THERE are few things in the world more tiresome than the talk which is heard, has always been heard, and will always be heard, about “the dreadful way the government is being run”; criticisms of the negligence, laziness, deceit, cheating, thievery, and incompetence of public officials, leading to the conclusion that things are going very badly indeed, that the country is headed straight for the damnation bow-wows.

“Facile criticism” is the name we well apply to such censure. If it is so perpetually recurring and so perpetually enduring, the reason is to be found in the premise which underlies it: the presupposition of a “perfect administration,” where everybody does his duty with perfect intelligence and perfect scrupulousness. And this, as we shall see, is a wholly abstract conception, which, being such, can never be verified in reality.

In reality, the State is a continuous assertion of “archy” over “anarchy,” a continuous struggle between forces of dissolution and forces of integration. Of these latter, the former are an immediate and spontaneous manifestation of the vital impulses of a nation; and to suppress them to the point of destroying the sources from which they spring would be to destroy all the rest: without them, in fact, the State would never be created.

What, after all, are these “forces of dissolution” which fill good citizens (rightfully so, from certain points of view) now with terror and now with loathing? They are individuals following their natural inclinations, eager to love, eager to help themselves, their children, their friends, eager to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh and of the mind—eager to live their lives, in short. Oftentimes if we stop for a close look at the public men who are being so severely censured, we are seized with a feeling of sympathy, of indulgence, at least of compassion, and our wrath somehow subsides. We begin to ask for less perfection, and to expect less perfection, thankful that things are going as well as possible or even that they are no worse than they are.

This is no excuse for a “laissez-faire” attitude towards politics—the refuge of the inept and the cynical, who, like the last of the Medici in Tuscany, shrug their shoulders and say that “the world takes care of itself.” Statesmen who adopt this policy, prepare the ground, in the very best case, for that violent treatment which a State gives to its own diseases by virtue of the forces lying deep in its organism—for revolution; and, in the worst case, they ruin or destroy the State and the nation which it was their duty to rule and to guide. Rather than “laisser faire” the duty incumbent upon us is to assume an attitude that will be not impatient, but firm and assertive.

Politicians themselves do not suffer so very much from the evils they see before and around them, evils which they must deflect and divert, which they must deal with and control. These evils are, so to speak, the material with which they work, and the emotions they feel as normal men find an outlet in their daily action. It is much the case of the artist, who is not dismayed at the difficulties thrown in his way by the rebellious materials offered to his hand, but rather welcomes them as challenges to his skill, and takes keen enjoyment in the triumph he gradually wins over them, incomplete though the victory must ever be. The people who suffer most from the way the world has a habit of going, the people who are downcast at the irregularities, absurdities, injustices they see on every side, are not politicians or statesmen, but poetic or meditative spectators of events (along with men of duty, of justice, of sacrifice, who are good souls devoted to the good).

Particularly acute is the agony such people suffer at viciousness or mismanagement in public affairs; for the State, in the aspect here considered, is an ethical institution, the greatest of all ethical institutions, even, one might say, the sum of them all. That is why violations of duty and justice made in the name of the State are as offensive as crimes committed by people who pose as honest men and are so esteemed in public opinion. They somehow shake our confidence in the reality and possibility of the good. With a view to the public welfare, we are asked, for example, to succour the poor, the humble, the unfortunate. We are asked to create public offices, to appropriate public moneys, and to elect public servants to manage these. Then we discover that we have been imposed upon. Concern for the public welfare was only a mask. All this public charity was organised and executed only to give profit and luxury to a few rascals. Such masks can be seen in so many departments of public administration that we begin to doubt whether government is anything but mask, falsehood, oppression, made a little more odious, perhaps, because of the rank hypocrisy conjoined with them. So individuals and political parties protest. They tear off this mask and that mask, and take the government over themselves; and at once political corruption to the advantage of individuals is increased, or at least the graft enjoyed by one group is now passed along to another, and things proceed as they did before, perhaps a little worse than they did before. “All parties are alike.” “We were better off when we were worse off.” Such are the numberless phrases that political reform inspires. And people are disgusted. They see that things are wrong. They perceive the damage that is being done. But they cannot repair the damage nor right the wrong. The torment they feel, whether as contemplative spirits or as virtuous souls, is the torment of impotence. Better not to worry, therefore! Better to forget politics, look the other way, withdraw into one’s own pursuits, keep to the narrow circle of one’s own friends, acquaintances, relatives!

Times past and present show us many cases of such attitudes (with a behaviour corresponding) of indifference to public affairs. But times past and present also show that the motive of moral indignation originally at the bottom of the attitude and the conduct soon changes, and necessarily changes, to a selfish one. People who manifest their moral disdain, their ethical nausea in this way, eventually find themselves members of that numerous but not very honourable company recruited from the world’s self-seekers, who turn their backs on the interests of their fellow-men to devote themselves exclusively to their own welfare.

In our own day we have the aesthetes and the aristocrats who regard politics and war as matters for the boors and bumpkins to attend to as they please—affairs for drunken slaves, as an ancient Roman might have put it; while they themselves stand apart in a presumed superiority, smiling contemptuously at the vulgar scramblings of the mob which quarrels and even lets its throat be cut over pieces of territory, protective tariffs, the form or name a State shall have. As though anything important were involved in such questions, as though a man should give up the pleasure he takes in himself and his own concerns for the sake of helping to answer them!

In centuries gone by, it was the “sages” who drew aside from the lives of their peoples to devote themselves to the pursuit of wisdom, content so long as they were left alone in a seclusion favourable to their meditations, ready to accept any peace so long as it was peace, and any despot so long as he could guarantee the leisure they desired.

We know the kind of men produced by the monasteries and ecclesiastical benefices of a later time when monks and clerics shook the weight of the world from their shoulders—those, I mean, who really renounced life; for the “valent” ones, as Thomas Campanella called them, renounced that renunciation and the pleasures of ignoring a struggling world. And the figures of this kind which we see, whether in the past or in the present, are such that no one would dare accord them admiration or veneration. They had their excuse, of course, and perhaps the illusion they cherished was sincere. They promoted, so they pretended, the contemplative life, cultivating the arts and the sciences, doing good to a suffering humanity with works of piety and mercy. But we know that the excuse was not valid. Art and science languish once we cut the vibrant ties that bind them to life. They become vapid, academic, trivial. Charity and loving-kindness themselves degenerate to such meaningless forms that they humiliate and debase instead of comforting the needy and lifting them to their feet. Alms and bread-lines never give true and solid and enduring help. This must come from political changes in the conditions of social life, which give men a freer air to breathe and more opportunity for productive labour. In support of these assertions I need hardly trouble to cite examples. The history of my own country is full of them, especially in certain centuries which furnish startling ones.

Indifference toward public affairs presents, accordingly, a curious anomaly: it seems utterly despicable in practice, and yet solidly motivated in logic. The reason for this is that it is the perversion of a sound principle—the principle of specification, that is to say, of specialisation. Specialisation involves limitation. We have to refrain from doing many things we would like to do, but ought not to do; since to do them would mean neglecting our own peculiar work to handle the work of others badly or imperfectly. That is why we should control our tempers in judging the work of others, be careful not to lose our heads over things remote from our experience, avoid fighting battles in our imaginations and writhing in agony in reality; all the more since the notions we conceive and the opinions we utter in such frames of mind are for the most part exaggerated, and unjust as well as bootless; just as our hopes and fears are also for the most part without foundation.

If we exercise such due restraint upon ourselves, the feeling that becomes uppermost in our minds is not one of superiority but one of humility, or at least of modesty; and the renunciation we make by virtue of it is not contemptuous but rational, based as it now is on a sane concept of fitness and of duty. So it is not renunciation in the sense of complete withdrawal, complete detachment from public concerns. Rather we arrive and stop at a definite point in a definite sphere—the point marked by the limit of our special competence in the sphere of our special activities. And this sphere is “public” in that it is part of that universal in which all other spheres of activity unite, vibrate, resound, and from which vibrations and echoes descend into each separate sphere.

A citizen becomes a poet, or a philosopher or a saint, without however ceasing to be a citizen. On the contrary, the deeper he goes into one of these forms of being, the more strictly he adheres to that form, the better and truer he becomes as a citizen. The poet gives his people their dreams of the human heart. The philosopher sets before them the truths of Nature and the outlines of history. The saint cultivates and imparts the moral virtues. And all these creative forces make their influence felt in the field that is more specifically political.

It may happen on occasion that poet, philosopher, or saint becomes statesman or soldier—a political personality, that is, in the narrow sense of the term. Not a few such re-orientations or changes of rôle might be counted in the past, though the men who made them were not in the highest rank of their particular vocations; and they had their public careers either before their special callings developed or after these had passed their full maturity and were wearing out. The ideal of the Italian Romanticists and patriots of our Independence days was that the poet should “fall singing in battle”; and in some men the ideal was realised.

However, the exception does not make the rule; and the rule is not multiplication, but specialisation, of aptitudes—a rule established in the course of history because it has proved valuable to humanity. To secure the union of politics with the other forms of human activity we do not have to depend on rare prodigies and geniuses. That union is already a fact when we do the work for which we are fitted in the best and noblest way, and with a sense of responsibility and of service to our fellows.