THE ERA OF STAGNATION
I
With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of unexampled calm
in English politics, which lasted until the expulsion of Walpole from
power in 1742. No vital questions were debated, nor did problems of
principle force themselves into view; and if the Jacobites remained in
the background as an element invincibly hostile to absorption, the
failure of their effort in 1715 showed how feeble was their hold on
English opinion. Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had
nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably
recorded in Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and
meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the reign
of George III, they were amenable to management. In the result, an
opposition in the classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question
to be considered was the personalities who were to share in power. The
dominating temper of Walpole decided that issue; and he gave thereby to
the political struggle the outlines in which it was encased for a
generation.
It is a dull period, but complacent; for it was not an unprosperous
time. Agriculture and commerce both were abundant; and the increasing
development of towns shows us that the Industrial Revolution loomed in
the near distance. The eager continuance of the deistic controversy
suggests that there was something of novelty beneath the calm; for
Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck at the root of religious belief,
and Shaftesbury's exaltation of Hellenism not only contributed to the
_Aufklarung_ in Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not
to go unchallenged. But the literature of the time is summarized in
Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of
the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the
latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop
Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his
_Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721) shows rather
the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea
Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought.
Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with
seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the
estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite
the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole
governed. It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the
keynote of the time. An able speaker, without being a great orator, a
superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men
low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the
man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions
to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over
the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from
office. One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney,
Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility. He maintained himself in
office by a corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically
conceived. An opposition developed less on principle than on the belief
that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for concentration.
The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save personal animosity
upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions could only seize upon a
doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain as the pretext of the war it
was Walpole's ambition no less than policy to avoid. From 1726 until
1735 the guiding spirit of the party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter
year he quarrelled with Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in
high dudgeon to France. But in the years of his leadership he had
evolved a theory of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the
intellectual bankruptcy of the time.
To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to remember
the peculiar character of his career. He had attained to the highest
office under Anne at an exceptionally early age; and his period of
power had been distinguished by the vehemence with which he pursued the
ideal of a strict division of parties and the expulsion of all alien
elements from the government. But he had staked all his fortunes upon a
scheme he had neither the resolution to plan nor the courage to execute;
and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had been followed
by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to his reputation and
place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the
King's mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to
political place. His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from
power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance between the
Tories and malcontent Whigs for Walpole's overthrow. The alliance
succeeded, though too late for Bolingbroke to enjoy the fruits of
success; but in effecting the purgation of the Tory party from its taint
of Jacobitism he rendered no inconsiderable service. His foundation,
moreover, of the _Craftsman_--the first official journal of a political
party in England--showed his appreciation of the technique of political
controversy. Most of it is dead now, and, indeed, no small part of its
contemporary success is due to the making of comment in terms of the
immediate situation, as also by its consistent use of a personal
reference which has, save in the mass, no meaning for today. Though,
doubtless, the idea of its inception was derived from journals like
Defoe's _Review_ and Leslie's _Rehearsal_, which had won success, its
intimate connection with the party leadership was a novel element; and
it may therein claim a special relation to the official periodicals of a
later generation.
The reputation of Bolingbroke as a political philosopher is something
that our age can hardly understand. "A solemn trifler," Lord Morley has
called him; and it is difficult to know why his easy declamation was so
long mistaken for profound thought. Much, doubtless, is due to that
personal fascination which made him the inspiration of men so different
as Pope and Voltaire; and the man who could supply ideas to Chatham and
Disraeli cannot be wholly devoid of merit. Certainly he wrote well, in
that easy elegance of style which was the delight of the eighteenth
century; and he is consistently happy in his choice of adjectives. But
his work is at every point embellished with that affectation of
classical learning which was the curse of his age. He sought no general
truths, and he is free from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any
enthusiasm save that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his
political writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize
his animosity. The _Dissertation on Parties_ (1734) and the _Idea of a
Patriot King_ (1738) might have betrayed us, taken alone, into regarding
their author as a disinterested observer watching with regret the
development of a fatal system; but taken in conjunction with the _Letter
to Sir W. Windham_ (1717), which was not published until after his
death, and is written with an acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to
honesty, they reveal the opinions as no more than a mask for ambition
born of hate.
The whole, of course, must have some sort of background; and the
_Letters on the Study of History_ (1735) was doubtless intended to
supply it. Experience is to be the test of truth, since history is
philosophy teaching by example. But Bolingbroke's own argument supplies
its refutation. His history is an arbitrary selection of instances
intended to illustrate the particular ideas which happened to be
uppermost in his mind. The Roman consuls were chosen by annual election;
whence it is clear that England should have, if not an annual, at least
a triennial parliament. He acknowledges that the past in some degree
unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks upon the
evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger
aspect than their immediate environment. But his history is intended
less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy
of citation. Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content
with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration. He is willing,
indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the
reign of James I; though he shows his lack of true perception when he
ascribes the true inwardness of the Reformation to the greed of the
monarch for the spoils of the clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses
him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events.
Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the
real root of great changes. And when he expresses a "thorough contempt"
for the kind of work scholars such as Scaliger and Petavius had
achieved, he shows his entire ignorance of the method whereby alone a
knowledge of general principle can be attained.
A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high
notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings is too
stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king
important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the Church; for
Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with such matters as
the apostolic succession. He makes great show of his love of liberty,
which is the true end of government; and we are informed with a vast
solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in which it always stands. So that
the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told
what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained. The social compact
seems to win his approbation and we learn that the secret of the
British constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual
independency. But what the powers are, and how their independence is
preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of
Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria
against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the
secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of
standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told
that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and
vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for
corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his
sincerity. The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no
difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how
completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted. He
wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He would have
disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen from Parliament.
The press was to be free; and there is at least a degree of generous
insight in his plea for a wider commercial freedom in colonial matters.
Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man with
the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the committee for the
settlement of disputed elections? And what else can we see in his desire
for liberty of the press save a desire to fight Walpole in the open,
without fear of the penalties his former treason had incurred?
His value can be tested in another way. His _Idea of a Patriot King_ is
the remedy for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty years old when it
appeared, and he had then been in active politics for thirty-five years,
so that we are entitled to regard it as the fruit of his mature
experience. He was too convinced that the constitution was "in the
strictest sense a bargain, a conditional contract between the prince and
the people" to attempt again the erection of a system of prerogative.
Yet it is about the person of the monarch that the theory hinges. He is
to have no powers inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for
such restraints will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil
propensities of a bad king. What is needed is a patriot king who will
destroy corruption and awaken the spirit of liberty. His effective
government will synchronize with the commencement of his reign; and he
will at once dismiss the old and cunning ministers, to replace them by
servants who are wise. He will not stand upon party, but upon the State.
He will unite the forces of good counsel into a single scheme.
Complaints will be answered, the evildoers punished. Commerce will flow
on with uninterrupted prosperity, and the navy of England receive its
due meed of attention. His conduct must be dignified, and he must
acquire his influence not apart from, but on account of, the affection
of his people. "Concord," says Bolingbroke in rhapsodical prospection,
"will appear breeding peace and prosperity on every hand"; though he
prudently hopes also that men will look back with affection upon one
"who desired life for nothing so much as to see a King of Great Britain
the most powerful man in the country, and a patriot King at the head of
a united people."
Bolingbroke himself has admitted that such a monarch would be a "sort of
standing miracle," and perhaps no other comment upon his system is
required. A smile in Plato at the sight of his philosopher-King in such
strange company might well be pardoned. It is only necessary to point
out that the person whom Bolingbroke designates for this high function
was Frederick, Prince of Wales, to us the most meagre of a meagre
generation, but to Bolingbroke, by whose grace he was captivated, "the
greatest and most glorious of human beings." This exaltation of the
monarch came at a time when a variety of circumstances had combined to
show the decrease of monarchical sentiment. It bears upon its every page
the marks of a personal antagonism. It is too obviously the programme of
a party to be capable of serious interpretation as a system. The
minister who is to be impeached, the wise servants who are to gain
office, the attack on corruption, the spirited foreign policy--all these
have the earmarks of a platform rather than of a philosophy. Attacks on
corruption hardly read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the
one solid evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger of
finance in politics. For none of the Tories save Barnard, who owed his
party influence thereto, understood the financial schemes of Walpole;
and since they were his schemes obviously they represented the triumph
of devilish ingenuity. The return of landed men to power would mean the
return of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country
squires, the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that
Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a régime which already
faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power. The pamphlet was the
cornerstone in the education of Frederick's son; and when George III
came to the throne he proceeded to give such heed to his master as the
circumstances permitted. It is perhaps, as Mr. A.L. Smith has argued,
unfair to visit Bolingbroke with George's version of his ideal; yet they
are sufficiently connected for the one to give the meaning to the other.
Chatham, indeed, was later intrigued by this ideal of a national party;
and before Disraeli discovered that England does not love coalitions he
expended much rhetoric upon the beauties of a patriotic king. But
Chatham was a wayward genius who had nothing of that instinct for common
counsel which is of the essence of party government; while it is
necessary to draw a firm line between Disraeli's genial declamation and
his practice when in office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort
founded upon the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that
his own last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of
the event which he looked to as the inauguration of the golden age.
II
The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political thought;
the system continued, though the men were different. What alone can be
detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which found its
sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the strength of
which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king. An able
pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival of this unlooked-for portent.
_Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts_ (1742) was, though it is
anonymous,[16] obviously written by one in touch with the inner current
of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of Walpole, though he sees
the chaos in its result. "A republican spirit," he says, "has strangely
arisen"; and he goes on to tell how the electors of London and
Westminster were now regarding their members as delegates to whom
instructions might be issued. "A new party of malcontents" had arisen,
"assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People."
They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ... and
endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands
that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the
people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so
obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society,
to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves."
The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike, that temper which
produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible for Cartwright and
Horne Tooke and Sir Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English
radicalism.
[Footnote 16: It was probably written by Lord Egmont.]
Yet the influence of that temper still lay a generation ahead; and the
next piece of import comes from a mind which, though perhaps the most
powerful of all which have applied themselves to political philosophy in
England, was, from its very scepticism, incapable of constructive
effort. David Hume was thirty-one years of age when he published (1742)
the first series of his essays; and his _Treatise of Human Nature_ which
had fallen "dead-born from the press" was in some sort compensated by
the success of the new work. The second part, entitled _Political
Discourses_, was published in 1752, almost simultaneously with the
"_Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals_." As in the case of
Hume's metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful
dissolvent the century was to see. Yet nowhere was so clearly to be
demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had fallen.
Hume, of course, is always critical and suggestive, and even if he had
no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new turn to speculation.
There is something almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes
divine right and the social contract. The one is an inevitable deduction
from theism, but it protects an usurper not less than an hereditary
king, and gives a "divine commission" as well to a constable as to the
most majestic prince. The proponents of the social contract are in no
better case. "Were you to preach," he remarks, "in most parts of the
world that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary
consent, or on a mutual promise, the magistrate would soon imprison you
as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience; if your friends did
not before shut you up as delirious for advancing such absurdities." The
original contract could not be produced, and, even if it were, it would
suppose the "consent of the fathers to bind the children even to the
most remote generations." The real truth, as he remarks, is that "almost
all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains
any record in story, have been founded originally on usurpation, or on
conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary
subjection of the people." If we then ask why obedience is possible, the
sufficient answer is that "it becomes so familiar that most men never
make any inquiry about its origin or cause, any more than about the
principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of nature."
Government, in short, is dependent upon the inescapable facts of
psychology. It might be unnecessary if all desires could be individually
fulfilled by making them, or if man showed to his fellow-men the same
tender regard he has for himself. So happy a condition does not exist;
and government is the most useful way of remedying the defects of our
situation. A theologian might say that Hume derives government from
original sin; to which he would have replied by denying the fall. His
whole attitude is simply an insistence that utility is the touchstone of
institutions, and he may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its
application to the whole field of political science. He knows that
opinion is the sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie
at the base of the thoughts which get accepted. He does not, indeed,
deny that fear and consent enter into the attitude of men; he simply
asserts that these also are founded upon a judgment of utility in the
thing judged. We obey because otherwise "society could not subsist," and
society subsists for its utility. "Men," he says "could not live at all
in society, at least in a civilized society, without laws and
magistrates and judges, to prevent the encroachments of the strong upon
the weak, of the violent upon the just and equitable."
Utilitarianism is, of course, above all a method; and it is not unfair
to say of Hume that he did not get very far beyond insistence on that
point. He sees that the subjection of the many to the few is rooted in
human impulse; but he has no penetrating inquiry, such as that of Locke
or Hobbes, into the purpose of such subjection. So, too, it is the sense
of public interest which determines men's thoughts on government, on who
should rule, and what should be the system of property; but the ethical
substance of these questions he leaves undetermined. Politics, he
thinks, may one day be a science; though he considers the world still
too young for general truths therein. The maxims he suggests as of
permanent value, "that a hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals,
and a people voting by their representatives form the best monarchy,
autocracy and democracy"; that "free governments ... are the most
ruinous and oppressive to their provinces"; that republics are more
favorable to science, monarchies to art; that the death of a political
body is inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most
thinkers at the present time. And when he constructs an ideal
constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be regarded as
practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is obvious that the
historical method had not yet come fully into being.
Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an avoidance
of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic insight that he had.
He has a keen eye for the absurdity of Pope's maxim that administration
is all in all; nothing can ever make the forms of government immaterial.
He accepts Harrington's dictum that the substance of government
corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as later
thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces. He sees that
the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or withstand the new balance
of property in the State; a prophecy of which the accuracy was
demonstrated by the failure of George III. "In all governments," as he
says, "there is a perpetual intestinal struggle, open or secret,"
between Authority and Liberty; though his judgment that neither "can
ever absolutely prevail," shows us rather that we are on the threshold
of _laissez-faire_ than that Hume really understood the problem of
freedom. He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of
the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular
government. He saw the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency
to persist in terms of men instead of principles. He was convinced of
the necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and
no one, save Adam Smith, has more acutely insisted upon the evil effect
on commerce of an absolute government. He emphasized the value of
freedom of the press, in which he saw the secret whereby the mixed
government of England was maintained. "It has also been found," he said
in a happy phrase, "... that the people are no such dangerous monsters
as they have been represented, and that it is in every respect better to
guide them like rational creatures than to lead or drive them like brute
beasts." There is, in fact, hardly a page of his work in which some such
acuteness may not be found.
Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is absent. Hume was a typical
child of one aspect of the eighteenth century in his hatred of
enthusiasm, and the form in which he most abominates it is religious.
Why people's religious opinions should lead to antagonism he could no
more understand than why people should refuse to pass one another on a
road. Wars of religion thus seemed to him based upon a merely frivolous
principle; and in his ideal commonwealth he made the Church a department
of the State lest it should get out of hand. He was, moreover, a static
philosopher, disturbed by signs of political restlessness; and this led
to the purgation of Whig doctrines from his writings, and their
consistent replacement by a cynical conservatism. He was always afraid
that popular government would mean mob-rule; and absolute government is
accordingly recommended as the euthanasia of the British constitution.
Not even the example of Sweden convinced him that a standing army might
exist without civil liberty being endangered; and he has all the noxious
fallacies of his time upon the balance of power. Above all, it is
striking to see his helplessness before the problem of national
character. Mainly he ascribes it to the form of government, and that in
turn to chance. Even the friend of Montesquieu can see no significance
in race or climate. The idea, in fact, of evolution is entirely absent
from his political speculation. Political life, like human life, ends in
death; and the problem is to make our egress as comfortable as we can,
for the prime evil is disturbance. It is difficult not to feel that
there is almost a physical basis in his own disease for this love of
quiet. The man who put indolence among the primary motives of human
happiness was not likely to view novel theories with unruffled temper.
Hume has an eminent place among economists, and for one to whom the
study of such phenomena was but a casual inquiry, it is marvelous how
much he saw. He is free from the crude errors of mercantilism; and
twenty years before Adam Smith hopes, "as a British subject," for the
prosperity of other countries. "Free communication and exchange" seems
to him an ordinance of nature; and he heaps contempt upon those
"numberless bars, obstructions and imposts which all nations of Europe,
and none more than England, have put upon trade." Specie he places in
its true light as merely a medium of exchange. The supposed antagonism
between commerce and agriculture he disposes of in a half-dozen
effective sentences. He sees the place of time and distance in the
discussion of economic want. He sees the value of a general level of
economic equality, even while he is sceptical of its attainment. He
insists upon the economic value of high wages, though he somewhat
belittles the importance of wealth in the achievement of happiness.
Before Bentham, who on this point converted Adam Smith, he knew that the
rate of interest depends upon the supply of and demand for loans. He
insists that commerce demands a free government for its progress,
pointing out, doubtless from his abundant French experience, that an
absolute government gives to the commercial class an insufficient status
of honor. He pointed out, doubtless with France again in his mind, the
evils of an arbitrary system of taxation. "They are commonly converted,"
he says with unwonted severity, "into punishments on industry; and also,
by their unavoidable inequality, are more grievous, than by the real
burden which they impose." And he emphasizes his belief that the best
taxes are those which, like taxes upon luxury, press least upon the
poor.
Such insight is extraordinary enough in the pre-Adamite epoch; but even
more remarkable are his psychological foundations. The wealth of the
State, he says, is the labor of its subjects, and they work because the
wants of man are not a stated sum, but "multiply every moment upon
him." The desire for wealth comes from the idea of pleasure; and in the
_Treatise on Human Nature_ he discusses with superb clarity the way in
which the idea of pleasure is related at once to individual satisfaction
and to that sympathy for others which is one of the roots of social
existence. He points out the need for happiness in work. "The mind," he
writes, "acquires new vigor, enlarges its powers and faculties, and by
an assiduity in honest industry both satisfies its own appetites and
prevents growth of unnatural ones"; though, like his predecessor,
Francis Hutcheson, he overemphasizes the delights opened by civilization
to the humbler class of men. He gives large space in his discussion to
the power of will; and, indeed, one of the main advantages he ascribed
to government was the compulsion it puts upon us to allow the categories
of time and space a part in our calculations. He does not, being in his
own life entirely free from avarice, regard the appetite for riches as
man's main motive to existence; though no one was more urgent in his
insistence that "the avidity of acquiring goods and possessions for
ourselves and our nearest friends is ... destructive of society" unless
balanced by considerations of justice. And what he therein intended may
be gathered from the liberal notions of equality he manifested. "Every
person," he wrote in a famous passage, "if possible ought to enjoy the
fruits of his labor in a full possession of all the necessaries, and
many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt but such an equality
is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less the happiness
of the rich than it adds to that of the poor." It is clear that we have
moved far from the narrow confines of the old political arithmetic. The
theory of utility enables Hume to see the scope of economics--the word
itself he did not know--in a more generous perspective than at any
previous time. It would be too much to say that his grasp of its
psychological foundation enabled him entirely to move from the
limitations of the older concept of a national prosperity expressed only
in terms of bullion to the view of economics as a social science. But at
least he saw that economics is rooted in the nature of men and therein
he had the secret of its true understanding. _The Wealth of Nations_
would less easily have made its way had not the insight of Hume prepared
the road for its reception.
What, then, and in general, is his place in the history of political
thought? Clearly enough, he is not the founder of a system; his work is
rather a series of pregnant hints than a consecutive account of
political facts. Nor must we belittle the debt he owes to his
predecessors. Much, certainly, he owed to Locke, and the full radiance
of the Scottish enlightenment emerges into the day with his teaching.
Francis Hutcheson gave him no small inspiration; and Hutcheson means
that he was indebted to Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy
commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in
that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is
characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth
century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is
entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism. He first
showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between
ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He brings to an end
what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical school." After him we
are done with the abuse of history to bolster up Divine Right and social
contract; for there is clearly present in his use of facts a true sense
of historical method. He put an end also to the confusion which resulted
from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong
independent of all positive law. He took the facts as phenomena to be
explained rather than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be
maintained in part defiance of them. Conventional Whiggism has no
foothold after he has done with its analysis. His utilitarianism was the
first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract
school; and even if he was not the first to see through its
pretensions--that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury--he was the first
to show the grounds of their uselessness. He saw that history and
psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy.
So that even if he could not himself construct it the hints at least
were there.
[Footnote 17: There are few books which show so clearly as Lorimer's
_Institutes of Nations_ (1872) how fully the Scottish school was in the
midstream of European thought.]
His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion. The
metaphysics of Burke, so far as one may use a term he would himself have
repudiated, are largely those of Hume. The place of habit and of social
instinct alongside of consent, the perception that reason alone will not
explain political facts, the emphasis upon resistance as of last resort,
the denial that allegiance is a mere contract to be presently explained,
the deep respect for order--all these are, after all, the fabric from
which the thought of Burke was woven. Nor is there in Bentham's defence
of Utilitarianism argument in which he would have recognized novelty.
Herein, at least, his proof that morality is no more than general
opinion of utility constructs, in briefer form, the later arguments of
Bentham, Paley and the Mills, nor can their mode of statement claim
superiority to Hume's. So that on either side of his work he foreshadows
the advent of the two great schools of modern political thought. His
utilitarianism is the real path by which radical opinion at last found
means of acceptance. His use of history is, through Burke, the ancestor
of that specialized conservatism begotten of the historical method. If
there is thus so much, it is, of course, tempting to ask why there is
not more. If Hume has the materials why did he fail to build up a system
from them? The answer seems twofold. In part it is the man himself. His
genius, as his metaphysics show, lay essentially in his power of
destruction; and the man who gave solipsism to philosophy was not likely
to effect a new creation in politics. In part, also, the condition of
the time gave little stimulus to novelty. Herein Hume was born a
generation too early. Had he written when George III attempted the
destruction of the system of the Revolution, and when America and France
combined to raise again the basic questions of politics, he might have
done therein what Adam Smith effected in his own field. But the time had
not yet come; and it was left to Burke and Bentham to reap where he had
sown.