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This same veering of interest may be seen in the career of another Englishman. I refer to Mr. Graham Wallas. Back in the '80's he was working with the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Sidney Olivier, Annie Besant and others in socialist propaganda. Readers of the Fabian Essays know Mr. Wallas and appreciate the work of his group.
But the most interesting evidence gathered by Mr. Wallas was that relating to women workers. He had an opportunity of collecting the views of girls employed in the laundries and poorer kind of factories in Boston. 'The answers', he says, 'surprised me greatly.
Mr. Wallas takes exactly the same position as William James did when he planned a "moral equivalent" for war. Both men illustrate the changing focus of political thought. Both try to found statesmanship on human need. Both see that there are good and bad satisfactions of the same impulse.
Only it would have to be absolutely certain knowledge proved and proved again up to the hilt. Graham Wallas, that although the State may not undertake any positive schemes for selective breeding in the present state of our knowledge, it can no more evade a certain reaction upon these things than the individual can evade a practical solution.
See Place's account in Additional MSS. 27,823. G. C. Robertson, Philosophical Remains, p. 166; and under George Grote in Dictionary of National Biography. Letters communicated by Mr. Graham Wallas. See Mr. Wallas's Francis Place, p. 91. So Place observed that Mill 'could help the mass, but could not help the individual, not even himself or his own. Wallas's Francis Place, p. 79.
Wallas amused himself by reading over the directions for restoring life to the apparently drowned, and Wester tidied up Bowler's study and helped him make up the stores into seven equal brown-paper packages, writing the name of the owner of each on the outside. This done, the preparations were pronounced as complete as they could be till Monday dawned.
And yet we do not begin to know our desires or the art of their satisfaction. Mr. Wallas's book and the special literature of the subject leave no doubt that a precise political psychology is far off indeed. The human nature we must put at the center of our statesmanship is only partially understood. True, Mr. Wallas works with a psychology that is fairly well superseded.
"Upon my word," said Bowler, "this is jolly. It's just like the real New Swishford, isn't it, you fellows?" "Warthah," said Braintree, "except my wifle to let fly at the seagulls with." "But," said Wallas, "if the wind's off the land this side, it will be off the sea when we get over there, so I suppose it'll get rougher and rougher the farther out we get?"
"The widow who takes in washing," says Graham Wallas, in his deep and searching analysis of our contemporary life, "fails or succeeds according to her skill in choosing starch or soda or a wringing machine under the influence of half a dozen competing world-schemes of advertisement.... The English factory girl who is urged to join her Union, the tired old Scotch gatekeeper with a few pounds to invest, the Galician peasant when the emigration agent calls, the artisan in a French provincial town whose industry is threatened by a new invention, all know that unless they find their way among world-wide facts, which only reach them through misleading words, they will be crushed."
It'll be dark at six, and we can land in Rocket Bay, you know, and dodge them that way." Bowler was evidently so well up in the arrangements, and had made such a careful study of all the pros and cons of the venture, that every one felt satisfied, and even the somewhat doubtful Wallas desisted from throwing more cold water on the expedition.
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