The question must sometimes occur to us who are interested in political science, whether it will ever supply general principles for the guidance of statecraft. At present there seems to be little if any connection between them. Technical skill and special knowledge in history, economics and jurisprudence are appreciated and employed by statesmen, but the idea of determining state policy upon scientific principles has no place in practical politics. In memoirs of Bismarck one finds much about politics as an art and nothing about politics as a science except in contemptuous references to people who approach politics in a doctrinaire spirit. His way of expressing a small opinion of Gladstone's statesmanship was to speak of him as “Professor” Gladstone. This did not mean that Bismarck felt any contempt for professors as such—administration in Germany makes large use of the service of specialists—but that his conception of statecraft was altogether empirical and he distrusted political activities based upon abstract principles. This, I believe, is a frame of mind common among statesmen. Professor Sheldon Amos, in his “Science of Politics” remarks that “practical statesmen, immersed in actual business and oppressed by the ever-recurring presence of new emergencies, almost resent the notion of applying the comprehensive principles of science.”

Examination of manuals of political science might furnish practical statesmen with the retort that political science has no comprehensive principles to offer. Eminent authorities in political science restrict its scope, either by giving a technical meaning to the term “Political” or to the term “the State.”