July 15.
A certain writer has defined the difference between a politician and a_ statesman as being that the politician legislates for the next election and the statesman legislates for the next generation. This is not only definition: it is also an epigram. We know it by the smile on its lips and the sting in its tail. But an epigram is in words what a caricature is in a picture: it is an exaggeration of the truth. Tt may be true that a statesman Jegislates for the nest generation but that must be a by-product o* his activities. He is elected by the present generation to legislate for its needs and these must be his first care. Tf he succeeds in so framing the laws which he enacts that they meet the needs of the present while promoting the interests of the future, he is not only a statesman but is also partly a prophet and wholly a genius.
These reflexions occur to us in connexion with a letter we have seen, within the last few days, from a young artisan at home who writes to.a friend in Shanghai from a port.on his way to Australie, This young. man, sober, steady and anxious to earn a modest competence by hard-work and thrift, explains that he. has been out of work for a yeat@and, while be has not come to. real want, owing to the Government grant of unemployed relief, he has lost hope of making a living in his native land and so turns his face towards the land of equal chances in the southern hemis sphere. Government grants of relief, or, as it is called, ''doles'' to the unemployed, have been described as a pernicious policy, but, while it has little to "commend it, it is certainly an improvement on the old, bad policy of leaving the unfortunate out-of-works to beg, borrow or steal, until it was once more possible for a man, able and_ willing to work, to earn a living for himself and his family. -No one would wish that men of this stamp should be pushed to the wall or that, when they fall in fortune's strife, though no fault of their own, they should be allowed to drift from the unemployed to the unemployable stage and become the derelicts four city slums. Any money that is spent to avert such a catastrophe is well expended, for there is no more valuable citizen than an honest, self-respecting workman and no mote pitiable sight than the same man turned into a pauper or a hopeless tramp. Nor can the spectacle o* a man of this kind, turning his back, regretfully, on his native land, be viewed without a certain measure of <disappointment. He will, doubtless, do well in the new land to which he goes, and his muscle and energy will go towards building up that Greater Britain beyond the seas, but his going is a loss and he cannot fail to have a feeling that his native land has been a stony stepmother to him in spite of the relief doled out to him to prevent him experiencing the pangs of actual want.
The Government grant to the unemployed, then, has something to commend it. Where it fails is in that it was given'as a dole and not in return for some useful work expended for the benefit of the community at large. It seems almost incredible that for fully a year and a half there have been more than a million men drawing a weekly payment from the nation and that no way has been found to utilize the labour of this army on some work of national importance. There are so many things clamant to be done and here was the energy capable of compassing their accomplishment, but it was allowed to run to waste instead of being turned into useful channels. Surely.the men who allowed this to happen were politicians, with their eyes fixed on the next election, lather than statesmen with the needs of the next generation patent to their vision. One thinks of the great highways of Great: Britain, many of which have served the needs of the country since the days of the Romans, but. are now, owing to the development of modern power traction, utterly inadequate to the burden of traffic imposed on them. Could not a beginning have been made on the creation of a scientific system of intercommunication between London and the other great cities in the provinces? This would have been a statesmanlike measure, hut it was evidently beyond the purview of the men who at present hold in their bands the destinies of our Empire.
Tiooking backward, we see instances where the statesman triumphed over the politician, in, for instance, Disvaeli's purchase of the Suez Canal shares. Sir, Henry Campbell - Bannerman's settlement of South Africa after the Boer War and, we are inclined to say, the present Government's enactment: of the Trish Free State. The Versailles treaty, we are afraid, must be reckoned as the work of politicians. not the achievement of statesmen. But what would you? A politician is made, cast up on the surface of parliamentary life by the caucus and the machine: a statesman is a gilt of the gods.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.