SIGNS OF CHANGE
I
From Hume until the publication of Burke's _Present Discontents_ (1770)
there is no work on English politics of the first importance. Walpole
had fallen in 1742; but for the next fifteen years his methods dominated
the parliamentary scene. It was only with the advent of the elder Pitt
to power that a new temper may be observed, a temper quickened by what
followed on the accession of George III. Henceforward, it is not untrue
to say that the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it
was no longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French
Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim
satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the
standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight, though
collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for men to
grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater
prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to
victory. Something of the exhilaration of these years we can still catch
in the letters which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to
turn off with easy laughter his deep sense of pride. In the House of
Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show that a
new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the
first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in
the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent.
So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single
source, the French influence is the effective cause of change. Voltaire
and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole's
administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw.
Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the
good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution,
and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience. Yet
when he came, in 1762, to publish the _Contrat Social_ it was obvious
that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real meaning of their
work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English
institutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the
simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and
one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a
general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of
English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing--less
admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a _Habeas
Corpus_ and a _lettre de cachet_, the regular succession of Parliaments,
all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a
magnificent achievement. The English constitution revealed to France an
immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration. Even to
Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was
a generalization from its significance at a special crisis. Hume had
partial glimpses of its inner substance. But for most it had become a
discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs. Its analysis as a
connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil
Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was
more significant was the realization of Montesquieu's import
simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence.
Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers.
Rousseau's time was not yet; though within a score of years it was
possible to see him as the rival to Burke's conservatism.
It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which underlies
the _Esprit des Lois_ (1748). It is a commonplace now that Montesquieu
is to be regarded as the founder of the historical method. The present
is to be explained by its ancestry. Laws, governments, customs are not
truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin
and the country from which they derive. It would be inaccurate, with
Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the
systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in
the most complete unreality, are to be found in Godwin's _Political
Justice_; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time
such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his
faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly
saw--the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the
high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past
wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened
this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But
Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main
mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that
decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the
true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the
importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid
Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in his inaugural lecture as
Vinerian professor. He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to
which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent
utterance both in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention, and in
the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What, perhaps, is most
immediately significant is his famous praise of the British
Constitution--the secret of which he entirely misapprehended--and his
discovery of its essence in the separation of powers. The short sixth
chapter of his eleventh book is the real keynote of Blackstone and De
Lolme. It led them to investigate, on principles of at least doubtful
validity, an edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the
last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth
antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated
structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That it
was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been
made. The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines have been
more noxious in their consequence than this theory of checks and
balances. But Blackstone's _Commentaries_ (1765-9) produced Bentham's
_Fragment on Government_ (1776), and with that book we enter upon the
realistic study of the British Constitution.
Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from
English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an
influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those
that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to
avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference
between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power
of government which Locke had proposed. It is a removal at every point
conditioned by the interest of the people. For Rousseau declared that
the existing distribution of power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and
he made the people sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their
achievement in the shape of sinister interest. The powers of the people
thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for
innovation. It is easy enough then to understand why such a philosophy
should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager sympathy for humble
men, his optimistic faith in the immediate prospect of popular power
were to Burke the symptoms of insane delusion and their author "the
great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England."
But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's influence was the
success of the American Revolution; and no one had done more than Burke
himself to promote its cause and justify its principles. That revolution
established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its
statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America
guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the
soberness with which it checked the supposed weakness of the sovereign
people. America made herself independent while what was best in Europe
combined in enthusiastic applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of
Rousseau had been taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of
power could remove what deliberation was impotent to secure. Here
Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage
denied. Nor, at the moment, was it influential except in the general
impetus it gave to thought. But from the moment of its appearance it is
an undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its metaphysical
form it failed to command acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its
results were victorious. Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the
conclusions he recommends so much as in the language in which he clothes
them. Either make a final end of the optimism of men like Hume and
Blackstone, or the veneration for the past which is at the root of
Burke's own teaching.
It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the
stimulus it did. Montesquieu came to praise the British constitution at
a time when good men were aghast at its perversion. There was no room in
many years for revolution, but at least there was place for hearty
discontent and a seeking after new methods. Of that temper two men so
different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are the political symbols. The
former's rise to power upon the floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant
nothing so much as a protest against the cynical corruption of the
previous generation. Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly
awaking to a sense of its own power. The French creed was too purely
logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its
entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden
shoes played not a little part in its rejection. The rights of man made
only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was
involved in that rejection; and then it was too late. But no one could
feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and
Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for
thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is
nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes.
The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is
attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the
French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would
have been a supreme achievement.
II
The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757. John Brown's
_Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_ is largely
forgotten now; though it went through seven editions in a year and was
at once translated into French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in
the vast Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of
comment upon the _Characteristics_ of Shaftesbury. His book is too
evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with reverence, to
make us doubt its derivation. There is the same reliance upon Livy and
Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking generalization; though the
argument upon which Brown's conclusions are based is seldom given,
perhaps because his geometric clarity of statement impressed him as
self-demonstrative. Brown's volumes are an essay upon the depravity of
the times. He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering
sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing
so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the
universities out of hand, in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would
not have rejected. He deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men
trifle with Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would,
appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become
nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the
theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The
neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown
in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to
the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling
penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the
army devote themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize
money. Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour
brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman. The poor, indeed,
the middle class, and the legal and medical professions, Brown
specifically exempts from this indictment. But he emphasizes his belief
that this is unimportant. "The manners and principles of those who
lead," he says, "... not of those who are governed ... will ever
determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the continuance or
dissolution of a state."
This profligacy Brown compares to the languid vice which preceded the
fall of Carthage and of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great
Britain at the hands of France, unless it can be cured. So far as he has
an explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the
decay of religious sentiment. His remedy is only Bolingbroke's Patriot
King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen to the height
of power. What mainly stirred Englishmen was the prophecy of defeat on
the morrow of the disastrous convention of Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe
and Clive repaired that royal humiliation Brown seems to have died a
natural death. What is more interesting than his prophecies was the
evidence of a close reading of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is
the product of the climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and
sullen temper. Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of
England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the
simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation.
Brown has no passion, and his book reads rather like Mr. Galsworthy's
_Island Pharisees_ sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a
well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of attention
to the evils of his time. It describes undoubted facts, and it shows
that the era of content has gone. But its careful periods and strangely
far-off air lack the eagerness for truth which Rousseau put into his
questions. Brown can neither explain nor can he proffer remedy. He sees
that Pitt is somehow significant; but when he rules out the popular
voice as devoid of all importance, he deprives himself of the means
whereby to grasp the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted. Nothing
could prove more strongly the exactitude of Burke's _Present
Discontents_. Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of
Junius.
Hume was the friend of Montesquieu, though twenty years his junior; and
the _Esprit des Lois_ travelled rapidly to Scotland. There it caught the
eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a treatise on refinement, and by the
influence of Hume and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
University of Edinburgh. Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular
in his time, and certainly he has a skill for polished phrase, and a
genial paraphrase of other men's ideas. His _Essay on the History of
Civil Society_ (1767), which in a quarter of a century went through six
editions, was thought by Helvétius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume
himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its
suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some
fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the investigation of
savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government. He
sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature. He
insists, probably after conversation with Adam Smith, upon the social
value of the division of functions. He does not doubt the original
equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his age has reached the limit
of its useful growth. Property he traces back to a parental desire to
make a better provision for children "than is found under the
promiscuous management of many copartners." Climate has the new
importance upon which Montesquieu has insisted; or, at least, as it
"ripens the pineapple and the tamarina," so it "inspires a degree of
mildness that can even assuage the rigours of despotical government."
The priesthood--this is Hume--becomes a separate influence under the
sway of superstition. Liberty, he says, "is maintained by the continued
differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in
behalf of equitable government." The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is
certainly not here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in
the obscurity into which he has fallen. The _Esprit des Lois_ took
twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of men
like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped. Facile
popularisers of this sort may have mollified the drawing-room; but they
did not add to political ideas.
III
A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the students of
constitutional law. Blackstone's _Commentaries on the Laws of England_
(1765-9) has had ever since its first publication an authority such as
Coke only before possessed. "He it is," said Bentham, "who, first of
all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the
language of the Scholar and the Gentleman." Certainly, as Professor
Dicey has remarked, "the book contains much real learning about our
system of government." We are less concerned here with Blackstone as an
antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy. Here his
purpose seems obvious enough. The English constitution raised him from
humble means through a Professorship at Oxford to a judgeship in the
Court of Common Pleas. He had been a member of Parliament and refused
the office of Solicitor-General. He had thus no reason to be
dissatisfied with the conditions of his time; and the first book of the
_Commentaries_ is nothing so much as an attempt to explain why English
constitutional law is a miracle of wisdom.
Constitutional law, as such, indeed, found no place in Blackstone's
book. It creeps in under the rights of persons, where he deals with the
power of king and Parliament. His treatment implies a whole philosophy.
Laws are of three kinds--of nature, of God, and of the civil state.
Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is "a rule of civil conduct
prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and
prohibiting what is wrong." It is, he tells us, "called a rule to
distinguish it from a compact or agreement." It derives from the
sovereign power, of which the chief character is the making of laws.
Society is based upon the "wants and fears" of men; and it is coeval
with their origin. The idea of a state of nature "is too wild to be
seriously admitted," besides being contrary to historical knowledge.
Society implies government, and whatever its origins or its forms there
"must be in all of them a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled
authority, in which the _jura summa imperii_, or rights of sovereignty
reside." The forms of government are classified in the usual way; and
the British constitution is noted as a happy mixture of them all. "The
legislature of the Kingdom," Blackstone writes, "is entrusted to three
powers entirely independent of each other; first the King, secondly the
lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical assembly of
persons, chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour
or their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by
the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy;
and as this aggregate body, actuated by different springs and attentive
to different interests, composes the British Parliament and has the
supreme disposal of everything; there can be no inconvenience attempted
by either of the three branches, but will be withstood by one of the
other two; each branch being armed with a negative power, sufficient to
repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous." It
is in the king in Parliament that British sovereignty resides. Eschewing
the notion of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the
implications of it are secured. "The constitutional government of this
island," he says, "is so admirably tempered and compounded, that nothing
can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the equilibrium of power between
one branch of the legislature and the rest."
All this is not enough; though, as Bentham was to show in his _Fragment
on Government_, it is already far too much. "A body of nobility," such
is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, "is also more
peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded constitution, in order
to support the rights of both the Crown and people, by forming a barrier
to withstand the encroachments of both ... if they were confounded with
the mass of the people, and like them had only a vote in electing
representatives, their privileges would soon be borne down and
overwhelmed by the popular torrent, which would effectually level all
distinctions." "The Commons," he says further, "consist of all such men
of property in the kingdom as have not seats in the House of Lords." The
legal irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. "He is not only
incapable of doing wrong," says Blackstone, "but even of thinking wrong;
he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or
weakness," though he points out that the constitution "has allowed a
latitude of supposing the contrary." The powers of the King are
described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of William the
Norman than to the backstairs corruption of George III. The right of
revolution is noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals
rather than of law.
"Its true defect," says Professor Dicey of the _Commentaries_, "is the
hopeless confusion both of language and of thought introduced into the
whole subject of constitutional law by Blackstone's habit--common to all
the lawyers of his time--of applying old and inapplicable terms to new
institutions." This is severe enough; yet Blackstone's sins are deeper
than the criticism would suggest. He introduced into English political
philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of substance upon
which the whole vicious theory of checks and balances was erected. He
made no distinction between the unlimited sovereignty of law and the
very obviously limited sovereignty of reality. He must have known that
to talk of the independence of the branches of the legislature was
simple nonsense at a time when King and peers competed for the control
of elections to the House of Commons. His idealization of a peerage
whose typical spiritual member was Archbishop Cornwallis and whose
temporal embodiment was the Duke of Bedford would not have deceived a
schoolboy had it not provided a bulwark against improvement. It was
ridiculous to describe the Commons as representative of property so long
as places like Manchester and Sheffield were virtually disfranchised.
His picture of the royal prerogative was a portrait against every detail
of which what was best in England had struggled in the preceding century
and a half. He has nothing to say of the cabinet, nothing of ministerial
responsibility, nothing of the party system. What he did was to produce
the defence of a non-existent system which acted as a barrier to all
legal, and much political, progress in the next half-century. He gave
men material without cause for satisfaction.
As a description of the existing government there is thus hardly an
element of Blackstone's work which could stand the test of critical
inquiry. But even worse was its philosophy. As Bentham pointed out, he
was unaware of the distinction between society and government. The state
of nature exists, or fails to exist, with startling inconsistency.
Blackstone, in fact, was a Lockian who knows that Hume and Montesquieu
have cut the ground from under his master's feet, and yet cannot
understand how, without him, a foundation is to be supplied. Locke,
indeed, seems to him, as a natural conservative, to go too far, and he
rejects the original contract as without basis in history; yet
contractual notions are present at every fundamental stage of his
argument. The sovereign power, so we are told, is irresistible; and then
because Blackstone is uncertain what right is to mean, we hear of moral
limitations upon its exercise. He speaks continually of representation
without any effort to examine into the notions it conveys. The members
of society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify
existent inequalities. "The natural foundations of sovereignty," he
writes, "are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and
power." Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have been
taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the actual
exertion of authority. Nor has he clear notions of the way in which
property is to be founded. Communism, he writes in seventeenth century
fashion, is the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the
earth to men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the
soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions. This is
pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are utterly
remote from the logical result of his own premises.
The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these questions, only
the most confused sort of notions. He had to preface his work with some
sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded
it. The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some
uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to
the great sceptic's speculations. So that he was driven back upon
notions he felt to be false, without a proper realization of their
falsity. His use of Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a
great idea can be in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than
the fertility it contained. The merit of Blackstone is his learning,
which was substantial, his realization that the powers of law demand
some classification, his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is
right alike in searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying
the historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was
little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions
of his time to question its assumptions.
De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with Blackstone,
what he failed to see was even more remarkable than what he did
perceive, his book has real ability and merit. De Lolme was a citizen of
Geneva, who published his _Constitution of England_ in 1775, after a
twelve months' visit to shores sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to
die in obscurity and want. His book, as he tells us in his preface, was
no mean success, though he derived no profit from it. Like Blackstone,
he was impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional
equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty. The attitude was
not unnatural in one who, with his head full of Montesquieu, was a
witness of the struggle between Junius and the King. He has, of course,
the limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of
government in purely mechanical terms. "It is upon the passions of
mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the
action of the various parts of a state depends. The machine may vary as
to its dimensions; but its movement and acting springs still remain
intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks of government as "a great
ballet or dance in which ... everything depends upon the disposition of
the figures." He does not deal, that is to say, with men as men, but
only as inert adjuncts of a machine by which they are controlled. Such
an attitude is bound to suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction.
It regards historic forces as distinct from the men related to them.
Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to
unstability. The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal
power against the popular. The King's interest is safeguarded by the
division of Parliament into two Houses, each of which rejects the
encroachment of the other upon the executive. His power is limited by
parliamentary privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and
so forth. The theory was not true; though it represented with some
accuracy the ideals of the time.
Nor must we belittle what insight De Lolme possessed. He saw that the
early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented the
continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with the
result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the English
people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior power. He
understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was the
independence of the judges. He realized that the party-system--he never
used the actual term--while it provides room for men's ambitions at the
same time prevents the equation of ambition with indispensability. "Woe
to him," says De Lolme, "... who should endeavor to make the people
believe that their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single
citizen." He sees the paramount value of freedom of the press. This, as
he says, with the necessity that members should be re-elected, "has
delivered into the hands of the people at large the exercise of the
censorial power." He has no doubt but that resistance is the remedy
whereby governmental encroachment can be prevented; "resistance," he
says, "is the ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of
power." He points out how real is the guarantee of liberty where the
onus of proof in criminal cases is thrown upon the government. He
regards with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military
arm, and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it
has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding to
the royal power. Nor can he fail to admire the insight which organizes
"the agitation of the popular mind," not as "the forerunner of violent
commotions" but to "animate all parts of the state." Therein De Lolme
had grasped the real essence of party government.
It was, of course, no more than symptomatic of his time that cabinet and
prime minister should have escaped his notice. A more serious defect was
his inability, with the Wilkes contest prominently in his notice, to
see that the people had assumed a new importance. For the masses,
indeed, De Lolme had no enthusiasm. "A passive share," he thought, "was
the only one that could, with safety to the state, be trusted" to the
humble man. "The greater part," he wrote, "of those who compose this
multitude, taken up with the care of providing for their subsistence,
have neither sufficient leisure, nor even, in consequence of their
imperfect education, the degree of information, requisite for functions
of this kind." Such an attitude blinded him to the significance of the
American conflict, which he saw unattended by its moral implications. He
trusted too emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that
institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George III
could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a sense of its
own power. The real social forces of the time found there no channels of
activity; and the difference between De Lolme and Bagehot is the
latter's power to go behind the screen of statute to the inner sources
of power.
IV
The basis of revolutionary doctrine was already present in England when,
in 1762, Rousseau published his _Contrat Social_. With its fundamental
doctrines Locke had already made his countrymen familiar; and what was
needed for the appreciation of its teaching was less a renaissance than
discontent. So soon as men are dissatisfied with the traditional
foundations of the State, a gospel of natural rights is certain to make
its appearance. And, once the design of George III had been made
familiar by his treatment of Chatham and Wilkes, the discontent did not
fail to show itself. Indeed, in the year before the publication of
Rousseau's book, Robert Wallace, a Scottish chaplain royal, had written
in his _Various Prospects_ (1761) a series of essays which are at once
an anticipation of the main thesis of Malthus and a plea for the
integration of social forces by which alone the mass of men could be
raised from misery. In the light of later experience it is difficult not
to be impressed by the modernist flavour of Wallace's attack. He
insists upon the capacity of men and the disproportion between their
potential achievement and that which is secured by actual society. Men
are in the mass condemned to ignorance and toil; and the lust of power
sets man against his neighbor to the profit of the rich. Wallace traces
these evils to private property and the individualistic organization of
work, and he sees no remedy save community of possessions and a
renovated educational system. Yet he does not conceal from himself that
it is to the interest of the governing class to prevent a revolution
which, beneficent to the masses, would be fatal to themselves; nor does
he conceive it possible until the fertility of men has been reduced to
the capacity of the soil. He speculates upon the chances of a new spirit
among men, of an all-wise legislator, and of the beneficent example of
colonies upon the later Owenite model. But his book is contemporaneous
with our own ideas rather than with the thoughts of his generation. Nor
does it seem to have excited any general attention.
It is five years after Rousseau that we see the first clear signs of his
influence. Naturally enough the men amongst whom the new spirit spread
abroad were the Nonconformists. For more than seventy years they had
been allowed existence without recognition. None had more faithfully
supported the new dynasty than they; none had been paid less for their
allegiance. Their utmost effort could secure only a sparing mitigation
of the Test Act. All of them were Whigs, and the doctrines of Locke
suited exactly their temper and their wants. There were amongst them
able men in every walk of life, and they were apt to publication. Joseph
Priestley, in particular, gave up with willingness to mankind what was
obviously meant for chemical science. A few years previously Brown of
the _Estimate_ had submitted a scheme for national education, in which
the essential principle was Church control. Priestley had answered him,
and was encouraged by friends to expand his argument into a general
treatise. His _Essay on the First Principles of Government_ appeared in
1768; and, if for nothing else, it would be noteworthy because it was
therein that the significance of the "greatest happiness principle"
first flashed across Bentham's mind. But the book shows more than this.
"I had placed," says Priestley with due modesty, "the foundation of some
of the most valuable interests of mankind on a broader and firmer basis
than Mr. Locke"; and the breadth and firmness are Rousseau's
contribution.
Certainly we herein meet new elements. On the very threshold of the book
we meet the dogma of the perfectibility of man. "Whatever," Priestley
rhapsodizes, "was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious
and paradisaical, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive." "The
instrument of this progress ... towards this glorious state" is
government; though a little later we are to find that the main business
of government is noninterference. Men are all equal, and their natural
rights are indefeasible. Government must be restrained in the interests
of liberty. No man can be governed without his consent; for government
is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in
exchange for a power to share in public decisions. It thus follows that
the people must be sovereign, and interference with their natural
rights will justify resistance. Every government, he says, is "in its
original principles, and antecedent to its present form an equal
republic"; wherefore, of course, it follows that we must restore to men
the equality they have lost. And, equally, of course, this would bestow
upon the Nonconformists their full citizenship; for Warburton's
_Alliance_, to attack which Priestley exhausts all the resources of his
ingenuity, has been one of the main instruments in their degradation.
"Unbounded liberty in matters of religion," which means the abolition of
the Establishment, promises to be "very favorable to the best interests
of mankind."
So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for English
Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import. It can never be
forgotten in the history of political ideas that the alliance of Church
and State made Nonconformists suspicious of government interference.
Their original desire to be left unimpeded was soon exalted into a
definite theory; and since political conditions had confined them so
largely to trade none felt as they did the hampering influence of
State-restrictions. The result has been a great difficulty in making
liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the organic
nature of the State. It remains for them almost entirely a police
institution which, once it aims at the realization of right, usurps a
function far better performed by individuals. There is no sense of the
community; all that exists is a sum of private sentiments. "Civil
liberty," says Priestley, "has been greatly impaired by an abuse of the
maxim that the joint understanding of all the members of a State,
properly collected, must be preferable to that of individuals; and
consequently that the more the cases are in which mankind are governed
by this united reason of the whole community, so much the better;
whereas, in truth, the greater part of human actions are of such a
nature, that more inconvenience would follow from their being fixed by
laws than from their being left to every man's arbitrary will." If my
neighbor assaults me, he suggests, I may usefully call in the police;
but where the object is the discovery of truth, the means of education,
the method of religious belief, individual initiative is superior to
State action. The latter produces an uniform result "incompatible with
the spirit of discovery." Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just
to posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future. Men are
too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all action.
Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past tradition; and
the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered broadcast over his
pages. Nevertheless the basis upon which he defended his ideas was a
utilitarianism hardly less complete than that which Bentham made the
instrument of revolution. "Regard to the general good," he says, "is the
main method by which natural rights are to be defended." "The good and
happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any
State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state
must finally be determined." In substance, that is to say, if not
completely in theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to
those of expediency. His chief attack upon religious legislation is
similarly based upon considerations of policy. His view of the
individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates
all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual
energy. Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar
fashion to Adam Smith and his followers. Priestley, of course, was
inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief
instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that
government has the future in its hands than that government action may
well be decisive for good or evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism
is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all
doors. That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made
discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school
which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of
unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of
that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it
encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the
energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the
previous age.
It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley exerted;
certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small. Dr. Richard
Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he might have had has
been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents. His sinking-fund scheme
was taken up by the younger Pitt, and proved, though the latter believed
in it to the last, to be founded upon an arithmetical fallacy which did
not sit well upon a fellow of the Royal Society. His sermon on the
French Revolution provoked the _Reflections_ of Burke; and, though much
of the right was on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he
survived Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day,
and he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English
revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb optimism;
for the rigid _a priori_ morality of which he was the somewhat muddled
defender was less favorable to a confidence in reason. He had a good
deal of John Brown's fear that luxury was the seed of English
degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the
population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential
to the general thesis he had to make.
Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to print by
the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely popular, his
_Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty_ (1776) attained its eighth
edition within a decade. This, with its supplement _Additional
Observations_ (1777), presents a perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their
ancestry concealed. They represent the tradition of Locke, modified by
the importations of Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume,
and he takes sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has
little or nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument
is upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government, and
self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator.
Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to its last
consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public services"; laws are
"particular provisions or regulations established by Common Consent for
gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are "trustees or deputies
for carrying these regulations into execution." And almost in the words
of Rousseau, Price goes on to admit that liberty, "in its most perfect
degree, can be enjoyed only in small states where every independent
agent is capable of giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen
into public offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though
he thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize the
sacrifice of liberty involved.
But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized.
"Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust; and
all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects the theory
of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with self-government; if
the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its life, it would betray its
constituents and dissolve itself. "If omnipotence," he writes, "can with
any sense be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all
legislative authority originates; that is, in the People." Such a
system is alone compatible with the ends of government, since it cannot
be supposed that men "combine into communities and institute government"
for self-enslavement. Nor is any other political system "consistent with
the natural equality of mankind"; by which Price means that no man "is
constituted by the author of nature the vassal or subject of another, or
has any right to give law to him, or, without his consent, to take away
any part of his property or to abridge him of his liberty." From all of
which it is concluded that liberty is inalienable; and a people which
has lost it "must have a right to emancipate themselves as soon as they
can." The aptness of the argument to the American situation is obvious
enough; and nowhere is Price more happy or more formidable than when he
applies his precepts to phrases like "the unity of the empire" and the
"honor of the kingdom" which were so freely used to cover up the
inevitable results of George's obstinacy.
The _Essay on the Right of Property in Land_ (1781) of William Ogilvie
deserves at least a passing notice. The author, who published his book
anonymously, was a Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen and
an agriculturist of some success. His own career was distinctly
honorable. The teacher of Sir James Mackintosh, he had a high reputation
as a classical scholar and deserves to be remembered for his effort to
reform a college which had practically ceased to perform its proper
academic functions. His book is virtually an essay upon the natural
right of men to the soil. He does not doubt that the distress of the
times is due to the land monopoly. The earth being given to men in
common, its invasion by private ownership is a dangerous perversion. Men
have the right to the full product of their labor; but the privileges of
the landowner prevent the enjoyment of that right. The primary duty of
every State is the increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation
is that which has the greatest number of free and independent
cultivators. But governments attend rather to the interest of the higher
classes, even while they hold out the protection of the common people as
the main pretext of their authority. The result is their maintenance of
land-monopoly even though it affects the prime material of all essential
industries, prevents the growth of population, and makes the rich
wealthier at the expense of the poor. It breeds oppression and
ignorance, and poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative.
He points out how a nation is dominated by its landlords, and how they
have consistently evaded the fiscal burdens they should bear. Only in a
return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source of an
increase in happiness.
Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to speak of
actual changes, he had little more to propose than a system of peasant
proprietorship. What is striking in the book is its sense of great,
impending changes, its thorough grasp of the principle of utility, its
realization of the immense agricultural improvement that is possible if
the landed system can be so changed as to bring into play the impulses
of humble men. He sees clearly enough that wealth dominates the State;
and his interpretation of history is throughout economic. Ogilvie is
one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who, chiefly through
Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special current of their own in
the great tide of protest against the unjust situation of labor. Like
them, he builds his system upon natural rights; though, unlike them, his
natural rights are defended by expediency and in a style that is always
clear and logical. The book itself has rather a curious history. At its
appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind. Mackintosh
knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against the amiable
delusion that its excellence would persuade the British government to
force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the East India Company.
Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby, it was intended to
instruct the Chartists in the secret of their oppression; and therein it
may well have contributed to the tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus
O'Connor. In 1891 the problem of the land was again eagerly debated
under the stimulus of Mr. Henry George; and a patriotic Scotchman
published the book with biographical notes that constitute one of the
most amazing curiosities in English political literature.
V
Against the school of Rousseau's English disciples it is comparatively
easy to multiply criticisms. They lacked any historic sense. Government,
for them, was simply an instrument which was made and unmade at the
volition of men. How complex were its psychological foundations they had
no conception; with the single factor of consent they could explain the
most marvellous edifice of any time. They were buried beneath a mountain
of metaphysical right which they never related to legal facts or to
political possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions
of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to
investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led. They
overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy themselves
with political affairs. They made no proper allowance for the protective
armour each social system must acquire by the mere force of
prescription. Nor is there sufficient allowance in their attitude for
those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman must
of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to say, so
completely with _staatslehre_ that they do not admit the mollifying
influence of _politik_. They search for principles of universal right,
without the perception that a right which is to be universal must
necessarily be so general in character as to be useless in its
application.
Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their
insight. They were protesting against a system strongly upheld on
grounds which now appear to have been simply indefensible. The business
of government had been made the private possession of a privileged
class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from
the minds of most men engaged in its direction. The loss of America, the
heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the
Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and
North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most
to the fact that principle is a vital part of policy. The revolutionists
recalled men to the need of explaining, no less than carrying on, the
government of the Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by
elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid
intrigues of the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government
as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful
reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the
governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political
controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle
of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind
and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had
in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his
Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer
like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated,
unconvinced. It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part
of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes of
Europe and America before they would give serious heed; and even then
they met antagonism with nothing save oppression and hate. Yet the
doctrines remained; for thought, after all, is killed by reasoned answer
alone. And when the first gusts of war and revolution had passed, the
cause for which they stood was found to have permeated all classes save
that which had all to lose by learning.
We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and
Priestley as representing more than an important segment of opinion. The
opposition to their theories was not less articulate than their own
defence of them. Some, like Burke, desired a purification of the
existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had no sort of sympathy with
new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least, deserves some mention less for
the inherent value of what he had to say, than for the nature of the
opinions he expounded. Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a
reputation alike in political and economic enquiry. He represents the
sturdy nationalism of Arbuthnot's _John Bull_, the unreasoned prejudice
against all foreigners, the hatred of all metaphysics as inconsistent
with common sense, the desire to let things be on the ground that the
effort after change is worse than the evil of which men complain. His
_Treatise on Civil Government_ (1781) is in many ways a delightful book,
bluff, hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that
is all its own. He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the first
place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the second, to
explode the new bubble of Rousseau's followers. The second point takes
the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as Tucker shrewdly saw,
the theories of the school may trace their ancestry. He analyses the
theory of consent in such fashion as to show that if its adherents could
be persuaded to be logical, they would have to admit themselves
anarchists. He has no sympathy with the state of nature; the noble
savage, on investigation, turns out to be a barbaric creature with a
club and scalping knife. Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or,
as he prefers, somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that
does not mean that the actual governors can be dismissed when any
eccentric happens to take exception to their views. He has no sympathy
with parliamentary reform. Give the mob an increase of power, he says,
and nothing is to be expected but outrage and violence. He thinks the
constitution very well as it is, and those who preach the evils of
corruption ought to prove their charges instead of blasphemously
asserting that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own. He does not doubt that
the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered upon them.
Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as ever George III
himself could have desired. But not for one moment would he fight them
to compel their return to British allegiance. If the American colonies
want to go, let them by all means cut adrift. They are only a useless
source of expenditure. The trade they represent does not depend upon
allegiance but upon wants that England can supply if she keeps shop in
the proper way, if, that is, she makes it to their interest to buy in
her market. Indeed, colonies of all kinds seem to him quite useless.
They ever are, he says, and ever were, "a drain to and an incumbrance on
the Mother-country, requiring perpetual and expensive nursing in their
infancy, and becoming headstrong and ungovernable in proportion as they
grow up." All wise relations depend upon self-interest, and that needs
no compulsion. If Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up,
the result would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and
contracts effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal
industry encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that
mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-century
before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean crustily explaining
his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had just rejected Edmund
Burke for advocating free trade with Ireland.
No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr. Johnson.
Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of gloomy
prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of the source
from which they come. He thought life a poor thing at the best and took
a low view of human nature. "The notion of liberty," he told the
faithful Boswell, "amuses the people of England and helps to keep off
the _tedium vitae_." The idea of a society properly organized into ranks
and societies he always esteemed highly. "I am a friend to
subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of
society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the
offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he seems to
have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as the worst of
sins. He did not believe in the honesty of republicans; they levelled
down, but were never inclined to level up. Men, he felt, had a part to
act in society, and their business was to fulfil their allotted station.
Rousseau was a very bad man: "I would sooner sign a sentence for his
transportation than that of any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey
these many years." Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth
while was freedom in private concerns. He blessed the government in the
case of general warrants and thought the power of the Crown too small.
Toleration he considered due to an inapt distinction between freedom to
think and freedom to talk, and any magistrate "while he thinks himself
right ... ought to enforce what he thinks." The American revolt he
ascribed to selfish faction; and in his _Taxation no Tyranny_ (1775) he
defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite ground
of the necessity of subordination. He was willing, he said, to love all
mankind except an American.
Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an
acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and
fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the
letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He
knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe
under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the _Idler_ as
one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish
as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the
sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt
for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular.
There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of
the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time
was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as
elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental
questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no age
are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is
diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require
something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's attitude
would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but
where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to
contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in
a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to
look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution.