into partnership," have a close parallel in the modern politicians who introduce household suffrage into towns to "dish" one side, and into counties to "dish" the other.
Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government.
One thinks of "Hands up! Don't shoot!" and the spread of "die ins."
On the other hand, he is completely wrong on the historical impact of universal suffrage.
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