English dislike of speculation by saying that all our philosophy
consists of a short catechism in two questions: "What is mind? No
matter. What is matter? Never mind." The only accepted appeal was to
tradition. Patriots were in the habit of saying that they took their
stand upon the ancient ways, and would not have the laws of England
changed. To enforce their argument they invented a story that the
constitution had come from Troy, and that the Romans had allowed it to
subsist untouched. Such fables did not avail against Strafford; and the
oracle of precedent sometimes gave responses adverse to the popular
cause. In the sovereign question of religion, this was decisive, for the
practice of the sixteenth century, as well as of the fifteenth,
testified in favour of intolerance. By royal command, the nation had
passed four times in one generation from one faith to another, with a
facility that made a fatal impression on Laud. In a country that had
proscribed every religion in turn, and had submitted to such a variety
of penal measures against Lollard and Arian, against Augsburg and Rome,
it seemed there could be no danger in cropping the ears of a Puritan.
But an age of stronger conviction had arrived; and men resolved to
abandon the ancient ways that led to the scaffold and the rack, and to
make the wisdom of their ancestors and the statutes of the land bow
before an unwritten law. Religious liberty had been the dream of great
Christian writers in the age of Constantine and Valentinian, a dream
never wholly realised in the Empire, and rudely dispelled when the
barbarians found that it exceeded the resources of their art to govern
civilised populations of another religion, and unity of worship was
imposed by laws of blood and by theories more cruel than the laws. But
from St. Athanasius and St. Ambrose down to Erasmus and More, each age
heard the protest of earnest men in behalf of the liberty of conscience,
and the peaceful days before the Reformation were full of promise that
it would prevail.
In the commotion that followed, men were glad to get tolerated
themselves by way of privilege and compromise, and willingly renounced
the wider application of the principle. Socinus was the first who, on
the ground that Church and State ought to be separated, required
universal toleration. But Socinus disarmed his own theory, for he was a
strict advocate of passive obedience.
The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle of civil,
and that civil liberty is the necessary condition of religious, was a
discovery reserved for the seventeenth century. Many years before the
names of Milton and Taylor, of Baxter and Locke were made illustrious by
their partial condemnation of intolerance, there were men among the
Independent congregations who grasped with vigour and sincerity the
principle that it is only by abridging the authority of States that the
liberty of Churches can be assured. That great political idea,
sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching men to treasure
the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of
justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of
what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.
The cause of religion, even under the unregenerate influence of worldly
passion, had as much to do as any clear notions of policy in making
this country the foremost of the free. It had been the deepest current
in the movement of 1641, and it remained the strongest motive that
survived the reaction of 1660.
The greatest writers of the Whig party, Burke and Macaulay, constantly
represented the statesmen of the Revolution as the legitimate ancestors
of modern liberty. It is humiliating to trace a political lineage to
Algernon Sidney, who was the paid agent of the French king; to Lord
Russell, who opposed religious toleration at least as much as absolute
monarchy; to Shaftesbury, who dipped his hands in the innocent blood
shed by the perjury of Titus Oates; to Halifax, who insisted that the
plot must be supported even if untrue; to Marlborough, who sent his
comrades to perish on an expedition which he had betrayed to the French;
to Locke, whose notion of liberty involves nothing more spiritual than
the security of property, and is consistent with slavery and
persecution; or even to Addison, who conceived that the right of voting
taxes belonged to no country but his own. Defoe affirms that from the
time of Charles II. to that of George I. he never knew a politician who
truly held the faith of either party; and the perversity of the
statesmen who led the assault against the later Stuarts threw back the
cause of progress for a century.
When the purport of the secret treaty became suspected by which Louis
XIV. pledged himself to support Charles II. with an army for the
destruction of Parliament, if Charles would overthrow the Anglican
Church, it was found necessary to make concession to the popular alarm.
It was proposed that whenever James should succeed, great part of the
royal prerogative and patronage should be transferred to Parliament. At
the same time, the disabilities of Nonconformists and Catholics would
have been removed. If the Limitation Bill, which Halifax supported with
signal ability, had passed, the monarchical constitution would have
advanced, in the seventeenth century, farther than it was destined to do
until the second quarter of the nineteenth. But the enemies of James,
guided by the Prince of Orange, preferred a Protestant king who should
be nearly absolute, to a constitutional king who should be a Catholic.
The scheme failed. James succeeded to a power which, in more cautious
hands, would have been practically uncontrolled, and the storm that cast
him down gathered beyond the sea.
By arresting the preponderance of France, the Revolution of 1688 struck
the first real blow at Continental despotism. At home it relieved
Dissent, purified justice, developed the national energies and
resources, and ultimately, by the Act of Settlement, placed the crown in
the gift of the people. But it neither introduced nor determined any
important principle, and, that both parties might be able to work
together, it left untouched the fundamental question between Whig and
Tory. For the divine right of kings it established, in the words of
Defoe, the divine right of freeholders; and their domination extended
for seventy years, under the authority of John Locke, the philosopher of
government by the gentry. Even Hume did not enlarge the bounds of his
ideas; and his narrow materialistic belief in the connection between
liberty and property captivated even the bolder mind of Fox.
By his idea that the powers of government ought to be divided according
to their nature, and not according to the division of classes, which
Montesquieu took up and developed with consummate talent, Locke is the
originator of the long reign of English institutions in foreign lands.
And his doctrine of resistance, or, as he finally termed it, the appeal
to Heaven, ruled the judgment of Chatham at a moment of solemn
transition in the history of the world. Our Parliamentary system,
managed by the great revolution families, was a contrivance by which
electors were compelled, and legislators were induced to vote against
their convictions; and the intimidation of the constituencies was
rewarded by the corruption of their representatives. About the year 1770
things had been brought back, by indirect ways, nearly to the condition
which the Revolution had been designed to remedy for ever. Europe seemed
incapable of becoming the home of free States. It was from America that
the plain ideas that men ought to mind their own business, and that the
nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State,--ideas long
locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin
folios,--burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined
to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man. Whether the British
legislature had a constitutional right to tax a subject colony was hard
to say, by the letter of the law. The general presumption was immense on
the side of authority; and the world believed that the will of the
constituted ruler ought to be supreme, and not the will of the subject
people. Very few bold writers went so far as to say that lawful power
may be resisted in cases of extreme necessity. But the colonisers of
America, who had gone forth not in search of gain, but to escape from
laws under which other Englishmen were content to live, were so
sensitive even to appearances that the Blue Laws of Connecticut forbade
men to walk to church within ten feet of their wives. And the proposed
tax, of only L12,000 a year, might have been easily borne. But the
reasons why Edward I. and his Council were not allowed to tax England
were reasons why George III. and his Parliament should not tax America.
The dispute involved a principle, namely, the right of controlling
government. Furthermore, it involved the conclusion that the Parliament
brought together by a derisive election had no just right over the
unrepresented nation, and it called on the people of England to take
back its power. Our best statesmen saw that whatever might be the law,
the rights of the nation were at stake. Chatham, in speeches better
remembered than any that have been delivered in Parliament, exhorted
America to be firm. Lord Camden, the late Chancellor, said: "Taxation
and representation are inseparably united. God hath joined them. No
British Parliament can separate them."
From the elements of that crisis Burke built up the noblest political
philosophy in the world. "I do not know the method," said he, "of
drawing up an indictment against a whole people. The natural rights of
mankind are indeed sacred things, and if any public measure is proved
mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that
measure, even if no charter at all could be set up against it. Only a
sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legislation and
administration, should dictate." In this way, just a hundred years ago,
the opportune reticence, the politic hesitancy of European
statesmanship, was at last broken down; and the principle gained ground,
that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot
control. The Americans placed it at the foundation of their new
government. They did more; for having subjected all civil authorities to
the popular will, they surrounded the popular will with restrictions
that the British legislature would not endure.
During the revolution in France the example of England, which had been
held up so long, could not for a moment compete with the influence of a
country whose institutions were so wisely framed to protect freedom even
against the perils of democracy. When Louis Philippe became king, he
assured the old Republican, Lafayette, that what he had seen in the
United States had convinced him that no government can be so good as a
Republic. There was a time in the Presidency of Monroe, about fifty-five
years ago, which men still speak of as "the era of good feeling," when
most of the incongruities that had come down from the Stuarts had been
reformed, and the motives of later divisions were yet inactive. The
causes of old-world trouble,--popular ignorance, pauperism, the glaring
contrast between rich and poor, religious strife, public debts, standing
armies and war,--were almost unknown. No other age or country had solved
so successfully the problems that attend the growth of free societies,
and time was to bring no further progress.
But I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the
beginning of my task. In the ages of which I have spoken, the history of
freedom was the history of the thing that was not. But since the
Declaration of Independence, or, to speak more justly, since the
Spaniards, deprived of their king, made a new government for themselves,
the only known forms of liberty, Republics and Constitutional Monarchy,
have made their way over the world. It would have been interesting to
trace the reaction of America on the Monarchies that achieved its
independence; to see how the sudden rise of political economy suggested
the idea of applying the methods of science to the art of government;
how Louis XVI., after confessing that despotism was useless, even to
make men happy by compulsion, appealed to the nation to do what was
beyond his skill, and thereby resigned his sceptre to the middle class,
and the intelligent men of France, shuddering at the awful recollections
of their own experience, struggled to shut out the past, that they might
deliver their children from the prince of the world and rescue the
living from the clutch of the dead, until the finest opportunity ever
given to the world was thrown away, because the passion for equality
made vain the hope of freedom.
And I should have wished to show you that the same deliberate rejection
of the moral code which smoothed the paths of absolute monarchy and of
oligarchy, signalised the advent of the democratic claim to unlimited
power,--that one of its leading champions avowed the design of
corrupting the moral sense of men, in order to destroy the influence of
religion, and a famous apostle of enlightenment and toleration wished
that the last king might be strangled with the entrails of the last
priest. I would have tried to explain the connection between the
doctrine of Adam Smith, that labour is the original source of all
wealth, and the conclusion that the producers of wealth virtually
compose the nation, by which Sieyes subverted historic France; and to
show that Rousseau's definition of the social compact as a voluntary
association of equal partners conducted Marat, by short and unavoidable
stages, to declare that the poorer classes were absolved, by the law of
self-preservation, from the conditions of a contract which awarded to
them misery and death; that they were at war with society, and had a
right to all they could get by exterminating the rich, and that their
inflexible theory of equality, the chief legacy of the Revolution,
together with the avowed inadequacy of economic science to grapple with
problems of the poor, revived the idea of renovating society on the
principle of self-sacrifice, which had been the generous aspiration of
the Essenes and the early Christians, of Fathers and Canonists and
Friars, of Erasmus, the most celebrated precursor of the Reformation, of
Sir Thomas More, its most illustrious victim, and of Fenelon, the most
popular of bishops, but which, during the forty years of its revival,
has been associated with envy and hatred and bloodshed, and is now the
most dangerous enemy lurking in our path.
Last, and most of all, having told so much of the unwisdom of our
ancestors, having exposed the sterility of the convulsion that burned
what they adored, and made the sins of the Republic mount up as high as
those of the monarchy, having shown that Legitimacy, which repudiated
the Revolution, and Imperialism, which crowned it, were but disguises of
the same element of violence and wrong, I should have wished, in order
that my address might not break off without a meaning or a moral, to
relate by whom, and in what connection, the true law of the formation of
free States was recognised, and how that discovery, closely akin to
those which, under the names of development, evolution, and continuity,
have given a new and deeper method to other sciences, solved the ancient
problem between stability and change, and determined the authority of
tradition on the progress of thought; how that theory, which Sir James
Mackintosh expressed by saying that Constitutions are not made, but
grow; the theory that custom and the national qualities of the governed,
and not the will of the government, are the makers of the law; and
therefore that the nation, which is the source of its own organic
institutions, should be charged with the perpetual custody of their
integrity, and with the duty of bringing the form into harmony with the
spirit, was made, by the singular co-operation of the purest
Conservative intellect with red-handed revolution, of Niebuhr with
Mazzini, to yield the idea of nationality, which, far more than the idea
of liberty, has governed the movement of the present age.
I do not like to conclude without inviting attention to the impressive
fact that so much of the hard fighting, the thinking, the enduring that
has contributed to the deliverance of man from the power of man, has
been the work of our countrymen, and of their descendants in other
lands. We have had to contend, as much as any people, against monarchs
of strong will and of resources secured by their foreign possession,
against men of rare capacity, against whole dynasties of born tyrants.
And yet that proud prerogative stands out on the background of our
history. Within a generation of the Conquest, the Normans were compelled
to recognise, in some grudging measure, the claims of the English
people. When the struggle between Church and State extended to England,
our Churchmen learned to associate themselves with the popular cause;
and, with few exceptions, neither the hierarchical spirit of the foreign
divines, nor the monarchical bias peculiar to the French, characterised
the writers of the English school. The Civil Law, transmitted from the
degenerate Empire to be the common prop of absolute power, was excluded
from England. The Canon Law was restrained, and this country never
admitted the Inquisition, nor fully accepted the use of torture which
invested Continental royalty with so many terrors. At the end of the
Middle Ages foreign writers acknowledged our superiority, and pointed to
these causes. After that, our gentry maintained the means of local
self-government such as no other country possessed. Divisions in
religion forced toleration. The confusion of the common law taught the
people that their best safeguard was the independence and the integrity
of the judges.
All these explanations lie on the surface, and are as visible as the
protecting ocean; but they can only be successive effects of a constant
cause which must lie in the same native qualities of perseverance,
moderation, individuality, and the manly sense of duty, which give to
the English race its supremacy in the stern art of labour, which has
enabled it to thrive as no other can on inhospitable shores, and which
(although no great people has less of the bloodthirsty craving for glory
and an army of 50,000 English soldiers has never been seen in battle)
caused Napoleon to exclaim, as he rode away from Waterloo, "It has
always been the same since Crecy."
Therefore, if there is reason for pride in the past, there is more for
hope in the time to come. Our advantages increase, while other nations
fear their neighbours or covet their neighbours' goods. Anomalies and
defects there are, fewer and less intolerable, if not less flagrant than
of old.
But I have fixed my eyes on the spaces that Heaven's light illuminates,
that I may not lay too heavy a strain on the indulgence with which you
have accompanied me over the dreary and heart-breaking course by which
men have passed to freedom; and because the light that has guided us is
still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van
of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the
future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same
thing that shall be.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: An address delivered to the members of the Bridgnorth
Institution at the Agricultural Hall, 28th May 1877.]
[Footnote 4: [Poynet, in his _Treatise on Political Power_.]]
III
SIR ERSKINE MAY'S DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE[5]
Scarcely thirty years separate the Europe of Guizot and Metternich from
these days of universal suffrage both in France and in United Germany;
when a condemned insurgent of 1848 is the constitutional Minister of
Austria; when Italy, from the Alps to the Adriatic, is governed by
friends of Mazzini; and statesmen who recoiled from the temerities of
Peel have doubled the electoral constituency of England. If the
philosopher who proclaimed the law that democratic progress is constant
and irrepressible had lived to see old age, he would have been startled
by the fulfilment of his prophecy. Throughout these years of
revolutionary change Sir Thomas Erskine May has been more closely and
constantly connected with the centre of public affairs than any other
Englishman, and his place, during most of the time, has been at the
table of the House of Commons, where he has sat, like Canute, and
watched the rising tide. Few could be better prepared to be the
historian of European Democracy than one who, having so long studied the
mechanism of popular government in the most illustrious of assemblies at
the height of its power, has written its history, and taught its methods
to the world.
It is not strange that so delicate and laborious a task should have
remained unattempted. Democracy is a gigantic current that has been fed
by many springs. Physical and spiritual causes have contributed to
swell it. Much has been done by economic theories, and more by economic
laws. The propelling force lay sometimes in doctrine and sometimes in
fact, and error has been as powerful as truth. Popular progress has been
determined at one time by legislation, at others by a book, an
invention, or a crime; and we may trace it to the influence of Greek
metaphysicians and Roman jurists, of barbarian custom and ecclesiastical
law, of the reformers who discarded the canonists, the sectaries who
discarded the reformers, and the philosophers who discarded the sects.
The scene has changed, as nation succeeded nation, and during the most
stagnant epoch of European life the new world stored up the forces that
have transformed the old.
A history that should pursue all the subtle threads from end to end
might be eminently valuable, but not as a tribute to peace and
conciliation. Few discoveries are more irritating than those which
expose the pedigree of ideas. Sharp definitions and unsparing analysis
would displace the veil beneath which society dissembles its divisions,
would make political disputes too violent for compromise and political
alliances too precarious for use, and would embitter politics with all
the passion of social and religious strife. Sir Erskine May writes for
all who take their stand within the broad lines of our constitution. His
judgment is averse from extremes. He turns from the discussion of
theories, and examines his subject by the daylight of institutions,
believing that laws depend much on the condition of society, and little
on notions and disputations unsupported by reality. He avows his
disbelief even in the influence of Locke, and cares little to inquire
how much self-government owes to Independency, or equality to the
Quakers; and how democracy was affected by the doctrine that society is
founded on contract, that happiness is the end of all government, or
labour the only source of wealth; and for this reason, because he always
touches ground, and brings to bear, on a vast array of sifted fact, the
light of sound sense and tried experience rather than dogmatic precept,
all men will read his book with profit, and almost all without offence.