19. Imagination and Radicals

Conservatism, I believe, is mainly due to want of imagination.

In saying this, I do not for a moment mean to deny the other and equally
obvious truth that Conservatism, in the lump, is a euphemism for
selfishness. But the two ideas have much in common. Selfish people are
apt to be unimaginative: unimaginative people are apt to be selfish.
Clearly to realise the condition of the unfortunate is the beginning of
philanthropy. Clearly to realise the rights of others is the beginning
of justice. "Put yourself in his place" strikes the keynote of ethics.
Stupid people can only see their own side of a question: they cannot
even imagine any other side possible. So, as a rule, stupid people are
Conservative. They cling to what they have; they dread revision,
redistribution, justice. Also, if a man has imagination he is likely to
be Radical, even though selfish; while if he has no imagination he is
likely to be Conservative, even though otherwise good and kind-hearted.
Some men are Conservative from defects of heart, while some are
Conservative from defects of head. Conversely, most imaginative people
are Radical; for even a bad man may sometimes uphold the side of right
because he has intelligence enough to understand that things might be
better managed in the future for all than they are in the present.

But when I say that Conservatism is mainly due to want of imagination, I
mean more than that. Most people are wholly unable to conceive in their
own minds any state of things very different from the one they have been
born and brought up in. The picturing power is lacking. They can
conceive the past, it is true, more or less vaguely--because they have
always heard things once were so, and because the past is generally
realisable still by the light of the relics it has bequeathed to the
present. But they can't at all conceive the future. Imagination fails
them. Innumerable difficulties crop up for them in the way of every
proposed improvement. Before there was any County Council for London,
such people thought municipal government for the metropolis an insoluble
problem. Now that Home Rule quivers trembling in the balance, they think
it would pass the wit of man to devise in the future a federal league
for the component elements of the United Kingdom; in spite of the fact
that the wit of man has already devised one for the States of the Union,
for the Provinces of the Dominion, for the component Cantons of the
Swiss Republic. To the unimaginative mind difficulties everywhere seem
almost insuperable. It shrinks before trifles. "Impossible!" said
Napoleon. "There is no such word in my dictionary!" He had been trained
in the school of the French Revolution--which was _not_ carried out by