[Footnote 1: February 1886.]
"If the government of the Many," says the distinguished author of the
volume before us, "be really inevitable, one would have thought that
the possibility of discovering some other and newer means of enabling
It to fulfil the ends for which all governments exist would have been
a question exercising all the highest powers of the strongest minds,
particularly in the community which, through the success of its
popular institutions, has paved the way for modern Democracy. Yet
hardly anything worth mentioning has been produced on the subject in
England or on the Continent." To say this, by the way, Is strangely to
ignore three or four very remarkable books that have been published
within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years, that have excited
immense attention and discussion, and that are the work of minds that
even Sir Henry Maine would hardly call weak or inactive. We are no
adherents of any of Mr. Hare's proposals, but there are
important public men who think that his work on the _Election of
Representatives_ is as conspicuous a landmark in politics as the
_Principia_ was in natural philosophy. J.S. Mill's volume on
_Representative Government_, which appeared in 1861, was even a more
memorable contribution towards the solution of the very problem
defined by Sir Henry Maine, than was the older Mill's article on
Government In 1820 to the political difficulties of the eve of the
Reform Bill. Again, Lord Grey's work on Parliamentary Government
failed in making its expected mark on legislation, but it was worth
mentioning because It goes on the lines of the very electoral law in
Belgium which Sir Henry Maine (p. 109) describes as deserving our most
respectful attention--an attention, I suspect, which it is as little
likely to receive from either of our two political parties as Lord
Grey's suggestions. Nor should we neglect Sir G.C. Lewis's little
book, or Mr. Harrison's volume on _Order and Progress_, which abounds
in important criticism and suggestion for the student of the abstract
politics of modern societies. In the United States, too, and In our
own colonies, there have been attempts, not without merit, to state
and to deal with some of the drawbacks of popular government.
Nothing has been done, however, that makes the appearance in the field
of a mind of so high an order as Sir Henry Maine's either superfluous
or unwelcome. It is hardly possible that he should discuss any subject
within the publicist's range, without bringing into light some of its
less superficial aspects, and adding observations of originality and
value to the stock of political thought. To set people thinking at all
on the more general and abstract truths of that great subject which is
commonly left to be handled lightly, unsystematically, fragmentarily,
in obedience to the transitory necessities of the day, by Ministers,
members of Parliament, journalists, electors, and the whole host who
live intellectually and politically from hand to mouth, is in itself a
service of all but the first order. Service of the very first order is
not merely to propound objections, but to devise working answers, and
this is exactly what Sir Henry Maine abstains from doing.
No one will think the moment for a serious political inquiry ill
chosen. We have just effected an immense recasting of our system of
parliamentary representation. The whole consequences of the two great
Acts of 1884 and 1885 are assuredly not to be finally gauged by
anything that has happened during the recent election. Yet even this
single election has brought about a crisis of vast importance in
one part of the United Kingdom, by forcing the question of an Irish
constitution to the front. It is pretty clear, also, that the infusion
of a large popular element into the elective House has made more
difficult the maintenance of its old relations with the hereditary
House. Even if there were no others, these two questions alone, and
especially the first of them, will make the severest demands on the
best minds in the country. We shall be very fortunate if the crisis
produces statesmen as sagacious as those American publicists of whom
Sir Henry Maine rightly entertains so exalted an opinion.
Whether or not we are on the threshold of great legislative changes,
it is in any case certain that the work of government will be carried
on under new parliamentary and social conditions. In meeting this
prospect, we have the aid neither of strong and systematic political
schools, nor powerful and coherent political parties. No one can
pretend, for instance, that there is any body of theoretic opinion so
compact and so well thought out as Benthamism was in its own day
and generation. Again, in practice, there are ominous signs that
Parliament is likely to break up into groups; and the substitution of
groups for parties is certain, if continental experience is to count
for anything, to create new obstacles in the way of firm and stable
government. Weak government throws power to something which usurps
the name of public opinion, and public opinion as expressed by the
ventriloquists of the newspapers is at once more capricious and more
vociferous than it ever was. This was abundantly shown during the last
five years by a variety of unfortunate public adventures. Then,
does the excitement of democracy weaken the stability of national
temperament? By setting up what in physics would be called a highly
increased molecular activity, does it disturb not merely conservative
respect for institutions, but respect for coherence and continuity of
opinion and sentiment in the character of the individual himself? Is
there a fluidity of character in modern democratic societies which
contrasts not altogether favourably with the strong solid types
of old? Are Englishmen becoming less like Romans, and more like
disputatious Greeks? These and many other considerations of the same
kind are enough to secure a ready welcome for any thinker who can
light up the obscurities of the time.
With profound respect for Sir Henry Maine's attainments, and every
desire to profit by illumination wherever it may be discerned, we
cannot clearly see how the present volume either makes the problems
more intelligible, or points the way to feasible solutions. Though
he tries, in perfect good faith, to be the dispassionate student, he
often comes very close to the polemics of the hour. The truth is
that scientific lawyers have seldom been very favourable to popular
government; and when the scientific lawyer is doubled with the Indian
bureaucrat, we are pretty sure beforehand that in such a tribunal it
will go hard with democracy. That the author extremely dislikes and
suspects the new order, he does not hide either from himself or
us. Intellectual contempt for the idolatries of the forum and the
market-place has infected him with a touch of that chagrin which
came to men like Tacitus from disbelief In the moral government of
a degenerate world. Though he strives, like Tacitus, to take up his
parable _nec amore et sine odio_, the disgust is ill concealed. There
are passages where we almost hear the drone of a dowager in the
Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was said of Tocqueville that he was an
aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Sir Henry Maine in politics is a
bureaucrat who cannot bear to think that democracy will win. He is
dangerously near the frame of mind of Scipio Emilianus, after the
movement of the Gracchi and the opening of the Roman revolution.
Scipio came to the conclusion that with whichever party he took sides,
or whatever measures a disinterested and capable statesman might
devise, he would only aggravate the evil. Sir Henry Maine would seem
to be nearly as despondent. Hence his book is fuller of apprehension
than of guidance, more plausible in alarm than wise or useful in
direction. It is exclusively critical and negative. There Is, indeed,
an admirable account of the constitution of the United States. But on
the one great question on which the constitution of the United States
might have been expected to shed light--the modification of the House
of Lords--Sir Henry Maine explicitly admits (p. 186) that it is very
difficult to obtain from the younger institution, the Senate, any
lessons which can be of use in the reconstruction of the older. At
every turn, the end of the discussion lands us in a philosophical
_cul-de-sac_, and nothing is so depressing as a _cul-de-sac_. The tone
is that of the political valetudinarian, watching with uneasy eye the
ways of rude health. Unreflecting optimism about Popular Government is
sickening, but calculated pessimism is not much better.
Something, no doubt, may often be gained by the mere cross-examination
of catchwords and the exposure of platitudes. Popular government is
no more free from catchwords and platitudes than any other political,
religious, or social cause which interests a great many people, and is
the subject of much discussion. Even the Historical Method has its own
claptrap. But one must not make too much of these things. "In order
to love mankind," said Helvétius, "one must not expect too much from
them." And fairly to appreciate institutions you must not hold them up
against the light that blazes in Utopia; you must not expect them
to satisfy microscopic analysis, nor judge their working, which is
inevitably rough, awkward, clumsy, and second-best, by the fastidious
standards of closet logic.
Before saying more as to the substance of the hook, we may be allowed
to notice one or two matters of literary or historical interest in
which Sir Henry Maine is certainly open to criticism. There is an old
question about Burke which was discussed by the present writer a long
time ago. A great disillusion, says Sir Henry Maine, has always seemed
to him to separate the _Thoughts on the Present Discontents_ and the
_Speech on Taxation_ from the magnificent panegyric on the British
Constitution in 1790. "Not many persons in the last century could
have divined from the previous opinions of Edmund Burke the real
substructure of his political creed, or did in fact suspect it till
it was uncovered by the early and comparatively slight miscarriage of
French revolutionary institutions." This is, as a statement of fact,
not at all correct. Lord Chatham detected what he believed to be the
mischievous Conservatism in Burke's constitutional doctrines at the
very outset. So did the Constitutional Society detect it. So did Mrs.
Macaulay, Bishop Watson, and many other people. The story of Burke's
inconsistency is, of course, as old as Sheridan. Hazlitt declared
that the Burke of 1770 and the Burke of 1790 were not merely opposite
persons, but deadly enemies. Mr. Buckle, who is full of veneration for
the early writings, but who dislikes the later ones, gets over the
difficulty by insisting that Burke actually went out of his mind after
1789. We should have expected a subtler judgment from Sir Henry Maine.
Burke belonged from first to last to the great historic and positive
school, of which the founder was Montesquieu. Its whole method,
principle, and sentiment, all animated him with equal force whether he
was defending the secular pomps of Oude or the sanctity of Benares,
the absolutism of Versailles, or the free and ancient Parliament at
Westminster.[1]
[Footnote 1: It is satisfactory to have the authority of Mr. Lecky on
the same side. _England in the Eighteenth Century_, vol. iii. chap.
ix. p. 209.]
Versailles reminds us of a singular overstatement by Sir Henry Maine
of the blindness of the privileged classes in France to the approach
of the Revolution. He speaks as if Lord Chesterfield's famous passage
were the only anticipation of the coming danger. There is at least one
utterance of Louis XV. himself, which shows that he did not expect
things to last much beyond his time. D'Argenson, in the very year of
Chesterfield's prophecy, pronounced that a revolution was inevitable,
and he even went so close to the mark as to hint that it would arise
on the first occasion when it should be necessary to convoke the
States General. Rousseau, in a page of the _Confessions_, not only
divined a speedy revolution, but enumerated the operative causes of it
with real precision. There Is a striking prediction In Voltaire, and
another in Mercier de la Rivière. Other names might be quoted to
the same effect, including Maria Theresa, who described the ruined
condition of the French monarchy, and only hoped that the ruin might
not overtake her daughter. The mischief was not so much that the
privileged classes were blind as that they were selfish, stubborn,
helpless, and reckless. The point is not very important in itself,
but it is characteristic of a very questionable way of reading human
history. Sir Henry Maine's readiness to treat revolutions as due to
erroneous abstract ideas naturally inclines him to take too narrow a
view both of the preparation in circumstances, and of the preparation
in the minds of observant onlookers.
In passing, by the way, we are curious to know the writer's authority
for what he calls the odd circumstance that the Jacobins generally
borrowed their phrases from the legendary history of the early Roman
Republic, while the Girondins preferred to take metaphors from the
literature of Rousseau (p. 75). There was plenty of nonsense talked
about Brutus and Scaevola by both parties, and It Is not possible
to draw the line with precision. But the received view Is that the
Girondins were Voltairean, and the Jacobins Rousseauite, while Danton
was of the school of the Encyclopaedia, and Hébert and Chaumette were
inspired by Holbach.
The author seems to us greatly to exaggerate the whole position of
Rousseau, and even in a certain sense to mistake the nature of his
influence. That Jean-Jacques was a far-reaching and important voice
the present writer is not at all likely to deny; but no estimate of
his influence in the world is correct which does not treat him rather
as moralist than publicist. _Emilius_ went deeper into men's minds in
France and in Europe at large, and did more to quicken the democratic
spirit, than the _Social Contract_ Apart from this, Sir Henry Maine
places Rousseau on an isolated eminence which does not really belong
to him. It did not fall within the limited scope of such an essay as
Sir Henry Maine's to trace the leading ideas of the _Social Contract_
to the various sources from which they had come, but his account
of these sources is, even for its scale, inadequate. Portions of
Rousseau's ideas, he says truly, may be discovered in the speculations
of older writers; and he mentions Hobbes and the French Economists.
But the most characteristic of all the elements in Rousseau's
speculation were drawn from Locke. The theoretic basis of popular
government Is to be found in more or less definite shape in various
authors from Thomas Aquinas downwards. But it was Locke's philosophic
vindication of the Revolution of 1688, in the famous essay on
Civil Government, that directly taught Rousseau the lesson of the
Sovereignty of the People. Such originality as the _Social Contract_
possesses is due to its remarkable union of the influence of the two
antagonistic English Thinkers. The differences between Hobbes and
Rousseau were striking enough. Rousseau looked on men as good, Hobbes
looked on them as bad. The one described the state of nature as a
state of peace, the other as a state of war. The first believed that
laws and institutions had depraved man, the second that they had
improved him. In spite of these differences the influence of Hobbes
was important, but only important in combination. "The total result
is," as I have said elsewhere, "a curious fusion between the premises
and the temper of Hobbes, and the conclusions of Locke. This fusion
produced that popular absolutism of which the _Social Contract_ was
the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the practical
manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception of
sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat
and original of authority, and of the two together he made the great
image of the Sovereign People. Strike the crowned head from that
monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of the _Leviathan_, and
you have a frontispiece that will do excellently well for the _Social
Contract_."[1]
[Footnote 1: _Rousseau_, chap. xii.]
One more word may be said by the way. The very slightest account of
Rousseau is too slight to be tolerable, if it omits to mention Calvin.
Rousseau's whole theory of the Legislator, which produced such
striking results in certain transitory phases of the French
Revolution, grew up in his mind from the constitution which the great
reformer had so predominant a share in framing for the little republic
where Rousseau was born.
This omission of Locke and Calvin again exemplifies the author's
characteristic tendency to look upon political ideas as if speculative
writers got them out of their own heads, or out of the heads of other
people, apart from the suggestions of events and the requirements of
circumstance, Calvin was the builder of a working government, and
Locke was the defender of a practical revolution.
Nor does the error stop at the literary sources of political theories.
A point more or less in an estimate of a writer or a book is of
trivial importance compared with what strikes us as Sir Henry
Maine's tendency to impute an unreal influence to writers and books
altogether. There is, no doubt, a vulgar and superficial opinion that
mere speculation is so remote from the real interests of men, that it
is a waste of time for practical people to concern themselves about
speculation. No view could be more foolish, save one; and that one is
the opposite view, that the real interests of men have no influence
on their speculative opinions, and no share either in moulding those
opinions or in causing their adoption. Sir Henry Maine does not push
things quite so far as this. Still he appears to us to attribute
almost exclusive influence to political theories, and almost entirely
to omit what we take to be the much more important reaction upon
theory, both of human nature, and of the experience of human life and
outward affairs. He makes no allowance among innovating agencies for
native rationalism without a formula. His brilliant success in other
applications of the Historic Method has disposed him to see survivals
where other observers will be content with simpler explanations.
The reader is sometimes tempted to recall Edie Ochiltree's rude
interruption of Mr. Oldbuck's enthusiasm over the praetorium of the
Immortal Roman camp at Monkbarns. "Praetorian here, Praetorian there!
I mind the bigging o 't!"
Sir Henry Maine believes that the air is thick with ideas about
democracy that were conceived _a priori_, and that sprung from the
teaching of Rousseau. A conviction of the advantages of legislative
change, for example, he considers to owe its origin much less to
active and original intelligence, than to "the remote effect of words
and notions derived from broken-down political theories." There are
two great fountains of political theory in our country according to
the author: Rousseau is one, and Bentham is the other. Current
thought and speech Is infested by the floating fragments of these two
systems--by loose phrases, by vague notions, by superstitions, that
enervate the human intellect and endanger social safety. This is the
constant refrain of the pages before us. We should have liked better
evidence. We do not believe that it is a Roman praetorium. Men often
pick up old phrases for new events, even when they are judging events
afresh with independent minds. When a politician of the day speaks of
natural rights, he uses a loose traditional expression for a view of
social equities which has come to him, not from a book, but from a
survey of certain existing social facts. Now the phrase, the literary
description, is the least significant part of the matter. When Mr.
Mill talks of the influence of Bentham's writings, he is careful to
tell us that he does not mean that they caused the Reform Bill or the
Appropriation Clause. "The changes which have been made," says Mill,
"and the greater changes which will be made, in our institutions are
not the work of philosophers, but of the interests and instincts
of large portions of society recently grown into strength"
_(Dissertations_, i. 332). That is the point. It is the action of
these interests and instincts which Sir Henry Maine habitually
overlooks. For is the omission a mere speculative imperfection. It has
an important bearing on the whole practical drift of the book. If he
had made more room for "the common intellect rough-hewing political
truths at the suggestion of common wants and common experience,"
he would have viewed existing circumstances with a less lively
apprehension.
It is easy to find an apposite illustration of what is meant by
saying that this talk of the influence of speculation is enormously
exaggerated and misleading. When Arthur Young was in France in the
autumn of 1787, he noticed a remarkable revolution in manners in two
or three important respects. One of them was a new fashion that had
just come in, of spending some weeks in the country: everybody who had
a country seat went to live there, and such as had none went to visit
those who had. This new custom, observed the admirable Young, is one
of the best that they have taken from England, and "its introduction
was effected the easier being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's
writings." The other and more generally known change was that women
of the first fashion were no longer ashamed of nursing their own
children, and that infants were no longer tightly bound round by
barbarous stays and swaddling clothes. This wholesome change, too,
was assisted by Rousseau's eloquent pleas for simplicity and the life
natural. Of these particular results of his teaching in France a
hundred years ago the evidence is ample, direct, and beyond denial.
But whenever we find gentlemen with a taste for country life, and
ladies with a fancy for nursing their own children, we surely need not
cry out that here is another proof of the extraordinary influence of
the speculations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We need not treat it as a
survival of a broken-down theory. "Great Nature is more wise than I,"
says the Poet. Great Nature had much more to do with moulding men and
women to these things than all the books that have ever been printed.
We are entirely sceptical as to the proposition that "men have at all
times quarrelled more fiercely about phrases and formulas than even
about material interests" (p. 124). There has been a certain amount of
fighting in the world about mere words, as idle as the faction fights
between Caravats and Shanavests, or Two-Year-Olds and Three-Year-Olds
in Ireland. But the more carefully we look into human history, the
more apparent it becomes that underneath the phrase or the formula
there is usually a material or a quasi-material, or a political, or
a national, or an ecclesiastical interest. Few quarrels now seem so
purely verbal as those which for several centuries raged about the
mysteries of the faith in the Western and the Eastern Churches. Yet
these quarrels, apparently as frivolous as they were ferocious,
about the relations of mind and matter, about the composition of
the Trinity, about the Divine nature, turned much less on futile
metaphysics than on the solid competition for ecclesiastical power, or
the conflict of rival nationalities. The most transcendental heresy or
orthodoxy generally had business at the bottom of it.
In limiting the parentage of Modern English Liberalism of a Radical or
democratic type to Rousseau and Bentham, the author has left out
of sight what is assuredly a much more important factor than any
speculative, literary, or philosophic matter whatever. "Englishmen,"
he says truly, "are wont to be content with the rough rule of success
or failure as the test of right or wrong in national undertakings."
The same habit of mind and temper marks the attitude of Englishmen
towards their national institutions. They look to success and failure,
they take the measure of things from results, they consult the
practical working of the machine, they will only go to school with
experience. We cannot find the proof that _a priori_ Radicalism ever
at any time got a real hold of any considerable mass of the people of
this country, or that any of the great innovations in domestic policy
since the end of Lord Liverpool's administration have been inspired
or guided by Rousseauite assumptions. Godwin, whose book on Political
Justice was for a long time the great literary fountain of English
Radicalism, owed quite as much to the utilitarian Helvétius as to the
sentimental Rousseau. Nor can either William Cobbett or Joseph Hume be
said to have dealt largely in _a priori_. What makes the Radical of
the street is mostly mother-wit exercising itself upon the facts of
the time. His weakness is that he does not know enough of the facts of
other times.
Sir Henry Maine himself points to what has had a far more decisive
influence on English ways of thinking about politics than his two
philosophers, put together. "The American Republic," he says (p. 11),
"has greatly influenced the favour into which popular government grew.
It disproved the once universal assumptions that no Republic could
govern a large territory, and that no strictly Republican government
could be stable." Nothing can be more true. When Burke and Chatham
and Fox persistently declared that the victory of England over the
colonists would prove fatal in the long run to the liberties of
England itself, those great men were even wiser than they knew.
The success of popular government across the Atlantic has been the
strongest incentive to the extension of popular government here.
We need go no further back than the Reform Bill of 1867 to remind
ourselves that the victory of the North over the South, and the
extraordinary clemency and good sense with which that victory
was used, had more to do with the concession of the franchise to
householders in boroughs than all the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone and
all the diplomacies of Mr. Disraeli.
To the influence of the American Union must be added that of the
British colonies. The success of popular self-government in these
thriving communities is reacting on political opinion at home with a
force that no statesman neglects, and that is every day increasing.
There is even a danger that the influence may go too far. They are
solving some of our problems, but not under our conditions, and not
in presence of the same difficulties. Still the effect of colonial
prosperity--a prosperity alike of admirable achievement and boundless
promise--is irresistible. It imparts a freedom, an elasticity, an
expansiveness, to English political notions, and gives our people a
confidence in free institutions and popular government, which
they would never have drawn from the most eloquent assumptions of
speculative system-mongers, nor from any other source whatever, save
practical experience carefully observed and rationally interpreted.
This native and independent rationality in men is what the jealous
votary of the historic method places far too low.
In coming closer to the main current of the book, our first
disappointment is that Sir Henry Maine has not been very careful to
do full justice to the views that he criticises. He is not altogether
above lending himself to the hearsay of the partisan. He allows
expressions to slip from him which show that he has not been anxious
to face the problems of popular government as popular government is
understood by those who have best right to speak for it. "The more
the difficulties of multitudinous government are probed," he says (p.
180), "the stronger grows the doubt of the infallibility of popularly
elected legislatures." We do not profess to answer for all that may
have been said by Mr. Bancroft, or Walt Whitman, or all the orators of
all the Fourths of July since American Independence. But we are not
acquainted with any English writer or politician of the very slightest
consideration or responsibility who has committed himself to the
astounding proposition, that popularly elected legislatures are
infallible. Who has ever advanced such a doctrine? Further, "It
requires some attention to facts to see how widely spread is the
misgiving as to the absolute wisdom of popularly elected chambers." We
are not surprised at the misgiving. But after reasonable attention to
facts, we cannot recall any publicist, whom it could be worth while
to spend five minutes in refuting, who has ever said that popularly
elected chambers are absolutely wise. Again, we should like the
evidence for the statement that popularly elected Houses "do not
nowadays appeal to the wise deduction from experience, as old as
Aristotle, which no student of constitutional history will deny, that
the best constitutions are those in which there is a large popular
element. It is a singular proof of the widespread influence of the
speculations of Rousseau that although very few First Chambers really
represent the entire community, nevertheless in Europe they almost
invariably claim to reflect it, and as a consequence they assume an
air of divinity, which if it rightfully belonged to them would be
fatal to all argument for a Second Chamber." That would be very
important If it were true. But is it true that First Chambers assume
an air of divinity? Or is such an expression a "burlesque of the real
argument?" A reasonable familiarity with the course of the controversy
in France, where the discussion has been abundant, and in England,
where it has been comparatively meagre, leaves me, for one, entirely
ignorant that this claim for divinity, or anything like it, is ever
heard in the debate. The most powerful modern champion of popular
government was Gambetta. Did Gambetta consider First Chambers divine?
On the contrary, some of the most strenuous pleas for the necessity of
a Second Chamber are to be found precisely in the speeches of Gambetta
(_e.g._ his speech at Grenoble, in the autumn of 1878, _Discours_
viii. 270, etc.). Abstract thinking is thinking withdrawn from the
concrete and particular facts. But the abstract thinker should not
withdraw too far.
Sir Henry Maine speaks (p. 185) of "the saner political theorist, who
holds that in secular matters it is better to walk by sight than by
faith." He allows that a theorist of this kind, as regards popularly
elected chambers, "will be satisfied that experience has shown the
best Constitutions to be those in which the popular element is large,
and he will readily admit that, as the structure of each society of
men slowly alters, it is well to alter and amend the organisation by
which this element makes itself felt." Sir Henry Maine would surely
have done better service in this grave and difficult discussion, if he
had dealt with views which he mistrusts, as they are really held and
expressed by sane theorists, and not by insane theorists out of sight.
In France, a hundred years ago, from causes that are capable of
explanation, the democracy of sentiment swept away the democracy of
utility. In spite of casual phrases in public discussion, and in spite
of the incendiary trash of Red journalists without influence, it is
the democracy of reason, experience, and utility that is now in the
ascendant, both in France and elsewhere.
The same spirit of what we must call parody is shown in such a
statement as that (p. 78) "an audience composed of roughs or clowns is
boldly told by an educated man that it has more political information
than an equal number of scholars." By "roughs" Sir Henry Maine
explains that he means the artisans of the towns. The designation is
hardly felicitous. It is not even fashionable; for the roughs and
clowns are now by common consent of Tories and Liberals alike
transformed into capable citizens. Such a phrase gives us a painful
glimpse of the accurate knowledge of their countrymen that is
possessed by eminent men who write about them from the dim and distant
seclusion of college libraries and official bureaux. If Sir Henry
Maine could spare a few evenings from dispassionate meditations on
popular government in the abstract, to the inspection of the governing
people in the concrete, he would be the first to see that to dispatch
an audience of skilled artisans as an assembly of roughs is as
unscientific, to use the mildest word, as the habit in a certain
religious world of lumping all the unconverted races of the earth
in every clime and age in the summary phrase, the heathen. A great
meeting of artisans listening to Mr. Arthur Balfour or Sir Henry
Roscoe at Manchester, to Sir Lyon Playfair at Leeds (the modern
democrat, at any rate, does not think the Republic has no need of
chemists), or to anybody else in a great industrial centre anywhere
else, is no more an assemblage of roughs than Convocation or the
House of Lords. Decidedly, an enemy of the unverified assumptions of
democracy ought to be on his guard against the unverified assumptions
of pedantocracy.
As for the particular bit of sycophancy which educated men wickedly
dangle before roughs and clowns, we should like to be sure that the
proposition is correctly reported. If the educated man tells his
roughs (if that be the right name for the most skilful, industrious,
and effective handicraftsmen in the world) that they have as much
of the information necessary for shaping a sound judgment on the
political issues submitted to them, as an equal number of average
Masters of Arts and Doctors of Laws, then we should say that the
educated man, unless he has been very unlucky with his audience, is
perfectly right. He proves that his education has not confined itself
to books, bureaux, and an exclusive society, but has been carried on
in the bracing air of common life. I will not add anything of my
own on this point, because any candidate or member of Parliament
is suspect, but I will venture to transcribe a page or so from Mr.
Frederic Harrison. Mr. Harrison's intellectual equipment is not
inferior to that of Sir Henry Maine himself; and he has long had close
and responsible contact with the class of men of whom he is speaking,
which cannot be quite a disqualification after all.
"No worse nonsense is talked than what we are told as to the
requisites for the elective franchise. To listen to some people,
it is almost as solemn a function as to be a trustee of the
British Museum. What you want in a body of electors is a rough,
shrewd eye for men of character, honesty, and purpose. Very plain
men know who wish them well, and the sort of thing which will
bring them good. Electors have not got to govern the country; they
have only to find a set of men who will see that the Government is
just and active.... All things go best by comparison, and a body
of men may be as good voters as their neighbours without basing
the type of the Christian hero.
"So far from, being the least fit for political influence of all
classes in the community, the best part of the working class forms
the most fit of all others. If any section of the people is to
be the paramount arbiter in public affairs, the only section
competent for this duty is the superior order of workmen.
Governing is one thing; but electors of any class cannot or ought
not to govern. Electing, or the giving an indirect approval
of Government, is another thing, and demands wholly different
qualities. These are moral, not intellectual; practical, not
special gifts--gifts of a very plain and almost universal order.
Such are, firstly, social sympathies and sense of justice; then
openness and plainness of character; lastly, habits of action, and
a practical knowledge of social misery. These are the qualities
which fit men to be the arbiters or ultimate source (though
certainly not the instruments) of political power. These qualities
the best working men possess in a far higher degree than any other
portion of the community; indeed, they are almost the only part of
the community which possesses them in any perceptible degree."[1]
[Footnote 1: _Order and Progress_, pp. 149-54, and again at p. 174.]
The worst of it is that, if Sir Henry Maine is right, we have no more
to hope from other classes than from roughs and clowns. He can discern
no blue sky in any quarter. "In politics," he says, "the most
powerful of all causes is the timidity, the listlessness, and the
superficiality of the generality of minds" (p. 73). This is carrying
criticism of democracy into an indictment against human nature. What
is to become of us, thus placed between the devil of mob ignorance
and corruption, and the deep sea of genteel listlessness and
superficiality? After all, Sir Henry Maine is only repeating in more
sober tones the querulous remonstrances with which we are so familiar
on the lips of Ultramontanes and Legitimists. A less timid observer of
contemporary events, certainly in the land that all of us know best
and love best, would judge that, when it comes to a pinch, Liberals
are still passably prudent, and Conservatives quite sufficiently
wide-awake.
Another of the passages in Sir Henry Maine's book, that savours rather
of the party caricaturist than of the "dispassionate student of
politics," is the following:--
"There is some resemblance between the period of political reform
in the nineteenth century and the period of religious reformation
in the sixteenth. Now as then the multitude of followers must be
distinguished from the smaller group of leaders. Now as then
there are a certain number of zealots who desire that truth shall
prevail.... But behind these, now as then, there is a crowd which
has imbibed a delight in change for its own sake, who would reform
the Suffrage, or the House of Lords, or the Land Laws, or the
Union with Ireland, in precisely the same spirit in which the mob
behind the reformers of religion broke the nose of a saint in
stone, made a bonfire of copes and surplices, or shouted for the
government of the Church by presbyteries" (p. 130).
We should wish to look at this remarkable picture a little more
closely. That there exist Anabaptists in the varied hosts of the
English reformers is true. The feats of the Social Democrats, however,
at the recent election hardly convince us that they have very
formidable multitudes behind them. Nor is it they who concern
themselves with such innovations as those which Sir Henry Maine
specifies. The Social Democrats, even of the least red shade, go a
long way beyond and below such trifles as Suffrage or the Upper House.
To say of the crowd who do concern themselves with reform of the
Suffrage, or the Land Laws, or the House of Lords, or the Union with
Ireland, that they are animated by a delight in change for its own
sake, apart from the respectable desire to apply a practical remedy to
a practical inconvenience, is to show a rather highflying disregard
of easily ascertainable facts. The Crowd listen with interest to talk
about altering the Land Laws, because they suspect the English land
system to have something to do with the unprosperous condition of the
landlord, the farmer, and the labourer; with the depopulation of the
country and the congestion in the towns; with the bad housing of the
poor, and with various other evils which they suppose themselves to
see staring them daily in the face. They may be entirely mistaken
alike In their estimate of mischief and their hope of mitigation. But
they are not moved by delight in change for its own sake. When the
Crowd sympathises with disapproval of the House of Lords, it is
because the legislative performances of that body are believed to have
impeded useful reforms in the past, to be impeding them now, and to be
likely to impede them in the future. This may be a sad misreading
of the history of the last fifty years, and a painfully prejudiced
anticipation of the next fifty. At any rate, it is in intention a
solid and practical appeal to experience and results, and has no
affinity to a restless love of change for the sake of change. No
doubt, in the progress of the controversy, the assailants of the House
of Lords attack the principle of birth. But the principle of birth is
not attacked from the _a priori_ point of view. The whole force of
the attack lies in what is taken to be the attested fact that the
principle of a hereditary chamber supervising an elective chamber has
worked, is working, and will go on working, inconveniently, stupidly,
and dangerously. Finally, there is the question of the Irish Union. Is
it the English or Scottish Crowd that is charged with a wanton desire
to recast the Union? Nobody knows much about the matter who is not
perfectly aware that the English statesman, whoever he may be, who
undertakes the inevitable task of dealing with the demand for Home
Rule, will have to make his case very plain indeed in order to make
the cause popular here. Then is it the Irish Crowd? Sir Henry Maine,
of all men, is not likely to believe that a sentiment which the wisest
people of all parties in Ireland for a hundred years have known to lie
in the depths of the mind of the great bulk of the Irish population,
to whom we have now for the first time given the chance of declaring
their wishes, is no more than a gratuitous and superficial passion for
change for its own sake. The sentiment of Irish nationality may or may
not be able to justify itself in the eye of prudential reason, and
English statesmen may or may not have been wise in inviting it to
explode. Those are different questions. But Sir Henry Maine himself
admits in another connection (p. 83) that "vague and shadowy as are
the recommendations of what is called a Nationality, a State founded
on this principle has generally one real practical advantage, through
its obliteration of small tyrannies and local oppressions." It is not
to be denied that it is exactly the expectation of this very practical
advantage that has given its new vitality to the Irish National
movement which seems now once more, for good or for evil, to have
come to a head. When it is looked into, then, the case against the
multitudes who are as senselessly eager to change institutions as
other multitudes once were to break off the noses of saints in stone,
falls to pieces at every point.
Among other vices ascribed to democracy, we are told that it is
against science, and that "even in our day vaccination is in the
utmost danger" (p. 98). The instance is for various reasons not a
happy one. It is not even precisely stated. I have never understood
that vaccination is in much danger. Compulsory vaccination is perhaps
in danger. But compulsion, as a matter of fact, was strengthened as
the franchise went lower. It is a comparative novelty in English
legislation (1853), and as a piece of effectively enforced
administration it is more novel still (1871). I admit, however, that
it is not endured in the United States; and only two or three years
ago it was rejected by an overwhelming majority on an appeal to the
popular vote in the Swiss Confederation. Obligatory vaccination may
therefore one day disappear from our statute book, if democracy has
anything to do with it. But then the obligation to practise a medical
rite may be inexpedient, in spite of the virtues of the rite itself.
That is not all. Sir Henry Maine will admit that Mr. Herbert Spencer
is not against science, and he expresses in the present volume his
admiration for Mr. Spencer's work on _Man and the State_. Mr. Spencer
is the resolute opponent of compulsory vaccination, and a resolute
denier, moreover, of the pretension that the evidence for the
advantages of vaccination takes such account of the ulterior effects
in the system as to amount to a scientific demonstration. Therefore,
if science demands compulsory vaccination, democracy in rejecting the
demand, and even if it went further, is at least kept in countenance
by some of those who are of the very household of science. The
illustration is hardly impressive enough for the proposition that it
supports.
Another and a far more momentous illustration occurs on another page
(37). A very little consideration is enough to show that it will by
no means bear Sir Henry Maine's construction. "There is, in fact," he
says, "just enough evidence to show that even now there is a marked
antagonism between democratic opinion and scientific truth as applied
to human societies. The central seat in all Political Economy was from
the first occupied by the theory of Population. This theory ... has
become the central truth of biological science. Yet it is evidently
disliked by the multitude and those whom the multitude permits to lead
it."
Sir Henry Maine goes on to say that it has long been intensely
unpopular in France, and this, I confess, is a surprise to me. It has
usually been supposed that a prudential limitation of families is
rooted in the minds and habits of nearly, though not quite, all
classes of the French nation. An excellent work on France, written by
a sound English observer seven or eight years ago, chances to be lying
before me at the moment, and here is a passage taken almost at random.
"The opinions of thoughtful men seem to tend towards the wish to
introduce into France some of that improvidence which allows English
people to bring large families into the world without first securing
the means of keeping them, and which has peopled the continent of
North America and the Australian colonies with an English-speaking
race" (Richardson's _Corn and Cattle Producing Districts of France_,
p. 47, etc.). Surely this is a well-established fact. It is possible
that denunciations of Malthus may occasionally be found both in
Clerical and Socialistic prints, but then there are reasons for that.
It can hardly be made much of a charge against French democracy that
it tolerates unscientific opinion, so long as it cultivates scientific
practice.
As for our own country, and those whom the multitude permits to lead
it, we cannot forget that by far the most popular and powerful man _in
faece Romuli_--as Sir Henry Maine insists on our putting it in that
polite way--was tried and condemned not many years ago for publishing
a certain pamphlet which made a limitation of population the very
starting-point of social reform. It is not necessary to pronounce an
opinion on the particular counsels of the pamphlet, but the motives
which prompted its circulation (motives admitted to be respectable by
the Chief-Justice who tried the case), and the extraordinary reception
of the pamphlet by the serious portion of the workmen of the towns,
would make a careful writer think twice before feeling sure that
popular bodies will never listen to the truth about population. No
doubt, as Sir Henry Maine says in the same place, certain classes now
resist schemes for relieving distress by emigration. But there is a
pretty obvious reason for that. That reason is not mere aversion
to face the common sense of the relations between population and
subsistence, but a growing suspicion--as to the reasonableness of
which, again, I give no opinion--that emigration is made into an easy
and slovenly substitute for a scientific reform in our system of
holding and using land. In the case of Ireland, other political
considerations must be added.
Democracy will be against science, we admit, in one contingency: if
it loses the battle with the Ultramontane Church. The worst enemy
of science is also the bitterest enemy of democracy, _c'est le
cléricalisme_. The interests of science and the interests of democracy
are one. Let us take a case. Suppose that popular Government in France
were to succumb, a military or any other more popular Government would
be forced to lean on Ultramontanes. Ultramontanes would gather the
spoils of democratic defeat. Sir Henry Maine is much too well informed
to think that a clerical triumph would be good for science, whatever
else it might be good for. Then are not propositions about democracy
being against science very idle and a little untrue? "Modern
politics," said a wise man (Pattison, _Sermons_, p. 191) "resolve
themselves into the struggle between knowledge and tradition."
Democracy is hardly on the side of tradition.
We have dwelt on these secondary matters, because they show that
the author hardly brings to the study of modern democracy the ripe
preparation of detail which he gave to ancient law. In the larger
field of his speculation, the value of his thought is seriously
impaired by the absence of anything like a philosophy of society as a
whole. Nobody who has studied Burke, or Comte, or Mill--I am not sure
whether we should not add even De Maistre--can imagine any of them as
setting to work on a general political speculation without reference
to particular social conditions. They would have conducted the inquiry
in strict relation to the stage at which a community happened to be,
in matters lying outside of the direct scope of political government.
So, before all other living thinkers, should we have expected Sir
Henry Maine to do. It is obvious that systems of government, called
by the same name, bearing the same superficial marks, founded and
maintained on the same nominal principles, framed in the same verbal
forms, may yet work with infinite diversity of operation, according
to the variety of social circumstances around them. Yet it is here
inferred that democracy in England must be fragile, difficult, and
sundry other evil things, because out of fourteen Presidents of the
Bolivian Republic thirteen have died assassinated or in exile. If
England and Bolivia were at all akin in history, religion, race,
industry, the fate of Bolivian Presidents would be more instructive to
English Premiers.
One of the propositions which Sir Henry Maine is most anxious to bring
home to his readers is that Democracy, in the extreme form to which
it tends, is of all kinds of government by far the most difficult.
He even goes so far as to say (p. 87) that, while not denying to
Democracies some portion of the advantage which Bentham claimed for
them, and "putting this advantage at the highest, it is _more than
compensated_ by one great disadvantage," namely, its difficulty. This
generalisation is repeated with an emphasis that surprises us, for two
reasons. In the first place, if the proposition could be proved to be
true, we fail to see that it would be particularly effective in its
practical bearings. Everybody whose opinions are worth consideration,
and everybody who has ever come near the machinery of democratic
government, is only too well aware that whether it be far the most
difficult form of government or not, it is certainly difficult enough
to tax the powers of statesmanship to the very uttermost. Is not that
enough? Is anything gained by pressing us further than that? "Better
be a poor fisherman," said Danton as he walked in the last hours of
his life on the banks of the Aube, "better be a poor fisherman, than
meddle with the governing of men." We wonder whether there has been
a single democratic leader either in France or England who has not
incessantly felt the full force of Danton's ejaculation. There may,
indeed, be simpletons in the political world who dream that if only
the system of government were made still more popular, all would be
plain sailing. But then Sir Henry Maine is not the man to write for
simpletons.
The first reason, then, for surprise at the immense stress laid by the
author on the proposition about the difficulty of popular government
is that it would not be of the first order of importance if it were
true. Our second reason is that it cannot be shown to be true.
You cannot measure the relative difficulty of diverse systems of
government. Governments are things of far too great complexity for
precise quantification of this sort. Will anybody, for example, read
through the second volume of the excellent work of M. Leroy-Beaulieu
on the Empire of the Czars (1882), and then be prepared to maintain
that democracy is more difficult than autocracy? It would be
interesting, too, to know whether the Prince on whose shoulders
will one day be laid the burden of the German Empire will read the
dissertation on the unparalleled difficulties of democracy with
acquiescence. There are many questions, of which the terms are no
sooner stated than we at once see that a certain and definite answer
to them is impossible. The controversy as to the relative fragility,
or the relative difficulty, of popular government and other forms of
government, appears to be a controversy of this kind. We cannot decide
it until we have weighed, measured, sifted, and tested a great mass of
heterogeneous facts; and then, supposing the process to have been
ever so skilfully and laboriously performed, no proposition could be
established as the outcome, that would be an adequate reward for the
pains of the operation.
This, we venture to think, must be pronounced a grave drawback to the
value of the author's present speculation. He attaches an altogether
excessive and unscientific importance to form. It would be
unreasonable to deny to a writer on democracy as a form of government
the right of isolating his phenomenon. But it is much more
unreasonable to predicate fragility, difficulty, or anything else of a
particular form of government, without reference to other conditions
which happen to go along with it in a given society at a given time.
None of the properties of popular government are independent of
surrounding circumstances, social, economic, religious, and historic.
All the conditions are bound up together in a closely interdependent
connection, and are not secondary to, or derivative from, the mere
form of government. It is, if not impossible, at least highly unsafe
to draw inferences about forms of government in universals.
No writer seems to us to approach Machiavelli in the acuteness with
which he pushes behind mere political names, and passes on to the real
differences that may exist in movements and institutions that are
covered by the same designation. Nothing in its own way can be more
admirable, for instance, than his reflections on the differences
between democracy at Florence and democracy in old Rome--how the first
began in great inequality of conditions, and ended in great equality,
while the process was reversed in the second; how at Rome the people
and the nobles shared power and office, while at Florence the victors
crushed and ruined their adversaries; how at Rome the people, by
common service with the nobles, acquired some of their virtues, while
at Florence the nobles were forced down to seem, as well as to be,
like the common people (_Istorie Fiorentine_, bk. iii).
This is only an example of the distinctions and qualifications which
it is necessary to introduce before we can prudently affirm or deny
anything about political institutions in general terms. Who would
deny that both the stability and the degree of difficulty of popular
government are closely connected in the United States with the
abundance of accessible land? Who would deny that in Great Britain
they are closely connected with the greater or less prosperity of our
commerce and manufactures? To take another kind of illustration
from Mr. Dicey's brilliant and instructive volume on the Law of the
Constitution. The governments of England and of France are both of
them popular in form; but does not a fundamental difference in their
whole spirit and working result from the existence in one country of
the _droit administratif_, and the absolute predominance in the other
of regular law, applied by the ordinary courts, and extending equally
over all classes of citizens? Distinctions and differences of this
order go for nothing in the pages before us; yet they are vital to the
discussion.
The same fallacious limitation, the same exclusion of the many various
causes that cooperate in the production of political results, is to be
discerned in nearly every argument. The author justly calls attention
to the extraordinary good luck which has befallen us as a nation. He
proceeds to warn us that if the desire for legislative innovation be
allowed to grow upon us at its present pace--pace assumed to be very
headlong indeed--the chances are that our luck will not last. We shall
have a disaster like Sedan, or the loss of Alsace Lorraine (p. 151).
This is a curiously narrow reading of contemporary history. Did
Austria lose Sadowa, or was the French Empire ruined at Sedan,
in consequence of the passion of either of those Governments for
legislative innovations; or must we not rather, in order to
explain these striking events, look to a large array of military,
geographical, financial, diplomatic, and dynastic considerations and
conditions? If so, what becomes of the moral? England is, no doubt,
the one great civilised power that has escaped an organic or
structural change within the last five-and-twenty years. Within that
period, the American Union, after a tremendous war, has revolutionised
the social institutions of the South, and reconstructed the
constitution. The French Empire has foundered, and a French Republic
once more bears the fortunes of a great State over troubled waters.
Germany has undergone a complete transformation; so has the Italian
peninsula. The internal and the external relations alike of the
Austrian Power are utterly different to-day from what they were twenty
years ago. Spain has passed from monarchy to republic, and back to
monarchy again, and gone from dynasty to dynasty. But what share had
legislative innovation in producing these great changes? No share at
all in any one case. What is the logic, then, of the warning that if
we persist in our taste for legislative innovation, we shall lose
our immunity from the violent changes that have overtaken other
States--changes with which legislative innovation had nothing to do?
In short, modern societies, whether autocratic or democratic, are
passing through a great transformation, social, religious, and
political. The process is full of embarrassments, difficulties, and
perils. These are the dominant marks of our era. To set them all down
to popular government is as narrow, as confused, and as unintelligent
as the imputation in a papal Encyclical of all modern ills to
Liberalism. You cannot isolate government, and judge it apart from the
other and deeper forces of the time. Western civilisation is slowly
entering on a new stage. Form of government is the smallest part of
it. It has been well said that those nations have the best chance of
escaping a catastrophe in the obscure and uncertain march before us,
who find a way of opening the most liberal career to the aspirations
of the present, without too rudely breaking with all the traditions of
the past. This is what popular government, wisely guided, is best able
to do.
But will wise guidance be endured? Sir Henry Maine seems to think that
it will not. Mill thought that it would. In a singularly luminous
passage in an essay which for some reason or another he never
republished, Mill says--
"We are the last persons to undervalue the power of moral
convictions. But the convictions of the mass of mankind run hand
in hand with their interests or their class feelings. _We have a
strong faith, stronger than either politicians or philosophers
generally have, in the influence of reason and virtue over men's
minds_; but it is in that of the reason and virtue of their own
side of the question. We expect few conversions by the mere force
of reason from one creed to the other. Men's intellects and hearts
have a large share in determining what _sort_ of Conservatives or
Liberals they will be; but it is their position (saving individual
exceptions) which makes them Conservatives or Liberals."
This double truth points to the good grounds that exist why we should
think hopefully of popular government, and why we should be slow to
believe that it has no better foundation to build upon than the unreal
assumptions of some bad philosophers, French or others.