Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/720

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A SOCIAL PIONEER

same infinite care for detail that is expended by a general staff upon a plan of campaign. They involve the careful preparation by forehanded effort of each step to be taken. They involve precise estimates of the effect such steps will have upon the public as also the effect an hostile analysis of those steps will mean. They imply that every member of the organization has his allotted function and knows to a nicety the duties of his station. Above all, they demand consideration of the element surprise. It was in media such as these that Place worked, and his genius consists hardly less in the methods he used than in the results he achieved. They are a perennial well-spring of education just at the point where a democracy is most likely to be ill-informed.

Mr. Wallas himself has learned that lesson; and it is hardly too much to say that his two subsequent books were an examination into the psychological foundations of the technique implicit in Place's work. It will, one imagines, be a task of no small difficulty for the future historian of English thought, looking at Mr. Wallas' three volumes, to explain the exact bearing of his work. He will not find, as with Professor Bosanquet, a considered philosophy of the state. He will not find, as with Mr. Sidney Webb, an organized analysis of economic structure. He will not discover, as with Mr. Cole, a prophecy of our future almost perspiring in its enthusiasm. Yet the clue, it may be suggested, is a simple one. What Mr. Wallas has emphasized is the inadequacy of the previous formulae by which the complex facts of human association are explained. Fear as with Hobbes, consent as with Locke, the self-interest of the Utilitarians, the habit of Sir Henry Maine, these, at the best, are vaguely partial glimpses. Society, it is clear, is a vast effort at intellectual coöperation. It is a coöperation hindered at every stage by individual passion and the absorption of some group in the quest of its self-interest. What Mr. Wallas has done is to drive us to the examination of the methods by which that cooperation can be best attained. A society in which men were all as able and as altruistic as Francis Place would doubtless hardly need the rules he seeks to discover; but we work with different data. What we mainly have to search are the impulses of men in their social expression, the discovery of the channels by which their satisfaction may be attained. It is not an easy task. A genius like Bentham may escape the rule that a plan, to be a