always repealing laws, would have been both an anomaly and a nuisance.
But in the present state of the civilised part of the world such
difficulties are obsolete. There is a diffused desire in civilised
communities for an ADJUSTING legislation; for a legislation which
should adapt the inherited laws to the new wants of a world which now
changes every day. It has ceased to be necessary to maintain bad laws
because it is necessary to have some laws. Civilisation is robust
enough to bear the incision of legal improvements. But taking history
at large, the rarity of Cabinets is mostly due to the greater rarity of
continuous legislatures.
Other conditions, however, limit even at the present day the area of a
Cabinet government. It must be possible to have not only a legislature,
but to have a competent legislature--a legislature willing to elect and
willing to maintain an efficient executive. And this is no easy matter.
It is indeed true that we need not trouble ourselves to look for that
elaborate and complicated organisation which partially exists in the
House of Commons, and which is more fully and freely expanded in plans
for improving the House of Commons. We are not now concerned with
perfection or excellence; we seek only for simple fitness and bare
competency.
The conditions of fitness are two. First, you must get a good
legislature; and next, you must keep it good. And these are by no means
so nearly connected as might be thought at first sight. To keep a
legislature efficient, it must have a sufficient supply of substantial
business. If you employ the best set of men to do nearly nothing, they
will quarrel with each other about that nothing. Where great questions
end, little parties begin. And a very happy community, with few new
laws to make, few old bad laws to repeal, and but simple foreign
relations to adjust, has great difficulty in employing a legislature.
There is nothing for it to enact, and nothing for it to settle.
Accordingly, there is great danger that the legislature, being debarred
from all other kind of business, may take to quarrelling about its
elective business; that controversies as to Ministries may occupy all
its time, and yet that time be perniciously employed; that a constant
succession of feeble administrations, unable to govern and unfit to
govern, may be substituted for the proper result of Cabinet
government--a sufficient body of men long enough in power to evince
their sufficiency. The exact amount of non-elective business necessary
for a Parliament which is to elect the executive cannot, of course, be
formally stated. There are no numbers and no statistics in the theory
of constitutions. All we can say is, that a Parliament with little
business, which is to be as efficient as a Parliament with much
business, must be in all other respects much better. An indifferent
Parliament may be much improved by the steadying effect of grave
affairs; but a Parliament which has no such affairs must be
intrinsically excellent, or it will fail utterly.
But the difficulty of keeping a good legislature, is evidently
secondary to the difficulty of first getting it. There are two kinds of
nations which can elect a good Parliament. The first is a nation in
which the mass of the people are intelligent, and in which they are
comfortable. Where there is no honest poverty, where education is
diffused, and political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass
of the people to elect a fair legislature. The idea is roughly realised
in the North American colonies of England, and in the whole free States
of the Union. In these countries there is no such thing as honest
poverty; physical comfort, such as the poor cannot imagine here, is
there easily attainable by healthy industry. Education is diffused
much, and is fast spreading, Ignorant emigrants from the Old World
often prize the intellectual advantages of which they are themselves
destitute, and are annoyed at their inferiority in a place where
rudimentary culture is so common. The greatest difficulty of such new
communities is commonly geographical. The population is mostly
scattered; and where population is sparse, discussion is difficult. But
in a country very large, as we reckon in Europe, a people really
intelligent, really educated, really comfortable, would soon form a
good opinion. No one can doubt that the New England States, if they
were a separate community, would have an education, a political
capacity, and an intelligence such as the numerical majority of no
people, equally numerous, has ever possessed. In a State of this sort,
where all the community is fit to choose a sufficient legislature, it
is possible, it is almost easy, to create that legislature. If the New
England States possessed a Cabinet government as a separate nation,
they would be as renowned in the world for political sagacity as they
now are for diffused happiness.
The structure of these communities is indeed based on the principle of
equality, and it is impossible that ANY such community can wholly
satisfy the severe requirements of a political theorist. In every old
community its primitive and guiding assumption is at war with truth. By
its theory all people are entitled to the same political power, and
they can only be so entitled on the ground that in politics they are
equally wise. But at the outset of an agricultural colony this
postulate is as near the truth as politics want. There are in such
communities no large properties, no great capitals, no refined
classes--every one is comfortable and homely, and no one is at all
more. Equality is not artificially established in a new colony; it
establishes itself. There is a story that among the first settlers in
Western Australia, some, who were rich, took out labourers at their own
expense, and also carriages to ride in. But soon they had to try if
they could live in the carriages. Before the masters' houses were
built, the labourers had gone off--they were building houses and
cultivating land for themselves, and the masters were left to sit in
their carriages. Whether this exact thing happened I do not know, but
this sort of thing has happened a thousand times. There has been a
whole series of attempts to transplant to the colonies a graduated
English society. But they have always failed at the first step. The
rude classes at the bottom felt that they were equal to or better than
the delicate classes at the top; they shifted for themselves, and left
the "gentle-folks" to shift for themselves; the base of the elaborate
pyramid spread abroad, and the apex tumbled in and perished. In the
early ages of an agricultural colony, whether you have political
democracy or not, social democracy you must have, for nature makes it,
and not you. But in time, wealth grows and inequality begins. A and his
children are industrious, and prosper; B and his children are idle, and
fail. If manufactures on a considerable scale are established--and most
young communities strive even by protection to establish them--the
tendency to inequality is intensified. The capitalist becomes a unit
with much, and his labourers a crowd with little. After generations of
education, too, there arise varieties of culture--there will be an
upper thousand, or ten thousand, of highly cultivated people in the
midst of a great nation of moderately educated people. In theory it is
desirable that this highest class of wealth and leisure should have an
influence far out of proportion to its mere number: a perfect
constitution would find for it a delicate expedient to make its fine
thought tell upon the surrounding cruder thought. But as the world
goes, when the whole of the population is as instructed and as
intelligent as in the case I am supposing, we need not care much about
this. Great communities have scarcely ever--never save for transient
moments--been ruled by their highest thought. And if we can get them
ruled by a decent capable thought, we may be well enough contented with
our work. We have done more than could be expected, though not all
which could be desired. At any rate, an isocratic polity--a polity
where every one votes, and where every one votes alike--is, in a
community of sound education and diffused intelligence, a conceivable
case of Cabinet government. It satisfies the essential condition; there
is a people able to elect, a Parliament able to choose.
But suppose the mass of the people are not able to elect--and this is
the case with the numerical majority of all but the rarest nations--how
is a Cabinet government to be then possible? It is only possible in
what I may venture to call DEFERENTIAL nations. It has been thought
strange, but there ARE nations in which the numerous unwiser part
wishes to be ruled by the less numerous wiser part. The numerical
majority--whether by custom or by choice, is immaterial--is ready, is
eager to delegate its power of choosing its ruler to a certain select
minority. It abdicates in favour of its elite, and consents to obey
whoever that elite may confide in. It acknowledges as its secondary
electors--as the choosers of its government--an educated minority, at
once competent and unresisted; it has a kind of loyalty to some
superior persons who are fit to choose a good government, and whom no
other class opposes. A nation in such a happy state as this has obvious
advantages for constructing a Cabinet government. It has the best
people to elect a legislature, and therefore it may fairly be expected
to choose a good legislature--a legislature competent to select a good
administration.
England is the type of deferential countries, and the manner in which
it is so, and has become so, is extremely curious. The middle
classes--the ordinary majority of educated men--are in the present day
the despotic power in England. "Public opinion," nowadays, "is the
opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus." It is NOT
the opinion of the aristocratical classes as such; or of the most
educated or refined classes as such; it is simply the opinion of the
ordinary mass of educated, but still commonplace mankind. If you look
at the mass of the constituencies, you will see that they are not very
interesting people; and perhaps if you look behind the scenes and see
the people who manipulate and work the constituencies, you will find
that these are yet more uninteresting. The English constitution in its
palpable form is this--the mass of the people yield obedience to a
select few; and when you see this select few, you perceive that though
not of the lowest class, nor of an unrespectable class, they are yet of
a heavy sensible class--the last people in the world to whom, if they
were drawn up in a row, an immense nation would ever give an exclusive
preference.
In fact, the mass of the English people yield a deference rather to
something else that to their rulers. They defer to what we may call the
THEATRICAL SHOW of society. A certain state passes before them; a
certain pomp of great men; a certain spectacle of beautiful women; a
wonderful scene of wealth and enjoyment is displayed, and they are
coerced by it. Their imagination is bowed down; they feel they are not
equal to the life which is revealed to them. Courts and aristocracies
have the great quality which rules the multitude, though philosophers
can see nothing in it--visibility. Courtiers can do what others cannot.
A common man may as well try to rival the actors on the stage in their
acting, as the aristocracy in THEIR acting. The higher world, as it
looks from without, is a stage on which the actors walk their parts
much better than the spectators can. This play is played in every
district. Every rustic feels that his house is not like my lord's
house; his life like my lord's life; his wife like my lady. The climax
of the play is the Queen: nobody supposes that their house is like the
court; their life like her life; her orders like their orders. There is
in England a certain charmed spectacle which imposes on the many, and
guides their fancies as it will. As a rustic on coming to London finds
himself in presence of a great show and vast exhibition of
inconceivable mechanical things, so by the structure of our society, he
finds himself face to face with a great exhibition of political things
which he could not have imagined, which he could not make--to which he
feels in himself scarcely anything analogous.
Philosophers may deride this superstition, but its results are
inestimable. By the spectacle of this august society, countless
ignorant men and women are induced to obey the few nominal
electors--the Ll0 borough renters, and the L50 county renters--who have
nothing imposing about them, nothing which would attract the eye or
fascinate the fancy. What impresses men is not mind, but the result of
mind. And the greatest of these results is this wonderful spectacle of
society, which is ever new, and yet ever the same; in which accidents
pass and essence remains; in which one generation dies and another
succeeds, as if they were birds in a cage, or animals in a menagerie;
of which it seems almost more than a metaphor to treat the parts as
limbs of a perpetual living thing, so silently do they seem to change,
so wonderfully and so perfectly does the conspicuous life of the new
year take the place of the conspicuous life of last year. The apparent
rulers of the English nation are like the most imposing personages of a
splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they
whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate
carriages; no one cares for them or asks about them, but they are
obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendour of those
who eclipsed and preceded them.
It is quite true that this imaginative sentiment is supported by a
sensation of political satisfaction. It cannot be said that the mass of
the English people are well off. There are whole classes who have not a
conception of what the higher orders call comfort; who have not the
prerequisites of moral existence; who cannot lead the life that becomes
a man. But the most miserable of these classes do not impute their
misery to politics. If a political agitator were to lecture to the
peasants of Dorsetshire, and try to excite political dissatisfaction,
it is much more likely that he would be pelted than that he would
succeed. Of Parliament these miserable creatures know scarcely
anything; of the Cabinet they never heard. But they would say that,
"for all they have heard, the Queen is very good"; and rebelling
against the structure of society is to their minds rebelling against
the Queen, who rules that society, in whom all its most impressive
part--the part that they know--culminates. The mass of the English
people are politically contented as well as politically deferential.
A deferential community, even though its lowest classes are not
intelligent, is far more suited to a Cabinet government than any kind
of democratic country, because it is more suited to political
excellence. The highest classes can rule in it; and the highest classes
must, as such, have more political ability than the lower classes. A
life of labour, an incomplete education, a monotonous occupation, a
career in which the hands are used much and the judgment is used
little, cannot create as much flexible thought, as much applicable
intelligence, as a life of leisure, a long culture, a varied
experience, an existence by which the judgment is incessantly
exercised, and by which it may be incessantly improved. A country of
respectful poor, though far less happy than where there are no poor to
be respectful, is nevertheless far more fitted for the best government.
You can use the best classes of the respectful country; you can only
use the worst where every man thinks he is as good as every other.
It is evident that no difficulty can be greater than that of founding a
deferential nation. Respect is traditional; it is given not to what is
proved to be good, but to what is known to be old. Certain classes in
certain nations retain by common acceptance a marked political
preference, because they have always possessed it, and because they
inherit a sort of pomp which seems to make them worthy of it. But in a
new colony, in a community where merit MAY be equal, and where there
CANNOT be traditional marks of merit and fitness, it is obvious that a
political deference can be yielded to higher culture only upon proof,
first of its existence, and next of its political value. But it is
nearly impossible to give such a proof so as to satisfy persons of less
culture. In a future and better age of the world it may be effected;
but in this age the requisite premises scarcely exist; if the
discussion be effectually open, if the debate be fairly begun, it is
hardly possible to obtain a rational, an argumentative acquiescence in
the rule of the cultivated few. As yet the few rule by their hold, not
over the reason of the multitude, but over their imaginations, and
their habits; over their fancies as to distant things they do not know
at all, over their customs as to near things which they know very well.
A deferential community in which the bulk of the people are ignorant,
is therefore in a state of what is called in mechanics unstable
equilibrium. If the equilibrium is once disturbed there is no tendency
to return to it, but rather to depart from it. A cone balanced on its
point is in unstable equilibrium, for if you push it ever so little it
will depart farther and farther from its position and fall to the
earth. So in communities where the masses are ignorant but respectful,
if you once permit the ignorant class to begin to rule you may bid
farewell to deference for ever. Their demagogues will inculcate, their
newspapers will recount, that the rule of the existing dynasty (the
people) is better than the rule of the fallen dynasty (the
aristocracy). A people very rarely hears two sides of a subject in
which it is much interested; the popular organs take up the side which
is acceptable, and none but the popular organs in fact reach the
people. A people NEVER hears censure of itself. No one will tell it
that the educated minority whom it dethroned governed better or more
wisely than it governs. A democracy will never, save after an awful
catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so
would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some
almost unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced.
NO. IX.
ITS HISTORY, AND THE EFFECTS OF THAT HISTORY.--CONCLUSION.
A volume might seem wanted to say anything worth saying[12] on the
History of the English Constitution, and a great and new volume might
still be written on it, if a competent writer took it in hand. The
subject has never been treated by any one combining the lights of the
newest research and the lights of the most matured philosophy. Since
the masterly book of Hallam was written, both political thought and
historical knowledge have gained much, and we might have a treatise
applying our strengthened calculus to our augmented facts. I do not
pretend that I could write such a book, but there are a few salient
particulars which may be fitly brought together, both because of their
past interest and of their present importance.
[12] Since the first edition of this book was published several
valuable works have appeared, which, on many points, throw much light
on our early constitutional history, especially Mr. Stubbs' Select
Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History,
from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, Mr. Freeman's
lecture on "The Growth of the English Constitution," and the chapter on
the Anglo-Saxon Constitution in his History of the Norman Conquest: but
we have not yet a great and authoritative work on the whole subject
such as I wished for when I wrote the passage in the text, and as it is
most desirable that we should have.
There is a certain common polity, or germ of polity, which we find in
all the rude nations that have attained civilisation. These nations
seem to begin in what I may call a consultative and tentative
absolutism. The king of early days, in vigorous nations, was not
absolute as despots now are; there was then no standing army to repress
rebellion, no organised ESPIONAGE to spy out discontent, no skilled
bureaucracy to smooth the ruts of obedient life. The early king was
indeed consecrated by a religious sanction; he was essentially a man
apart, a man above others, divinely anointed or even God-begotten. But
in nations capable of freedom this religious domination was never
despotic. There was indeed no legal limit; the very words could not be
translated into the dialect of those times. The notion of law as we
have it--of a rule imposed by human authority, capable of being altered
by that authority, when it likes, and in fact, so altered
habitually--could not be conveyed to early nations, who regarded law
half as an invincible prescription, and half as a Divine revelation.
Law "came out of the king's mouth"; he gave it as Solomon gave
judgment--embedded in the particular case, and upon the authority of
Heaven as well as his own. A Divine limit to the Divine revealer was
impossible, and there was no other source of law. But though there was
no legal limit, there was a practical limit to subjection in (what may
be called) the pagan part of human nature--the inseparable obstinacy of
freemen. They NEVER would do exactly what they were told.
To early royalty, as Homer describes it in Greece and as we may well
imagine it elsewhere, there were always two adjuncts: one the "old
men," the men of weight, the council, the _boulé_, of which the king
asked advice, from the debates in which the king tried to learn what he
could do and what he ought to do. Besides this there was the _agorá_,
the purely listening assembly, as some have called it, but the
TENTATIVE assembly, as I think it might best be called. The king came
down to his assembled people in form to announce his will, but in
reality, speaking in very modern words, to "feel his way". He was
sacred, no doubt; and popular, very likely; still he was half like a
popular Premier speaking to a high-spirited chamber; there were limits
to his authority and power--limits which he would discover by trying
whether eager cheers received his mandate, or only hollow murmurs and a
thinking silence.
This polity is a good one for its era and its place, but there is a
fatal defect in it. The reverential associations upon which the
government is built are transmitted according to one law, and the
capacity needful to work the government is transmitted according to
another law. The popular homage clings to the line of god-descended
kings; it is transmitted by inheritance. But very soon that line comes
to a child or an idiot, or one by some defect or other incapable. Then
we find everywhere the truth of the old saying, that liberty thrives
under weak princes; then the listening assembly begins not only to
murmur, but to speak; then the grave council begins not so much to
suggest as to inculcate, not so much to advise as to enjoin.
Mr. Grote has told at length how out of these appendages of the
original kingdom the free States of Greece derived their origin, and
how they gradually grew--the oligarchical States expanding the council,
and the democratical expanding the assembly. The history has as many
varieties in detail as there were Greek cities, but the essence is the
same everywhere. The political characteristic of the early Greeks, and
of the early Romans, too, is that out of the tentacula of a monarchy
they developed the organs of a republic.