different, and its growth far slower and longer. The scale was larger,
and the elements more various. A Greek city soon got rid of its kings,
for the political sacredness of the monarch would not bear the daily
inspection and constant criticism of an eager and talking multitude.
Everywhere in Greece the slave population--the most ignorant, and
therefore the most unsusceptible of intellectual influences--was struck
out of the account. But England began as a kingdom of considerable
size, inhabited by distinct races, none of them fit for prosaic
criticism, and all subject to the superstition of royalty. In early
England, too, royalty was much more than a superstition. A very strong
executive was needed to keep down a divided, an armed, and an impatient
country; and therefore the problem of political development was
delicate. A formed free government in a homogeneous nation may have a
strong executive; but during the transition state, while the republic
is in course of development and the monarchy in course of decay, the
executive is of necessity weak. The polity is divided, and its action
feeble and failing. The different orders of English people have
progressed, too, at different rates. The change in the state of the
higher classes since the Middle Ages is enormous, and it is all
improvement; but the lower have varied little, and many argue that in
some important respects they have got worse, even if in others they
have got better. The development of the English Constitution was of
necessity slow, because a quick one would have destroyed the executive
and killed the State, and because the most numerous classes, who
changed very little, were not prepared for any catastrophic change in
our institutions.
I cannot presume to speak of the time before the Conquest, and the
exact nature even of all Anglo-Norman institutions is perhaps dubious:
at least, in nearly all cases there have been many controversies.
Political zeal, whether Whig or Tory, has wanted to find a model in the
past; and the whole state of society being confused, the precedents
altering with the caprice of men and the chance of events, ingenious
advocacy has had a happy field. But all that I need speak of is quite
plain. There was a great "council" of the realm, to which the king
summoned the most considerable persons in England, the persons he most
wanted to advise him, and the persons whose tempers he was most anxious
to ascertain. Exactly who came to it at first is obscure and
unimportant. I need not distinguish between the "magnum concilium in
Parliament" and the "magnum concilium out of Parliament". Gradually the
principal assemblies summoned by the English sovereign took the precise
and definite form of Lords and Commons, as in their outside we now see
them. But their real nature was very different. The Parliament of
to-day is a ruling body; the mediaeval Parliament was, if I may so say,
an EXPRESSIVE body. Its function was to tell the executive--the
king--what the nation wished he should do; to some extent, to guide him
by new wisdom, and, to a very great extent, to guide him by new facts.
These facts were their own feelings, which were the feelings of the
people, because they were part and parcel of the people. From thence
the king learned, or had the means to learn, what the nation would
endure, and what it would not endure;--what he might do, and what he
might not do. If he much mistook this, there was a rebellion.
There are, as is well known, three great periods in the English
Constitution. The first of these is the ante-Tudor period. The English
Parliament then seemed to be gaining extraordinary strength and power.
The title to the Crown was uncertain; some monarchs were imbecile. Many
ambitious men wanted to "take the people into partnership". Certain
precedents of that time were cited with grave authority centuries
after, when the time of freedom had really arrived. But the causes of
this rapid growth soon produced an even more sudden decline. Confusion
fostered it, and confusion destroyed it. The structure of society then
was feudal; the towns were only an adjunct and a make-weight. The
principal popular force was an aristocratic force, acting with the
co-operation of the gentry and yeomanry, and resting on the loyal
fealty of sworn retainers. The head of this force, on whom its
efficiency depended, was the high nobility. But the high nobility
killed itself out. The great barons who adhered to the "Red Rose" or
the "White Rose," or who fluctuated from one to the other, became
poorer, fewer, and less potent every year. When the great struggle
ended at Bosworth, a large part of the greatest combatants were gone.
The restless, aspiring, rich barons, who made the civil war, were
broken by it. Henry VII. attained a kingdom in which there was a
Parliament to advise, but scarcely a Parliament to control.
The consultative government of the ante-Tudor period had little
resemblance to some of the modern governments which French philosophers
call by that name. The French Empire, I believe, calls itself so. But
its assemblies are symmetrical "shams". They are elected by a universal
suffrage, by the ballot, and in districts once marked out with an eye
to equality, and still retaining a look of equality. But our English
Parliaments were UNsymmetrical realities. They were elected anyhow; the
sheriff had a considerable licence in sending writs to boroughs, that
is, he could in part pick its constituencies; and in each borough there
was a rush and scramble for the franchise, so that the strongest local
party got it, whether few or many. But in England at that time there
was a great and distinct desire to know the opinion of the nation,
because there was a real and close necessity. The nation was wanted to
do something--to assist the sovereign in some war, to pay some old
debt, to contribute its force and aid in the critical conjuncture of
the time. It would not have suited the ante-Tudor kings to have had a
fictitious assembly; they would have lost their sole FEELER, their only
instrument for discovering national opinion. Nor could they have
manufactured such an assembly if they wished. The instrument in that
behalf is the centralised executive, and there was then no 'prefet' by
whom the opinion of a rural locality could be made to order, and
adjusted to suit the wishes of the capital. Looking at the mode of
election a theorist would say that these Parliaments were but "chance"
collections of influential Englishmen. There would be many corrections
and limitations to add to that statement if it were wanted to make it
accurate, but the statement itself hits exactly the principal
excellence of those Parliaments. If not "chance" collections of
Englishmen, they were "undesigned" collections; no administrations made
them or could make them. They were bona-fide counsellors, whose opinion
might be wise or unwise, but was anyhow of paramount importance,
because their co-operation was wanted for what was in hand.
Legislation as a positive power was very secondary in those old
Parliaments. I believe no statute at all, as far as we know, was passed
in the reign of Richard I., and all the ante-Tudor acts together would
look meagre enough to a modern Parliamentary agent who had to live by
them. But the negative action of Parliament upon the law was essential
to its whole idea, and ran through every part of its use. That the king
could not change what was then the almost sacred datum of the common
law, without seeing whether his nation liked it or not, was an
essential part of the "tentative" system. The king had to feel his way
in this exceptional, singular act, as those ages deemed original
legislation, as well as in lesser acts. The legislation was his at
last; he enacted after consulting his Lords and Commons; his was the
sacred mouth which gave holy firmness to the enactment; but he only
dared alter the rule regulating the common life of his people after
consulting those people; he would not have been obeyed if he had not,
by a rude age which did not fear civil war as we fear it now. Many most
important enactments of that period (and the fact is most
characteristic) are declaratory acts. They do not profess to enjoin by
inherent authority what the law shall in future be, but to state and
mark what the law is; they are declarations of immemorial custom, not
precepts of new duties. Even in the "Great Charter" the notion of new
enactments was secondary, it was a great mixture of old and new; it was
a sort of compact defining what was doubtful in floating custom, and
was re-enacted over and over again, as boundaries are perambulated once
a year, and rights and claims tending to desuetude thereby made patent
and cleared of new obstructions. In truth, such great "charters" were
rather treaties between different orders and factions, confirming
ancient rights, or what claimed to be such, than laws in our ordinary
sense. They were the "deeds of arrangement" of mediaeval society
affirmed and re-affirmed from time to time, and the principal
controversy was, of course, between the king and nation--the king
trying to see how far the nation would let him go, and the nation
murmuring and recalcitrating, and seeing how many acts of
administration they could prevent, and how many of its claims they
could resist.
Sir James Mackintosh says that Magna Charta "converted the right of
taxation into the shield of liberty," but it did nothing of the sort.
The liberty existed before, and the right to be taxed was an
efflorescence and instance of it, not a sub-stratum or a cause. The
necessity of consulting the great council of the realm before taxation,
the principle that the declaration of grievances by the Parliament was
to precede the grant of supplies to the sovereign, are but conspicuous
instances of the primitive doctrine of the ante-Tudor period, that the
king must consult the great council of the realm, before he did
anything, since he always wanted help. The right of self-taxation was
justly inserted in the "great treaty"; but it would have been a dead
letter, save for the armed force and aristocratic organisation which
compelled the king to make a treaty; it was a result, not a basis--an
example, not a cause.
The civil wars of many years killed out the old councils (if I might so
say): that is, destroyed three parts of the greater nobility, who were
its most potent members, tired the small nobility and the gentry, and
overthrew the aristocratic organisation on which all previous effectual
resistance to the sovereign had been based.
The second period of the British Constitution begins with the accession
of the House of Tudor, and goes down to 1688; it is in substance the
history of the growth, development, and gradually acquired supremacy of
the new great council. I have no room and no occasion to narrate again
the familiar history of the many steps by which the slavish Parliament
of Henry VIII. grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth,
the mutinous Parliament of James I., and the rebellious Parliament of
Charles I. The steps were many, but the energy was one--the growth of
the English middle-class, using that word in its most inclusive sense,
and its animation under the influence of Protestantism. No one, I
think, can doubt that Lord Macaulay is right in saying that political
causes would not alone have then provoked such a resistance to the
sovereign unless propelled by religious theory. Of course the English
people went to and fro from Catholicism to Protestantism, and from
Protestantism to Catholicism (not to mention that the Protestantism was
of several shades and sects), just as the first Tudor kings and queens
wished. But that was in the pre-Puritan era. The mass of Englishmen
were in an undecided state, just as Hooper tells us his father
was--"Not believing in Protestantism, yet not disinclined to it".
Gradually, however, a strong Evangelic spirit (as we should now speak)
and a still stronger anti-Papal spirit entered into the middle sort of
Englishmen, and added to that force, fibre, and substance which they
have never wanted, an ideal warmth and fervour which they have almost
always wanted. Hence the saying that Cromwell founded the English
Constitution. Of course, in seeming, Cromwell's work died with him; his
dynasty was rejected, his republic cast aside; but the spirit which
culminated in him never sank again, never ceased to be a potent, though
often a latent and volcanic force in the country. Charles II. said that
he would never go again on his travels for anything or anybody; and he
well knew that though the men whom he met at Worcester might be dead,
still the spirit which warmed them was alive and young in others.
But the Cromwellian republic and the strict Puritan creed were utterly
hateful to most Englishmen. They were, if I may venture on saying so,
like the "Rouge" element in France and elsewhere--the sole
revolutionary force in the entire State, and were hated as such. That
force could do little of itself; indeed, its bare appearance tended to
frighten and alienate the moderate and dull as well as the refined and
reasoning classes. Alone it was impotent against the solid clay of the
English apathetic nature. But give this fiery element a body of
decent-looking earth; give it an excuse for breaking out on an
occasion, when the decent, the cultivated, and aristocratic classes
could join with it, and they would conquer by means of it, and it could
be disguised in their covering.
Such an excuse was found in 1688. James II., by incredible and
pertinacious folly, irritated not only the classes which had fought
AGAINST his father, but also those who had fought FOR his father. He
offended the Anglican classes as well as the Puritan classes; all the
Whig nobles, and half the Tory nobles, as well as the dissenting
bourgeois. The rule of Parliament was established by the concurrence of
the usual supporters of royalty with the usual opponents of it. But the
result was long weak. Our revolution has been called the minimum of a
revolution, because in law, at least, it only changed the dynasty, but
exactly on that account it was the greatest shock to the common
multitude, who see the dynasty but see nothing else. The support of the
main aristocracy held together the bulk of the deferential classes, but
it held them together imperfectly, uneasily, and unwillingly. Huge
masses of crude prejudice swayed hither and thither for many years. If
an able Stuart had with credible sincerity professed Protestantism
probably he might have overturned the House of Hanover. So strong was
inbred reverence for hereditary right, that until the accession of
George III. the English Government was always subject to the unceasing
attrition of a competitive sovereign.
This was the result of what I insist on tediously, but what is most
necessary to insist on, for it is a cardinal particular in the whole
topic. Many of the English people--the higher and more educated
portion--had come to comprehend the nature of constitutional
government, but the mass did not comprehend it. They looked to the
sovereign as the Government, and to the sovereign only. These were
carried forward by the magic of the aristocracy and principally by the
influence of the great Whig families with their adjuncts. Without that
aid reason or liberty would never have held them.
Though the rule of Parliament was definitely established in 1688, yet
the mode of exercising that rule has since changed. At first Parliament
did not know how to exercise it; the organisation of parties and the
appointment of Cabinets by parties grew up in the manner Macaulay has
described so well. Up to the latest period the sovereign was supposed,
to a most mischievous extent, to interfere in the choice of the persons
to be Ministers. When George III. finally became insane, in 1810, every
one believed that George IV., on assuming power as Prince Regent, would
turn out Mr. Perceval's Government and empower Lord Grey or Lord
Grenville, the Whig leaders, to form another. The Tory Ministry was
carrying on a successful war--a war of existence--against Napoleon; but
in the people's minds, the necessity at such an occasion for an
unchanged Government did not outweigh the fancy that George IV. was a
Whig. And a Whig it is true he had been before the French Revolution,
when he lived an indescribable life in St. James's Street with Mr. Fox.
But Lord Grey and Lord Grenville were rigid men, and had no immoral
sort of influence. What liberalism of opinion the Regent ever had was
frightened out of him (as of other people) by the Reign of Terror. He
felt, according to the saying of another monarch, that "he lived by
being a royalist". It soon appeared that he was most anxious to retain
Mr. Perceval, and that he was most eager to quarrel with the Whig
Lords. As we all know, he kept the Ministry whom he found in office;
but that it should have been thought he could then change them, is a
significant example how exceedingly modern our notions of the despotic
action of Parliament in fact are.
By the steps of the struggle thus rudely mentioned (and by others which
I have no room to speak of, nor need I), the change which in the Greek
cities was effected both in appearance and in fact, has been effected
in England, though in reality only, and not in outside. Here, too, the
appendages of a monarchy have been converted into the essence of a
republic; only here, because of a more numerous heterogeneous political
population, it is needful to keep the ancient show while we secretly
interpolate the new reality.
This long and curious history has left its trace on almost every part
of our present political condition; its effects lie at the root of many
of our most important controversies; and because these effects are not
rightly perceived, many of these controversies are misconceived.
One of the most curious peculiarities of the English people is its
dislike of the executive government. We are not in this respect "un
vrai peuple moderne," like the Americans. The Americans conceive of the
executive as one of their appointed agents; when it intervenes in
common life, it does so, they consider, in virtue of the mandate of the
sovereign people, and there is no invasion or dereliction of freedom in
that people interfering with itself. The French, the Swiss, and all
nations who breathe the full atmosphere of the nineteenth century,
think so too. The material necessities of this age require a strong
executive; a nation destitute of it cannot be clean, or healthy, or
vigorous, like a nation possessing it. By definition, a nation calling
itself free should have no jealousy of the executive, for freedom means
that the nation, the political part of the nation, wields the
executive. But our history has reversed the English feeling: our
freedom is the result of centuries of resistance, more or less legal,
or more or less illegal, more or less audacious, or more or less timid,
to the executive government. We have, accordingly, inherited the
traditions of conflict, and preserve them in the fulness of victory. We
look on State action, not as our own action, but as alien action; as an
imposed tyranny from without, not as the consummated result of our own
organised wishes. I remember at the census of 1851 hearing a very
sensible old lady say that the "liberties of England were at an end";
if Government might be thus inquisitorial, if they might ask who slept
in your house, or what your age was, what, she argued, might they not
ask and what might they not do?
The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority. The
introduction of effectual policemen was not liked; I know people, old
people, I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of
freedom, and an imitation of the gendarmes of France. If the original
policemen had been started with the present helmets, the result might
have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and
the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed
over the very modern love of PERFECT peace and order. The old notion
that the Government is an extrinsic agency still rules our
imaginations, though it is no longer true, and though in calm and
intellectual moments we well know it is not. Nor is it merely our
history which produces this effect; we might get over that; but the
results of that history co-operate. Our double Government so acts: when
we want to point the antipathy to the executive, we refer to the
jealousy of the Crown, so deeply embedded in the very substance of
constitutional authority; so many people are loth to admit the Queen,
in spite of law and fact, to be the people's appointee and agent, that
it is a good rhetorical emphasis to speak of her prerogative as
something NON-popular, and therefore to be distrusted. By the very
nature of our government our executive cannot be liked and trusted as
the Swiss or the American is liked and trusted.
Out of the same history and the same results proceed our tolerance of
those "local authorities" which so puzzle many foreigners. In the
struggle with the Crown these local centres served as props and
fulcrums. In the early Parliaments it was the local bodies who sent
members to Parliament, the counties, and the boroughs; and in that way,
and because of THEIR free life, the Parliament was free too. If active
real bodies had not sent the representatives, they would have been
powerless. This is very much the reason why our old rights of suffrage
were so various; the Government let whatever people happened to be the
strongest in each town choose the members. They applied to the electing
bodies the test of "natural selection"; whatever set of people were
locally strong enough to elect, did so. Afterwards in the civil war,
many of the corporations, like that of London, were important bases of
resistance. The case of London is typical and remarkable. Probably, if
there is any body more than another which an educated Englishman
nowadays regards with little favour, it is the Corporation of London.
He connects it with hereditary abuses perfectly preserved, with large
revenues imperfectly accounted for, with a system which stops the
principal city government at an old archway, with the perpetuation of a
hundred detestable parishes, with the maintenance of a horde of
luxurious and useless bodies. For the want of all which makes Paris
nice and splendid we justly reproach the Corporation of London; for the
existence of much of what makes London mean and squalid we justly
reproach it too. Yet the Corporation of London was for centuries a
bulwark of English liberty. The conscious support of the near and
organised capital gave the Long Parliament a vigour and vitality which
they could have found nowhere else. Their leading patriots took refuge
in the City, and the nearest approach to an English "sitting in
permanence" is the committee at Guildhall, where all members "that came
were to have voices". Down to George III.'s time the City was a useful
centre of popular judgment. Here, as elsewhere, we have built into our
polity pieces of the scaffolding by which it was erected.
De Tocqueville indeed used to maintain that in this matter the English
were not merely historically excusable but likewise politically
judicious. He founded what may be called the culte of corporations. And
it was natural, that in France, where there is scarcely any power of
self-organisation in the people, where the prefet must be asked upon
every subject, and take the initiative in every movement, a solitary
thinker should be repelled from the exaggerations of which he knew the
evil, to the contrary exaggeration of which he did not. But in a
country like England where business is in the air, where we can
organise a vigilance committee on every abuse and an executive
committee for every remedy--as a matter of political instruction, which
was De Tocqueville's point--we need not care how much power is
delegated to outlying bodies, and how much is kept for the central
body. We have had the instruction municipalities could give us: we have
been through all that. Now we are quite grown up, and can put away
childish things.