[99] Croker's 'Boswell,' pp. 767, 8vo. ed.
[100] 'The Choice of Books,' p. 37.
[101] Mr Lowell's Address at the dedication of the Free Public Library,
Chelsea, Massachusetts.
[102] Notes to Bacon's 'Essays.'
[103] Mr. Lowel.
Art. IX.--1. _Popular Government. Four Essays._ By Sir Henry Sumner
Maine. Second Edition. London, 1886.
2. _Democracy in America._ By Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated by Henry
Reeve. New Edition. London, 1862.
3. _On the State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789._
Translated by Henry Reeve. Second Edition. London, 1873.
4. _Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with
Nassau W. Senior, 1834-59._ London, 1872.
5. _On the Government of Dependencies._ By Sir George Cornewall Lewis.
London, 1841.
6. _On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion._ By the Same.
London, 1849.
7. _A Dialogue on the best Form of Government._ By the Same. London,
1863.
8. _The English Constitution._ By Walter Bagehot. Revised Edition.
London, 1883.
Of the latest Work on the Characteristics of Democracy we are precluded
from speaking, as Sir Henry Maine's valuable Essays first appeared in
the pages of this Review. But we desire on the present occasion to call
attention to some writers on the subject, who are almost unknown to a
younger generation, or known only by occasional references made to them
by those who were well acquainted with the writers and their works. And
among these half-forgotten names few perhaps will recur more frequently
in the recollections of the best-informed men of from forty-five to
sixty, or more surprise those who have entered on life since their
owners left it, than those of Alexis de Tocqueville, Nassau William
Senior, and Walter Bagehot. Among the statesmen of the last generation,
few who will fill so small a space in history are so often or so
reverently quoted by those who remember Lord Palmerston's Government,
the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis.
Most men under forty will hear with surprise that in the City, at least,
he was deemed a sounder and safer financier than Mr. Gladstone; honoured
as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who first redeemed the financial
reputation of the Whigs from the discredit that had clung to the party
of retrenchment and reform for a whole generation. Of the small minority
who know him as the founder of the English school of historical
sceptics, how many have heard of his multifarious literary and political
works, or his shrewd, genial, two-edged, criticisms on public and social
life? It seems too probable that our grandchildren will retain nothing
of his save the characteristic saying, that 'life would be very
tolerable but for its pleasures;' and _that_, probably, will be assigned
to some more famous and far less wise _causeur_ or phrasemaker, losing
half its force in the transfer. Even Mill is known to the passing and
the rising generation by different works and diverse characteristics. To
the one he is little more than the greatest, most original, and most
heretical of English economists; a standard author on logic and
metaphysics. The other prefers to remember him by his later and lesser
writings; those sexagenarian and posthumous Essays, in which the riper
wisdom of a mind, very slow to learn the lessons of practical life, was
gathered, and the wilder errors of his earlier theories modified or
corrected. Much of that which is really best in his thought and
teaching, set forth in these last writings, bears a close analogy to the
views of Tocqueville Senior, and Bagehot, and shows that a tardy,
hardly-acquired, unwillingly accepted, knowledge of men and women, of
the real and ineradicable tendencies of human nature, brought the giant
of the closet into nearer accord with the practical philosophy of a man
like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, wise, calm, and judicial, by natural
temper, wiser yet by the closet-study which had analysed the experiences
of the literary, business, and political, world, of administration,
Parliament, and the Cabinet.
One common and very striking feature characterizes the political
thought of all these men--all of them Liberals in more than mere nominal
profession or party connection. All regarded the triumph of Democracy as
near and inevitable, and all, from different points of view, regarded it
with a mixture of resignation and distrust, strangely significant in men
of such different views, of such diverse character, mental training, and
personal experience. None of them were fatalists, much less pessimists;
none inclined _a priori_ to that political superstition which
recognizes, in the tendencies of a thing so uncertain and changeful as
the spirit of the age, the hand of Providence, or the indication of
'manifest destiny.' All were men of more than average independence of
temper, an independence which, in one or two, approached nearly to that
which practical politicians call impracticability. None of them were
disposed to be silent when the many-headed Caesar had spoken. Mill's most
striking, and--to the credit of Democracy be it spoken--most popular
characteristic, was a stern and almost pardoxical defiance alike of
personal consequences and of public opinion. On the verge of his
entrance into public life he affronted the working-classes by telling
them, with more than Carlylese directness and exaggeration, that they
were 'mostly liars.' If ever there were a man sure to protest to the
last against false doctrines and mischievous tendencies, to protest the
more fiercely the more certain their victory seemed, it was John Stuart
Mill.
Tocqueville, conscious of no common political and administrative
capacity--a statesman whose strong popular sympathies, practical wisdom,
contempt of popular catchwords, knowledge of and respect for concrete
facts; above all, whose signal freedom from the characteristic
weaknesses and vices of French statesmanship, rendered him the fittest
of all men to direct the destiny of France, whose counsels and guidance
would have saved her from all the worst mistakes and most signal
disasters--was content to spend a lifetime first in opposition,
afterwards in absolute exile from public life, rather than go 'the way
that was not his way for an inch.' An Orleanist, an enthusiastic lover
of Parliamentary institutions, he would not stoop with Guizot and Thiers
to serve a King whose power was founded on corruption. A minister of the
President, he held aloof as sternly from the despotism of the Empire as
from the factions of the Republican Assembly. He never designed to
conceal or soften the expressions of the most unpopular sentiments or
convictions.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis was an eminently English statesman, fully
aware of the necessity of mutual concession--more willing than most to
be guided as a Minister by the tradition of his office, to leave the
administration for which he must answer in Parliament to the practical
experience of his permanent subordinates--but one whom, assuredly, no
one ever accused of undue pliancy, or excessive deference to party or
popular feeling.
Mr. Bagehot alone of the three was a man likely, _coeteris paribus,_
to prefer the winning side; to believe that the belief of the many was
likely to be right; looking, however, to the opinion of the many
educated and thoughtful rather than of the many ignorant and
over-occupied. Yet all agree at once in treating the coming rule of
numbers almost as a law of nature, which it were folly to criticize and
madness to resist; and in anticipating its advent with doubt and
distrust, with deep and sometimes gloomy apprehension. Their constant,
thoughtful concurrence in both convictions, their equal assurance that
pure Democracy was dangerous and that it was inevitable, deserves a
profound significance from their utterly distinct points of view; from
the utter unlikeness of their tempers, their experience, and their
natural bias.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, as a Liberal politician, was decidedly
distrustful of electoral reform, and accepted it only as a party
necessity. His personal delight in the exposure of popular errors, his
insistence on the value of authority, and the immense extent of the
sphere in which the thought and conduct of the many are necessarily
controlled by the authority of the few, the spirit of such books as his
'Essay on the Government of Dependencies' are those of a mind wholly
adverse to democratic theories, and intensely mistrustful of popular
judgments. He was not fascinated by what he describes as 'the splendid
_vision_ of a community bound together by the ties of fraternity,
liberty, and equality, exempt from hereditary privilege, giving all
things to merit, and presided over by a government in which all the
national interests are faithfully represented.' He put these words into
the mouth of the advocate of Democracy in his 'Dialogue on the best form
of Government,' which he published shortly before his death. In this
work his own views are expressed in the person of Crito.
'Even if I were to decide in favour of one of these forms,
and against the two others, I should not find myself nearer
the solution of the practical problem. A nation does not
change the form of its government with the same facility
that a man changes his coat. A nation in general only
changes the form of its government by means of a violent
revolution.... The history of forcible attempts to improve
governments is not cheering. Looking back upon the course of
revolutionary movements, and upon the character of their
consequences, the practical conclusion which I draw is, that
it is the part of wisdom and prudence to acquiesce in any
form of government, which is tolerably well administered,
and affords tolerable security to person and property. I
would not, indeed, yield to apathetic despair or acquiesce
in the persuasion that a merely tolerable government is
incapable of improvement. I would form an individual model,
suitable to the character, disposition, wants, and
circumstances of the country, and I would make all
exertions, whether by action or by writing, within the
limits of the existing law, for ameliorating its existing
condition, and bringing it nearer to the model selected for
imitation; but I should consider the problem of the best
form of government as purely ideal, and as unconnected with
practice; and should abstain from taking a ticket in the
lottery of revolution, unless there was a well-founded
expectation that it would come out a prize.'
The conservatism of Lewis was that of a profoundly sceptical instinct,
of practical cautious incredulity. Bagehot's was the conservatism of
middle-class English thought and experience. Tocqueville's was that of
wide observation and bitter disappointment. Mill was a Conservative only
so far as conservatism was forced upon a mind essentially radical and
even revolutionary, imbued with a profound faith in abstract principles
leading far beyond universal suffrage to, if not across the verge of
communism, by the danger which he foresaw to individual liberty and
unfettered intellectual freedom from the ascendency of mere numbers.
Upon this point he agreed closely with Tocqueville, though upon nearly
every other their views were as opposite as their character and
experience; and their teaching has been fully confirmed by the actual
working of the most successful, the most tolerant, and the most
fortunately situated democracy that the world has ever seen.
The tendency of Democracy to naked despotism is obvious enough in the
recent history of France; but sanguine democrats ascribe the special
experience of France to the intense centralization inherited, as
Tocqueville shows, by the Republic, the Constitutional Monarchy and the
Empire from the _Ancien Regime_; the absence of any local school of
practical discussion, mutual tolerance, and co-operation; the bitterness
of factions fighting not for administrative or legislative control, but
for fundamentally incompatible forms of Government,--to anything rather
than the unfitness of the French nation for Teutonic liberties.
Conservative pessimists and democratic optimists can only find a common
ground, a test which both will accept, in the experience of the United
States. Whatever vices are found in American democracy must be inherent
in democracy itself; and it must be granted that, looking on the surface
of public life, the larger facts of national history, and the material
condition of the people, there is no evidence, obvious to the hasty
observer, of interference with personal freedom, of any demoralizing or
weakening influence on individual character exercised by political or
social equality. It is outside of the proper field of politics, in facts
invisible to distant observers, and not visible at a glance to
thoughtful travellers, that we must seek for proof of the bearing of
democratic institutions and ideas upon personal and social liberty, upon
the maintenance of individual and collective rights.
Upon such a point the remarks of a leisurely, thoughtful, cultivated
writer, like Richard Grant White, a man who had enjoyed exceptional
opportunities of comparing the effect upon daily life of English
aristocracy and American democracy, are more instructive than the
elaborate treatises of political theorists or the generalizations of
historians. The testimony of such writers bears out the inference which
careful students might draw from English history, that the influence of
a local and landed aristocracy is far more favourable, than that even of
a landed democracy, to the jealous and resolute assertion of legal
rights, to a strenuous and successful resistance to the encroachments of
power, social or political, upon the property, the comfort, the liberty,
and the privileges, of individuals or communities. The moral of Mr.
Grant White's sketches of English and American life is, that the English
peasant or tradesman is far safer from practical oppression or injustice
than the American farmer or citizen; that an Englishman, whatever his
rank, is far more free to speak his mind, and far more likely to have a
mind worth speaking, than one of the same position in France, or even in
Massachusetts. The lively interest in, the diffused knowledge of,
politics and public matters, found among educated, and even
half-educated men and women throughout the upper and middle classes of
England, evidently impressed Mr. White by the contrast it presented to
the indifference of American 'Society' to State and Federal politics. He
notes particularly the higher tone, the wider knowledge, the freedom
from petty class and personal concerns, the broader range of thought,
the familiarity with subjects of general human interest, which
characterize the conversation of an English dinner-table or
drawing-room, as compared with that of American clubs and parlours. He
speaks, with the bitterness of a man often and deeply bored, of the
limited range of American table-talk, the prominence of the 'shop,' the
professional interests of each chance assemblage; the price of stocks
and railway shares, and the chances and changes of Wall Street; the
inferior tone of thought among men and women alike, in the best or at
least the wealthiest society of New York and Philadelphia. In this he is
incidentally confirmed by so observant and candid a social critic as
Laurence Oliphant. There is an American society of higher cultivation
and loftier interests; but that society, except in Boston, is
necessarily scattered and somewhat exclusive; and, standing wholly aloof
from politics, lacks the knowledge of history, of legislation, of social
and economic interests, of current opinion, of foreign affairs--which is
in itself a sort of liberal, if necessarily superficial, education.
American ladies, and even gentlemen, hardly know who are the Senators
for their State, much less who is the representative of their district;
care nothing for, and know little of, the debates in Congress, still
less in the State Legislature, deeply as these may affect the well-being
of the community, the laws under which they and their children are to
live.
But this lack of interest in public affairs has a deeper and far more
reaching consequence. Everybody's business is nobody's business. In a
community really democratic there are no natural leaders; none bound by
rank, station, and recognized primacy, to originate resistance; none too
strong to be crushed by the animosity of a Fiske or a Gould, or
grievously wronged by a corrupt corporation like that of New York, a
dishonest political organization like Tammany Hall, or a powerful
Tramway or Railway Company. The consequence is, that not only the
individual citizen, but a whole community submits to high-handed
oppression, to administrative and judicial corruption, to impudent
usurpation and flagrant illegalities, such as the greatest of English
corporations would never dream of attempting. Perhaps the most
oppressive and insolent exactions, to which living Englishmen have as
yet submitted, are those of the Water Companies of London; but the
offenders have repeatedly been resisted and brought to justice; and it
is in London alone, the one English city which lacks natural leaders and
protectors, which is too large for any citizen or body of citizens--save
that great City Corporation which English Radicalism has marked for
destruction--to speak and act in its name, that the Water Companies
would have been endured for five years. Even in London, no such
high-handed interference with the rights of property and the comfort of
families, as the Elevated Railways of New York, with their uncompensated
destruction of individual privacy and comfort throughout many of the
wealthiest streets of the first city in the Union, would have been
obviously and utterly impossible.
The tolerance of Democracy for what seem to English ideas the grossest
form of oppression--oppression systematic and legal, arbitrary power and
class privilege, formally embodied in the law and made a fundamental
principle of government--is illustrated by that clause of the Code
Napoleon, which exempts the whole bureaucracy of France from civil or
criminal liability. No official can be prosecuted, no redress sought at
law for the abuse of powers the most extensive, affecting every man's
daily life--powers which enable their holder to harass and almost ruin
individuals and communities at his pleasure--save by permission of the
Council of State, a body of officials inclined of course to believe and
to shield its subordinates. This law has been sustained by each
successive Government that has seized the reins of centralized power;
nor are we aware that any serious effort has been made to repeal it.
The tyranny of democracy is, as Mill insists, the most formidable,
searching, and irresistible of all. Under an autocracy or oligarchy,
public opinion is the protector of the injured, and imposes limits on
arbitrary power. Assassination is the resort of the victim driven to
frenzy by individual oppression, and tempers the sternest despotism; but
Demos wields opinion and defies the dagger. By general confession life
is far less free, individual taste, caprice or eccentricity is kept
under far sharper restraint by fashion and feeling, in America than in
aristocratic England. At every epoch of American history, the freedom of
opinion has been curtailed at certain points within strict if
ill-defined limits. The patriots of Virginia proclaimed in 1775 that any
who dared 'by speech or writing to maintain' Royalist or Constitutional
views should be treated as an enemy of his country. A similar ban was
put some fifty years ago upon the Abolitionists of Illinois and
Connecticut. A time came when it was almost equally dangerous to
maintain the constitutional doctrines which the Abolitionists had
assailed. Nowadays, of actual persecution there is little, because there
is little need; because the repression acts, save with the most
independent, original and contradictious tempers, upon thought rather
than expression. No human intellect or character can resist the
universal, insensible, unconscious, pressure of the atmosphere which
surrounds it from the cradle. Upon certain political, social, and
ethical dogmas, wherever national pride and democratic prejudice are
touched, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that the 'unanimous
opinion' of the North and West has demoralized or extinguished thought
itself.
Demos is not only tyrant but Pope. He feels, and his courtiers venture
openly to claim for him, not only the royalty which can do no wrong, but
the infallibility which can define right and wrong themselves. He
resents, we are told upon democratic authority, all pretension to
special knowledge.
'No observer of American polities' (Mr. Godkin admits in his
reply to Sir Henry Maine) 'can deny that, with regard to
matters which can become the subject of legislation, the
American voter listens with extreme impatience to anything
which has the air of instruction; but the reason is to be
found not in his dislike of instruction so much as his
dislike in the political field of anything which savours of
superiority. The passion for equality is one of the very
strongest influences in American politics. This is so fully
recognized now by politicians, that self-depreciation, even
in the matter of knowledge, has become one of the ways of
commending one's self to the multitude, which even the
foremost men of both parties do not disdain. In talking on
such subjects as the currency, with a view of enlightening
the people, skilful orators are very careful to repudiate
all pretence of knowing anything more about the matter than
their hearers. The speech is made to wear as far as possible
the appearance of being simply a reproduction of things with
which the audience is just as familiar as the speaker.
Nothing is more fatal to a stump orator than an air of
superior wisdom on any subject. He has, if he means to
persuade, to keep carefully, in outward seeming at all
events, on the same intellectual level as those whom he is
addressing. Orators of a demagogic turn, of course, push
this caution to its extreme, and often affect ignorance, and
boast of the smallness of the educationale opportunities
enjoyed by them in their youth, and of the extreme
difficulty they had in acquiring even the little they know.
There is nothing, in fact, people are less willing to
tolerate in a man, who seek office at their hands, than any
sign that he does not consider himself as belonging to the
same class as the bulk of the voters--that either birth, or
fortune, or education has taken him out of sympathy with
them, or caused him, in any sense, to look down on them.'
Historians treat the vote of the present generation as decisive, morally
as well as practically, on the issues of the past. The people has, by
chance or caprice, passed judgment upon questions, in discussing which
consummate statesmen with intimate practical knowledge of their bearings
profoundly differed; and that judgment concludes the controversy,
determines the right or wrong, the wisdom or folly, of men like J.Q.
Adams, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. We have seen too
much of this abject superstition in recent English historical essays, as
well as in political polemics. It is needless to point out the debasing
effect upon all discussion of such anticipatory appeal to the arbitrary
decision of Pope or posterity. No man can reason vigorously, frankly,
forcibly, and fully, who feels that he, or the heirs of his thought, may
be forced not merely to accept defeat, but to cry '_peccavi_.' The maxim
'_securus judicat orbis terrarum_' has no place in historical
criticism; and if it had, one nation is not the world, nor the next
generation a posterity on whose experience and impartiality reliance
might be placed.
M. de Tocqueville is known to the world chiefly by two great works. His
'Democracy in America' was the production of his early manhood. In New
England he saw democracy at its best and brightest; saw nothing of that
deterioration which the decay of the old Puritan severity, the infusion
of a strong foreign element, the corruption and the passions of the
Civil War, have confessedly caused. The colonial traditions and
principles were still in modified force; simple habits of life, a
general prevalence of competence, the absence of ostentatious wealth and
luxury, left women content to be mothers and housekeepers; a position of
which, as trustworthy witnesses allege, modern luxury, culture, and love
of leisure, have rendered them impatient; while the impossibility of
devolving their domestic duties upon servants makes the family a burden,
and maternity no longer the deepest instinct and strongest hope of
womanhood. He saw no beginning of that manifold change of morals and
manners which the survivors of an elder generation now regard with deep
dismay. His portrait of Democracy, as seen in New England, is decidedly
rose-coloured. He saw enough in the Middle and Southern States of the
working of democracy under different social conditions, to tinge that
picture with the hues of doubt, if not yet with the sombre colours of
deep apprehension.
How apt to be partial is the widest and closest political observation is
shown by the very partial lessons derived from the experience of the New
World. Few observe how signally the history of Central and South America
contradicts the inferences so confidently drawn from the United
States--or rather from the New England of yesterday, and the present
condition of California and the States bounded by the Lakes and the
Ohio, the Mississippi and the Alleghanies. Among the States of Spanish
and Portuguese speech and civilization--it would be too much to say
blood--the failure of democracy has been complete, glaring, and ruinous.
Social and political anarchy, utter insecurity of life and property,
incessant revolution and murderous war, have been its only fruits. The
happy accident of hereditary princes, exceptionally wise, able, and
forbearing, has barely saved Brazil. The one prosperous, solvent,
orderly State between the Rio Grande and Cape Horn is the aristocratic
republic of Chili. So large, striking, and impressive a fact can hardly
have escaped a thinker like Tocqueville, whose French birth and
experience protected him in great measure from the insular ignorance,
rather than arrogance, which leads the ablest English writers to base
their political philosophy exclusively upon Anglo-Saxon experience and
examples: yet it is strange to find so striking a lesson so lightly
touched by the wisest, widest, most reflective, and best-informed, among
the political teachers of his age.
In the _Ancien Regime_ we see the seeds of all that is worst and most
dangerous in the modern French polity: the hothouse which fostered into
a growth, unknown elsewhere, that passion of envy, which Tocqueville
regards as the radical vice, the paramount impulse, the fundamental
principle, of Democracy. The peculiar reasons for this dominant
sentiment of hatred and jealousy in the democracy of France will be
found in his own writings. Much as there was to admire in the old
nobility of France, the people saw it only in an aspect calculated to
excite unmingled hatred and contempt. It had ceased to govern, to render
any service in return for privileges, exemptions, and exactions so
odious, vexatious, and oppressive that no service could atone for them.
Even these were forgiven to the resident aristocracy of La Vendee. But
absentees supported by such exactions, an Order known to the people not
even by neglected duties and ill-directed interference, but solely by
demands and extortions unconnected with any remaining or remembered
functions, a class whose wealth and luxury were supported not by rents
or other returns paid by the tillers of the soil to its original owners,
holders, or 'lords,' but by rates, tithes, fines, heriots, monopolies
(to use the nearest English equivalents) levied for their benefit, and
levied in the worst possible way--what feelings could these excite among
a people consciously fainting beneath the load of taxes, _corvees_,
restrictions and imposts, fees and stamps, of which only a part ever
reached the empty Treasury of the State? Is it strange that so monstrous
a fabric, when those on whose living bodies it was built rose in revolt,
should have fallen with a great ruin, and have crushed all whom it had
sheltered? 'The guilt of an Order cannot palliate the massacre of its
Innocents.' True; but human nature being what it is, the unreasoning
burst of fury which strove to stamp out every trace of old institutions,
to exterminate the race of the unconscious oppressors, was less strange
than the fidelity of the Vendeans.
And yet that massacre is in itself suggestive. The wholesale butcheries
of the Terror are accountable; even the attempt of Robespierre, St.
Just, and Barere to suppress revolt and discontent by _noyades_ and
_mitraitlades_, if fiendish, is intelligible. It had a political aim. It
satisfied a definite if diabolical desire. But the executions of
veteran philosophers, of grey-haired parish-priests, of harmless
nuns--the deliberate cold-blooded cruelty which punished with death the
resentment, the imprudence, often the mere birth, of orphaned lads; the
prayers or the tears of schoolgirls who might well hav urged the piteous
plea of Sejanus' infant daughter--these recal the indiscriminate
ferocity of wild beasts, the atrocities occasionally committed by
destructive maniacs in an excess of fury, or the infectious frenzies of
lycanthropy and similar forms of epidemic madness, rather than such
human cruelty as prompted the massacre of Drogheda, the butchery of
Melos, or the destruction of Carthage. What could schoolboys have done
worthy of the guillotine, even in the eyes of the Jacobin Club? Girls,
like children, can try the temper and patience of manhood, and among
rough men or in rough times get roughly punished; but when, save in
1793, did men ever think of killing them? There was but one fault
besides their birth--a fault almost inseparable from their birth--which
the boy-ensigns and pages, the convent-bred demoiselles, shared with
their parents; that inalienable, instinctive, inborn grace, that sense,
air, and bearing of superiority, which we find acknowledged alike by the
noble and the _bourgeois_, the _von Adel_ and the _buerger_, acknowledged
by those who regret or resent as distinctly as by those who would uphold
it. The unpardonable sin of the _noblesse_, the inheritance of which
they could not be deprived but with their lives, the secret sting that
maddened the Jacobin to slay not merely the beardless heirs but the
innocent and helpless daughters of the captured chateau, may perhaps be
hinted in a question and answer like the following, between Senior and
De Tocqueville, after the third Revolution had proved its impotence to
efface the footmarks of nature:--
'I said that I was told that the distinction between noble
and _roturier_ existed in its full force in real life.
'"Yes," said Tocqueville, "it does, meaning by noble,
_gentilhomme_; and it is a great misfortune, since it keeps
up distinctions and animosities of caste; but it is
incurable--at least, it has not been cured, or perhaps much
palliated, by our sixty years of revolution. It is a sort of
Freemasonry. When I talk to a _gentilhomme_, though we have
not two ideas in common, though all his opinions, wishes,
and thoughts are opposed to mine, yet I feel at once that we
belong to the same family, that we speak the same language,
that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois
better, but he is a stranger." I mentioned the remark to me
of a very sensible Prussian, _buerger_ himself, that it was
unwise to send out as ambassador any not noble. I said it
did not matter in England, where the distinction is unknown.
"Yes," he replied, "unknown with you; but you may be sure
that when any of our _buerger_ ministers meets one who is
_von Adel_, he does not negociate with him on equal terms;
he is always wishing to sneak under the table."'
In these conversations, preserved in a separate series of Senior's
Journals, we have the best, latest, and wisest, of De Tocqueville's
thoughts; none the less valuable, and to English readers all the more
intelligible and impressive, that we have them in undress; put into the
terse, pithy, concentrated style of summarized oral conversation by the
recorder, instead of being elaborately tricked out in all the formal
grace of French literary diction by one of the most fastidious of French
writers. Senior, who habitually wrote down in his Journals the
conversation of the great, wise, and thoughtful--the leaders of
political action or literary criticism, the statesmen and thinkers--with
whom in the course of a leisurely life of social observation he was
brought into intimate intercourse, had a gift of getting from each man
the best he had to give. His friends knew that their table-talk was
recorded, often themselves read and corrected the record, and therefore
gave him what they were willing to give not to the contemporary world,
but to posterity; those opinions upon the current facts of the day by
which they were willing to be judged hereafter. No opinions upon the
tendencies and consequences, the prospects and passions, the strength
and weakness of democracy, could well be more valuable than those which
the painter of Democracy in America--after the experience of many years
in the public life of France, in the Representative Chamber of the
Orleans Monarchy, and in the Legislature of the Republic,--delivered for
the benefit of readers far removed by time and distance, during the
latter months of the rickety infancy of that ill-starred Government and
the first period of the Second Empire. Tocqueville spoke from a point of
vantage, such as few other men have attained, upon a theme which he had
studied profoundly in youth, and upon which Fate had ever since been
writing elaborate commentaries. He spoke with a mind naturally calm,
candid, and judicial, enriched by a deeper knowledge than any other
Continental writer enjoyed of the working of popular institutions in
England and America, matured by the experience of a lifetime; spoke
while the most critical experiments in democratic Constitutionalism and
democratic Caesarism were being worked out before his eyes.
Founding a so-called Constitutional Monarchy upon a corruption as gross
as that of Walpole, Louis Phillippe had rendered his power absolute at
the price of sapping its foundation; and Tocqueville had predicted the
Revolution long before accident precipitated it--predicted it as an
inevitable result of the corruption he denounced, and indicated the
forces of silent discontent which were sure to overthrow it. In 1848,
and still more in 1871, the people of France at large turned
instinctively to those natural leaders whom at all other times they had
so persistently ostracized. Alarmed in the first case by an unexpected
and undesired triumph of the Parisian populace--in the second, chastened
by a great national disaster, without definite views or objects of their
own--they deliberately trusted their interests to the larger landowners,
whose interests must coincide with theirs; to the men of hereditary
culture, of thoughtful habits, and wider experience, in whom they
recognized a natural capacity to deal with problems that bewildered
themselves, with events that had taken them utterly unawares. But, save
at such times, and under the sobering influence of such lessons,
equality, and not liberty, is the root of French Democracy. To equality,
liberty is readily and unhesitatingly sacrificed.
_'"Egalite,"_ said Tocqueville, "is an expression of envy.
It means in the real heart of every Republican, 'No one
shall be better off than I am;' and while this is preferred
to good government, good government is impossible. In fact,
no party desires good government. The first object of the
reactionary party is to keep down the Republicans; the
second, if it be the second, object of each branch of that
party, is to keep down the two others. The object of the
Republicans is, as they admit, _egalite_--but as for
liberty, or security, or education, or the other ends of
government, no one cares for them."'
It was the passion for Equality that made the Second Empire possible.
The city _proletariat_ would endure anything but a privilege of class, a
constitutional monarchy associated in their experience with an
artificial peerage and a narrow uniform franchise; the _bourgeoisie_,
terrified by socialism--that is, confiscation--would accept any
Government strong enough to put and keep down the Reds, the Anarchists,
who under the Republic had kept Paris always within a week--had brought
her more than once within twenty-four hours--of sack and pillage. The
peasantry hated privilege and Socialism with an equal and impartial
hatred. The First Empire had given them much of what they most prized in
their actual condition, and was credited with all. Its one hateful
association was incessant and at last disastrous war, anticipated
conscriptions, and foreign invasion. The Second Empire, with its promise
of peace, was the embodiment of their ideal. It promised work to the
operative, opportunities of fortune to the restless, and safe investment
to the prudent among the middle-class. Its protectorate of the Pope
secured the clergy and the women; and it mattered nothing that, crushing
under foot the freedom at once of the press and the tribune, it incurred
the bitter hatred of the intellectual classes in a country where pure
intellect is more ambitious and more immediately powerful than in any
other. It stood firm and unshaken while it kept its promise of peace and
prosperity--the firmer that it embodied so distinctly the errors and
illusions of the many, and not the less popular that it showed so
profound and cynical a contempt for the intelligence of the few. Its
Budgets alone would have been fatal to a Government resting on and
responsible to Opinion, for the rapid growth of the Debt in a time of
peace and plenty would have terrified men accustomed to sift the
'capital' and 'revenue' accounts of great Companies, and to calculate
the resources of Empires as a peasant the yield of his farm. But the
millions were content; the worse the credit of the State, the higher the
interest on their savings; the embellishment of Paris and other great
public works were a practical acknowledgement of the _droit au travail_;
and the calculations of those, who criticised the fearful waste
(_coulage_) of such a system, proved to demonstration that a spendthrift
State must come to the end of a spendthrift _rentier_--with what
consequences the Commune of 1871 bare witness--found no attention; spoke
in a tongue not understood by the people. The masses were not even
alarmed by the warnings of veteran statesmen, consummate financiers, and
_doctrinaires_ of every school. Only in those great crises when all that
is left to wisdom is a choice of calamities, as in 1848 and 1871, does
Demos abdicate; recognize for a moment that all men are not born, much
less trained to remain, free _and equal_, and entreat the pilots by
hereditary profession to see the ship of State through the breakers.
In the criticism, and especially in the best, most thoughtful, and least
obvious criticism, provoked by the long foreseen electoral settlement of
last year, the direct and indirect influence of Mr. Bagehot's writings
was constantly to be traced. On this subject he had looked back and
looked forward farther than most political reasoners. Household suffrage
seemed to him the inevitable consequence, the logical development, of
the reform of 1832. It was at that point, as he considered, that the
right and wrong path had diverged; that chance and destiny, rather than
choice, determined at the moment the adoption of that which led
necessarily and logically to sheer Democracy. The practice of the old
system had become throughly vicious, but the underlying principle was
sound and safe. All classes, all interests, were represented; but
accident had given, not to wealth or birth, but to a particular kind of
wealth, a certain set of families, an enormously disproportionate
representation. The landed interest was wronged in the utterly
inadequate representation of the counties. Ireland was misrepresented;
and the Scotch people could not be said to be represented at all. But
every class, every great interest, had its spokesmen; exercised a direct
and independent influence in the national councils. Rotten or pocket
boroughs were not only nurseries of professional statesmanship, but a
back door through which interests, whose direct representation was
impossible, found access to Parliament. The West Indian interest, the
East India Company, and the statesmen trained in its service, with their
special knowledge and zealous care for the welfare of our Oriental
empire, could secure a hearing for views to which no English
constituency would listen. Under such a system our Australian Colonies,
the great Dominion of Canada, the English minority which sustains the
Imperial cause in South Africa, would never have complained, as now,
that their voice was unheard, their feelings unreflected, in an assembly
which is no longer merely the Parliament of Great Britain, but the
Senate of an Empire greater than that of Rome.
The working classes were represented through those numerous
constituencies in which the scot and lot franchise prevailed. It was
imperative that the abuses of the system should be redressed; that the
new communities which had grown up since the Restoration should be
directly represented; that the borough proprietors and the great
families should be deprived of their excessive weight in Parliament;
that the middle class should acquire a power more adequate to its new
social and political importance; that Scotland, again, should be really
and directly represented. But in Mr. Bagehot's view universal and varied
representation was of more consequence than arithmetical proportion. No
class, no interest, represented in the House of Commons, was likely to
be grossly wronged, none could be neglected or unheard. No class
intelligent enough to understand its own grievances, to have distinct
ideas and desires of its own, would have failed, under a reform
retaining the principle of the old system, to command attention and
secure redress. Had Pitt been able to carry out his well-known and
thoroughly sincere scheme of practical reform, or had Canning and his
followers sided with the Whigs upon this as upon almost every other
question, reform might have anticipated revolution. It was the weakness,
rather than the will, of the Whigs that compelled them to go not only
farther and faster, but in another direction, than their actual opinions
and traditional inclinations would have carried them. They were
compelled to present a scheme broad, simple, and extreme enough, to
attract irresistible support.
When once uniformity of franchise and proportionate representation were
made the basis of the electoral system, the extension of the former, the
more and more accurate adjustment of the latter, became a mere question
of time. The poorest class of householders in towns in 1886 are probably
as intelligent and competent as were the ten-pounders of 1832. The
masses might have been satisfied with the gradual enlargement of their
old representation; having been once disfranchised by wholesale, it was
certain that they would ere long demand and ultimately secure that
wholesale enfranchisement, by which every other class must necessarily
be swamped. Minority representation, electoral districts, and single
seats, are at best lame and unsatisfactory methods of engrafting on pure
democracy securities and checks, which were essential and natural parts
of the old representation of classes and interests. When once every
borough below a certain numerical standard had been extinguished, and
all below another deprived of their second member, the upward extension
of the principle became a logical and historical necessity. So again
much, perhaps most, of what has been written upon the contrast between
the American and English constitutions--the two great types of popular
government, Parliamentary and Presidential, the direct and indirect
election of the actual Executive, terms fixed by law or dependent upon
Parliamentary favour--was anticipated in the best chapters of Mr.
Bagehot's 'English Constitution.'
Few writers so terse, compact, and clear, have been so completely free
from the temptation of deliberate phrase making as Mr. Bagehot; yet few
professional phrase-makers have left in the minds of their readers so
many telling, forcible, and suggestive phrases; sentences in which a
novel or striking thought, an impressive view of new or old truth, a
principle apt to be forgotten or imperfectly appreciated, is vivified
and incarnated in a few emphatic words. It would be difficult to quote
any passage of ten times the length half so suggestive of the
exceptional conditions that have secured to England peace and stability
during the last two centuries of storm and shipwreck, revolution, and
reaction abroad, any phrase so expressive of the distinctive character
of the nation and its Government, as the two aptly chosen epithets
employed by Mr. Bagehot--the 'dignified parts' of the English
Constitution and the 'deferential tendency' of the English people. In
both instances he has, as we think, overstated his point. The dignified
parts of the Constitution are more real and living, are more intimately
associated with the practical work of Government, than he was disposed
to allow. Popular deference is paid more to truth and less to fiction
than he supposed. It is eminently characteristic of the cautious English
temper, the distrust of sharp contrasts and clever paradoxes engrained
in his nature, that (so far as we remember) he never adopts the familiar
saying of Thiers, that a constitutional Prince _regne et ne gouverne
pas_. But his actual conception of the English monarchy approaches far
too near that misleading and mischievous fallacy.
It is a little strange that so devoted a disciple of Darwin, a writer
who applied the principle of Evolution with so much skill, insight, and
success, to the life of nations and the course of politics, should have
allowed so little weight to the natural selection which operates so
powerfully upon the character of hereditary Princes and aristocracies.
It is far from obvious why so close and careful an observer should have
drawn his illustrations of the working of constitutional monarchy so
exclusively from the past, and especially from the examples of George
III. and William IV., ignoring so completely the experience of the
present reign; the deep, lasting, and for the most part wholesome,
influence exercised in European politics by men like Leopold I., Prince
Albert, and the present Emperor of Germany. Prince Bismarck owes to
Royal favour and trust the foundation of his power, the strength which
enabled him in the teeth of a short-sighted Liberal opposition to create
that Prussian army, to carry out that ruthless but eminently successful
policy of blood and steel, which excluded Austria from her place in the
Confederation, put an end to the old dualism, and achieved the union of
Germany. Italy owes everything to Cavour; but she owed Cavour to Victor
Emmanuel. The selection of Russian, Austrian, and German ministers, the
consistency of their policy, the power or rather authority, most
judiciously used by the Crown at more than one critical period of recent
English history, completely refute Mr. Bagehot's theoretical and
historical doctrine that a Parliament must be wiser than an average
sovereign. He forgets that a Prince is exempt from the influence of
party, whose disastrous action in the great crisis of the national
fortunes has been brought home of late with painful force to all
thoughtful Englishmen.
Nor has he escaped that influence in his criticism of George III. It
would be easy to show that the modern theory of Parliamentary
Government, the theory accepted by his immediate predecessors and now
firmly established, was one on which no scrupulous and conscientious
Prince in the position of George III. could possibly have acted. The
King found throughout the earlier years of his reign, until the younger
Pitt obtained an actual potent and controlling influence in the Houses
and in the closet, that the influence which secured a Parliamentary
majority was not his ministers' but his own. The dismissal of the elder
Pitt and Newcastle broke at once the strongest coalition of aristocratic
and popular influence, the mightiest league between intellect sustained
by national confidence, borough-mongering wealth, and family interest,
that ever dominated the unreformed Parliament. It was in the King's
power to give the control of the House to whom he would--to Chatham,
Grafton, Rockingham, or North. The one thoroughly unconstitutional use
of the Royal influence, with which the King can fairly be charged, was
employed to defeat the most unconstitutional and indefensible measure
ever brought forward by a corrupt and unprincipled coalition--the India
Bill, which endeavoured to secure for Fox and North personally the power
and patronage of our Oriental Empire. The King could not shift the
responsibility of administration upon ministers who owed office and
Parliamentary support to himself. The American war was not his work. The
Stamp Act was brought in during his first illness by the minister he
most hated. The Tea Duty was the madness of Townshend; and the step,
which gave the signal for revolt, was really a remission of two-thirds
of that duty. True that the King was the last man to agree to the
disruption of the empire, the abandonment of thousands of American loyal
subjects, to lower the flag of England before her coalesced European
enemies; but in that perseverance, surely not unkingly, he had one
enthusiastic supporter; and those who censure the King pass the same
censure on the dying speech of Lord Chatham. The one fatal error of a
long and conscientious reign should be laid to the account less of
George III. than of those who betrayed Pitt's counsels and played upon
the conscientious vagaries of a half-crazed brain.
Mr. Bagehot dwells exclusively upon the unfavourable incidents of a
royal education. He overlooks the direct and indirect influences which
are brought to bear from the very cradle upon an hereditary Prince--the
sense of responsibility, the consciousness of a great position, the
familiarity with the gravest interests, a youth passed under the tuition
of the ablest masters, and above all that constant intercourse with the
finest intellects of the age, which secure for a future King a moral and
intellectual training unequalled in its excellence. The effect of that
training we see in our own Royal family, unfortunate as they have been
in the withdrawal at the most critical period of a father's control and
guidance. Of the Queen's daughters it is needless to speak. Her sons
are, by general admission, soldiers and sailors of more than average
professional ability. The Crown Prince of Germany, the late King of
Spain, the present heir of the House of France, Leopold II. of Belgium,
and King Humbert of Italy, are generally credited with high ability; and
more than one of them would take rank among the first statesmen of his
Kingdom. A Prince of fair abilities, with such a training and such
knowledge of the men with whom he is necessarily brought into contact,
has every means of knowing, at least as well as Parliament, who are the
most competent and most trustworthy statesmen to whom he can commit the
fortunes of his Kingdom. His continuous, experience of politics,
legislation, and government, his access, especially with regard to
foreign affairs, to wider and more impartial sources of information,
lend to his counsels an authority which no prudent or thoughtful
statesman will disregard. He looks at affairs from a higher point of
view, with a wider survey as a rule, and also with a calmer and more
unbiassed judgment.
Mr. Bagehot dwells at length on what may be called the fictitious value
of Constitutional Monarchy; and this he was evidently inclined to
exaggerate. The English people, he thought, are, as a rule, too ignorant
to understand what the Queen's Government really is--how completely it
is carried on in the Royal name by Parliamentary Ministers. For them the
law is really incarnate in the Sovereign; in yielding obedience to
magistrates and policemen, to common law and Parliamentary statutes, in
forbearing or resisting riot, they obey or uphold the Royal authority.
Were they aware that at each general election they choose their real and
effective rulers for an indefinite period, they would be confused,
alarmed, and bewildered, to a degree which would render them incapable
of a real and intelligent choice. The people--the lower orders--may have
been, when Mr. Bagehot wrote, and probably are now, somewhat wiser and
better informed as to the real character of the Government--the actual
responsibility for particular measures--than their critic supposed. But
it is beyond doubt that the Queen's name is a great power. The law is
too mere an abstraction, the names of Ministers represent too much party
feeling, excite too much antagonism, to command the prompt obedience,
the loyal reverence, the enthusiastic support which is rendered to the
name of the Sovereign. In France and America a very different feeling
prevails.
Mr. Senior, than whom no Englishman of his day was more intimate with a
number of French statesmen of different parties, views and
character--than whom there was, perhaps, no cooler, closer, or more
constant observer of French politics--remarks that Frenchmen are always
weak and timid in upholding, daring, resolute, and even fierce in
resisting the powers that be. Confidence, enthusiasm, conviction, seem
in every case of insurrection and dangerous riot to be on the side of
the mob. The revolution of 1848 afforded very striking examples of this
contrast. The overthrow of Louis Philippe, deeply as the King himself
was disliked and despised, narrow as was the electorate, unpopular as
was the Ministry, was the act of a small minority. The Republic was
imposed upon France by a knot of reckless journalists and
semi-communistic dreamers, backed by the dreaded populace of Paris,
against the will of the peasantry who formed four-fifths of the voters,
and of the educated or semi-educated classes, amounting to one half of
the remaining fifth. Again and again was the Provisional
Government--though backed by all who had anything to lose, by all who
dreaded anarchy--on the point of overthrow, and saved only by
Lamartine's eloquence from the conspiracy of a few thousand desperadoes,
and the stormy passions of a mob that hardly knew what it wanted. The
Assembly itself was invaded and terrorized for several hours: the lives
of the leaders, to whom all France looked up with reverence, were in
imminent peril at the hands of a faction numerically insignificant. Only
in the terrible days of June did the National Guard, after four months
of distress and incessant panic, of daily and hourly fear of sack and
pillage, act with energy and decision; and even then the struggle
between the army, supported by the National Guard and the Anarchist
faction of the barricades, was long balanced and doubtful: yet the party
of order in Paris itself constituted an overwhelming majority.
In America, New England perhaps excepted, the mob and the people, the
party of lawless force and law-abiding principle, meet on more equal
terms. No one dreams of disputing, in the last resort, the authority of
the Sovereign, but that Sovereign is invisible and inaccessible. It must
be remembered, moreover, that more than one of the hundred popular
risings, that the Union has seen during its hundred years' existence,
were risings, not against the law, but for the law against the laxity of
its administrators. This very fact makes it the more clear how uncertain
and ineffective is the authority of abstract law and an impersonal
Sovereign. The legal authorities, State or Federal, are not necessarily
representative of the power by which they are elected. In California,
after a period of anarchy, the respectable classes rose with the tacit
support of the people against the State Government which the people had
elected; deposed it almost without an effort, and established in its
place the arbitrary rule of a self-appointed Vigilance Committee, whose
members no one knew. That lawless Government hanged as many rowdies,
pilferers, highway robbers and card sharpers as it thought fit;
banished hundreds under penalty of death--a penalty sure to be
enforced--re-established order, and laid down its power without having
encountered the shadow of legal or popular resistance. We have seen an
actual insurrection of the better elements of society provoked by the
escape of murderers and other criminals through the hands of lax or
corrupt juries, and of an administration whose use of the prerogative of
mercy was imputed to partisanship or to bribery. But in a great majority
of instances, riots that have reached the proportions of insurrection
have been simply anarchical or rebellious. It is not so long since the
railway employes of Pennsylvania, striking work upon an every-day
quarrel between employer and employed, took possession of the iron
highways of the State, intercepted communication, seized the great
railway arsenal of Pittsburg, and fought a pitched battle against the
militia, as obstinate and almost as sanguinary as the minor combats of
the Civil War. While we write, another strike of the same class has
suspended the traffic of the great Western railway line. In three States
the militia have been called out to protect property and liberty, the
rights of capital, the freedom of labour, the interest of the public,
against a class insurrection; the public authorities have been forcibly
resisted, and lives have been lost in a skirmish with fire-arms between
the _posse_ of the Sheriff and the insurgent Knights of Labour. Every
American mob feels itself invested with something of the majesty of the
sovereign people. Every body of English rioters--political, social, or
simply lawless--knows and feels itself guilty of resistance to the
Sovereign. The truncheon of the police, the uniform of the soldier,
unquestionably represents the legal will of the Sovereign; and before
that will the largest and most excited multitude gives way at once.
Mr. Bagehot overlooks the _certainty_ which personal sovereignty gives:
the absence of a moment's possible doubt on which side is that supreme
arbiter, sure to be backed by nine-tenths of the physical forces of
society. He underrates, if he does not altogether ignore, the much wider
and deeper influence of the Royal name; its power over passion as well
as over ignorance. The omnipotence of Parliament, even when, in the
belief of half the nation, a Parliamentary majority represents a
minority of the people, is due less to traditional respect for the House
of Commons, or superstitious reverence for a majority vote, such as
prevails in America, than to the fact, that resistance means rebellion,
visible, unmistakable disobedience to the Queen. It is therefore deeply
to be regretted, not for any sentimental reason, but for the sake of
order and the protection of life and property, that the democratic
changes in our Constitution are gradually undermining the habit of
submission to the Queen's Majesty which still characterizes, to a great
extent, the English people. The Services still feel proud to consider
that they serve, in their own phrase--not the State but--'the Queen.'
That sentiment of loyalty, which Mr. Bagehot ascribes to the ignorant
alone, is as strong in the upper or middle as in the lower orders; has a
far wider, deeper influence than he allows, than it was consistent with
the whole scope of his work on the English constitution to recognize.
One of the most remarkable and interesting points in Tocqueville's
conversations, as recorded by Mr. Senior, is the value which he and
other interlocutors ascribe to the English Poor Law. Mr Senior had seen
its essential principle, the right of subsistence, worked out
farther--to extremer and more dangerous consequences--than perhaps any
other political or social experiment, before the practical common sense
of England interfered. Under the old Poor Law, at least in the rural
districts, the income of a household was regulated by its number. Every
head of a family was entitled to an allowance, increasing with its
increase, and wholly independent of his earnings. Nominal wages had been
actually forced down _below_ the starvation point. The law had
demoralized industry by placing the idlest ditcher on a level of comfort
with the best ploughman, and threatened to swallow up property in the
support of poverty. Tocqueville and his friends had seen the danger from
another point of view. The most popular and most formidable of the
dogmas of that Socialism, which had infected so deeply the _proletariat_
of Paris and other French cities, was in another and yet more insidious
and destructive form the doctrine of the Poor Law. The right of
subsistence was admitted by the establishment of the _ateliers
nationaux_, and asserted by the insurgents of June, 1848, under the
nobler and more dignified guise of the _droit au travail_. The State was
bound, according to that doctrine, not to keep the idle alive, but to
furnish the industrious with work suited to their skill at market rate
of wages; a rate which had no right to fall below the average standard
of an artizan's needs, or rather of his habits.
A principle which contradicts the laws of nature is obviously false; and
the right to subsistence--if claimed not for all who do, but for all who
may, exist in a given country--yet more clearly the _droit au travail_
of which this is the practical meaning--involves the demand, that
agricultural production shall keep pace with population. But, save for
checks all ultimately reducible to the fear of want, checks which it is
the essential object of a Poor Law to relax, population would rapidly,
in any old country, overtake subsistence. That, were the population of
England or France to multiply at an American rate, it would soon lack
standing room, is mathematically demonstrable. A poor law then must be
attended by checks on population as effective as those of Nature
herself; and from their artificial character necessarily more offensive,
revolting, and difficult to enforce. None the less, Englishmen familiar
as Senior with the ruinous operation of the old Poor Law, Frenchmen
confronted like Tocqueville by the terrible theory of the _droit au
travail_, the alarming experience of the _ateliers nationaux_, were
inclined to regard that admission of the right to subsistence--limited
to those actually born--which is the fundamental principle of the
present Poor Law, as a most valuable, if not an indispensable, guarantee
of social security; a signal instance of that practical English wisdom,
which refuses to push admitted principles, sound or false, to
consequences undeniably logical, but practically dangerous.
It might be thought that in a Christian, and especially a Roman Catholic
country, the danger of starvation could never be very practical--that
men, and still more women and children, bearing in their forms and faces
the stamp of actual want, of pinching hunger, would never be denied. But
Senior's experiences of the Irish famine pointed to a different
conclusion. Death by famine is at last rapid, sudden, and unexpected. On
the road to Kenmare, from which many Irish emigrants were despatched to
America, corpses were daily found with collapsed stomachs _and money in
their pockets_. Hoping to reach the port, keeping their money to pay
their passage, death had overtaken them unawares; and this in the face
of organized measures of relief, the largest and most liberal that
public or private charity has ever provided. In cases of prolonged and
extreme distress, but for the Poor Law, hundreds would die of want
almost unawares, before want had overcome their reluctance to beg. And
if actual starvation were rare, yet in the absence of a recognized right
to food and shelter, the fear of starvation must be ever present. This
spectral horror, Tocqueville evidently thought, haunted the imagination
of the French operative; and had much to do with the popularity of
Socialism in a country of diffused property and general thrift, and with
the ferocity of Socialistic or Red Republican insurrections. Charity,
however liberal, is an uncertain and--to their credit be it spoken--to
the majority of French operatives, a repulsive and degrading resource.
It cannot exorcise the hideous spectre of actual famine, which, though
remote, seems ever to threaten them, their wives and their children; and
which in times of distress and depression looms terribly near, distinct,
and horrible. No wonder that men haunted by such a spectre should be
driven to gloomy envy, sullen hate, and outbreaks of ferocity worse than
those provoked by actual suffering. No wonder that any schemes, however
frantic and however unrighteous, should have charms for a class whose
reason is disturbed by the perpetual vision of that ultimate but
undeniably possible horror. We have seen in France within the last few
weeks moral portents which can hardly be ascribed to any other final
cause an atrocious murder committed by workmen, and, what is infinitely
worse, extenuated and almost approved by responsible legislators. It is
probable that the Belgian riots approach as near as any witnessed in
Europe during the last two centuries to a revolt of actual want. Belgium
has secured an artificial manufacturing prominence--a disproportionate
trade to hard toil and low wages. The latter had lately been forced down
to the _minimum_, as profits had been well-nigh extinguished, by the
general depression of business. In fear of actual want, the populace
rose, wasted farms, destroyed factories, plundered and levied
blackmail--in a word, tried to inflict on others the misery that had
maddened themselves. The word has been given to the most quiet and
law-abiding people in Europe _to defend themselves_: a step far more
significant of stern intentions than the sharpest military repression.
Yet the Government is forced to accompany its preventive measures with
an expenditure of 20_s_ per head of the population on public
works--equivalent to an English rate in aid of twenty millions! Could
there be a more conclusive proof that the dread of hunger is a real and
a terrible power for evil among Continental nations; that their choice
lies, in a word, between a recognition of the right to subsistence--a
Poor Law with severe labour tests and restrictions--and periodical,
spasmodic measures of relief enforced by insurrection? Or can there be a
doubt, that the latter is infinitely the more dangerous and demoralizing
alternative: that only the adoption of a Poor law can prevent the
lessons of 1886 from shaking the very foundations of order, property and
civil government in countries situate as are France and Belgium?
It seems strange that French Democracy should not have long since
insisted on laying for ever the spectre of starvation by a Poor Law more
liberal than that of England. It must be remembered, however, that the
democracy of France is a propertied and landed democracy, heavily
burdened with taxes and interest on mortgages, pinched by necessity,
and pinching itself by thrift. No class is so hard to want, so ruthless
to idleness, as a peasantry which wins for itself a bare subsistence by
constant toil, and provides for the future by constant self-denial.
The temper of a progressive and prosperous democracy is very different.
Many, perhaps most of the American States, are without a Poor Law.
Slavery dispensed with it, and the race antagonism consequent on the
manner and circumstances of emancipation has rendered a thorough
revision of social relations--a systematic attempt to meet the new and
very exceptional conditions of Southern society in its present
form--hitherto impossible. Yet, by the confession of one of their
bitterest enemies, no people are so tender, so generous, so lavish of
active sympathy towards the sick, the bereaved, and the unfortunate. In
States which, probably from an instinct under their circumstances just
and wise, refuse to recognize the right to subsistence by a legal
provision for the poor, whereby the idle and vicious would chiefly
benefit, nevertheless paupers by the visitation of God--the aged and
infirm, the blind, the deaf, and dumb, lunatics and idiots--are amply
provided by public and private charity with all that can alleviate their
lot: or teach them, as far as possible, the means of self-dependence.
American charity towards the victims of great natural catastrophes, far
more common there than here--communities burned out by a forest fire, or
ruined by a flood--and yet more the personal sacrifices made, the
readiness with which men and women devote their leisure thought, and
energy to the supervision of public institutions, the efficient
distribution of public subscriptions, the succour and nursing of a
community stricken by pestilence, are above praise. A careful study of
Transatlantic examples might put our own boasted lavishness of charity
to shame.
Even in England, organized private charity, wisely directed, might
surely contrive to effect a discrimination between those who are paupers
by vice, unthrift, and idleness, and those whom God has striken for no
fault that humanity is entitled to pass judgment upon; between the
fitting inmates of the workhouse, and those--helpless from age,
infirmity, accident, and disease--to whom the associations of the
workhouse are humiliating, painful and demoralizing. Nothing is more
essential, under democratic rule, than the maintenance of due severity
towards those who will not work; nothing more likely to relax that
needful severity than its indiscriminate application to those who
cannot.
ART. X.--1. _Fourth Midlothian Campaign._ Political speeches delivered,
November, 1885, by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P. Edinburgh, 1886.