themselves in the criticism of their government, he insists that there
is one defect which they insufficiently acknowledge. By law or custom no
man can represent any district but the one he resides in. If ten
statesmen live in the same street, nine will be thrown out of work. It
is worth while to point out (though this may not be the right place for
a purely political problem) that even in that piece of censure in which
he believes himself unsupported by his friends in the States, Mr. Bryce
says no more than intelligent Americans have said before him. It chances
that several of them have discussed this matter with me. One was
governor of his State, and another is among the compurgators cited in
the preface. Both were strongly persuaded that the usage in question is
an urgent evil; others, I am bound to add, judged differently, deeming
it valuable as a security against Boulangism--an object which can be
attained by restricting the number of constituencies to be addressed by
the same candidate. The two American presidents who agreed in saying
that Whig and Tory belong to natural history, proposed a dilemma which
Mr. Bryce wishes to elude. He prefers to stand half-way between the two,
and to resolve general principles into questions of expediency,
probability, and degree: "The wisest statesman is he who best holds the
balance between liberty and order." The sentiment is nearly that of
Croker and De Quincey, and it is plain that the author would discard the
vulgar definition that liberty is the end of government, and that in
politics things are to be valued as they minister to its security. He
writes in the spirit of John Adams when he said that the French and the
American Revolution had nothing in common, and of that eulogy of 1688 as
the true Restoration, on which Burke and Macaulay spent their finest
prose. A sentence which he takes from Judge Cooley contains the brief
abstract of his book: "America is not so much an example in her liberty
as in the covenanted and enduring securities which are intended to
prevent liberty degenerating into licence, and to establish a feeling of
trust and repose under a beneficent government, whose excellence, so
obvious in its freedom, is still more conspicuous in its careful
provision for permanence and stability." Mr. Bryce declares his own
point of view in the following significant terms: "The spirit of 1787
was an English spirit, and therefore a conservative spirit.... The
American constitution is no exception to the rule that everything which
has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots
deep in the past, and that the more slowly every institution has grown,
so much the more enduring is it likely to prove.... There is a hearty
puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of
1787.... No men were less revolutionary in spirit than the heroes of the
American Revolution. They made a revolution in the name of Magna Charta
and the Bill of Rights." I descry a bewildered Whig emerging from the
third volume with a reverent appreciation of ancestral wisdom, Burke's
_Reflections_, and the eighteen Canons of Dort, and a growing belief in
the function of ghosts to make laws for the quick.
When the last Valois consulted his dying mother, she advised him that
anybody can cut off, but that the sewing on is an acquired art. Mr.
Bryce feels strongly for the men who practised what Catharine thought so
difficult, and he stops for a moment in the midst of his very impersonal
treatise to deliver a panegyric on Alexander Hamilton. _Tanto nomini
nullum par elogium._ His merits can hardly be overstated. Talleyrand
assured Ticknor that he had never known his equal; Seward calls him "the
ablest and most effective statesman engaged in organising and
establishing the union"; Macmaster, the iconoclast, and Holst, poorly
endowed with the gift of praise, unite in saying that he was the
foremost genius among public men in the new world; Guizot told Rush that
_The Federalist_ was the greatest work known to him, in the application
of elementary principles of government to practical administration; his
paradox in support of political corruption, so hard to reconcile with
the character of an honest man, was repeated to the letter by Niebuhr.
In estimating Hamilton we have to remember that he was in no sense the
author of the constitution. In the convention he was isolated, and his
plan was rejected. In _The Federalist_, written before he was thirty, he
pleaded for a form of government which he distrusted and disliked. He
was out of sympathy with the spirit that prevailed, and was not the true
representative of the cause, like Madison, who said of him, "If his
theory of government deviated from the republican standard, he had the
candour to avow it, and the greater merit of co-operating faithfully in
maturing and supporting a system which was not his choice." The
development of the constitution, so far as it continued on his lines,
was the work of Marshall, barely known to us by the extracts in late
editions of the _Commentaries_. "_The Federalist_," says Story, "could
do little more than state the objects and general bearing of these
powers and functions. The masterly reasoning of the chief-justice has
followed them out to their ultimate results and boundaries with a
precision and clearness approaching, as near as may be, to mathematical
demonstration." Morris, who was as strong as Hamilton on the side of
federalism, testifies heavily against him as a leader: "More a theoretic
than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system
may be good in itself, and bad in relation to particular circumstances.
He well knew that his favourite form was inadmissible, unless as the
result of civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he
called an approaching crisis arose from a conviction that the kind of
government most suitable, in his opinion, to this extensive country,
could be established in no other way.... He trusted, moreover, that in
the changes and chances of time we should be involved in some war, which
might strengthen our union and nerve the executive. He was of all men
the most indiscreet. He knew that a limited monarchy, even if
established, could not preserve itself in this country.... He never
failed, on every occasion, to advocate the excellence of, and avow his
attachment to, monarchical government.... Thus, meaning very well, he
acted very ill, and approached the evils he apprehended by his very
solicitude to keep them at a distance." The language of Adams is more
severe; but Adams was an enemy. It has been justly said that "he wished
good men, as he termed them, to rule; meaning the wealthy, the
well-born, the socially eminent." The federalists have suffered somewhat
from this imputation; for a prejudice against any group claiming to
serve under that flag is among the bequests of the French Revolution.
"Les honnetes gens ont toujours peur: c'est leur nature," is a maxim of
Chateaubriand. A man most divergent and unlike him, Menou, had drawn the
same conclusion: "En revolution il ne faut jamais se mettre du cote des
honnetes gens: ils sont toujours balayes." And Royer Collard, with the
candour one shows in describing friends, said: "C'est le parti des
honnetes gens qui est le moins honnete de tous les partis. Tout le
monde, meme dans ses erreurs, etait honnete a l'assemblee constituante,
excepte le cote droit." Hamilton stands higher as a political
philosopher than as an American partisan. Europeans are generally
liberal for the sake of something that is not liberty, and conservative
for an object to be conserved; and in a jungle of other motives besides
the reason of state we cannot often eliminate unadulterated or
disinterested conservatism. We think of land and capital, tradition and
custom, the aristocracy and the services, the crown and the altar. It is
the singular superiority of Hamilton that he is really anxious about
nothing but the exceeding difficulty of quelling the centrifugal forces,
and that no kindred and coequal powers divide his attachment or
intercept his view. Therefore he is the most scientific of conservative
thinkers, and there is not one in whom the doctrine that prefers the
ship to the crew can be so profitably studied.
In his scruple to do justice to conservative doctrine Mr. Bryce extracts
a passage from a letter of Canning to Croker which, by itself, does not
adequately represent that minister's views. "Am I to understand, then,
that you consider the king as completely in the hands of the Tory
aristocracy as his father, or rather as George II. was in the hands of
the Whigs? If so, George III. reigned, and Mr. Pitt (both father and
son) administered the government, in vain. I have a better opinion of
the real vigour of the crown when it chooses to put forth its own
strength, and I am not without some reliance on the body of the people."
The finest mind reared by many generations of English conservatism was
not always so faithful to monarchical traditions, and in addressing the
incessant polemist of Toryism Canning made himself out a trifle better
than he really was. His intercourse with Marcellus in 1823 exhibits a
diluted orthodoxy: "Le systeme britannique n'est que le butin des
longues victoires remportees par les sujets contre le monarque.
Oubliez-vous que les rois ne doivent pas donner des institutions, mais
que les institutions seules doivent donner des rois?... Connaissez-vous
un roi qui merite d'etre libre, dans le sens implicite du mot?... Et
George IV., croyez-vous que je serais son ministre, s'il avait ete libre
de choisir?... Quand un roi denie au peuple les institutions dont le
peuple a besoin, quel est le procede de l'Angleterre? Elle expulse ce
roi, et met a sa place un roi d'une famille alliee sans doute, mais qui
se trouve ainsi, non plus un fils de la royaute, confiant dans le droit
de ses ancetres, mais le fils des institutions nationales, tirant tous
ses droits de cette seule origine.... Le gouvernement representatif est
encore bon a une chose que sa majeste a oubliee. Il fait que des
ministres essuient sans repliquer les epigrammes d'un roi qui cherche a
se venger ainsi de son impuissance."
Mr. Bryce's work has received a hearty welcome in its proper hemisphere,
and I know not that any critic has doubted whether the pious founder,
with the dogma of unbroken continuity, strikes the just note or covers
all the ground. At another angle, the origin of the greatest power and
the grandest polity in the annals of mankind emits a different ray. It
was a favourite doctrine with Webster and Tocqueville that the beliefs
of the pilgrims inspired the Revolution, which others deem a triumph of
pelagianism; while J.Q. Adams affirms that "not one of the motives which
stimulated the puritans of 1643 had the slightest influence in actuating
the confederacy of 1774." The Dutch statesman Hogendorp, returning from
the United States in 1784, had the following dialogue with the
stadtholder: "La religion, monseigneur, a moins d'influence que jamais
sur les esprits.... Il y a toute une province de quakers?... Depuis la
revolution il semble que ces sortes de differences s'evanouissent....
Les Bostoniens ne sont-ils pas fort devots?... Ils l'etaient,
monseigneur, mais a lire les descriptions faites il y a vingt ou meme
dix ans, on ne les reconnait pas de ce cote-la." It is an old story that
the federal constitution, unlike that of Herault de Sechelles, makes no
allusion to the Deity; that there is none in the president's oath; and
that in 1796 it was stated officially that the government of the United
States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. No three
men had more to do with the new order than Franklin, Adams, and
Jefferson. Franklin's irreligious tone was such that his manuscripts,
like Bentham's, were suppressed, to the present year. Adams called the
Christian faith a horrid blasphemy. Of Jefferson we are assured that, if
not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence; and he
hoped that the French arms "would bring at length kings, nobles, and
priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with
human blood." If Calvin prompted the Revolution, it was after he had
suffered from contact with Tom Paine; and we must make room for other
influences which, in that generation, swayed the world from the rising
to the setting sun. It was an age of faith in the secular sense
described by Guizot: "C'etait un siecle ardent et sincere, un siecle
plein de foi et d'enthousiasme. Il a eu foi dans la verite, car il lui a
reconnu le droit de regner."
In point both of principle and policy, Mr. Bryce does well to load the
scale that is not his own, and to let the jurist within him sometimes
mask the philosophic politician. I have to speak of him not as a
political reasoner or as an observer of life in motion, but only in the
character which he assiduously lays aside. If he had guarded less
against his own historic faculty, and had allowed space to take up
neglected threads, he would have had to expose the boundless innovation,
the unfathomed gulf produced by American independence, and there would
be no opening to back the Jeffersonian shears against the darning-needle
of the great chief-justice. My misgiving lies in the line of thought of
Riehl and the elder Cherbuliez. The first of those eminent conservatives
writes: "Die Extreme, nicht deren Vermittelungen und Abschwaechungen,
deuten die Zukunft vor." The Genevese has just the same remark: "Les
idees n'ont jamais plus de puissance que sous leur forme la plus
abstraite. Les idees abstraites ont plus remue le monde, elles ont cause
plus de revolutions et laisse plus de traces durables que les idees
pratiques." Lassalle says, "Kein Einzelner denkt mit der Consequenz
eines Volksgeistes." Schelling may help us over the parting ways: "Der
erzeugte Gedanke ist eine unabhaengige Macht, fuer sich fortwirkend, ja,
in der menschlichen Seele, so anwachsend, dass er seine eigene Mutter
bezwingt und unterwirft." After the philosopher, let us conclude with a
divine: "C'est de revolte en revolte, si l'on veut employer ce mot, que
les societes se perfectionnent, que la civilisation s'etablit, que la
justice regne, que la verite fleurit."
The anti-revolutionary temper of the Revolution belongs to 1787, not to
1776. Another element was at work, and it is the other element that is
new, effective, characteristic, and added permanently to the experience
of the world. The story of the revolted colonies impresses us first and
most distinctly as the supreme manifestation of the law of resistance,
as the abstract revolution in its purest and most perfect shape. No
people was so free as the insurgents; no government less oppressive than
the government which they overthrew. Those who deem Washington and
Hamilton honest can apply the term to few European statesmen. Their
example presents a thorn, not a cushion, and threatens all existing
political forms, with the doubtful exception of the federal constitution
of 1874. It teaches that men ought to be in arms even against a remote
and constructive danger to their freedom; that even if the cloud is no
bigger than a man's hand, it is their right and duty to stake the
national existence, to sacrifice lives and fortunes, to cover the
country with a lake of blood, to shatter crowns and sceptres and fling
parliaments into the sea. On this principle of subversion they erected
their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its orbit
and assigned a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken
chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten
law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason
cutting as clean as Atropos. The wisest philosopher of the old world
instructs us to take things as they are, and to adore God in the event:
"Il faut toujours etre content de l'ordre du passe, parce qu'il est
conforme a la volonte de Dieu absolue, qu'on connoit par l'evenement."
The contrary is the text of Emerson: "Institutions are not aboriginal,
though they existed before we were born. They are not superior to the
citizen. Every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular
case. We may make as good; we may make better." More to the present
point is the language of Seward: "The rights asserted by our forefathers
were not peculiar to themselves, they were the common rights of mankind.
The basis of the constitution was laid broader by far than the
superstructure which the conflicting interests and prejudices of the day
suffered to be erected. The constitution and laws of the federal
government did not practically extend those principles throughout the
new system of government; but they were plainly promulgated in the
declaration of independence. Their complete development and reduction to
practical operation constitute the progress which all liberal statesmen
desire to promote, and the end of that progress will be complete
political equality among ourselves, and the extension and perfection of
institutions similar to our own throughout the world." A passage which
Hamilton's editor selects as the keynote of his system expresses well
enough the spirit of the Revolution: "The sacred rights of mankind are
not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are
written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the
hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by
mortal power. I consider civil liberty, in a genuine, unadulterated
sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am convinced that the
whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can be wrested from no
part of them without the blackest and most aggravated guilt." Those were
the days when a philosopher divided governments into two kinds, the bad
and the good, that is, those which exist and those which do not exist;
and when Burke, in the fervour of early liberalism, proclaimed that a
revolution was the only thing that could do the world any good: "Nothing
less than a convulsion that will shake the globe to its centre can ever
restore the European nations to that liberty by which they were once so
much distinguished."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 402: _English Historical Review_, 1889.]
XVII
HISTORICAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE AND FRENCH BELGIUM AND SWITZERLAND.
By ROBERT FLINT[403]
When Dr. Flint's former work appeared, a critic, who, it is true, was
also a rival, objected that it was diffusely written. What then occupied
three hundred and thirty pages has now expanded to seven hundred, and
suggests a doubt as to the use of criticism. It must at once be said
that the increase is nearly all material gain. The author does not cling
to his main topic, and, as he insists that the science he is adumbrating
flourishes on the study of facts only, and not on speculative ideas, he
bestows some needless attention on historians who professed no
philosophy, or who, like Daniel and Velly, were not the best of their
kind. Here and there, as in the account of Condorcet, there may be an
unprofitable or superfluous sentence. But on the whole the enlarged
treatment of the philosophy of history in France is accomplished not by
expansion, but by solid and essential addition. Many writers are
included whom the earlier volume passed over, and Cousin occupies fewer
pages now than in 1874, by the aid of smaller type and the omission of a
passage injurious to Schelling. Many necessary corrections and
improvements have been made, such as the transfer of Ballanche from
theocracy to the liberal Catholicism of which he is supposed to be the
founder.
Dr. Flint's unchallenged superiority consists alike in his familiarity
with obscure, but not irrelevant authors, whom he has brought into
line, and in his scrupulous fairness towards all whose attempted systems
he has analysed. He is hearty in appreciating talent of every kind, but
he is discriminating in his judgment of ideas, and rarely sympathetic.
Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would
be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of
polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they
would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse
the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so
clever. Without transfiguration the effect might be attained by
sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original.
Excepting one unduly favoured competitor, who fills two pages with
untranslated French, there is little direct quotation. Cournot is one of
those who, having been overlooked at first, are here raised to
prominence. He is urgently, and justly, recommended to the attention of
students. "They will find that every page bears the impress of patient,
independent, and sagacious thought. I believe I have not met with a more
genuine thinker in the course of my investigations. He was a man of the
finest intellectual qualities, of a powerful and absolutely truthful
mind." But then we are warned that Cournot never wrote a line for the
general reader, and accordingly he is not permitted to speak for
himself. Yet it was this thoughtful Frenchman who said: "Aucune idee
parmi celles qui se referent a l'ordre des faits naturels ne tient de
plus pres a la famille des idees religieuses que l'idee du progres, et
n'est plus propre a devenir le principe d'une sorte de foi religieuse
pour ceux qui n'en ont pas d'autres. Elle a, comme la foi religieuse, la
vertu de relever les ames et les caracteres."
The successive theories gain neither in clearness nor in contrast by the
order in which they stand. As other countries are reserved for other
volumes, Cousin precedes Hegel, who was his master, whilst Quetelet is
barely mentioned in his own place, and has to wait for Buckle, if not
for Oettingen and Ruemelin, before he comes on for discussion. The finer
threads, the underground currents, are not carefully traced. The
connection between the _juste milieu_ in politics and eclecticism in
philosophy was already stated by the chief eclectic; but the subtler
link between the Catholic legitimists and democracy seems to have
escaped the author's notice. He says that the republic proclaimed
universal suffrage in 1848, and he considers it a triumph for the party
of Lafayette. In fact, it was the triumph of an opposite school--of
those legitimists who appealed from the narrow franchise which sustained
the Orleans dynasty to the nation behind it. The chairman of the
constitutional committee was a legitimist, and he, inspired by the abbe
de Genoude, of the _Gazette de France_, and opposed by Odilon Barrot,
insisted on the pure logic of absolute democracy.