About all these things they argue by the old _a priori_ methods which we have inherited with our political language. But after a time a sense of unreality grows upon them. Knowledge of the complex and difficult world forces itself into their minds. Like the old Chartists with whom I once spent an evening, they tell you that their politics have been 'all talk'--all words--and there are few among them, except those to whom politics has become a profession or a career, who hold on until through weariness and disappointment they learn new confidence from new knowledge. Most men, after the first disappointment, fall back on habit or party spirit for their political opinions and actions. Having ceased to think of their unknown fellow citizens as uniform repetitions of a simple type, they cease to think of them at all; and content themselves with using party phrases about the mass of mankind, and realising the individual existence of their casual neighbours. Wordsworth's _Prelude_ describes with pathetic clearness a mental history, which must have been that of many thousands of men who could not write great poetry, and whose moral and intellectual forces have been blunted and wasted by political disillusionment. He tells us that the 'man' whom he loved in 1792, when the French Revolution was still at its dawn, was seen in 1798 to be merely 'the composition of the brain.' After agonies of despair and baffled affection, he saw 'the individual man ... the man whom we behold with our own eyes.'[45] But in that change from a false simplification of the whole to the mere contemplation of the individual, Wordsworth's power of estimating political forces or helping in political progress was gone for ever. [45] _The Prelude_, Bk. XIII., ll. 81-84. If this constantly repeated disappointment is to cease, quantitative method must spread in politics and must transform the vocabulary and the associations of that mental world into which the young politician enters. Fortunately such a change seems at least to be beginning. Every year larger and more exact collections of detailed political facts are being accumulated; and collections of detailed facts, if they are to be used at all in political reasoning, must be used quantitatively. The intellectual work of preparing legislation, whether carried on by permanent officials or Royal Commissions or Cabinet Ministers takes every year a more quantitative and a less qualitative form.