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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14735 ***
+
+HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+No. 103
+
+_Editors:_
+
+HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D. LL.D., F.B.A.
+PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
+PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND
+
+FROM LOCKE TO BENTHAM
+
+
+BY
+
+HAROLD J. LASKI
+
+
+SOMETIME EXHIBITIONER OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD, OF THE DEPARTMENT OF
+HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF STUDIES IN THE PROBLEM OF
+SOVEREIGNTY AND AUTHORITY IN THE MODERN STATE
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+LONDON
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+It is impossible for me to publish this book without some expression of
+the debt it owes to Leslie Stephen's _History of the English Thought in
+the Eighteenth Century_. It is almost insolent to praise such work; but
+I may be permitted to say that no one can fully appreciate either its
+wisdom or its knowledge who has not had to dig among the original texts.
+
+Were so small a volume worthy to bear a dedication, I should associate
+it with the name of my friend Walter Lippmann. He and I have so often
+discussed the substance of its problems that I am certain a good deal of
+what I feel to be my own is, where it has merit, really his. This volume
+is thus in great part a tribute to him; though there is little that can
+repay such friendship as he gives.
+
+H.J.L.
+
+HARVARD UNIVERSITY
+Sept. 15, 1919
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                                       PAGE
+
+  I. INTRODUCTION                                7
+
+ II. THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION           24
+
+III. CHURCH AND STATE                           77
+
+ IV. THE ERA OF STAGNATION                     127
+
+  V. SIGNS OF CHANGE                           159
+
+ VI. BURKE                                     213
+
+VII. THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM    281
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY                                   317
+
+INDEX                                          321
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The eighteenth century may be said to begin with the Revolution of 1688;
+for, with its completion, the dogma of Divine Right disappeared for ever
+from English politics. Its place was but partially filled until Hume and
+Burke supplied the outlines of a new philosophy. For the observer of
+this age can hardly fail, as he notes its relative barrenness of
+abstract ideas, to be impressed by the large part Divine Right must have
+played in the politics of the succeeding century. Its very absoluteness
+made for keen partisanship on the one side and the other. It could
+produce at once the longwinded rhapsodies of Filmer and, by repulsion,
+the wearisome reiterations of Algernon Sidney. Once the foundations of
+Divine Right had been destroyed by Locke, the basis of passionate
+controversy was absent. The theory of a social contract never produced
+in England the enthusiasm it evoked in France, for the simple reason
+that the main objective of Rousseau and his disciples had already been
+secured there by other weapons. And this has perhaps given to the
+eighteenth century an urbaneness from which its predecessor was largely
+free. Sermons are perhaps the best test of such a change; and it is a
+relief to move from the addresses bristling with Suarez and Bellarmine
+to the noble exhortations of Bishop Butler. Not until the French
+Revolution were ultimate dogmas again called into question; and it is
+about them only that political speculation provokes deep feeling. The
+urbanity, indeed, is not entirely new. The Restoration had heralded its
+coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common with Bolingbroke and
+Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an
+historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers
+in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different
+substitutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and
+Blackstone are respectable, they bear no comparison with masters like
+Selden and Sir Henry Spelman.
+
+Yet urbanity must not deceive us. The eighteenth century has an
+importance in English politics which the comparative absence of
+systematic speculation can not conceal. If its large constitutional
+outlines had been traced by a preceding age, its administrative detail
+had still to be secured. The process was very gradual; and the attempt
+of George III to arrest it produced the splendid effort of Edmund Burke.
+Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and stumbling; but it
+gave to the principle of consent a permanent place in English politics.
+It is the age which saw the crystallization of the party-system, and
+therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called
+the vital principle of representative government. Few discussions of the
+sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith
+gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite
+its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of Church
+and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed its name. De
+Lolme is the real parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in
+Bagehot's hands, become not the least fruitful type of political method.
+Blackstone, in a real sense, may be called the ancestor of Professor
+Dicey. The very calmness of the atmosphere only the more surely paved
+the way for the surprising novelties of Godwin and the revolutionists.
+
+Nor must we neglect the relation between its ethics and its politics.
+The eighteenth century school of British moralists has suffered somewhat
+beside the greater glories of Berkeley and Hume. Yet it was a great work
+to which they bent their effort, and they knew its greatness. The
+deistic controversy involved a fresh investigation of the basis of
+morals; and it is to the credit of the investigators that they attempted
+to provide it in social terms. It is, indeed, one of the primary
+characteristics of the British mind to be interested in problems of
+conduct rather than of thought. The seventeenth century had, for the
+most part, been interested in theology and government; and its
+preoccupation, in both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its
+conclusions unfitted for a period dominated by rationalism. Locke
+regarded his _Human Understanding_ as the preliminary to an ethical
+enquiry; and Hume seems to have considered his _Principles of Morals_
+the most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of
+Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have been
+represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been
+periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no one will be
+inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the spiritual idealism of
+the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson and the Wesleyan revival
+will make us generalize with caution. But the truth was that theological
+ethics had become empty and inadequate, and the problem was therefore
+urgent. That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith--to take
+only men of the first eminence--were thinking not less for politics than
+for ethics when they sought to justify the ways of man to man. For all
+of them saw that a theory of society is impossible without the provision
+of psychological foundations; and those must, above all, result in a
+theory of conduct if the social bond is to be maintained. That sure
+insight is, of course, one current only in a greater English stream
+which reaches back to Hobbes at its source and forward to T.H. Green at
+perhaps its fullest. Its value is its denial of politics as a science
+distinct from other human relations; and that is why Adam Smith can
+write of moral sentiments no less than of the wealth of nations. The
+eighteenth century saw clearly that each aspect of social life must find
+its place in the political equation.
+
+Yet it is undoubtedly an age of methods rather than of principles; and,
+as such its peaceful prosperity was well suited to its questions.
+Problems of technique, such as the cabinet and the Bank of England
+required the absence of passionate debate if they were in any fruitful
+fashion to be solved. Nor must the achievement of the age in politics be
+minimized. It was, of course, a complacent time; but we ought to note
+that foreigners of distinction did not wonder at its complacency.
+Voltaire and Montesquieu look back to England in the eighteenth century
+for the substance of political truths. The American colonies took alike
+their methods and their arguments from English ancestors; and Burke
+provided them with the main elements of justification. The very
+quietness, indeed, of the time was the natural outcome of a century of
+storm; and England surely had some right to be contented when her
+political system was compared with the governments of France and
+Germany. Not, indeed, that the full fruit of the Revolution was
+gathered. The principle of consent came, in practice and till 1760, to
+mean the government of the Whig Oligarchy; and the _Extraordinary Black
+Book_ remains to tell us what happened when George III gave the Tory
+party a new lease of power. There is throughout the time an
+over-emphasis upon the value of order, and a not unnatural tendency to
+confound the private good of the governing class with the general
+welfare of the state. It became the fixed policy of Walpole to make
+prosperity the mask for political stagnation. He turned political debate
+from principles to personalities, and a sterile generation was the
+outcome of his cunning.
+
+Not that this barrenness is without its compensations. The theories of
+the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within a generation. The
+constitutional ideas of the seventeenth century had no substance for an
+England where Anglicanism and agriculture were beginning to lose the
+rigid outlines of overwhelming predominance. What was needed was the
+assurance of safety for the Church that her virtue might be tested in
+the light of nonconformist practice on the one hand, and the new
+rationalism on the other. What was needed also was the expansion of
+English commerce into the new channels opened for it by the victories of
+Chatham. Mr. Chief Justice Holt had given it the legal categories it
+would require; and Hume and Adam Smith were to explain that commerce
+might grow with small danger to agricultural prosperity. Beneath the
+apparent calm of Walpole's rule new forces were fast stirring. That can
+be seen on every side. The sturdy morality of Johnson, the new literary
+forms of Richardson and Fielding, the theatre which Garrick founded upon
+the ruins produced by Collier's indignation, the revival of which Law
+and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the stagnation was sleep
+rather than death. The needed events of shock were close at hand. The
+people of England would never have discovered the real meaning of 1688
+if George III had not denied its principles. When he enforced the
+resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and
+English radicalism were born; for the _Present Discontents_ and the
+_Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights_ are the dawn of a
+splendid recovery. And they made possible the speculative ferment which
+showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and
+Rousseau. Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor
+despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the complacency of
+the eighteenth century. But the peace of the Tudors was the death-bed of
+the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism of the early eighteenth
+century which made possible the birth of democratic England.
+
+The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is deep-rooted in the conditions of
+the past. Locke could not have written had not Hobbes and Filmer
+defended in set terms the ideal of despotic government. He announced the
+advent of the modern system of parliamentary government; and from his
+time the debate has been rather of the conditions under which it is to
+work, than of the foundations upon which it is based. Burke, for
+example, wrote what constitutes the supreme analysis of the statesman's
+art. Adam Smith discussed in what fashion the prosperity of peoples
+could be best advanced. From Locke, that is to say, the subject of
+discussion is rather _politik_ than _staatslehre_. The great debate
+inaugurated by the Reformation ceased when Locke had outlined an
+intelligible basis for parliamentary government. Hume, Bolingbroke,
+Burke, are all of them concerned with the detail of political
+arrangement in a fashion which presupposes the acceptance of a basis
+previously known. Burke, indeed, toward the latter part of his life,
+awoke to the realization that men were dissatisfied with the traditional
+substance of the State. But he met the new desires with hate instead of
+understanding, and the Napoleonic wars drove the current of democratic
+opinion underground. Hall and Owen and Hodgskin inherited the thoughts
+of Ogilvie and Spence and Paine; and if they did not give them
+substance, at least they gave them form for a later time.
+
+Nor is the reason for this preoccupation far to seek. The advance of
+English politics in the preceding two centuries was mainly an advance of
+structure; yet relative at least to continental fact, it appeared
+liberal enough to hide the disharmonies of its inner content. The King
+was still a mighty influence. The power of the aristocracy was hardly
+broken until the Reform Bill of 1867. The Church continued to dominate
+the political aspect of English religious life until, after 1832, new
+elements alien from her ideals were introduced into the House of
+Commons. The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial
+Revolution, when a new class of men attained control of the nation's
+economic power. Only then was a realignment of political forces
+essential. Only then, that is to say, had the time arrived for a new
+theory of the State.
+
+The political ideas of the eighteenth century are thus in some sort a
+comment upon the system established by the Revolution; and that is, in
+its turn, the product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in
+the preceding age. But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or
+its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly
+aristocratic. From no accusation were its statesmen more anxious to be
+free than from that of a belief in democratic government. Whether Whigs
+or Tories were in power, it was always the great families who ruled. For
+them the Church, at least in its higher branches, existed; and the
+difference between nobleman and commoner at Oxford is as striking as it
+is hideous to this generation. For them also literature and the theatre
+made their display; and if Dr. Johnson could heap an immortal contumely
+upon the name of patron, we all know of the reverence he felt in the
+presence of the king. Divine Right and non-resistance were dead, but
+they had not died without a struggle. Freedom of the press and legal
+equality may have been obtained; but it was not until the passage of
+Fox's Libel Act that the first became secure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond
+have recently illumined for us the inward meaning of the second. The
+populace might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt
+upon an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the
+unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons. Such
+outbursts are yet the exception to the prevailing temper. The
+deliberations of Parliament were still, at least technically, a secret;
+and membership therein, save for one or two anomalies like Westminster
+and Bristol, was still the private possession of a privileged class. The
+Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract and general freedom, than a
+special release from the arbitrary will of a stupid monarch who aroused
+against himself every deep-seated prejudice of his generation. The
+England which sent James II upon his travels may be, as Hume pointed
+out, reduced to a pathetic fragment even of its electorate. The masses
+were unknown and undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to
+protest against some wise reform like Walpole's Excise Scheme, or to
+become, as in Goldsmith and Cowper and Crabbe, the object of
+half-pitying poetic sentiment. How deep-rooted was the notion of
+aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial
+fact Rousseau's demand for freedom. The protest of Burke against its
+supposed anarchy swept England like a flame; and only a courageous
+handful could be found to protest against Pitt's prostitution of her
+freedom.
+
+Such an age could make but little pretence to discovery; and, indeed, it
+is most largely absent from its speculation. In its political ideas this
+is necessarily and especially the case. For the State is at no time an
+unchanging organization; it reflects with singular exactness the
+dominating ideas of its environment. That division into government and
+subjects which is its main characteristic is here noteworthy for the
+narrowness of the class from which the government is derived, and the
+consistent inertia of those over whom it rules. There is curiously
+little controversy over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most
+men acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament. What balance of
+forces is necessary to its most perfect equilibrium may arouse
+dissension when George III forgets the result of half a century's
+evolution. Junius may have to explain in invective what Burke
+magistrally demonstrated in terms of political philosophy. But the
+deeper problems of the state lay hidden until Bentham and the
+revolutionists came to insist upon their presence. That did not mean
+that the eighteenth century was a soulless failure. Rather did it mean
+that a period of transition had been successfully bridged. The stage was
+set for a new effort simply because the theories of the older philosophy
+no longer represented the facts at issue.
+
+It was thus Locke only in this period who confronted the general
+problems of the modern State. Other thinkers assumed his structure and
+dealt with the details he left undetermined. The main problems, the
+Church apart, arose when a foreigner occupied the English throne and
+left the methods of government to those who were acquainted with them.
+That most happy of all the happy accidents in English history made
+Walpole the fundamental statesman of the time. He used his opportunity
+to the full. Inheriting the possibilities of the cabinet system he gave
+it its modern expression by creating the office of Prime Minister. The
+party-system was already inevitable; and with his advent to full power
+in 1727 we have the characteristic outlines of English representative
+government. Thenceforward, there are, on the whole, but three large
+questions with which the age concerned itself. Toleration had already
+been won by the persistent necessities of two generations, and the noble
+determination of William III; but the place of the Church in the
+Revolution State and the nature of that State were still undetermined.
+Hoadly had one solution, Law another; and the genial rationalism of the
+time, coupled with the political affiliations of the High Church party,
+combined to give Hoadly the victory; but his opponents, and Law
+especially, remained to be the parents of a movement for ecclesiastical
+freedom of which it has been the good fortune of Oxford to supply in
+each succeeding century the leaders. America presented again the problem
+of consent in the special perspective of the imperial relation; and the
+decision which grew out of the blundering obscurantism of the King
+enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the principles of
+1688. Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster empire; and the
+industrial system which his effort quickened could not live under an
+economic régime which still bore traces of the narrow nationalism of the
+Tudors. No man was so emphatically representative of his epoch as Adam
+Smith; and no thinker has ever stated in such generous terms the answer
+of his time to the most vital of its questions. The answer, indeed, like
+all good answers, revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the
+prospect of its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age
+that was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real
+appreciation of it. The American War and the two great revolutions
+brought a new race of thinkers into being. The French seed at last
+produced its harvest. Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even
+while he rejected his methods. For a time, indeed, the heat and dust of
+war obscured the issue that Bentham raised. But the certainties of the
+future lay on his side.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the attempt of
+James II to establish a despotism in alliance with France and Rome. It
+was almost entirely a movement of the aristocracy, and, for the most
+part, it was aristocratic opposition that it encountered. What it did
+was to make for ever impossible the thought of reunion with Rome and the
+theory that the throne could be established on any other basis than the
+consent of Parliament. For no one could pretend that William of Orange
+ruled by Divine Right. The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the
+deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not
+calculated to deceive even the warmest of William's adherents. An
+unconstitutional Parliament thereupon declared the throne vacant; and
+after much negotiation William and Mary were invited to occupy it. To
+William the invitation was irresistible. It gave him the assistance of
+the first maritime power in Europe against the imperialism of Louis XIV.
+It ensured the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an
+enemy who never slumbered. Nor did England find the new régime
+unwelcome. Every widespread conviction of her people had been wantonly
+outraged by the blundering stupidity of James. If a large fraction of
+the English Church held aloof from the new order on technical grounds,
+the commercial classes gave it their warm support; and many who doubted
+in theory submitted in practice. All at least were conscious that a new
+era had dawned.
+
+For William had come over with a definite purpose in view. James had
+wrought havoc with what the Civil Wars had made the essence of the
+English constitution; and it had become important to define in set terms
+the conditions upon which the life of kings must in the future be
+regulated. The reign of William is nothing so much as the period of that
+definition; and the fortunate discovery was made of the mechanisms
+whereby its translation into practice might be secured. The Bill of
+Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701) are the foundation-stones
+of the modern constitutional system.
+
+What, broadly, was established was the dependence of the crown upon
+Parliament. Finance and the army were brought under Parliamentary
+control by the simple expedient of making its annual summons essential.
+The right of petition was re-affirmed; and the independence of the
+judges and ministerial responsibility were secured by the same act which
+forever excluded the legitimate heirs from their royal inheritance. It
+is difficult not to be amazed at the almost casual fashion in which so
+striking a revolution was effected. Not, indeed, that the solution
+worked easily at the outset. William remained to the end a foreigner,
+who could not understand the inwardness of English politics. It was the
+necessities of foreign policy which drove him to admit the immense
+possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his own best
+safeguard in the foundation of the Bank of England. The Cabinet,
+towards the close of his reign, had already become the fundamental
+administrative instrument. Originally a committee of the Privy Council,
+it had no party basis until the ingenious Sunderland atoned for a score
+of dishonesties by insisting that the root of its efficiency would be
+found in its selection from a single party. William acquiesced but
+doubtfully; for, until the end of his life, he never understood why his
+ministers should not be a group of able counsellors chosen without
+reference to their political affiliations. Sunderland knew better for
+the simple reason that he belonged to that period when the Whigs and
+Tories had gambled against each other for their heads. He knew that no
+council-board could with comfort contain both himself and Halifax; just
+as William himself was to learn quite early that neither honor nor
+confidence could win unswerving support from John Churchill. There is a
+certain feverishness in the atmosphere of the reign which shows how many
+kept an anxious eye on St. Germain even while they attended the morning
+levee at Whitehall.
+
+What secured the permanence of the settlement was less the policy of
+William than the blunder of the French monarch. Patience, foresight and
+generosity had not availed to win for William more than a grudging
+recognition of his kingship. He had received only a half-hearted support
+for his foreign policy. The army, despite his protests, had been
+reduced; and the enforced return of his own Dutch Guards to Holland was
+deliberately conceived to cause him pain. But at the very moment when
+his strength seemed weakest James II died; and Louis XIV, despite
+written obligation, sought to comfort the last moments of his tragic
+exile by the falsely chivalrous recognition of the Old Pretender as the
+rightful English king. It was a terrible mistake. It did for William
+what no action of his own could ever have achieved. It suggested that
+England must receive its ruler at the hands of a foreign sovereign. The
+national pride of the people rallied to the cause for which William
+stood. He was king--so, at least in contrast to Louis' decision, it
+appeared--by their deliberate choice and the settlement of which he was
+the symbol would be maintained. Parliament granted to William all that
+his foreign policy could have demanded. His own death was only the
+prelude to the victories of Marlborough. Those victories seemed to seal
+the solution of 1688. A moment came when sentiment and intrigue combined
+to throw in jeopardy the Act of Settlement. But Death held the stakes
+against the gambler's throw of Bolingbroke; and the accession of George
+I assured the permanence of Revolution principles.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort
+to justify the innovations of 1688. He sought, as he said, "to establish
+the throne of our great Restorer, our present King William, and make
+good his title in the consent of the people." In the debate which
+followed his argument remained unanswered, for the sufficient reason
+that it had the common sense of the generation on his side. Yet Locke
+has suffered not a little at the hands of succeeding thinkers. Though
+his influence upon his own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed to
+him the acutest of his insights; though the principles of the American
+Revolution are in large part an acknowledged adoption of his own; he has
+become one of the political classics who are taken for granted rather
+than read. It is a profound and regrettable error. Locke may not possess
+the clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing
+into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the first
+of English political thinkers. He yet stated more clearly than either
+the general problem of the modern State. Hobbes, after all, worked with
+an impossible psychology and sought no more than the prescription
+against disorder. Burke wrote rather a text-book for the cautious
+administrator than a guide for the liberal statesman. But Locke saw that
+the main problem of the State is the conquest of freedom and it was for
+its definition in terms of individual good that he above all strove.
+
+Much, doubtless, of his neglect is due to the medium in which he worked.
+He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only possible
+retort to the theory of Divine Right. He so emphasized the principle of
+consent that when contractualism came in its turn to be discarded, it
+was discovered that Locke suffered far more than Hobbes by the change so
+made. For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as strong
+government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men,
+while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to
+their opportunity for moral expression. Nor did he, like Rousseau, seize
+upon the organic nature of the State. To him the State was always a mere
+aggregate, and the convenient simplicity of majority-rule solved, for
+him, the vital political problems. But Rousseau was translated into the
+complex dialectic of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he
+would have doubtless been the first to disown. Nor was Locke aided by
+his philosophic outlook. Few great thinkers have so little perceived the
+psychological foundations of politics. What he did was rather to fasten
+upon the great institutional necessity of his time--the provision of
+channels of assent--and emphasize its importance to the exclusion of all
+other factors. The problem is in fact more complex; and the solution he
+indicated became so natural a part of the political fabric that the
+value of his emphasis upon its import was largely forgotten when men
+again took up the study of foundations.
+
+John Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset on the 29th of August, 1632.
+His father was clerk to the county justices and acted as a captain in a
+cavalry regiment during the Civil War. Though he suffered heavy losses,
+he was able to give his son as good an education as the time afforded.
+Westminster under Dr. Busby may not have been the gentlest of academies,
+but at least it provided Locke with an admirable training in the
+classics. He himself, indeed, in the _Thoughts on Education_ doubted the
+value of such exercises; nor does he seem to have conceived any
+affection for Oxford whither he proceeded in 1652 as a junior student of
+Christ Church. The university was then under the Puritan control of Dr.
+John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its
+reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and
+ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that
+he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to
+metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis
+the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659
+he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college, which he retained until
+he was deemed politically undesirable in 1684. After toying with his
+father's desire that he should enter the Church, he began the study of
+medicine. Scientific interest won for him the friendship of Boyle; and
+while he was administering physic to the patients of Dr. Thomas, he was
+making the observations recorded in Boyle's _History of the Air_ which
+Locke himself edited after the death of his friend.
+
+Meanwhile accident had turned his life into far different paths. An
+appointment as secretary to a special ambassador opened up to him a
+diplomatic career; but his sturdy commonsense showed him his unfitness
+for such labors. After his visit to Prussia he returned to Oxford, and
+there, in 1667, in the course of his medical work, he met Anthony
+Ashley, the later Lord Shaftesbury and the Ahitophel of Dryden's great
+satire. The two men were warmly attracted to each other, and Locke
+accepted an appointment as physician to Lord Ashley's household. But he
+was also much more than this. The tutor of Ashley's philosophic
+grandson, he became also his patron's confidential counsellor. In 1663
+he became part author of a constitutional scheme for Carolina which is
+noteworthy for its emphasis, thus early, upon the importance of
+religious toleration. In 1672, when Ashley became Lord Chancellor, he
+became Secretary of Presentations and, until 1675, Secretary to the
+Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations. Meanwhile he carried on his
+medical work and must have obtained some reputation in it; for he is
+honorably mentioned by Sydenham, in his _Method of Curing Fevers_
+(1676), and had been elected to the Royal Society in 1668. But his real
+genius lay in other directions.
+
+Locke himself has told us how a few friends began to meet at his chamber
+for the discussions of questions which soon passed into metaphysical
+enquiry; and a page from a commonplace book of 1671 is the first
+beginning of his systematic work. Relieved of his administrative duties
+in 1675, he spent the next four years in France, mainly occupied with
+medical observation. He returned to England in 1679 to assist Lord
+Shaftesbury in the passionate debates upon the Exclusion Bill. Locke
+followed his patron into exile, remaining abroad from 1683 until the
+Revolution. Deprived of his fellowship in 1684 through the malice of
+Charles II, he would have been without means of support had not
+Shaftesbury bequeathed him a pension. As it was, he had no easy time.
+His extradition was demanded by James II after the Monmouth rebellion;
+and though he was later pardoned he refused to return to England until
+William of Orange had procured his freedom. A year after his return he
+made his appearance as a writer. The _Essay Concerning Human
+Understanding_ and the _Two Treatises of Government_ were both published
+in 1690. Five years earlier the _Letter Concerning Toleration_ was
+published in its Latin dress; and four years afterwards an English
+translation appeared. This last, however, perhaps on grounds of
+expediency, Locke never acknowledged until his will was published; for
+the time was not yet suited to such generous speculations. Locke was
+thus in his fifty-eighth year when his first admitted work appeared. But
+the rough attempts at the essay date from 1671, and hints towards the
+_Letter on Toleration_ can be found in fragments of various dates
+between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years of his life. Of the
+_Two Treatises_ the first seems to have been written between 1680 and
+1685, the second in the last year of his Dutch exile.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: On the evidence for these dates see the convincing argument
+of Mr. Fox-Bourne in his _Life of Locke_, Vol. II, pp. 165-7.]
+
+The remaining fourteen years of Locke's life were passed in
+semi-retirement in East Anglia. Though he held public office, first as
+Commissioner of Appeals, and later of Trade, for twelve years, he could
+not stand the pressure of London writers, and his public work was only
+intermittent. His counsel, nevertheless, was highly valued; and he seems
+to have won no small confidence from William in diplomatic matters.
+Somers and Charles Montagu held him in high respect, and he had the
+warm friendship of Sir Isaac Newton. He published some short discussions
+on economic matters, and in 1695 gave valuable assistance in the
+destruction of the censorship of the press. Two years earlier he had
+published his _Thoughts on Education_, in which the observant reader may
+find the germ of most of Emile's ideas. He did not fail to revise the
+_Essay_ from time to time; and his _Reasonableness of Christianity_,
+which, through Toland, provoked a reply from Stillingfleet and showed
+Locke in retort a master of the controversial art, was in some sort the
+foundation of the deistic debate in the next epoch. But his chief work
+had already been done, and he spent his energies in rewarding the
+affection of his friends. Locke died on October 28, 1704, amid
+circumstances of singular majesty. He had lived a full life, and few
+have so completely realized the medieval ideal of specializing in
+omniscience. He left warm friends behind him; and Lady Masham has said
+of him that beyond which no man may dare to aspire.[2]
+
+[Footnote 2: Fox-Bourne, _op. cit_. Letter from Lady Masham to Jean le
+Clerc.]
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Locke's _Two Treatises of Government_ are different both in object and
+in value. The first is a detailed and tiresome response to the historic
+imagination of Sir Robert Filmer. In his _Patriarcha_, which first saw
+the light in 1680, though it had been written long before, the latter
+had sought to reach the ultimate conclusion of Hobbes without the
+element of contract upon which the great thinker depended. "I consent
+with him," said Filmer of Hobbes, "about the Rights of _exercising_
+Government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it." That power
+must be absolute, Filmer, like Hobbes, has no manner of doubt; but his
+method of proof is to derive the title of Charles I from Adam. Little
+difficulties like the origin of primogeniture, or whence, as Locke
+points out, the universal monarchy of Shem can be derived, the good Sir
+Robert does not satisfactorily determine. Locke takes him up point by
+point, and there is little enough left, save a sense that history is the
+root of institutions, when he has done. What troubles us is rather why
+Locke should have wasted the resources of his intelligence upon so
+feeble an opponent. The book of Hobbes lay ready to his hand; yet he
+almost ostentatiously refused to grapple with it. The answer doubtless
+lies in Hobbes' unsavory fame. The man who made the Church a mere
+department of the State and justified not less the title of Cromwell
+than of the Stuarts was not the opponent for one who had a very
+practical problem in hand. And Locke could answer that he was answering
+Hobbes implicitly in the second _Treatise_. And though Filmer might
+never have been known had not Locke thus honored him by retort, he
+doubtless symbolized what many a nobleman's chaplain preached to his
+master's dependents at family prayers.
+
+The _Second Treatise_ goes to the root of the matter. Why does political
+power, "a Right of making Laws and Penalties of Death and consequently
+all less Penalties," exist? It can only be for the public benefit, and
+our enquiry is thus a study of the grounds of political obedience. Locke
+thus traverses the ground Hobbes had covered in his _Leviathan_ though
+he rejects every premise of the earlier thinker. To Hobbes the state of
+nature which precedes political organization had been a state of war.
+Neither peace nor reason could prevail where every man was his
+neighbor's enemy; and the establishment of absolute power, with the
+consequent surrender by men of all their natural liberties, was the only
+means of escape from so brutal a régime. That the state of nature was so
+distinguished Locke at the outset denies. The state of nature is
+governed by the law of nature. The law of nature is not, as Hobbes had
+made it, the antithesis of real law, but rather its condition
+antecedent. It is a body of rules which governs, at all times and all
+places, the conduct of men. Its arbiter is reason and, in the natural
+state, reason shows us that men are equal. From this equality are born
+men's natural rights which Locke, like the Independents in the Puritan
+Revolution, identifies with life, liberty and property. Obviously
+enough, as Hobbes had also granted, the instinct to self-preservation is
+the deepest of human impulses. By liberty Locke means the right of the
+individual to follow his own bent granted only his observance of the
+law of nature. Law, in such an aspect, is clearly a means to the
+realization of freedom in the same way that the rule of the road will,
+by its common acceptance, save its observers from accident. It promotes
+the initiative of men by defining in terms which by their very statement
+obtain acknowledgment the conditions upon which individual caprice may
+have its play. Property Locke derives from a primitive communism which
+becomes transmuted into individual ownership whenever a man has mingled
+his labor with some object. This labor theory of ownership lived, it may
+be remarked, to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the
+parent of modern socialism.
+
+The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes,
+pre-eminently social in character. There may be war or violence; but
+that is only when men have abandoned the rule of reason which is
+integral to their character. But the state of nature is not a civil
+State. There is no common superior to enforce the law of nature. Each
+man, as best he may, works out his own interpretation of it. But
+because the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient
+variety in the conceptions of justice. The result is uncertainty and
+chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which the
+weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable. It is here that the
+social contract emerges. But just as Locke's natural state implies a
+natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture, so does
+Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of reason than of
+hard necessity. It is a contract of each with all, a surrender by the
+individual of his personal right to fulfil the commands of the law of
+nature in return for the guarantee that his rights as nature ordains
+them--life and liberty and property--will be preserved. The contract is
+thus not general as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character.
+Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of
+some single man or group. On the contrary, it is a contract with the
+community as a whole which thus becomes that common political
+superior--the State--which is to enforce the law of nature and punish
+infractions of it. Nor is Locke's state a sovereign State: the very
+word "sovereignty" does not occur, significantly enough, throughout the
+treatise. The State has power only for the protection of natural law.
+Its province ends when it passes beyond those boundaries.
+
+Such a contract, in Locke's view, involves the pre-eminent necessity of
+majority-rule. Unless the minority is content to be bound by the will of
+superior numbers the law of nature has no more protection than it had
+before the institution of political society. And it is further to be
+assumed that the individual has surrendered to the community his
+individual right of carrying out the judgment involved in natural law.
+Whether Locke conceived the contract so formulated to be historical, it
+is no easy matter to determine. That no evidence of its early existence
+can be adduced he ascribes to its origin in the infancy of the race; and
+the histories of Rome and Sparta and Venice seem to him proof that the
+theory is somehow demonstrable by facts. More important than origins, he
+seems to deem its implications. He has placed consent in the foreground
+of the argument; and he was anxious to establish the grounds for its
+continuance. Can the makers of the original contract, that is to say,
+bind their successors? If legitimate government is based upon the
+consent of its subjects, may they withdraw their consent? And what of a
+child born into the community? Locke is at least logical in his consent.
+The contract of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously
+insisted, it is not a contract. Yet Locke urged that the primitive
+members of a State are bound to its perpetuation simply because unless
+the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in any
+satisfactory sense, would be impossible. With children the case is
+different. They are born subjects of no government or country; and their
+consent to its laws must either be derived from express acknowledgment,
+or by the tacit implication of the fact that the protection of the State
+has been accepted. But no one is bound until he has shown by the rule of
+his mature conduct that he considers himself a common subject with his
+fellows. Consent implies an act of will and we must have evidence to
+infer its presence before the rule of subjection can be applied.
+
+We have thus the State, though the method of its organization is not
+yet outlined. For Locke there is a difference, though he did not
+explicitly describe its nature, between State and Government. Indeed he
+sometimes approximates, without ever formally adopting, the attitude of
+Pufendorf, his great German contemporary, where government is derived
+from a secondary contract dependent upon the original institution of
+civil society. The distinction is made in the light of what is to
+follow. For Locke was above all anxious to leave supreme power in a
+community whose single will, as manifested by majority-verdict, could
+not be challenged by any lesser organ than itself. Government there must
+be if political society is to endure; but its form and substance are
+dependent upon popular institution.
+
+Locke follows in the great Aristotelian tradition of dividing the types
+of government into three. Where the power of making laws is in a single
+hand we have a monarchy; where it is exercised by a few or all we have
+alternatively oligarchy and democracy. The disposition of the
+legislative power is the fundamental test of type; for executive and
+judiciary are clearly dependent on it. Nor, as Hobbes argued, is the
+form of government permanent in character; the supreme community is as
+capable of making temporary as of registering irrevocable decisions. And
+though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness to the family, is
+the most primitive type of government, he denies Hobbes' assertion that
+it is the best. It seems, in his view, always to degenerate into the
+hands of lesser men who betray the contract they were appointed to
+observe. Nor is oligarchy much better off since it emphasizes the
+interest of a group against the superior interest of the community as a
+whole. Democracy alone proffers adequate safeguards of an enduring good
+rule; a democracy, that is to say, which is in the hands of delegates
+controlled by popular election. Not that Locke is anxious for the
+abolition of kingship. His letters show that he disliked the Cromwellian
+system and the republicanism which Harrington and Milton had based upon
+it. He was content to have a kingship divested of legislative power so
+long as hereditary succession was acknowledged to be dependent upon
+popular consent. The main thing was to be rid of the Divine Right of
+kings.
+
+We have thus an organ for the interpretation of natural law free from
+the shifting variety of individual judgment. We have a means for
+securing impartial justice between members of civil society, and to that
+means the force of men has been surrendered. The formulation of the
+rules by which life, liberty and property are to be secured is
+legislation and this, from the terms of the original contract, is the
+supreme function of the State. But, in Locke's view, two other functions
+still remain. Law has not only to be declared. It must be enforced; and
+the business of the executive is to secure obedience to the command of
+law. But Locke here makes a third distinction. The State must live with
+other States, both as regards its individual members, and as a
+collective body; and the power which deals with this aspect of its
+relationships, Locke termed "federative." This last distinction, indeed,
+has no special value; and its author's own defence of it is far from
+clear. More important, especially, for future history, was his emphasis
+of the distinction between legislature and executive. The making of laws
+is for Locke a relatively simple and rapid task; the legislature may do
+its work and be gone. But those who attend to their execution must be
+ceaseless in their vigilance. It is better, therefore, to separate the
+two both as to powers and persons. Otherwise legislators "may exempt
+themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both
+in its making and its execution, to their own private wish, and thereby
+come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community,
+contrary to the end of society and government." The legislator must
+therefore be bound by his own laws; and he must be chosen in such
+fashion that the representative assembly may fairly represent its
+constituencies. It was the patent anomalies of the existent scheme of
+distribution which made Locke here proffer his famous suggestion that
+the rotten boroughs should be abolished by executive act. One hundred
+and forty years were still to pass before this wise suggestion was
+translated into statute.
+
+Though Locke thus insisted upon the separation of powers, he realized
+that emergencies are the parent of special need; and he recognized that
+not only may the executive, as in England, share in the task of
+legislation, but also may issue ordinances when the legislature is not
+in session, or act contrary to law in case of grave danger. Nor can the
+executive be forced to summon the legislature. Here, clearly enough,
+Locke is generalizing from the English constitution; and its sense of
+compromise is implicit in his remarks. Nor is his surrender here of
+consent sufficient to be inconsistent with his general outlook. For at
+the back of each governmental act, there is, in his own mind, an active
+citizen body occupied in judging it with single-minded reference to the
+law of nature and their own natural rights. There is thus a standard of
+right and wrong superior to all powers within the State. "A government,"
+as he says, "is not free to do as it pleases ... the law of nature
+stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others."
+The social contract is secreted in the interstices of public statutes.
+
+Its corollary is the right of revolution. It is interesting that he
+should have adopted this position; for in 1676 he had uttered the
+thought that not even the demands of conscience[3] can justify
+rebellion. That was, however, before the tyranny of Charles had driven
+him into exile with his patron, and before James had attempted the
+subversion of all constitutional government. To deny the right of
+revolution was to justify the worst demands of James, and it is in its
+favor that he exerts his ablest controversial power. "The true remedy,"
+he says, "of force without authority is to oppose force to it." Let the
+sovereign but step outside the powers derived from the social contract
+and resistance becomes a natural right. But how define such invasion of
+powers? The instances Locke chose show how closely, here at least, he
+was following the events of 1688. The substitution of arbitrary will for
+law, the corruption of Parliament by packing it with the prince's
+instruments, betrayal to a foreign prince, prevention of the due
+assemblage of Parliament--all these are a perversion of the trust
+imposed and operate to effect the dissolution of the contract. The
+state of nature again supervenes, and a new contract may be made with
+one more fitted to observe it. Here, also, Locke takes occasion to deny
+the central position of Hobbes' thesis. Power, the latter had argued,
+must be absolute and there cannot, therefore, be usurpation. But Locke
+retorts that an absolute government is no government at all since it
+proceeds by caprice instead of reason; and it is comparable only to a
+state of war since it implies the absence of judgment upon the character
+of power. It lacks the essential element of consent without which the
+binding force of law is absent. All government is a moral trust, and the
+idea of limitation is therein implied. But a limitation without the
+means of enforcement would be worthless, and revolution remains as the
+reserve power in society. The only hindrance to its exertion that Locke
+suggests is that of number. Revolution should not, he urges, be the act
+of a minority; for the contract is the action of the major portion of
+the people and its consent should likewise obtain to the dissolution of
+the covenant.
+
+[Footnote 3: King, _Life of Locke_, pp. 62, 63.]
+
+The problem of Church and State demanded a separate discussion; and it
+is difficult not to feel that the great _Letter on Toleration_ is the
+noblest of all his utterances. It came as the climax to a long evolution
+of opinion; and, in the light of William's own conviction, it may be
+said to have marked a decisive epoch of thought. Already in the
+sixteenth century Robert Brown and William the Silent had denounced the
+persecution of sincere belief. Early Baptists like Busher and Richardson
+had finely denied its validity. Roger Williams in America, Milton in
+England had attacked its moral rightness and political adequacy; while
+churchmen like Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth had shown
+the incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate. Nor
+had example been wanting. The religious freedom of Holland was narrow,
+as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom. Rhode Island,
+Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Massachusetts had all embarked upon
+admirable experiment; and Penn himself had aptly said that a man may go
+to chapel instead of church, even while he remains a good constable.
+And in 1687, in the preface to his translation of Lactantius, Burnet had
+not merely attacked the moral viciousness of persecution, but had drawn
+a distinction between the spheres of Church and State which is a
+remarkable anticipation of Locke's own theory.
+
+Locke himself covers the whole ground; and since his opinions on the
+problem were at least twenty years old, it is clear that he was
+consistent in a worthy outlook. He proceeds by a denial that any element
+of theocratic government can claim political validity. The magistrate is
+concerned only with the preservation of social peace and does not deal
+with the problem of men's souls. Where, indeed, opinions destructive of
+the State are entertained or a party subversive of peace makes its
+appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the
+latter case force is the worst and last of remedies. In the English
+situation, it follows that all men are to be tolerated save Catholics,
+Mahomedans and atheists. The first are themselves deniers of the rights
+they would seek, and they find the centre of their political allegiance
+in a foreign power. Mahomedan morals are incompatible with European
+civil systems; and the central factor in atheism is the absence of the
+only ultimately satisfactory sanction of good conduct. Though Church and
+State are thus distinct, they act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is
+thus important to see why Locke insists on the invalidity of
+persecution. For such an end as the cure of souls, he argues, the
+magistrate has no divine legation. He cannot, on other grounds, use
+force for the simple reason that it does not produce internal
+conviction. But even if that were possible, force would still be
+mistaken; for the majority of the world is not Christian, yet it would
+have the right to persecute in the belief that it was possessed of
+truth. Nor can the implication that the magistrate has the keys of
+heaven be accepted. "No religion," says Locke finely, "which I believe
+not to be true can be either true or profitable to me." He thus makes of
+the Church an institution radically different from the ruling
+conceptions of his time. It becomes merely a voluntary society, which
+can exert no power save over its members. It may use its own ceremonies,
+but it cannot impose them on the unwilling; and since persecution is
+alien from the spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the
+limit of ecclesiastical disciplinary power. Nor must we forget the
+advantages of toleration. Its eldest child is charity, and without it
+there can be no honesty of opinion. Later controversy did not make him
+modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay's hands, to be a
+vital weapon in the political method of the nineteenth century.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Any survey of earlier political theory would show how little of novelty
+there is in the specific elements of Locke's general doctrine. He is at
+all points the offspring of a great and unbroken tradition; and that not
+the least when he seems unconscious of it. Definite teachers, indeed, he
+can hardly be said to have had; no one can read his book without
+perceiving how much of it is rooted in the problems of his own day. He
+himself has expressed his sense of Hooker's greatness, and he elsewhere
+had recommended the works of Grotius and Pufendorf as an essential
+element in education. But his was a nature which learned more from men
+than books; and he more than once insisted that his philosophy was woven
+of his own "coarse thoughts." What, doubtless, he therein meant was to
+emphasize the freshness of his contact with contemporary fact in
+contrast with the technical jargon of the earlier thinkers. At least his
+work is free from the mountains of allusion which Prynne rolled into the
+bottom of his pages; and if the first Whig was the devil, he is
+singularly free from the irritating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet
+even with these novelties, no estimate of his work would be complete
+which failed to take account of the foundations upon which he builded.
+
+Herein, perhaps, the danger is lest we exaggerate Locke's dependence
+upon the earlier current of thought. The social contract is at least as
+old as when Glaucon debated with Socrates in the market-place at Athens.
+The theory of a state of nature, with the rights therein implied, is the
+contribution, through Stoicism, of the Roman lawyers, and the great
+medieval contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism. To the latter, also,
+may be traced the separation of powers; and it was then but little more
+than a hundred years since Bodin had been taken to make the doctrine an
+integral part of scientific politics. Nor is the theory of a right to
+revolution in any sense his specific creation. So soon as the
+Reformation had given a new perspective to the problem of Church and
+State every element of Locke's doctrine had become a commonplace of
+debate. Goodman and Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among
+Catholics, the author of the _Vindiciæ_ and Francis Hotman among the
+Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the concept of public power as a
+trust; with, of course, the necessary corollary that its abuse entails
+resistance. Algernon Sydney was at least his acquaintance; and he must
+have been acquainted with the tradition, even if tragedy spared him the
+details, of the _Discourses on Government_. Even his theory of
+toleration had in every detail been anticipated by one or other of a
+hundred controversialists; and his argument can hardly claim either the
+lofty eloquence of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent simplicity of William
+Penn.
+
+What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the manner of his
+writing on the one hand, and the fact of the Revolution on the other.
+Every previous thinker save Sydney--the latter's work was not published
+until 1689--was writing with the Church hardly less in mind than the
+purely political problems of the State; even the secular Hobbes had
+devoted much thought and space to that "kingdom of darkness" which is
+Rome. And, Sydney apart, the resistance they had justified was always
+resistance to a religious tyrant; and Cartwright was as careful to
+exclude political oppression from the grounds of revolution as Locke was
+to insist upon it as the fundamental excuse. Locke is, in fact, the
+first of English thinkers the basis of whose argument is mainly secular.
+Not, indeed, that he can wholly escape the trammels of ecclesiasticism;
+not until the sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible.
+But it is clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground
+from that which arrested the attention of his predecessors. He is
+attempting, that is to say, a separation between Church and State not
+merely in that Scoto-Jesuit sense which aimed at ecclesiastical
+independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as
+such. The central problem is with him political, and all other questions
+are subsidiary to it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any
+previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of
+medieval ideals. Church and State have become transposed in their
+significance. The way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.
+
+The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since made an
+end of the social contract as an explanation of state-origins; and with
+it, of necessity, has gone the conception of natural rights as anterior
+to organized society. The problem, as we now know, is far more complex
+than the older thinkers imagined. Yet Locke's insistence on consent and
+natural rights has received new meaning from each critical period of
+history since he wrote. The theory of consent is vital because without
+the provision of channels for its administrative expression, men tend to
+become the creatures of a power ignorant at once and careless of their
+will. Active consent on the part of the mass of men emphasizes the
+contingent nature of all power and is essential to the full realization
+of freedom; and the purpose of the State, in any sense save the mere
+satisfaction of material appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled. The
+concept of natural right is most closely related to this position. For
+so long as we regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there
+is at no point adequate safeguard against their usurpation. A merely
+legal theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of
+political philosophy.
+
+No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if his effort
+to make rights something more than interests under juridical protection
+can not be accepted in the form he made it, the underlying purpose
+remains. A State, that is to say, which aims at giving to men the full
+capacity their trained initiative would permit is compelled to regard
+certain things as beyond the action of an ordinary legislature. What
+Stammler calls a "natural law with changing content"[4]--a content
+which changes with our increasing power to satisfy demand--is essential
+if the state is to live the life of law. For here was the head and
+centre of Locke's enquiry. "What he was really concerned about," said
+T.H. Green, "was to dispute 'the right divine of kings to govern
+wrong.'" The method, as he conceived, by which this could be
+accomplished was the limitation of power. This he effected by two
+distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in character.
+
+[Footnote 4: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, p. 64., and
+the references there cited.]
+
+The external method has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the first
+place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state. To
+Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of
+gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at
+such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like
+Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the
+interest of individual exertion. But for Locke the real guarantee of
+right lies in another direction. What his whole work amounts to in
+substance--it is a significant anticipation of Rousseau--is a denial
+that sovereignty can exist anywhere save in the community as a whole. A
+common political superior there doubtless must be; but government is an
+organ to which omnipotence is wanting. So far as there is a sovereign at
+all in Locke's book, it is the will of that majority which Rousseau
+tried to disguise under the name of the general will; but obviously the
+conception lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the
+means of operation. The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen,
+under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there is
+lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof that an
+unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember that the
+shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the direction of
+Locke's attitude. That omnicompetence of Parliament which Bentham and
+Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke admits, in later hands, of
+exactly the amelioration he had in mind; and its ethical inadequacy
+becomes the more obvious the more closely it is studied.[5]
+
+[Footnote 5: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chap. I.]
+
+The internal limitation Locke suggested is of more doubtful value.
+Government, he says, in substance, is a trustee and trustees abuse their
+power; let us therefore divide it as to parts and persons that the
+temptation to usurp may be diminished. There is a long history to this
+doctrine in its more obvious form, and it is a lamentable history. It
+tied men down to a tyrannous classification which had no root in the
+material it was supposed to distinguish. Montesquieu took it for the
+root of liberty; Blackstone, who should have known better, repeated the
+pious phrases of the Frenchman; and they went in company to America to
+persuade Madison and the Supreme Court of the United States that only
+the separation of powers can prevent the approach of tyranny. The facts
+do not bear out such assumption. The division of powers means in the
+event not less than their confusion. None can differentiate between the
+judge's declaration of law and his making of it.[6] Every government
+department is compelled to legislate, and, often enough, to undertake
+judicial functions. The American history of the separation of powers
+has most largely been an attempt to bridge them; and all that has been
+gained is to drive the best talent, save on rare occasion, from its
+public life. In France the separation of powers meant, until recent
+times, the excessive subordination of the judiciary to the cabinet. Nor
+must we forget, as Locke should have remembered, the plain lesson of the
+Cromwellian constitutional experiments. That the dispersion of power is
+one of the great needs of the modern State at no point justifies the
+rigid categories into which Locke sought its division.[7]
+
+[Footnote 6: Cf. Mr. Justice Holmes' remarks in _Jensen_ v.
+_Southern Pacific_, 244 U.S. 221.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, pp. 70 f.]
+
+Nor must we belittle the criticism, in its clearest form the work of
+Fitz James Stephen,[8] that has been levelled at Locke's theory of
+toleration. For the larger part of the modern world, his argument is
+acceptable enough; and its ingenious compromises have made it especially
+representative of the English temper. Yet much of it hardly meets the
+argument that some of his opponents, as Proast for example, had made.
+His conception of the visible church as no part of the essence of
+religion could win no assent from even a moderate Anglican; and, once
+the visible church is admitted, Locke's facile distinction between
+Church and State falls to the ground. Nor can it be doubted that he
+underestimated the power of coercion to produce assent; the policy of
+Louis XIV to the Huguenots may have been brutal, but its efficacy must
+be unquestionable. And it is at least doubtful whether his theory has
+any validity for a man who held, as Roman Catholics of his generation
+were bound to hold, that the communication of his particular brand of
+truth outweighed in value all other questions. "Every Church," he wrote,
+"is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical"; but to any
+earnest believer this would approximate to blasphemy. Nor could any
+serious Christian accept the view that "under the gospel '...there is no
+such thing as a Christian commonwealth'"; to Catholics and Presbyterians
+this must have appeared the merest travesty of their faith.
+
+[Footnote 8: Cf. also Coleridge's apt remark. _Table Talk_, Jan. 3,
+1834.]
+
+Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the true progenitor of Benthamism,
+and his work can hardly be understood save in this context. Just as in
+his ethical enquiries it was always the happiness of the individual that
+he sought, so in his politics it was the happiness of the subject he had
+in view. In each case it was to immediate experience that he made his
+appeal; and this perhaps explains the clear sense of a contempt for past
+tradition which pervades all his work. "That which is for the public
+welfare," he said, "is God's will"; and therein we have the root of that
+utilitarianism which, as Maine pointed out, is the real parent of all
+nineteenth century change. And with Locke, as with the Benthamites, his
+clear sense of what utilitarianism demanded led to an over-emphasis of
+human rationalism. No one can read the _Second Treatise_ without
+perceiving that Locke looked upon the State as a machine which can be
+built and taken to pieces in very simple fashion. Herein, undoubtedly,
+he over-simplified the problem; and that made him miss some of the
+cardinal points a true psychology of the State must seize. His very
+contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection for the rational. It
+resulted in his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives
+imbedded in the political act. The significance of herd instinct and the
+vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him. All
+this is of defect; and yet excusably. For it needed the demonstration by
+Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to see the real substance
+of Aristotle's vision that man is embedded in political society.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Once Locke's work had become known, its reputation was secure. Not,
+indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation. Men were not
+wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and felt that
+anything but reason must be the test of truth. Those who stood by the
+ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism and the roots of
+atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the theories of Filmer could
+find defenders against him in the Indian summer of prerogative under
+Queen Anne. John Hutton informed a friend that he was not less dangerous
+than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the nonjuring sect.
+But these, after all, were but the eddies of a stream fast burying
+itself in the sands. For most, the Revolution was a final settlement,
+and Locke was welcome as a writer who had discovered the true source of
+political comfort. So it was that William Molyneux could embody the
+ideas of the "incomparable treatise" in his demand for Irish freedom; a
+book which, even in those days, occasioned some controversy. Nor is it
+uninteresting to discover that the translation of Hotman's
+_Franco-Gallia_ should have been embellished with a preface from one
+who, as Molyneux wrote to Locke,[9] never met the Irish writer without
+conversing of their common master. How rapidly the doctrine spread we
+learn from a letter of Bayle's in which, as early as 1693, Locke has
+already became "the gospel of the Protestants." Nor was his immediate
+influence confined to England. French Huguenots and the Dutch drew
+naturally upon so happy a defender; and Barbeyrac, in the translation of
+Pufendorf which he published in 1706, cites no writer so often as
+Locke. The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell were
+almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the accused
+counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his speech for the
+defence.
+
+[Footnote 9: Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX. 435.]
+
+More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the _Spectator_, on six
+separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose possession is a
+national glory. Defoe in his _Original Power of the People of England_
+made Locke the common possession of the average man, and offered his
+acknowledgments to his master. Even the malignant genius of Swift
+softened his hate to find the epithet "judicious" for one in whose
+doctrines he can have found no comfort. Pope summarized his teaching in
+the form that Bolingbroke chose to give it. Hoadly, in his _Original and
+Institution of Civil Government_, not only dismisses Filmer in a first
+part each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second
+section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to conceal
+the care with which the _Second Treatise_ had also been pillaged. Even
+Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of belittling all rivals in the
+field he considered his own to call him, in that _Divine Legation_ which
+he considered his masterpiece, "the honor of this age and the instructor
+of the future"; but since Warburton's attack on the High Church theory
+is at every point Locke's argument, he may have considered this
+self-eulogy instead of tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis, on the eve of English
+Radicalism, published a noble edition of his book. And there is perhaps
+a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke's economic
+tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the
+_Craftsman_, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole. That is
+irrefutable evidence of the position he had attained.
+
+Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons. There still
+remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke's
+separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch. The
+most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline
+of a social contract more daring even than his own. The authors of the
+_Declaration of Independence_ had still, in words taken from Locke, to
+reassert the state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of North
+Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the Philadelphia
+Convention. Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned against him and
+what was permanent in his work was being cast into the new form required
+by the time. A few sentences of Hume were sufficient to make the social
+contract as worthless as the Divine Right of kings, and when Blackstone
+came to sum up the result of the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual
+terms it was with a full admission that he was making use of fiction so
+far as he went behind the settlement of 1688. Nor is the work of Dean
+Tucker without significance. The failure of England in the American war
+was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked to
+Locke as the author of their principles. "The Americans," he wrote,
+"have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present war"; and in
+his _Treatise Concerning Civil Government_ and his _Four Letters_ he
+declares himself unable to understand on what Locke's reputation was
+based. Meanwhile the English disciples of Rousseau in the persons of
+Price and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol of the
+levellers of England," was the parent also of French destructiveness.
+Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he had dealt with the
+contract theory it ceased to influence political speculation in England.
+Its place was taken by the utilitarian doctrine which Hume had outlined;
+and once Bentham's _Fragment_ had begun to make its way, a new epoch
+opened in the history of political ideas.
+
+Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this renaissance; but,
+once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to other gods men turned.
+For Bentham made an end of natural rights; and his contempt for the past
+was even more unsparing than Locke's own. It is more instructive to
+compare his work with Hobbes and Rousseau than with later thinkers; for
+after Hume English speculation works in a medium Locke would not have
+understood. Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which
+made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English
+philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the
+grimness of facts about him. Yet he need not fear the comparison with
+the earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of
+the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy
+ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each one of
+which is in some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's
+view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil
+character is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept
+Hobbes' Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a
+kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges; but
+Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the other,
+pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the Hobbesian
+view. And anyone who surveys the history of Church and State in America
+will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred years the
+separateness for which Locke contended is not without its justification.
+Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes
+makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids
+them to judge. Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where
+Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder. At every
+point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the
+future has been on Locke's side. He may have defended his cause less
+splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that
+he had a more splendid cause to defend.
+
+With Rousseau there is no contrast, for the simple reason that his
+teaching is only a broadening of the channel dug by Locke. No element
+integral to the _Two Treatises_ is absent from the _Social Contract_.
+Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw deeper than his predecessor. The
+form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance
+Locke can perhaps hardly claim. He understood the organic character of
+the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow
+individualism. It is yet difficult to see that the contribution upon
+which Rousseau's fame has mainly rested is at any point a real advance
+upon Locke. The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms,
+really means the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we
+enquire how that general will is to be known, we come, after much
+shuffling, upon the will of that majority in which Locke also put his
+trust. Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an
+assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also Locke
+was anxious. But he did not think an infallible criterion existed for
+its detection; and he was satisfied with the convenience of a simple
+numerical test. Nor would it be difficult to show that Locke's state has
+more real room for individuality than Rousseau's. The latter made much
+show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in
+the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the
+confines of a city-state. Once, that is to say, we deal with modern
+problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke--what limits
+shall we place upon the power of government? Rousseau has only
+emphasized the urgency of the debate.
+
+Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching
+and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility
+that a final answer can be found to political questions. Each age has
+new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would
+condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the
+attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites
+disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless, even for our
+own day, the kind of work Locke did. In the largest sense, his questions
+are still our own. In the largest sense, also, we are near enough to his
+time to profit at each step of our own efforts by the hints he proffers.
+The point at which he stood in English history bears not a little
+resemblance to our own. The emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem
+of freedom. The problem, now as then, was its translation into
+institutional terms. It is the glory of Locke that he brought a generous
+patience and a searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his
+generation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CHURCH AND STATE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The Revolution of 1688 drew its main source of strength from the
+traditional dislike of Rome, and the eager desire to place the Church of
+England beyond the reach of James' aggression. Yet it was not until a
+generation had passed that the lines of ecclesiastical settlement were,
+in any full sense clear. The difficulties involved were mostly
+governmental, and it can hardly even yet be said that they have been
+solved. The nature of the relation between Church and State, the
+affiliation between the Church and Nonconformist bodies, the character
+of its internal government--all these had still to be defined. Nor was
+this all. The problem of definition was made more complex by schism and
+disloyalty. An important fraction of the Church could not accept at all
+the fact of William's kingship; and if the larger part submitted, it
+cannot be said to have been enthusiastic.
+
+Nor did the Church make easy the situation of the Nonconformists.
+Toleration of some kind was rapidly becoming inevitable; and with a
+Calvinist upon the throne persecution of, at any rate, the Presbyterians
+became finally impossible. Yet the definition of what limits were to be
+set to toleration was far from easy. The Church seemed like a fortress
+beleaguered when Nonjurors, Deists, Nonconformists, all alike assaulted
+her foundations. To loosen her hold upon political privilege seemed to
+be akin to self-destruction. And, after all, if Church and State were to
+stand in some connection, the former must have some benefit from the
+alliance. Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege for
+all who could not accept the special brand of religious doctrine? Locke,
+at least, denied the assumption, and argued that since Churches are
+voluntary societies, they cannot and ought not to have reciprocal
+relation with the State. But Locke's theory was meat too strong for the
+digestion of his time; and no statesman would then have argued that a
+government could forego the advantage of religious support. And William,
+after all, had come to free the church from her oppressor. Freedom
+implied protection, and protection in that age involved establishment.
+It was thus taken for granted by most members of the Church of England
+that her adoption by the State meant her superiority to every other form
+of religious organization. Superiority is, by its nature exclusive, the
+more especially when it is united to a certainty of truth and a kinship
+with the dominant political interest of the time. Long years were thus
+to pass before the real meaning of the Toleration Act secured
+translation into more generous statutes.
+
+The problem of the Church's government was hardly less complex. The very
+acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are in an age of
+settlement. Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless due to the dislike
+of all High Churchmen for William; with their consequent unwillingness
+to admit the full meaning of his ecclesiastical supremacy. Much also is
+due to the fact that the bench of bishops, despite great figures like
+Tillotson and Wake, was necessarily chosen for political aptitude rather
+than for religious value. Nor did men like Burnet and Hoadly, for all
+their learning, make easy the path for brethren of more tender
+consciences. The Church, moreover, must have felt its powers the more
+valuable from the very strength of the assault to which she was
+subjected. And the direct interference with her governance implied by
+the Oaths of Allegiance and of Abjuration raised questions we have not
+yet solved. It suggested the subordination of Church to State; and men
+like Hickes and Leslie were quick to point out the Erastianism of the
+age. It is a fact inevitable in the situation of the English Church that
+the charge of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick
+resentment. She cannot be a church unless she is a _societas perfecta_;
+she cannot have within herself the elements of perfect fellowship if
+what seem the plain commands of Christ are to be at the mercy of the
+king in Parliament. That is the difficulty which lies at the bottom of
+the debate with Wake in one age and with Hoadly in the next. In some
+sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and it is
+in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked with the
+Oxford Movement. But Newman and his followers are the unconscious
+sponsors of a debate which grows in volume; and to discuss the thoughts
+of Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a vital aspect, the study of
+contemporary ideas.
+
+We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William's advisers
+who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy. It raised in acute
+form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more than a century, been
+the main foundation of the alliance between throne and altar in England.
+The demand precipitated a schism which lingered on, though fitfully,
+until the threshold of the nineteenth century. The men who could not
+take the oath were, many of them, among the most distinguished churchmen
+of the time. Great ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of
+Canterbury and one of the seven who had gained immortality by his
+resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of Bath and Wells,
+scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men like Charles Leslie,
+born with a genius for recrimination; much, it is clear, of what was
+best in the Church of England was to be found amongst them. There is not
+a little of beauty, and much of pathos in their history. Most, after
+their deprivation, were condemned to poverty; few of them recanted. The
+lives of men like Sancroft and Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are
+part of the great Anglican tradition of earnest simplicity which later
+John Keble was to illustrate for the nineteenth century. The Nonjurors,
+as they were called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of
+their effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph
+Taylor, to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that
+the history even of their decline is without its interest; and the
+study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the
+Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for students of
+ecclesiastical history.
+
+Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than
+religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past. At the
+bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they
+represent. That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular
+state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the
+allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had
+declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main opponents,
+moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men like Andrewes must
+have felt that when they answered Bellarmine they were in substance also
+defenders of their Church. After the great controversy of James I's
+reign resistance as a duty had come to be regarded as a main element in
+Jesuit and Nonconformist teaching; with the result that its antithesis
+became, as a consequence of the political situation, no less integral a
+part of Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that
+the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to
+the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the
+main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope that it
+would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is
+this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like Barrow
+and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper. When they urge
+the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty
+of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with
+contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect. The Church of
+England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.
+
+How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the
+seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and Sanderson
+sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates its widespread
+acceptance as the result of the Revolution. Four hundred clergy
+abandoned their preferment because James ruled by Divine Right; and they
+could not in conscience resist even his iniquities. An able tract of
+1689[10] had collected much material to show how integral the doctrine
+was to the beliefs of the Church. Had William's government, indeed,
+refrained from the imposition of the oath, it is possible that there
+might have been no schism at all; for the early Nonjurors at
+least--perhaps Hickes and Turner are exceptions--would probably have
+welcomed anything which enabled the avoidance of schism. Once, however,
+the oath was imposed three vital questions were raised. Deprivation
+obviously involved the problem of the power of the State over the
+Church. If the act of a convention whose own legality was at best
+doubtful could deprive the consecrated of their position, was the Church
+a Church at all, or was it the mere creature of the secular power? And
+what, moreover, of conscience? It could not be an inherent part of the
+Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the sake of
+peace. Later thinkers added the purely secular argument that resistance
+in one case made for resistance in all. Admit, it was argued by Leslie,
+the right to disobey, and the fabric of society is at a stroke
+dissolved. The attitude is characteristic of that able controversialist;
+and it shows how hardly the earlier notions of Divine Right were to
+die.
+
+[Footnote 10: _The History of Passive Obedience_. Its author was
+Jeremy Collier.]
+
+These theories merit a further examination. Williams, later the Bishop
+of Chichester, had argued that separation on the basis of the oath was
+unreasonable. "All that the civil power here pretends to," he wrote "is
+to secure itself against the practices of dissatisfied persons." The
+Nonjurors, in this view, were making an ecclesiastical matter of a
+purely secular issue. He was answered, among others, by Samuel Grascom,
+in an argument which found high favor among the stricter of his sect.
+"The matter and substance of these Oaths," he said, "is put into the
+prayers of the Church, and so far it becomes a matter of communion. What
+people are enjoined in the solemn worship to pray for, is made a matter
+of communion; and if it be simple, will not only justify, but require a
+separation." Here is the pith of the matter. For if the form and
+substance of Church affairs is thus to be left to governmental will,
+then those who obey have left the Church and it is the faithful remnant
+only who constitute the true fellowship. The schism, in this view, was
+the fault of those who remained subject to William's dominion. The
+Nonjurors had not changed; and they were preserving the Church in its
+integrity from men who strove to betray it to the civil power.
+
+This matter of integrity is important. The glamour of Macaulay has
+somewhat softened the situation of those who took the oaths; and in his
+pages the Nonjurors appear as stupid men unworthily defending a dead
+cause. It is worth while to note that this is the merest travesty.
+Tillotson, who succeeded Sancroft on the latter's deprivation, and
+Burnet himself had urged passive resistance upon Lord William Russell as
+essential to salvation; Tenison had done likewise at the execution of
+Monmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick, White Kennett, had all written in its
+favor; and to William Sherlock belongs the privilege of having defended
+and attacked it in two pamphlets each of which challenges the pithy
+brilliance of the other. Clearly, so far as consistency is in question,
+the Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their
+side. And even if it is said that the policy of James introduced a new
+situation the answer surely is that Divine Right and non-resistance can,
+by their very nature, make no allowance for novelty.
+
+The root, then, of this ecclesiastical contention is the argument later
+advanced by Leslie in his "Case of the Regale and the Pontificate" in
+which he summarized the Convocation dispute. The State, he argues, has
+no power over bishops whose relationship to their flock is purely
+spiritual and derived from Christ. The Church is independent of all
+civil institution, and must have therefore within herself the powers
+necessary to her life as a society. Leslie repudiates Erastianism in the
+strongest terms. Not only is it, for him, an encroachment upon the
+rights of Christ, but it leads to deism in the gentry and to dissent
+among the common people. The Church of England comes to be regarded as
+no more than the creature of Parliamentary enactment; and thus to leave
+it as the creature of human votes, is to destroy its divinity.
+
+It is easy enough to see that men who felt in this fashion could hardly
+have decided otherwise than as they did. The matter of conscience,
+indeed, was fundamental to their position. "I think," said the Bishop of
+Worcester on his death-bed, "I could suffer at a stake rather than take
+this oath." That, indeed, represents the general temper. Many of them
+did not doubt that James had done grievous wrong; but they had taken the
+oath of allegiance to him, and they saw in their conscience no means of
+escape from their vow. "Their Majesties," writes the author of the
+account of Bishop Lake's death, "are the two persons in the world whose
+reign over them, their interest and inclination oblige them most to
+desire, and nothing but conscience could restrain them from being as
+forward as any in all expressions of loyalty." In such an aspect, even
+those who believe their attitude to have been wrong, can hardly doubt
+that they acted rightly in their expression of it. For, after all,
+experience has shown that the State is built upon the consciences of
+men. And the protest they made stands out in the next generation in
+vivid contrast to a worldly-minded and politically-corrupt Church which
+only internal revolution could awaken from its slumbers.
+
+No one represents so admirably as Charles Leslie the political argument
+of the case. At bottom it is an argument against anarchy that he
+constructs, and much of what he said is medieval enough in tone to
+suggest de Maistre's great defence of papalism as the secret of
+world-order. He stands four square upon divine right and passive
+obedience. "What man is he who can by his own natural authority bend the
+conscience of another? That would be far more than the power of life,
+liberty or prosperity. Therefore they saw the necessity of a divine
+original." Such a foundation, he argued elsewhere, is necessary to
+order, for "if the last resort be in the people, there is no end of
+controversy at all, but endless and unremediable confusion." Nor had he
+sympathy for the Whig attack on monarchy. "The reasons against Kings,"
+he wrote, "are as strong against all powers, for men of any titles are
+subject to err, and numbers more than fewer." And nothing can unloose
+the chain. "Obedience," he said in the _Best of All_, "is due to
+commonwealths by their subjects even for conscience' sake, where the
+princes from whom they have revolted have given up their claim."
+
+The argument has a wider history than its controversial statement might
+seem to warrant. At bottom, clearly enough, it is an attack upon the new
+tradition which Locke had brought into being. What seems to impress it
+most is the impossibility of founding society upon other than a divine
+origin. Anything less will not command the assent of men sufficiently to
+be immune from their evil passions. Let their minds but once turn to
+resistance, and the bonds of social order will be broken. Complete
+submission is the only safeguard against anarchy. So, a century later,
+de Maistre could argue that unless the whole world became the subject of
+Rome, the complete dissolution of Christian society must follow. So,
+too, fifty years before, Hobbes had argued for an absolute dominion lest
+the ambitions and desires of men break through the fragile boundaries of
+the social estate.
+
+The answer is clear enough; and, indeed, the case against the Nonjurors
+is nowhere so strong as on its political side. Men cannot be confined
+within the limits of so narrow a logic. They will not, with Bishop Ken,
+rejoice in suffering as a doctrine of the Cross. Rather will oppression
+in its turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience
+which provokes to action. Here was the root of Locke's doctrine of
+consent; for unless the government, as Hume was later to point out, has
+on its side the opinion of men, it cannot hope to endure. The fall of
+James was caused, not as the Nonjurors were tempted to think, by popular
+disregard of Divine personality, but by his own misunderstanding of the
+limits to which misgovernment may go. Here their opponents had a
+strong case to present; for, as Stillingfleet remarked, if William had
+not come over there might have been no Church of England for the
+Nonjurors to preserve. And other ingenious compromises were suggested.
+Non-resistance, it was argued by Sherlock, applied to government in
+general; and the oath, as a passage in the _Convocation Book_ of Overall
+seemed to suggest, might be taken not less to a _de facto_ monarch than
+to one _de jure_. Few, indeed would have taken the ground of Bishop
+Burnet, and allotted the throne to William and Mary as conquerors of
+the Kingdom; at least the pamphlet in which this uncomfortable doctrine
+was put forward the House of Commons had burned by the common hangman.
+
+What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense. Much the
+ablest attack upon their position was Stillingfleet's defence of the
+policy employed in filling up the sees vacated by deprivation; and it is
+remarkable that the theory he employs is to insist that unless the
+lawfulness of what had been done is admitted, the Nonjuror's position is
+inevitable. "If it be unlawful to succeed a deprived bishop," he
+wrote,[11] "then he is the bishop of the diocese still: and then the law
+that deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament
+that made that law no king and Parliament: and how can this be
+reconciled with the Oath of Allegiance, unless the Doctor can swear
+allegiance to him who is no King and hath no authority to govern." All
+this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the mere fact that it could
+be used as argument against them is proof that they were out of touch
+with the national temper. What they wanted was a legal revolution which
+is in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was
+deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly
+pressed. But the leaders of a revolution "tread a path of fire"; and the
+fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in the fact that
+this was an age when men acted on their principles. William and his
+advisers, with the condition of Ireland and Scotland a cause for
+agitation, with France hostile, with treason and plot not absent from
+the episcopate itself, had no easy task; what, in the temper of the
+time, gives most cause for consideration, is the moderate spirit in
+which they accomplished it.
+
+[Footnote 11: _A Vindication of their Majesties' Authority to fill
+the Sees of the Deprived Bishops_ (1691).]
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which the
+Church of England had to confront in these troubled years. The
+definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the moment
+it aroused less bitterness, was in the long run more intricate in its
+nature. That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of
+prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied. But greater things were
+in the air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of
+Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would have
+been admitted to the Church. It is this which explains the acrimonious
+debates of the next two years. The hatred of the Church for dissent can
+only be understood by those who study with care the insults heaped upon
+her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars. That men who had striven for
+her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen
+as tragic as ironical. Nor must we miss the political aspect of the
+matter. William had received an eager, if natural, support from
+Nonconformists; and since the vast majority of them was Whig in temper,
+the greater the degree of toleration, the greater likelihood there was
+of an attack upon the Church. Exclusion thus became a fundamental
+article of the Tory creed; and it was the more valued because it
+enabled them to strike at their opponents through an institution which
+at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710, still showed an overwhelming hold
+upon the mass of the people.
+
+The attitude of mind herein implied is in large part the reaction from
+the Erastian temper of the government. Under William, that temper is
+intelligible enough; for unless he held the Church in strict control, he
+must have felt that he was giving a large handle to his enemies. Under
+Anne, the essence of the situation remained unchanged, even though her
+eager sympathy with the Church was beyond all question. William had
+relieved Nonconformists from the burden of penal statute; the Occasional
+Conformity Act of 1713 broadly continued the exclusion of all save the
+more yielding of them from political office. When the Hanoverians
+succeeded they were willing to repeal its more rigid intolerance; but
+the Test Act remained as evidence that the Dissenters were not yet
+regarded as in a full sense part of the national life.
+
+The reasons for the hatred of dissent go back in part to the Civil War
+and in part also to the feeling of common ground between the dissenting
+interest and Rome which was born of the struggle under Elizabeth and
+James. The pamphlets are innumerable; and most of them deserve the
+complete obliquity into which they have fallen. We are told, in the
+eighteenth as in the seventeenth century, that the Presbyterian theory
+of government is inconsistent with the existence of the civil power.
+"They claim," said Leslie, "power to abrogate the laws of the land
+touching ecclesiastical matters, if they judge them hurtful or
+unprofitable... They require the civil magistrate to be subject to their
+power." Of Knox or Cartwright this is no unfair account; but of the
+later Presbyterians it is the merest travesty. It supposes that they
+would be willing to push to the utmost limit the implications of the
+theory of the two kingdoms--a supposition which their passive submission
+to the Act of 1712 restoring lay patronage decisively refutes. Bramhall
+had no doubt that their discipline was "the very quintessence of refined
+popery," and the argument is repeated by a hundred less learned
+pamphleteers. Neither the grim irony of Defoe nor the proven facts of
+the case could wean either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of
+the people from the belief that the Revolution endangered the very
+existence of the Church and that concession would be fatal. So stoutly
+did the Church resist it that the accession of George I alone, in
+Lecky's view, prevented the repeal of the Toleration Act and the
+destruction of the political benefits of the Revolution.
+
+But nowhere was the temper of the time more clearly displayed than in
+the disputes over Convocation. To William's advisers, perhaps, more than
+to the Church itself their precipitation is due; for had they not, at
+the outset of the reign, suggested large changes in the liturgy
+suspicions then aroused might well have slumbered. As it was, the
+question of the royal supremacy immediately came into view and the
+clergy spared no effort to meet the issue so raised. And this they felt
+the more bitterly because the upper house of Convocation, two-thirds of
+which were William's nominees, naturally inclined to his side. Both
+under William and Anne the dispute continued, and the lower clergy
+shrank from no opportunity of conflict. They fought the king, the
+archbishop, the upper house. They attacked the writings of Toland and
+Burnet, the latter's book since recognized as one of the great treasures
+of Anglican literature. In the main, of course, the struggle was part of
+the perennial conflict between High Church doctrine and
+latitudinarianism. But that was only a fragment of the issue. What
+really was in question was the nature of the State's power over the
+Church. That could be left unanswered so long, as with James I and
+Charles, the two powers had but a single thought. The situation changed
+only when State and Church had different policies to fulfil and
+different means for their attainment.
+
+The controversy had begun on the threshold of William's accession; but
+its real commencement dates from 1697. In that year was published the
+_Letter to a Convocation Man_, probably written by Sir Bartholomew
+Shower, an able if unscrupulous Jacobite lawyer, which maliciously,
+though with abounding skill, raised every question that peaceful
+churchmen must have been anxious to avoid. The _Letter_ pointed out the
+growth of infidelity and the increasing suspicion that the Church was
+becoming tainted with Socinian doctrine. Only the assembly of
+Convocation could arrest these evils. The author did not deny that the
+king's assent was necessary to its summons. But he argued that once the
+Convocation had met, it could, like Parliament, debate all questions
+relevant to its purpose. "The one of these courts," said Shower, "is of
+the same power and use with regard to the Church as the other is in
+respect to the State," and he insisted that the writ of summons could
+not at any point confine debate. And since the Convocation was an
+ecclesiastical Parliament, it followed that it could legislate and thus
+make any canons "provided they do not impugn common law, statutes,
+customs or prerogative." "To confer, debate and resolve," said Shower,
+"without the king's license, is at common law the undoubted right of
+convocation."
+
+Here was a clear challenge which was at once answered, in _The Authority
+of Christian Princes_, by William Wake, who was by far the most learned
+of the latitudinarian clergy, and the successor of Tenison in the see of
+Canterbury. His argument was purely historical. He endeavored to show
+that the right to summon ecclesiastical synods was always the
+prerogative of the early Christian princes until the aggression of the
+popes had won church independence. The Reformation resumed the primitive
+practice; and the Act of Submission of 1532 had made it legally
+impossible for the clergy to discuss ecclesiastical matters without
+royal permission. Historically, the argument of Wake was irrefutable;
+but what mostly impressed the Church was the uncompromising Erastianism
+of his tone. Princes, he said, "may make what laws or constitutions they
+think fit for the Church.... a canon is but as matter prepared for the
+royal stamp." In this view, obviously, the Church is more than a
+department of the State. But Wake went even farther, "I cannot see why
+the Supreme Magistrate," he wrote, "who confessedly has a power to
+confirm or reject their (Convocation's) decrees, may not also make such
+other use of them as he pleases, and correct, improve, or otherwise
+alter their resolutions, according to his own liking, before he gives
+his authority to them."
+
+So defined no Church could claim in any true sense the headship of
+Christ; for it was clearly left at the mercy of the governmental view of
+expedient conduct. Wake's answer aroused a sensation almost as acute as
+the original _Letter_ of Shower. But by far the ablest criticism it
+provoked was that of Francis Atterbury, then a young student of Christ
+Church and on the threshold of his turbulent career. His _Rights, Powers
+and Privileges of an English Convocation Stated and Vindicated_ not only
+showed a masterly historic sense in its effort to traverse the
+unanswerable induction of Wake, but challenged his position more
+securely on the ground of right. The historical argument, indeed, was
+not a safe position for the Church, and Wake's rejoinder in his _State
+of the Church_ (1703) is generally conceded to have proved his point, so
+far as the claim of prescription is concerned. But when Atterbury moves
+to the deeper problem of what is involved in the nature of a church, he
+has a powerful plea to make. It is unnecessary now to deal with his
+contention that Wake's defence of the Royal Supremacy undermines the
+rights of Parliament; for Wake could clearly reply that the seat of that
+power had changed with the advent of the Revolution. Where the avoidance
+of sympathy is difficult is in his insistence that no Church can live
+without an assembly to debate its problems, and that no assembly can be
+real which is subject to external control. "Their body," as he remarks,
+"will be useless to the State and by consequence contemptible"; for its
+opinions will not be born of that free deliberation which can alone
+ensure respect. Like all High Churchmen, Atterbury has a clear sense
+that Church and State can no longer be equated, and he is anxious to
+preserve the personality of the Church from the invasions of an alien
+body. To be real, it must be independent, and to be independent, it must
+have organs of self-expression. But neither William nor Anne could
+afford to forego the political capital involved in ecclesiastical
+control and Erastian principles proceeded to their triumph.
+
+Here, as elsewhere, it was Charles Leslie who best summed up the
+feeling of High Churchmen. His _Case of the Regale_ (1701) is by far the
+ablest of his many able performances. He saw at the outset that the real
+issue was defined by the Church's claim to be a divine society, with
+rights thus consecrated by the conditions of its origin. If it was
+divine, invasion did not touch its _de jure_ rights. "How," he asked,
+"can rights that are divine be given up? If they are divine, no human
+authority can either supersede or limit them.... How can rights that are
+inherent be given up? If they are inherent, they are inseparable. The
+right to meet, to consult, to make rules or canons for the regulation of
+the society, is essential to every society as such ... can she then part
+with what is essential to her?" Nor could it be denied that "where the
+choice of the governors of one society is in the hands of another
+society, that society must be dependent and subject to the other." The
+Church, in the Latitudinarian view was thus either the creature of the
+state or an _imperium in imperio_; but Leslie would not admit that
+fruitful stumbling block to the debate. "The sacred and civil powers
+were like two parallel lines which could never meet or interfere ... the
+confusion arises ... when the civil power will take upon them to control
+or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her spiritual authority."
+He did not doubt that the Church should give securities for its loyalty
+to the king, and renounce any effort at the coercion of the civil
+magistrate. But the Church was entitled to a similar privilege, and
+kings should not "have their beneficence and protection to the Church of
+Christ understood as a bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their
+hands the powers committed into her charge by Christ." Nor did he fail
+to point out the suicidal nature of Erastianism. For the church's hold
+upon men is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her
+principles. "When they see bishops," he wrote wisely, "made by the
+Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court
+language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a judge
+at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand from the
+Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest security of her
+government."
+
+The argument is powerful enough; though it should be noted that some of
+its implications remain undetermined. Leslie does not say how the
+spheres of Church and State are to be differentiated. He does not
+explain the methods whereby an establishment is to be made compatible
+with freedom. For it is obvious that the partnership of Church and State
+must be upon conditions; and once the State had permitted the existence
+of creeds other than that of its official adoption, it could not
+maintain the exclusive power for which the Church contended. And when
+the Church not only complained of State-betrayal, but attempted the use
+of political means to enforce remedial measures it was inevitable that
+statesmen would use the weapons ready to their hand to coerce it to
+their will. The real remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness
+but disestablishment.
+
+That this is the meaning of the struggle did not appear until the reign
+of George I. What is known as the Bangorian controversy was due to the
+posthumous publication, in 1716, of the papers of George Hickes, the
+most celebrated of the Nonjurors in his generation. The papers are of
+no special import; but taken in connection with the Jacobite rising of
+1715 they seemed to imply a new attack upon the Revolution settlement.
+So, at least, they were interpreted by Benjamin Hoadly, then Bishop of
+Bangor, and a stout upholder of the Latitudinarian school. The conflict
+today has turned to dust and ashes; and few who read the multitude of
+pamphlets it evoked, or stand amazed at their personal bitterness, can
+understand why more than a hundred writers should have thought it
+necessary to inform the world of their opinions, or why the London Stock
+Exchange should have felt so passionate an interest in the debate as to
+cease for a day the hubbub of its transactions. Nor can any one make
+heroes from the personalities of its protagonists. Hoadly himself was a
+typical bishop of the political school, who rose from humble
+circumstances to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester through a
+remarkable series of translations. Before the debate of 1716, he was
+chiefly known by two political tracts in which he had rewritten, in less
+cogent form, and without adequate acknowledgment, the two treatises of
+Locke. He clearly realized how worthless the dogma of Divine Right had
+become, without being certain of the principles by which it was to be
+replaced. Probably, as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is
+the result of a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy. If
+God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we
+must seek a human explanation of political facts. And he became
+convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to
+ecclesiastical than to secular politics. Of his opponents, by far the
+ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be said to
+have respected, and the parent, through his mystical writings, of the
+Wesleyan movement. Snape, then Provost of Eton, was always incisive; and
+his pamphlet went through seventeen editions in a single year and
+provoked seven replies within three months. Thomas Sherlock would not be
+either himself or his father's son, were he not caustic, logical and
+direct. But Hoadly and Law between them exhaust the controversy, so far
+as it has meaning for our own day. The less essential questions like
+Hoadly's choice of friends, his attitude to prayer, the accuracy of the
+details in his account of the Test Act, the cause of his refusal to
+answer Law directly, are hardly now germane to the substance of the
+debate. Hoadly's position is most fully stated in his _Preservative
+against the Principles and Practice of Nonjurors_ which he published in
+1716 as a counterblast to the papers of Hickes; and they are briefly
+summarized in the sermon preached before the King on March 31, 1717, on
+the text "My Kingdom is not of this world," and published by royal
+command. Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and qualifications, some
+simple points emerge. What he was doing was to deprive the priesthood of
+claims to supernatural authority that he might vindicate for civil
+government the right to preserve itself not less against persons in
+ecclesiastical office than against civil assailants. To do so he is
+forced to deny that the miraculous powers of Christ and the Apostles
+descended to their successors. For if that assumption is made we grant
+to fallible men privileges which confessedly belong to persons outside
+the category of fallibility. And, exactly in the fashion of Leslie in
+the _Regale_ he goes on to show that if a Church is a supernatural
+institution, it cannot surrender one jot or tittle of its prerogative.
+It is, in fact, an _imperium in imperio_ and its conflict with the state
+is inevitable. But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what
+is its nature? Hoadly here attacks the doctrine which lies at the basis
+of all ecclesiastical debate. The Church, he claims, is not a visible
+society, presided over by men who have authority directly transmitted by
+Christ. There are not within it "viceregents who can be said properly to
+supply his place; no interpreters upon whom his subjects are absolutely
+to depend; no judges over the conscience or religion of his people. For
+if this were so that any such absolute viceregent authority, either for
+the making of new laws, or interpreting old ones, or judging his
+subjects, in religious matters, were lodged in any men upon earth, the
+consequence would be that what still retains the name of the Church of
+Christ would not be the kingdom of Christ, but the kingdom of those men
+invested with such authority. For whoever hath such an authority of
+making laws is so far a king, and whoever can add new laws to those of
+Christ, equally obligatory, is as truly a king as Christ himself. Nay,
+whosoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken
+laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes,
+and not the person who first wrote and spoke them."
+
+The meaning is clear enough. What Hoadly is attacking is the theory of a
+visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense superstructure of
+miracle and infallibility erected thereon. The true Church of Christ is
+in heaven; and the members of the earthly society can but try in a
+human, blundering way, to act with decency and justice. Apostolic
+succession, the power of excommunication, the dealing out of forgiveness
+for men's sins, the determination of true doctrine, insofar as the
+Church claims these powers, it is usurping an authority that is not its
+own. The relation of man to God is his private affair, and God will ask
+from him sincerity and honesty, rather than judge him for his
+possession of some special set of dogmas. Clearly, therefore, if the
+Church is no more than this, it has no supernatural pretensions to
+oppose to the human claims of the State. And since the State must have
+within itself all the means of sufficient life, it has the right to
+resist the ecclesiastical onslaught as based upon the usurpation of
+power assumed without right. And in later treatises Hoadly did for
+ceremonial exactly what he had done for church government. The eucharist
+became a piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an
+announcement--"a mere external thing"--that the rules of the fellowship
+have been broken. It at no point is related to the sinner's opportunity
+of salvation.
+
+In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has no
+monopoly of truth. It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but reason
+alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes. Nor does its
+judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the truth of
+things. The real root of faith is not the possession of an infallible
+dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which you happen to
+believe. For the magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the
+table of your springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based
+upon that table; from which it follows that things like the Test and
+Corporation Acts have no real political validity. They have been imposed
+upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping power; and
+the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem as valid as that
+of a member of the Church of England.
+
+All this sounds sensible enough; though it is curious doctrine in the
+mouth of a bishop of that church. And this, in fact, is the
+starting-point of Law's analysis of Hoadly. No one who reads the
+unsparing vigor of his criticism can doubt that Law must have been
+thoroughly happy in the composition of his defence; and, indeed, his is
+the only contribution to the debate which may claim a permanent place in
+political literature. In one sense, indeed, the whole of Law's answer is
+an _ignoratio elenchi_, for he assumes the truth of that which Hoadly
+sets out to examine, with the inevitable result that each writer is, for
+the most part, arguing from different premises. But on the assumption
+that Hoadly is a Christian, Law's argument is an attack of great power.
+He shows conclusively that if the Church of England is no more than
+Hoadly imagines it to be, it cannot, in any proper historic sense, be
+called the Church of England at all. For every one of the institutions
+which Hoadly calls an usurpation, is believed by Churchmen to be
+integral to its nature. And if sincerity alone is to count as the test,
+then there cannot, for the existing world, be any such thing as
+objective religious truth. It subverted not merely absolute
+authority--which the Church of England did not claim--but any authority
+in the Church. It impugned the authority of the Crown to enforce
+religious belief by civil penalties. Hoadly's rejection of authority,
+moreover, is in Law's view fatal to government of any kind. For all
+lawful authority must affect eternal salvation insofar as to disobey it
+is to sin. The authority the Church possesses is inherent in the very
+nature of the Church; for the obligation to a belief in Christianity is
+the same thing as to a belief in that Church which can be shown to
+represent Christ's teaching.
+
+From Law's own point of view, the logic of his position is undeniable;
+and in his third letter to Hoadly, the real heart of his attack, he
+touches the centre of the latter's argument. For if it is sincerity
+which is alone important it would follow that things false and wrong are
+as acceptable to God as things true and right, which is patently absurd.
+Nor has Hoadly given us means for the detection of sincerity. He seemed
+to think that anyone was sincere who so thought himself; but, says Law,
+"it is also possible and as likely for a man to be mistaken in those
+things which constitute true sincerity as in those things which
+constitute true religion." Clearly, sincerity cannot be the pith of the
+matter; for it may be mistaken and directed to wrong ends. The State, in
+fact, may respect conscience, but Hoadly is no more entitled to assume
+the infallibility of private belief than he is to deny the infallibility
+of the Church's teaching. That way lies anarchy.
+
+Here, indeed, the antagonists were on common ground. Both had denied the
+absolute character of any authority; but while Hoadly virtually
+postulates a Church which logically is no more than those who accept
+the moral law as Christ described it, Law restricts the Church to that
+society which bears the traditional marks of the historic institution.
+On Hoadly's principles, there was no reason why anyone not hostile to
+the civil power should not enjoy political privilege; on Law's there was
+every reason simply because those who denied the doctrines of the High
+Church refused a truth open for their acceptance. Law, indeed, goes so
+far as to argue that in the light of his principles Hoadly should be a
+Deist; and there is ground for what, in that age, was a valuable point
+to make. The sum total of it all is that for the bishop the outward
+actions of men alone concern the State; while Law insists that the root
+of action and the test of fitness is whether men have seen a certain
+aspect of the truth and grasped it.
+
+The result, to say the least, was calamitous. In May of 1717,
+convocation met and the Lower House immediately adopted an unanimous
+report condemning the "Preservative" and the sermon. But Hoadly had the
+government behind him and the convocation was prorogued before further
+action could be taken. Snape, Hare, Mosse and Sherlock, all of whom were
+chaplains royal, and had been drawn into the conflict, were dismissed
+from their office; and for more than one hundred and thirty-five years
+convocation was not again summoned. It was a striking triumph for
+Erastianism, though the more liberal principles of Hoadly were less
+successful. Robert Walpole was on the threshold of his power, and, as a
+manager of Sacheverell's impeachment, he had seen the hold of the Church
+upon the common people, may even, indeed, have remembered that Hoadly's
+own dwelling had been threatened with destruction in the popular
+excitement. _Quieta non movere_ was his motto; and he was not interested
+in the niceties of ecclesiastic metaphysic. So the Test Act remained
+immovable until 1828; while the annual Act of Indemnity for its
+infractions represented that English genius for illogical mitigation
+which solves the deeper problems of principle while avoiding the
+consideration of their substance.
+
+In the hundred and twenty years which passed between the Bangorian
+Controversy and the Oxford Movement, there is only one volume upon the
+problem of Church and State which deserves more than passing notice.
+Bishop Warburton was the Lord Brougham of his age; and as its
+self-constituted universal provider of intellectual fare, he deemed it
+his duty to settle this, amongst others of the eternal questions. The
+effort excited only the contempt of Leslie Stephen--"the peculiar
+Warburton mixture," he says "of sham logic and bluster." Yet that is
+hardly fair to the total result of Warburton's remarks. He tried to
+steer a middle path between the logical result of such Erastianism as
+that of the _Independent Whig_, on the one hand, and the excessive claim
+of High Churchmanship on the other. Naturally enough, or the writer
+would not be Warburton, the book is full of tawdry rhetoric and stupid
+quibbles. But the _Alliance between Church and State_ (1736) set the
+temper of speculation until the advent of Newman, and is therefore
+material for something more than contempt. It acutely points out that
+societies generate a personality distinct from that of their members in
+words reminiscent of an historic legal pronouncement.[12] "When any
+number of men," he says, "form themselves into a society, whether civil
+or religious, this society becomes a body different from that aggregate
+which the number of individuals composed before the society was
+formed.... But a body must have its proper personality and will, which
+without these is no more than a shadow or a name."
+
+[Footnote 12: Dicey, _Law and Opinion in England_ (2nd edition),
+p. 165.]
+
+And that is the root of Warburton's pronouncement. The Church is a
+society distinct from the State, but lending to that body its assistance
+because without the sanction of religion the full achievement of the
+social purpose is impossible. There is thus an alliance between them,
+each lending its support to the other for their common benefit. The two
+remain distinct; the union between them is of a federal kind. But they
+interchange their powers, and this it is which explains at once the
+royal supremacy and the right of Churchmen to a share in the
+legislature. This also it is which explains the existence of a Test
+Act, whereby those who might injure that which the State has undertaken
+to protect are deprived of their power to evil. And, in return, the
+Church engages to "apply its utmost endeavors in the service of the
+State." It becomes attached to its benefactor from the privilege it
+receives; and the dangers which might arise from its natural
+independence are thus obviated. For a federal union precludes the grave
+problem of an _imperium in imperio_, and the "mischiefs which so
+terrified Hobbes" are met by the terms upon which it is founded.
+
+It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The contract
+does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton "in the same
+archive with the famous original compact between monarch and people"
+which has been the object of vast but fruitless searches. Nor does the
+Act of Submission bear upon its face the marks of that tender care of
+the protection of an independent society which Warburton declared a
+vital tenet of the Union. Yet such criticisms miss the real significance
+of the theory. It is really the introduction into English politics of
+that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and
+Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit
+was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a
+secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the
+superior. Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it
+pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had
+seemed mutually exclusive.
+
+Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the English Church
+because its temper, under the ægis of Laudian views, had been in
+substance theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly expressed the compromise
+the dominant party of the Church had then in mind. They did, indeed,
+mistake the power of the Church, or, rather, they submitted to the State
+so fully that what they had intended for a partnership became an
+absorption. So that the Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep
+enough to make the Church no more than a moral police department of the
+State. Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by
+fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct
+to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The
+Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and
+its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the
+obstrusive Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence
+slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until Newman's advent was
+the provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility. It
+is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church which
+was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The opponents of
+Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a
+plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making. They saw that a
+Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control
+of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth
+their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment
+and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to
+be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal
+and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the
+Church to possess an ethos of her own. It was thus against the
+sovereignty of the State that they protested. Somewhere, a line must be
+drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be
+safeguarded. For its supporters could not be true to their divine
+mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to
+impose its will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious
+body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they
+repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived from the
+State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an
+authority not rightly its own.
+
+The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment. For here
+the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived
+upon terms of her own definition. That was possible before the
+Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of
+rationalism the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become
+unacceptable. If the Church was to become so intimately involved with
+the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to complain, if
+statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to sacrifice it to
+the attainment of that ideal. For the real secret of independence is,
+after all, no more than independence. The Church sought it without being
+willing to pay the price. And this it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge
+triumphant from an ordeal where logically he should have failed. The
+State, by definition is an absorptive animal; and the Church had no
+right to complain if the price of its privileges was royal supremacy. A
+century so self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the
+difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High Church
+theory.
+
+Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next century.
+The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the seventeenth
+century, to the ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.[13] In
+fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law. Like them, it was
+searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it
+discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the
+sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation. "The
+State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words might have been
+written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement, indeed, like its
+predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and when Lord Brougham told
+the House of Lords that the idea of the Church possessing "absolute and
+unalienable rights" was a "gross and monstrous anomaly" because it would
+make impossible the supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the
+result of a doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first
+completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this
+controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury has
+told the House of Lords,[14] "... see the absolute need, if a Church is
+to be strong and vigorous, for the Church, _qua_ church, to be able to
+say what it can do as a church." "The rule of the sovereign, the rule of
+Parliament," replied Lord Haldane,[15] "extend as far as the rule of the
+Church. They are not to be distinguished or differentiated, and that was
+the condition under which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the
+Church of England." Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic
+theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the problem
+of its sovereignty. "A free church in a free state," now, as then, may
+be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to build it.
+
+[Footnote 13: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chapter III.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34,
+p. 992 (June 3, 1919).]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p 1002.
+The quotation does not fully represent Lord Haldane's views.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ERA OF STAGNATION
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of unexampled calm
+in English politics, which lasted until the expulsion of Walpole from
+power in 1742. No vital questions were debated, nor did problems of
+principle force themselves into view; and if the Jacobites remained in
+the background as an element invincibly hostile to absorption, the
+failure of their effort in 1715 showed how feeble was their hold on
+English opinion. Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had
+nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably
+recorded in Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and
+meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the reign
+of George III, they were amenable to management. In the result, an
+opposition in the classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question
+to be considered was the personalities who were to share in power. The
+dominating temper of Walpole decided that issue; and he gave thereby to
+the political struggle the outlines in which it was encased for a
+generation.
+
+It is a dull period, but complacent; for it was not an unprosperous
+time. Agriculture and commerce both were abundant; and the increasing
+development of towns shows us that the Industrial Revolution loomed in
+the near distance. The eager continuance of the deistic controversy
+suggests that there was something of novelty beneath the calm; for
+Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck at the root of religious belief,
+and Shaftesbury's exaltation of Hellenism not only contributed to the
+_Aufklarung_ in Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not
+to go unchallenged. But the literature of the time is summarized in
+Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of
+the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the
+latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop
+Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his
+_Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721) shows rather
+the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea
+Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought.
+Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with
+seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the
+estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite
+the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole
+governed. It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the
+keynote of the time. An able speaker, without being a great orator, a
+superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men
+low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the
+man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions
+to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over
+the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from
+office. One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney,
+Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility. He maintained himself in
+office by a corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically
+conceived. An opposition developed less on principle than on the belief
+that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for concentration.
+The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save personal animosity
+upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions could only seize upon a
+doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain as the pretext of the war it
+was Walpole's ambition no less than policy to avoid. From 1726 until
+1735 the guiding spirit of the party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter
+year he quarrelled with Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in
+high dudgeon to France. But in the years of his leadership he had
+evolved a theory of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the
+intellectual bankruptcy of the time.
+
+To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to remember
+the peculiar character of his career. He had attained to the highest
+office under Anne at an exceptionally early age; and his period of
+power had been distinguished by the vehemence with which he pursued the
+ideal of a strict division of parties and the expulsion of all alien
+elements from the government. But he had staked all his fortunes upon a
+scheme he had neither the resolution to plan nor the courage to execute;
+and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had been followed
+by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to his reputation and
+place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the
+King's mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to
+political place. His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from
+power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance between the
+Tories and malcontent Whigs for Walpole's overthrow. The alliance
+succeeded, though too late for Bolingbroke to enjoy the fruits of
+success; but in effecting the purgation of the Tory party from its taint
+of Jacobitism he rendered no inconsiderable service. His foundation,
+moreover, of the _Craftsman_--the first official journal of a political
+party in England--showed his appreciation of the technique of political
+controversy. Most of it is dead now, and, indeed, no small part of its
+contemporary success is due to the making of comment in terms of the
+immediate situation, as also by its consistent use of a personal
+reference which has, save in the mass, no meaning for today. Though,
+doubtless, the idea of its inception was derived from journals like
+Defoe's _Review_ and Leslie's _Rehearsal_, which had won success, its
+intimate connection with the party leadership was a novel element; and
+it may therein claim a special relation to the official periodicals of a
+later generation.
+
+The reputation of Bolingbroke as a political philosopher is something
+that our age can hardly understand. "A solemn trifler," Lord Morley has
+called him; and it is difficult to know why his easy declamation was so
+long mistaken for profound thought. Much, doubtless, is due to that
+personal fascination which made him the inspiration of men so different
+as Pope and Voltaire; and the man who could supply ideas to Chatham and
+Disraeli cannot be wholly devoid of merit. Certainly he wrote well, in
+that easy elegance of style which was the delight of the eighteenth
+century; and he is consistently happy in his choice of adjectives. But
+his work is at every point embellished with that affectation of
+classical learning which was the curse of his age. He sought no general
+truths, and he is free from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any
+enthusiasm save that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his
+political writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize
+his animosity. The _Dissertation on Parties_ (1734) and the _Idea of a
+Patriot King_ (1738) might have betrayed us, taken alone, into regarding
+their author as a disinterested observer watching with regret the
+development of a fatal system; but taken in conjunction with the _Letter
+to Sir W. Windham_ (1717), which was not published until after his
+death, and is written with an acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to
+honesty, they reveal the opinions as no more than a mask for ambition
+born of hate.
+
+The whole, of course, must have some sort of background; and the
+_Letters on the Study of History_ (1735) was doubtless intended to
+supply it. Experience is to be the test of truth, since history is
+philosophy teaching by example. But Bolingbroke's own argument supplies
+its refutation. His history is an arbitrary selection of instances
+intended to illustrate the particular ideas which happened to be
+uppermost in his mind. The Roman consuls were chosen by annual election;
+whence it is clear that England should have, if not an annual, at least
+a triennial parliament. He acknowledges that the past in some degree
+unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks upon the
+evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger
+aspect than their immediate environment. But his history is intended
+less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy
+of citation. Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content
+with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration. He is willing,
+indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the
+reign of James I; though he shows his lack of true perception when he
+ascribes the true inwardness of the Reformation to the greed of the
+monarch for the spoils of the clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses
+him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events.
+Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the
+real root of great changes. And when he expresses a "thorough contempt"
+for the kind of work scholars such as Scaliger and Petavius had
+achieved, he shows his entire ignorance of the method whereby alone a
+knowledge of general principle can be attained.
+
+A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high
+notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings is too
+stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king
+important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the Church; for
+Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with such matters as
+the apostolic succession. He makes great show of his love of liberty,
+which is the true end of government; and we are informed with a vast
+solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in which it always stands. So that
+the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told
+what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained. The social compact
+seems to win his approbation and we learn that the secret of the
+British constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual
+independency. But what the powers are, and how their independence is
+preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of
+Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria
+against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the
+secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of
+standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told
+that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and
+vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for
+corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his
+sincerity. The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no
+difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how
+completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted. He
+wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He would have
+disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen from Parliament.
+The press was to be free; and there is at least a degree of generous
+insight in his plea for a wider commercial freedom in colonial matters.
+Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man with
+the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the committee for the
+settlement of disputed elections? And what else can we see in his desire
+for liberty of the press save a desire to fight Walpole in the open,
+without fear of the penalties his former treason had incurred?
+
+His value can be tested in another way. His _Idea of a Patriot King_ is
+the remedy for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty years old when it
+appeared, and he had then been in active politics for thirty-five years,
+so that we are entitled to regard it as the fruit of his mature
+experience. He was too convinced that the constitution was "in the
+strictest sense a bargain, a conditional contract between the prince and
+the people" to attempt again the erection of a system of prerogative.
+Yet it is about the person of the monarch that the theory hinges. He is
+to have no powers inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for
+such restraints will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil
+propensities of a bad king. What is needed is a patriot king who will
+destroy corruption and awaken the spirit of liberty. His effective
+government will synchronize with the commencement of his reign; and he
+will at once dismiss the old and cunning ministers, to replace them by
+servants who are wise. He will not stand upon party, but upon the State.
+He will unite the forces of good counsel into a single scheme.
+Complaints will be answered, the evildoers punished. Commerce will flow
+on with uninterrupted prosperity, and the navy of England receive its
+due meed of attention. His conduct must be dignified, and he must
+acquire his influence not apart from, but on account of, the affection
+of his people. "Concord," says Bolingbroke in rhapsodical prospection,
+"will appear breeding peace and prosperity on every hand"; though he
+prudently hopes also that men will look back with affection upon one
+"who desired life for nothing so much as to see a King of Great Britain
+the most powerful man in the country, and a patriot King at the head of
+a united people."
+
+Bolingbroke himself has admitted that such a monarch would be a "sort of
+standing miracle," and perhaps no other comment upon his system is
+required. A smile in Plato at the sight of his philosopher-King in such
+strange company might well be pardoned. It is only necessary to point
+out that the person whom Bolingbroke designates for this high function
+was Frederick, Prince of Wales, to us the most meagre of a meagre
+generation, but to Bolingbroke, by whose grace he was captivated, "the
+greatest and most glorious of human beings." This exaltation of the
+monarch came at a time when a variety of circumstances had combined to
+show the decrease of monarchical sentiment. It bears upon its every page
+the marks of a personal antagonism. It is too obviously the programme of
+a party to be capable of serious interpretation as a system. The
+minister who is to be impeached, the wise servants who are to gain
+office, the attack on corruption, the spirited foreign policy--all these
+have the earmarks of a platform rather than of a philosophy. Attacks on
+corruption hardly read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the
+one solid evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger of
+finance in politics. For none of the Tories save Barnard, who owed his
+party influence thereto, understood the financial schemes of Walpole;
+and since they were his schemes obviously they represented the triumph
+of devilish ingenuity. The return of landed men to power would mean the
+return of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country
+squires, the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that
+Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a régime which already
+faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power. The pamphlet was the
+cornerstone in the education of Frederick's son; and when George III
+came to the throne he proceeded to give such heed to his master as the
+circumstances permitted. It is perhaps, as Mr. A.L. Smith has argued,
+unfair to visit Bolingbroke with George's version of his ideal; yet they
+are sufficiently connected for the one to give the meaning to the other.
+Chatham, indeed, was later intrigued by this ideal of a national party;
+and before Disraeli discovered that England does not love coalitions he
+expended much rhetoric upon the beauties of a patriotic king. But
+Chatham was a wayward genius who had nothing of that instinct for common
+counsel which is of the essence of party government; while it is
+necessary to draw a firm line between Disraeli's genial declamation and
+his practice when in office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort
+founded upon the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that
+his own last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of
+the event which he looked to as the inauguration of the golden age.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political thought;
+the system continued, though the men were different. What alone can be
+detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which found its
+sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the strength of
+which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king. An able
+pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival of this unlooked-for portent.
+_Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts_ (1742) was, though it is
+anonymous,[16] obviously written by one in touch with the inner current
+of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of Walpole, though he sees
+the chaos in its result. "A republican spirit," he says, "has strangely
+arisen"; and he goes on to tell how the electors of London and
+Westminster were now regarding their members as delegates to whom
+instructions might be issued. "A new party of malcontents" had arisen,
+"assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People."
+They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ... and
+endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands
+that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the
+people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so
+obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society,
+to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves."
+The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike, that temper which
+produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible for Cartwright and
+Horne Tooke and Sir Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English
+radicalism.
+
+[Footnote 16: It was probably written by Lord Egmont.]
+
+Yet the influence of that temper still lay a generation ahead; and the
+next piece of import comes from a mind which, though perhaps the most
+powerful of all which have applied themselves to political philosophy in
+England, was, from its very scepticism, incapable of constructive
+effort. David Hume was thirty-one years of age when he published (1742)
+the first series of his essays; and his _Treatise of Human Nature_ which
+had fallen "dead-born from the press" was in some sort compensated by
+the success of the new work. The second part, entitled _Political
+Discourses_, was published in 1752, almost simultaneously with the
+"_Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals_." As in the case of
+Hume's metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful
+dissolvent the century was to see. Yet nowhere was so clearly to be
+demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had fallen.
+
+Hume, of course, is always critical and suggestive, and even if he had
+no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new turn to speculation.
+There is something almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes
+divine right and the social contract. The one is an inevitable deduction
+from theism, but it protects an usurper not less than an hereditary
+king, and gives a "divine commission" as well to a constable as to the
+most majestic prince. The proponents of the social contract are in no
+better case. "Were you to preach," he remarks, "in most parts of the
+world that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary
+consent, or on a mutual promise, the magistrate would soon imprison you
+as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience; if your friends did
+not before shut you up as delirious for advancing such absurdities." The
+original contract could not be produced, and, even if it were, it would
+suppose the "consent of the fathers to bind the children even to the
+most remote generations." The real truth, as he remarks, is that "almost
+all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains
+any record in story, have been founded originally on usurpation, or on
+conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary
+subjection of the people." If we then ask why obedience is possible, the
+sufficient answer is that "it becomes so familiar that most men never
+make any inquiry about its origin or cause, any more than about the
+principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of nature."
+
+Government, in short, is dependent upon the inescapable facts of
+psychology. It might be unnecessary if all desires could be individually
+fulfilled by making them, or if man showed to his fellow-men the same
+tender regard he has for himself. So happy a condition does not exist;
+and government is the most useful way of remedying the defects of our
+situation. A theologian might say that Hume derives government from
+original sin; to which he would have replied by denying the fall. His
+whole attitude is simply an insistence that utility is the touchstone of
+institutions, and he may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its
+application to the whole field of political science. He knows that
+opinion is the sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie
+at the base of the thoughts which get accepted. He does not, indeed,
+deny that fear and consent enter into the attitude of men; he simply
+asserts that these also are founded upon a judgment of utility in the
+thing judged. We obey because otherwise "society could not subsist," and
+society subsists for its utility. "Men," he says "could not live at all
+in society, at least in a civilized society, without laws and
+magistrates and judges, to prevent the encroachments of the strong upon
+the weak, of the violent upon the just and equitable."
+
+Utilitarianism is, of course, above all a method; and it is not unfair
+to say of Hume that he did not get very far beyond insistence on that
+point. He sees that the subjection of the many to the few is rooted in
+human impulse; but he has no penetrating inquiry, such as that of Locke
+or Hobbes, into the purpose of such subjection. So, too, it is the sense
+of public interest which determines men's thoughts on government, on who
+should rule, and what should be the system of property; but the ethical
+substance of these questions he leaves undetermined. Politics, he
+thinks, may one day be a science; though he considers the world still
+too young for general truths therein. The maxims he suggests as of
+permanent value, "that a hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals,
+and a people voting by their representatives form the best monarchy,
+autocracy and democracy"; that "free governments ... are the most
+ruinous and oppressive to their provinces"; that republics are more
+favorable to science, monarchies to art; that the death of a political
+body is inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most
+thinkers at the present time. And when he constructs an ideal
+constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be regarded as
+practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is obvious that the
+historical method had not yet come fully into being.
+
+Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an avoidance
+of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic insight that he had.
+He has a keen eye for the absurdity of Pope's maxim that administration
+is all in all; nothing can ever make the forms of government immaterial.
+He accepts Harrington's dictum that the substance of government
+corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as later
+thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces. He sees that
+the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or withstand the new balance
+of property in the State; a prophecy of which the accuracy was
+demonstrated by the failure of George III. "In all governments," as he
+says, "there is a perpetual intestinal struggle, open or secret,"
+between Authority and Liberty; though his judgment that neither "can
+ever absolutely prevail," shows us rather that we are on the threshold
+of _laissez-faire_ than that Hume really understood the problem of
+freedom. He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of
+the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular
+government. He saw the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency
+to persist in terms of men instead of principles. He was convinced of
+the necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and
+no one, save Adam Smith, has more acutely insisted upon the evil effect
+on commerce of an absolute government. He emphasized the value of
+freedom of the press, in which he saw the secret whereby the mixed
+government of England was maintained. "It has also been found," he said
+in a happy phrase, "... that the people are no such dangerous monsters
+as they have been represented, and that it is in every respect better to
+guide them like rational creatures than to lead or drive them like brute
+beasts." There is, in fact, hardly a page of his work in which some such
+acuteness may not be found.
+
+Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is absent. Hume was a typical
+child of one aspect of the eighteenth century in his hatred of
+enthusiasm, and the form in which he most abominates it is religious.
+Why people's religious opinions should lead to antagonism he could no
+more understand than why people should refuse to pass one another on a
+road. Wars of religion thus seemed to him based upon a merely frivolous
+principle; and in his ideal commonwealth he made the Church a department
+of the State lest it should get out of hand. He was, moreover, a static
+philosopher, disturbed by signs of political restlessness; and this led
+to the purgation of Whig doctrines from his writings, and their
+consistent replacement by a cynical conservatism. He was always afraid
+that popular government would mean mob-rule; and absolute government is
+accordingly recommended as the euthanasia of the British constitution.
+Not even the example of Sweden convinced him that a standing army might
+exist without civil liberty being endangered; and he has all the noxious
+fallacies of his time upon the balance of power. Above all, it is
+striking to see his helplessness before the problem of national
+character. Mainly he ascribes it to the form of government, and that in
+turn to chance. Even the friend of Montesquieu can see no significance
+in race or climate. The idea, in fact, of evolution is entirely absent
+from his political speculation. Political life, like human life, ends in
+death; and the problem is to make our egress as comfortable as we can,
+for the prime evil is disturbance. It is difficult not to feel that
+there is almost a physical basis in his own disease for this love of
+quiet. The man who put indolence among the primary motives of human
+happiness was not likely to view novel theories with unruffled temper.
+
+Hume has an eminent place among economists, and for one to whom the
+study of such phenomena was but a casual inquiry, it is marvelous how
+much he saw. He is free from the crude errors of mercantilism; and
+twenty years before Adam Smith hopes, "as a British subject," for the
+prosperity of other countries. "Free communication and exchange" seems
+to him an ordinance of nature; and he heaps contempt upon those
+"numberless bars, obstructions and imposts which all nations of Europe,
+and none more than England, have put upon trade." Specie he places in
+its true light as merely a medium of exchange. The supposed antagonism
+between commerce and agriculture he disposes of in a half-dozen
+effective sentences. He sees the place of time and distance in the
+discussion of economic want. He sees the value of a general level of
+economic equality, even while he is sceptical of its attainment. He
+insists upon the economic value of high wages, though he somewhat
+belittles the importance of wealth in the achievement of happiness.
+Before Bentham, who on this point converted Adam Smith, he knew that the
+rate of interest depends upon the supply of and demand for loans. He
+insists that commerce demands a free government for its progress,
+pointing out, doubtless from his abundant French experience, that an
+absolute government gives to the commercial class an insufficient status
+of honor. He pointed out, doubtless with France again in his mind, the
+evils of an arbitrary system of taxation. "They are commonly converted,"
+he says with unwonted severity, "into punishments on industry; and also,
+by their unavoidable inequality, are more grievous, than by the real
+burden which they impose." And he emphasizes his belief that the best
+taxes are those which, like taxes upon luxury, press least upon the
+poor.
+
+Such insight is extraordinary enough in the pre-Adamite epoch; but even
+more remarkable are his psychological foundations. The wealth of the
+State, he says, is the labor of its subjects, and they work because the
+wants of man are not a stated sum, but "multiply every moment upon
+him." The desire for wealth comes from the idea of pleasure; and in the
+_Treatise on Human Nature_ he discusses with superb clarity the way in
+which the idea of pleasure is related at once to individual satisfaction
+and to that sympathy for others which is one of the roots of social
+existence. He points out the need for happiness in work. "The mind," he
+writes, "acquires new vigor, enlarges its powers and faculties, and by
+an assiduity in honest industry both satisfies its own appetites and
+prevents growth of unnatural ones"; though, like his predecessor,
+Francis Hutcheson, he overemphasizes the delights opened by civilization
+to the humbler class of men. He gives large space in his discussion to
+the power of will; and, indeed, one of the main advantages he ascribed
+to government was the compulsion it puts upon us to allow the categories
+of time and space a part in our calculations. He does not, being in his
+own life entirely free from avarice, regard the appetite for riches as
+man's main motive to existence; though no one was more urgent in his
+insistence that "the avidity of acquiring goods and possessions for
+ourselves and our nearest friends is ... destructive of society" unless
+balanced by considerations of justice. And what he therein intended may
+be gathered from the liberal notions of equality he manifested. "Every
+person," he wrote in a famous passage, "if possible ought to enjoy the
+fruits of his labor in a full possession of all the necessaries, and
+many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt but such an equality
+is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less the happiness
+of the rich than it adds to that of the poor." It is clear that we have
+moved far from the narrow confines of the old political arithmetic. The
+theory of utility enables Hume to see the scope of economics--the word
+itself he did not know--in a more generous perspective than at any
+previous time. It would be too much to say that his grasp of its
+psychological foundation enabled him entirely to move from the
+limitations of the older concept of a national prosperity expressed only
+in terms of bullion to the view of economics as a social science. But at
+least he saw that economics is rooted in the nature of men and therein
+he had the secret of its true understanding. _The Wealth of Nations_
+would less easily have made its way had not the insight of Hume prepared
+the road for its reception.
+
+What, then, and in general, is his place in the history of political
+thought? Clearly enough, he is not the founder of a system; his work is
+rather a series of pregnant hints than a consecutive account of
+political facts. Nor must we belittle the debt he owes to his
+predecessors. Much, certainly, he owed to Locke, and the full radiance
+of the Scottish enlightenment emerges into the day with his teaching.
+Francis Hutcheson gave him no small inspiration; and Hutcheson means
+that he was indebted to Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy
+commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in
+that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is
+characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth
+century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is
+entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism. He first
+showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between
+ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He brings to an end
+what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical school." After him we
+are done with the abuse of history to bolster up Divine Right and social
+contract; for there is clearly present in his use of facts a true sense
+of historical method. He put an end also to the confusion which resulted
+from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong
+independent of all positive law. He took the facts as phenomena to be
+explained rather than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be
+maintained in part defiance of them. Conventional Whiggism has no
+foothold after he has done with its analysis. His utilitarianism was the
+first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract
+school; and even if he was not the first to see through its
+pretensions--that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury--he was the first
+to show the grounds of their uselessness. He saw that history and
+psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy.
+So that even if he could not himself construct it the hints at least
+were there.
+
+[Footnote 17: There are few books which show so clearly as Lorimer's
+_Institutes of Nations_ (1872) how fully the Scottish school was in the
+midstream of European thought.]
+
+His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion. The
+metaphysics of Burke, so far as one may use a term he would himself have
+repudiated, are largely those of Hume. The place of habit and of social
+instinct alongside of consent, the perception that reason alone will not
+explain political facts, the emphasis upon resistance as of last resort,
+the denial that allegiance is a mere contract to be presently explained,
+the deep respect for order--all these are, after all, the fabric from
+which the thought of Burke was woven. Nor is there in Bentham's defence
+of Utilitarianism argument in which he would have recognized novelty.
+Herein, at least, his proof that morality is no more than general
+opinion of utility constructs, in briefer form, the later arguments of
+Bentham, Paley and the Mills, nor can their mode of statement claim
+superiority to Hume's. So that on either side of his work he foreshadows
+the advent of the two great schools of modern political thought. His
+utilitarianism is the real path by which radical opinion at last found
+means of acceptance. His use of history is, through Burke, the ancestor
+of that specialized conservatism begotten of the historical method. If
+there is thus so much, it is, of course, tempting to ask why there is
+not more. If Hume has the materials why did he fail to build up a system
+from them? The answer seems twofold. In part it is the man himself. His
+genius, as his metaphysics show, lay essentially in his power of
+destruction; and the man who gave solipsism to philosophy was not likely
+to effect a new creation in politics. In part, also, the condition of
+the time gave little stimulus to novelty. Herein Hume was born a
+generation too early. Had he written when George III attempted the
+destruction of the system of the Revolution, and when America and France
+combined to raise again the basic questions of politics, he might have
+done therein what Adam Smith effected in his own field. But the time had
+not yet come; and it was left to Burke and Bentham to reap where he had
+sown.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SIGNS OF CHANGE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+From Hume until the publication of Burke's _Present Discontents_ (1770)
+there is no work on English politics of the first importance. Walpole
+had fallen in 1742; but for the next fifteen years his methods dominated
+the parliamentary scene. It was only with the advent of the elder Pitt
+to power that a new temper may be observed, a temper quickened by what
+followed on the accession of George III. Henceforward, it is not untrue
+to say that the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it
+was no longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French
+Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim
+satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the
+standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight, though
+collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for men to
+grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater
+prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to
+victory. Something of the exhilaration of these years we can still catch
+in the letters which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to
+turn off with easy laughter his deep sense of pride. In the House of
+Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show that a
+new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the
+first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in
+the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent.
+
+So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single
+source, the French influence is the effective cause of change. Voltaire
+and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole's
+administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw.
+Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the
+good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution,
+and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience. Yet
+when he came, in 1762, to publish the _Contrat Social_ it was obvious
+that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real meaning of their
+work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English
+institutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the
+simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and
+one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a
+general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of
+English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing--less
+admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a _Habeas
+Corpus_ and a _lettre de cachet_, the regular succession of Parliaments,
+all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a
+magnificent achievement. The English constitution revealed to France an
+immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration. Even to
+Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was
+a generalization from its significance at a special crisis. Hume had
+partial glimpses of its inner substance. But for most it had become a
+discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs. Its analysis as a
+connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil
+Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was
+more significant was the realization of Montesquieu's import
+simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence.
+Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers.
+Rousseau's time was not yet; though within a score of years it was
+possible to see him as the rival to Burke's conservatism.
+
+It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which underlies
+the _Esprit des Lois_ (1748). It is a commonplace now that Montesquieu
+is to be regarded as the founder of the historical method. The present
+is to be explained by its ancestry. Laws, governments, customs are not
+truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin
+and the country from which they derive. It would be inaccurate, with
+Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the
+systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in
+the most complete unreality, are to be found in Godwin's _Political
+Justice_; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time
+such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his
+faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly
+saw--the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the
+high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past
+wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened
+this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But
+Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main
+mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that
+decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the
+true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the
+importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid
+Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in his inaugural lecture as
+Vinerian professor. He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to
+which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent
+utterance both in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention, and in
+the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What, perhaps, is most
+immediately significant is his famous praise of the British
+Constitution--the secret of which he entirely misapprehended--and his
+discovery of its essence in the separation of powers. The short sixth
+chapter of his eleventh book is the real keynote of Blackstone and De
+Lolme. It led them to investigate, on principles of at least doubtful
+validity, an edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the
+last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth
+antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated
+structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That it
+was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been
+made. The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines have been
+more noxious in their consequence than this theory of checks and
+balances. But Blackstone's _Commentaries_ (1765-9) produced Bentham's
+_Fragment on Government_ (1776), and with that book we enter upon the
+realistic study of the British Constitution.
+
+Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from
+English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an
+influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those
+that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to
+avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference
+between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power
+of government which Locke had proposed. It is a removal at every point
+conditioned by the interest of the people. For Rousseau declared that
+the existing distribution of power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and
+he made the people sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their
+achievement in the shape of sinister interest. The powers of the people
+thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for
+innovation. It is easy enough then to understand why such a philosophy
+should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager sympathy for humble
+men, his optimistic faith in the immediate prospect of popular power
+were to Burke the symptoms of insane delusion and their author "the
+great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England."
+But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's influence was the
+success of the American Revolution; and no one had done more than Burke
+himself to promote its cause and justify its principles. That revolution
+established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its
+statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America
+guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the
+soberness with which it checked the supposed weakness of the sovereign
+people. America made herself independent while what was best in Europe
+combined in enthusiastic applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of
+Rousseau had been taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of
+power could remove what deliberation was impotent to secure. Here
+Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage
+denied. Nor, at the moment, was it influential except in the general
+impetus it gave to thought. But from the moment of its appearance it is
+an undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its metaphysical
+form it failed to command acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its
+results were victorious. Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the
+conclusions he recommends so much as in the language in which he clothes
+them. Either make a final end of the optimism of men like Hume and
+Blackstone, or the veneration for the past which is at the root of
+Burke's own teaching.
+
+It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the
+stimulus it did. Montesquieu came to praise the British constitution at
+a time when good men were aghast at its perversion. There was no room in
+many years for revolution, but at least there was place for hearty
+discontent and a seeking after new methods. Of that temper two men so
+different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are the political symbols. The
+former's rise to power upon the floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant
+nothing so much as a protest against the cynical corruption of the
+previous generation. Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly
+awaking to a sense of its own power. The French creed was too purely
+logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its
+entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden
+shoes played not a little part in its rejection. The rights of man made
+only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was
+involved in that rejection; and then it was too late. But no one could
+feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and
+Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for
+thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is
+nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes.
+The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is
+attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the
+French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would
+have been a supreme achievement.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757. John Brown's
+_Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_ is largely
+forgotten now; though it went through seven editions in a year and was
+at once translated into French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in
+the vast Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of
+comment upon the _Characteristics_ of Shaftesbury. His book is too
+evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with reverence, to
+make us doubt its derivation. There is the same reliance upon Livy and
+Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking generalization; though the
+argument upon which Brown's conclusions are based is seldom given,
+perhaps because his geometric clarity of statement impressed him as
+self-demonstrative. Brown's volumes are an essay upon the depravity of
+the times. He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering
+sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing
+so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the
+universities out of hand, in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would
+not have rejected. He deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men
+trifle with Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would,
+appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become
+nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the
+theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The
+neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown
+in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to
+the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling
+penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the
+army devote themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize
+money. Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour
+brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman. The poor, indeed,
+the middle class, and the legal and medical professions, Brown
+specifically exempts from this indictment. But he emphasizes his belief
+that this is unimportant. "The manners and principles of those who
+lead," he says, "... not of those who are governed ... will ever
+determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the continuance or
+dissolution of a state."
+
+This profligacy Brown compares to the languid vice which preceded the
+fall of Carthage and of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great
+Britain at the hands of France, unless it can be cured. So far as he has
+an explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the
+decay of religious sentiment. His remedy is only Bolingbroke's Patriot
+King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen to the height
+of power. What mainly stirred Englishmen was the prophecy of defeat on
+the morrow of the disastrous convention of Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe
+and Clive repaired that royal humiliation Brown seems to have died a
+natural death. What is more interesting than his prophecies was the
+evidence of a close reading of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is
+the product of the climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and
+sullen temper. Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of
+England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the
+simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation.
+Brown has no passion, and his book reads rather like Mr. Galsworthy's
+_Island Pharisees_ sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a
+well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of attention
+to the evils of his time. It describes undoubted facts, and it shows
+that the era of content has gone. But its careful periods and strangely
+far-off air lack the eagerness for truth which Rousseau put into his
+questions. Brown can neither explain nor can he proffer remedy. He sees
+that Pitt is somehow significant; but when he rules out the popular
+voice as devoid of all importance, he deprives himself of the means
+whereby to grasp the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted. Nothing
+could prove more strongly the exactitude of Burke's _Present
+Discontents_. Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of
+Junius.
+
+Hume was the friend of Montesquieu, though twenty years his junior; and
+the _Esprit des Lois_ travelled rapidly to Scotland. There it caught the
+eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a treatise on refinement, and by the
+influence of Hume and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
+University of Edinburgh. Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular
+in his time, and certainly he has a skill for polished phrase, and a
+genial paraphrase of other men's ideas. His _Essay on the History of
+Civil Society_ (1767), which in a quarter of a century went through six
+editions, was thought by Helvétius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume
+himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its
+suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some
+fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the investigation of
+savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government. He
+sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature. He
+insists, probably after conversation with Adam Smith, upon the social
+value of the division of functions. He does not doubt the original
+equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his age has reached the limit
+of its useful growth. Property he traces back to a parental desire to
+make a better provision for children "than is found under the
+promiscuous management of many copartners." Climate has the new
+importance upon which Montesquieu has insisted; or, at least, as it
+"ripens the pineapple and the tamarina," so it "inspires a degree of
+mildness that can even assuage the rigours of despotical government."
+The priesthood--this is Hume--becomes a separate influence under the
+sway of superstition. Liberty, he says, "is maintained by the continued
+differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in
+behalf of equitable government." The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is
+certainly not here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in
+the obscurity into which he has fallen. The _Esprit des Lois_ took
+twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of men
+like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped. Facile
+popularisers of this sort may have mollified the drawing-room; but they
+did not add to political ideas.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the students of
+constitutional law. Blackstone's _Commentaries on the Laws of England_
+(1765-9) has had ever since its first publication an authority such as
+Coke only before possessed. "He it is," said Bentham, "who, first of
+all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the
+language of the Scholar and the Gentleman." Certainly, as Professor
+Dicey has remarked, "the book contains much real learning about our
+system of government." We are less concerned here with Blackstone as an
+antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy. Here his
+purpose seems obvious enough. The English constitution raised him from
+humble means through a Professorship at Oxford to a judgeship in the
+Court of Common Pleas. He had been a member of Parliament and refused
+the office of Solicitor-General. He had thus no reason to be
+dissatisfied with the conditions of his time; and the first book of the
+_Commentaries_ is nothing so much as an attempt to explain why English
+constitutional law is a miracle of wisdom.
+
+Constitutional law, as such, indeed, found no place in Blackstone's
+book. It creeps in under the rights of persons, where he deals with the
+power of king and Parliament. His treatment implies a whole philosophy.
+Laws are of three kinds--of nature, of God, and of the civil state.
+Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is "a rule of civil conduct
+prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and
+prohibiting what is wrong." It is, he tells us, "called a rule to
+distinguish it from a compact or agreement." It derives from the
+sovereign power, of which the chief character is the making of laws.
+Society is based upon the "wants and fears" of men; and it is coeval
+with their origin. The idea of a state of nature "is too wild to be
+seriously admitted," besides being contrary to historical knowledge.
+Society implies government, and whatever its origins or its forms there
+"must be in all of them a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled
+authority, in which the _jura summa imperii_, or rights of sovereignty
+reside." The forms of government are classified in the usual way; and
+the British constitution is noted as a happy mixture of them all. "The
+legislature of the Kingdom," Blackstone writes, "is entrusted to three
+powers entirely independent of each other; first the King, secondly the
+lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical assembly of
+persons, chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour
+or their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by
+the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy;
+and as this aggregate body, actuated by different springs and attentive
+to different interests, composes the British Parliament and has the
+supreme disposal of everything; there can be no inconvenience attempted
+by either of the three branches, but will be withstood by one of the
+other two; each branch being armed with a negative power, sufficient to
+repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous." It
+is in the king in Parliament that British sovereignty resides. Eschewing
+the notion of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the
+implications of it are secured. "The constitutional government of this
+island," he says, "is so admirably tempered and compounded, that nothing
+can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the equilibrium of power between
+one branch of the legislature and the rest."
+
+All this is not enough; though, as Bentham was to show in his _Fragment
+on Government_, it is already far too much. "A body of nobility," such
+is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, "is also more
+peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded constitution, in order
+to support the rights of both the Crown and people, by forming a barrier
+to withstand the encroachments of both ... if they were confounded with
+the mass of the people, and like them had only a vote in electing
+representatives, their privileges would soon be borne down and
+overwhelmed by the popular torrent, which would effectually level all
+distinctions." "The Commons," he says further, "consist of all such men
+of property in the kingdom as have not seats in the House of Lords." The
+legal irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. "He is not only
+incapable of doing wrong," says Blackstone, "but even of thinking wrong;
+he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or
+weakness," though he points out that the constitution "has allowed a
+latitude of supposing the contrary." The powers of the King are
+described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of William the
+Norman than to the backstairs corruption of George III. The right of
+revolution is noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals
+rather than of law.
+
+"Its true defect," says Professor Dicey of the _Commentaries_, "is the
+hopeless confusion both of language and of thought introduced into the
+whole subject of constitutional law by Blackstone's habit--common to all
+the lawyers of his time--of applying old and inapplicable terms to new
+institutions." This is severe enough; yet Blackstone's sins are deeper
+than the criticism would suggest. He introduced into English political
+philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of substance upon
+which the whole vicious theory of checks and balances was erected. He
+made no distinction between the unlimited sovereignty of law and the
+very obviously limited sovereignty of reality. He must have known that
+to talk of the independence of the branches of the legislature was
+simple nonsense at a time when King and peers competed for the control
+of elections to the House of Commons. His idealization of a peerage
+whose typical spiritual member was Archbishop Cornwallis and whose
+temporal embodiment was the Duke of Bedford would not have deceived a
+schoolboy had it not provided a bulwark against improvement. It was
+ridiculous to describe the Commons as representative of property so long
+as places like Manchester and Sheffield were virtually disfranchised.
+His picture of the royal prerogative was a portrait against every detail
+of which what was best in England had struggled in the preceding century
+and a half. He has nothing to say of the cabinet, nothing of ministerial
+responsibility, nothing of the party system. What he did was to produce
+the defence of a non-existent system which acted as a barrier to all
+legal, and much political, progress in the next half-century. He gave
+men material without cause for satisfaction.
+
+As a description of the existing government there is thus hardly an
+element of Blackstone's work which could stand the test of critical
+inquiry. But even worse was its philosophy. As Bentham pointed out, he
+was unaware of the distinction between society and government. The state
+of nature exists, or fails to exist, with startling inconsistency.
+Blackstone, in fact, was a Lockian who knows that Hume and Montesquieu
+have cut the ground from under his master's feet, and yet cannot
+understand how, without him, a foundation is to be supplied. Locke,
+indeed, seems to him, as a natural conservative, to go too far, and he
+rejects the original contract as without basis in history; yet
+contractual notions are present at every fundamental stage of his
+argument. The sovereign power, so we are told, is irresistible; and then
+because Blackstone is uncertain what right is to mean, we hear of moral
+limitations upon its exercise. He speaks continually of representation
+without any effort to examine into the notions it conveys. The members
+of society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify
+existent inequalities. "The natural foundations of sovereignty," he
+writes, "are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and
+power." Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have been
+taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the actual
+exertion of authority. Nor has he clear notions of the way in which
+property is to be founded. Communism, he writes in seventeenth century
+fashion, is the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the
+earth to men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the
+soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions. This is
+pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are utterly
+remote from the logical result of his own premises.
+
+The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these questions, only
+the most confused sort of notions. He had to preface his work with some
+sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded
+it. The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some
+uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to
+the great sceptic's speculations. So that he was driven back upon
+notions he felt to be false, without a proper realization of their
+falsity. His use of Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a
+great idea can be in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than
+the fertility it contained. The merit of Blackstone is his learning,
+which was substantial, his realization that the powers of law demand
+some classification, his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is
+right alike in searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying
+the historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was
+little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions
+of his time to question its assumptions.
+
+De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with Blackstone,
+what he failed to see was even more remarkable than what he did
+perceive, his book has real ability and merit. De Lolme was a citizen of
+Geneva, who published his _Constitution of England_ in 1775, after a
+twelve months' visit to shores sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to
+die in obscurity and want. His book, as he tells us in his preface, was
+no mean success, though he derived no profit from it. Like Blackstone,
+he was impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional
+equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty. The attitude was
+not unnatural in one who, with his head full of Montesquieu, was a
+witness of the struggle between Junius and the King. He has, of course,
+the limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of
+government in purely mechanical terms. "It is upon the passions of
+mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the
+action of the various parts of a state depends. The machine may vary as
+to its dimensions; but its movement and acting springs still remain
+intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks of government as "a great
+ballet or dance in which ... everything depends upon the disposition of
+the figures." He does not deal, that is to say, with men as men, but
+only as inert adjuncts of a machine by which they are controlled. Such
+an attitude is bound to suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction.
+It regards historic forces as distinct from the men related to them.
+Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to
+unstability. The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal
+power against the popular. The King's interest is safeguarded by the
+division of Parliament into two Houses, each of which rejects the
+encroachment of the other upon the executive. His power is limited by
+parliamentary privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and
+so forth. The theory was not true; though it represented with some
+accuracy the ideals of the time.
+
+Nor must we belittle what insight De Lolme possessed. He saw that the
+early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented the
+continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with the
+result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the English
+people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior power. He
+understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was the
+independence of the judges. He realized that the party-system--he never
+used the actual term--while it provides room for men's ambitions at the
+same time prevents the equation of ambition with indispensability. "Woe
+to him," says De Lolme, "... who should endeavor to make the people
+believe that their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single
+citizen." He sees the paramount value of freedom of the press. This, as
+he says, with the necessity that members should be re-elected, "has
+delivered into the hands of the people at large the exercise of the
+censorial power." He has no doubt but that resistance is the remedy
+whereby governmental encroachment can be prevented; "resistance," he
+says, "is the ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of
+power." He points out how real is the guarantee of liberty where the
+onus of proof in criminal cases is thrown upon the government. He
+regards with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military
+arm, and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it
+has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding to
+the royal power. Nor can he fail to admire the insight which organizes
+"the agitation of the popular mind," not as "the forerunner of violent
+commotions" but to "animate all parts of the state." Therein De Lolme
+had grasped the real essence of party government.
+
+It was, of course, no more than symptomatic of his time that cabinet and
+prime minister should have escaped his notice. A more serious defect was
+his inability, with the Wilkes contest prominently in his notice, to
+see that the people had assumed a new importance. For the masses,
+indeed, De Lolme had no enthusiasm. "A passive share," he thought, "was
+the only one that could, with safety to the state, be trusted" to the
+humble man. "The greater part," he wrote, "of those who compose this
+multitude, taken up with the care of providing for their subsistence,
+have neither sufficient leisure, nor even, in consequence of their
+imperfect education, the degree of information, requisite for functions
+of this kind." Such an attitude blinded him to the significance of the
+American conflict, which he saw unattended by its moral implications. He
+trusted too emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that
+institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George III
+could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a sense of its
+own power. The real social forces of the time found there no channels of
+activity; and the difference between De Lolme and Bagehot is the
+latter's power to go behind the screen of statute to the inner sources
+of power.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The basis of revolutionary doctrine was already present in England when,
+in 1762, Rousseau published his _Contrat Social_. With its fundamental
+doctrines Locke had already made his countrymen familiar; and what was
+needed for the appreciation of its teaching was less a renaissance than
+discontent. So soon as men are dissatisfied with the traditional
+foundations of the State, a gospel of natural rights is certain to make
+its appearance. And, once the design of George III had been made
+familiar by his treatment of Chatham and Wilkes, the discontent did not
+fail to show itself. Indeed, in the year before the publication of
+Rousseau's book, Robert Wallace, a Scottish chaplain royal, had written
+in his _Various Prospects_ (1761) a series of essays which are at once
+an anticipation of the main thesis of Malthus and a plea for the
+integration of social forces by which alone the mass of men could be
+raised from misery. In the light of later experience it is difficult not
+to be impressed by the modernist flavour of Wallace's attack. He
+insists upon the capacity of men and the disproportion between their
+potential achievement and that which is secured by actual society. Men
+are in the mass condemned to ignorance and toil; and the lust of power
+sets man against his neighbor to the profit of the rich. Wallace traces
+these evils to private property and the individualistic organization of
+work, and he sees no remedy save community of possessions and a
+renovated educational system. Yet he does not conceal from himself that
+it is to the interest of the governing class to prevent a revolution
+which, beneficent to the masses, would be fatal to themselves; nor does
+he conceive it possible until the fertility of men has been reduced to
+the capacity of the soil. He speculates upon the chances of a new spirit
+among men, of an all-wise legislator, and of the beneficent example of
+colonies upon the later Owenite model. But his book is contemporaneous
+with our own ideas rather than with the thoughts of his generation. Nor
+does it seem to have excited any general attention.
+
+It is five years after Rousseau that we see the first clear signs of his
+influence. Naturally enough the men amongst whom the new spirit spread
+abroad were the Nonconformists. For more than seventy years they had
+been allowed existence without recognition. None had more faithfully
+supported the new dynasty than they; none had been paid less for their
+allegiance. Their utmost effort could secure only a sparing mitigation
+of the Test Act. All of them were Whigs, and the doctrines of Locke
+suited exactly their temper and their wants. There were amongst them
+able men in every walk of life, and they were apt to publication. Joseph
+Priestley, in particular, gave up with willingness to mankind what was
+obviously meant for chemical science. A few years previously Brown of
+the _Estimate_ had submitted a scheme for national education, in which
+the essential principle was Church control. Priestley had answered him,
+and was encouraged by friends to expand his argument into a general
+treatise. His _Essay on the First Principles of Government_ appeared in
+1768; and, if for nothing else, it would be noteworthy because it was
+therein that the significance of the "greatest happiness principle"
+first flashed across Bentham's mind. But the book shows more than this.
+"I had placed," says Priestley with due modesty, "the foundation of some
+of the most valuable interests of mankind on a broader and firmer basis
+than Mr. Locke"; and the breadth and firmness are Rousseau's
+contribution.
+
+Certainly we herein meet new elements. On the very threshold of the book
+we meet the dogma of the perfectibility of man. "Whatever," Priestley
+rhapsodizes, "was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious
+and paradisaical, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive." "The
+instrument of this progress ... towards this glorious state" is
+government; though a little later we are to find that the main business
+of government is noninterference. Men are all equal, and their natural
+rights are indefeasible. Government must be restrained in the interests
+of liberty. No man can be governed without his consent; for government
+is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in
+exchange for a power to share in public decisions. It thus follows that
+the people must be sovereign, and interference with their natural
+rights will justify resistance. Every government, he says, is "in its
+original principles, and antecedent to its present form an equal
+republic"; wherefore, of course, it follows that we must restore to men
+the equality they have lost. And, equally, of course, this would bestow
+upon the Nonconformists their full citizenship; for Warburton's
+_Alliance_, to attack which Priestley exhausts all the resources of his
+ingenuity, has been one of the main instruments in their degradation.
+"Unbounded liberty in matters of religion," which means the abolition of
+the Establishment, promises to be "very favorable to the best interests
+of mankind."
+
+So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for English
+Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import. It can never be
+forgotten in the history of political ideas that the alliance of Church
+and State made Nonconformists suspicious of government interference.
+Their original desire to be left unimpeded was soon exalted into a
+definite theory; and since political conditions had confined them so
+largely to trade none felt as they did the hampering influence of
+State-restrictions. The result has been a great difficulty in making
+liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the organic
+nature of the State. It remains for them almost entirely a police
+institution which, once it aims at the realization of right, usurps a
+function far better performed by individuals. There is no sense of the
+community; all that exists is a sum of private sentiments. "Civil
+liberty," says Priestley, "has been greatly impaired by an abuse of the
+maxim that the joint understanding of all the members of a State,
+properly collected, must be preferable to that of individuals; and
+consequently that the more the cases are in which mankind are governed
+by this united reason of the whole community, so much the better;
+whereas, in truth, the greater part of human actions are of such a
+nature, that more inconvenience would follow from their being fixed by
+laws than from their being left to every man's arbitrary will." If my
+neighbor assaults me, he suggests, I may usefully call in the police;
+but where the object is the discovery of truth, the means of education,
+the method of religious belief, individual initiative is superior to
+State action. The latter produces an uniform result "incompatible with
+the spirit of discovery." Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just
+to posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future. Men are
+too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all action.
+
+Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past tradition; and
+the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered broadcast over his
+pages. Nevertheless the basis upon which he defended his ideas was a
+utilitarianism hardly less complete than that which Bentham made the
+instrument of revolution. "Regard to the general good," he says, "is the
+main method by which natural rights are to be defended." "The good and
+happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any
+State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state
+must finally be determined." In substance, that is to say, if not
+completely in theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to
+those of expediency. His chief attack upon religious legislation is
+similarly based upon considerations of policy. His view of the
+individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates
+all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual
+energy. Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar
+fashion to Adam Smith and his followers. Priestley, of course, was
+inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief
+instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that
+government has the future in its hands than that government action may
+well be decisive for good or evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism
+is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all
+doors. That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made
+discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school
+which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of
+unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of
+that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it
+encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the
+energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the
+previous age.
+
+It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley exerted;
+certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small. Dr. Richard
+Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he might have had has
+been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents. His sinking-fund scheme
+was taken up by the younger Pitt, and proved, though the latter believed
+in it to the last, to be founded upon an arithmetical fallacy which did
+not sit well upon a fellow of the Royal Society. His sermon on the
+French Revolution provoked the _Reflections_ of Burke; and, though much
+of the right was on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he
+survived Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day,
+and he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English
+revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb optimism;
+for the rigid _a priori_ morality of which he was the somewhat muddled
+defender was less favorable to a confidence in reason. He had a good
+deal of John Brown's fear that luxury was the seed of English
+degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the
+population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential
+to the general thesis he had to make.
+
+Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to print by
+the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely popular, his
+_Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty_ (1776) attained its eighth
+edition within a decade. This, with its supplement _Additional
+Observations_ (1777), presents a perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their
+ancestry concealed. They represent the tradition of Locke, modified by
+the importations of Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume,
+and he takes sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has
+little or nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument
+is upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government, and
+self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator.
+Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to its last
+consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public services"; laws are
+"particular provisions or regulations established by Common Consent for
+gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are "trustees or deputies
+for carrying these regulations into execution." And almost in the words
+of Rousseau, Price goes on to admit that liberty, "in its most perfect
+degree, can be enjoyed only in small states where every independent
+agent is capable of giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen
+into public offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though
+he thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize the
+sacrifice of liberty involved.
+
+But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized.
+"Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust; and
+all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects the theory
+of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with self-government; if
+the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its life, it would betray its
+constituents and dissolve itself. "If omnipotence," he writes, "can with
+any sense be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all
+legislative authority originates; that is, in the People." Such a
+system is alone compatible with the ends of government, since it cannot
+be supposed that men "combine into communities and institute government"
+for self-enslavement. Nor is any other political system "consistent with
+the natural equality of mankind"; by which Price means that no man "is
+constituted by the author of nature the vassal or subject of another, or
+has any right to give law to him, or, without his consent, to take away
+any part of his property or to abridge him of his liberty." From all of
+which it is concluded that liberty is inalienable; and a people which
+has lost it "must have a right to emancipate themselves as soon as they
+can." The aptness of the argument to the American situation is obvious
+enough; and nowhere is Price more happy or more formidable than when he
+applies his precepts to phrases like "the unity of the empire" and the
+"honor of the kingdom" which were so freely used to cover up the
+inevitable results of George's obstinacy.
+
+The _Essay on the Right of Property in Land_ (1781) of William Ogilvie
+deserves at least a passing notice. The author, who published his book
+anonymously, was a Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen and
+an agriculturist of some success. His own career was distinctly
+honorable. The teacher of Sir James Mackintosh, he had a high reputation
+as a classical scholar and deserves to be remembered for his effort to
+reform a college which had practically ceased to perform its proper
+academic functions. His book is virtually an essay upon the natural
+right of men to the soil. He does not doubt that the distress of the
+times is due to the land monopoly. The earth being given to men in
+common, its invasion by private ownership is a dangerous perversion. Men
+have the right to the full product of their labor; but the privileges of
+the landowner prevent the enjoyment of that right. The primary duty of
+every State is the increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation
+is that which has the greatest number of free and independent
+cultivators. But governments attend rather to the interest of the higher
+classes, even while they hold out the protection of the common people as
+the main pretext of their authority. The result is their maintenance of
+land-monopoly even though it affects the prime material of all essential
+industries, prevents the growth of population, and makes the rich
+wealthier at the expense of the poor. It breeds oppression and
+ignorance, and poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative.
+He points out how a nation is dominated by its landlords, and how they
+have consistently evaded the fiscal burdens they should bear. Only in a
+return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source of an
+increase in happiness.
+
+Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to speak of
+actual changes, he had little more to propose than a system of peasant
+proprietorship. What is striking in the book is its sense of great,
+impending changes, its thorough grasp of the principle of utility, its
+realization of the immense agricultural improvement that is possible if
+the landed system can be so changed as to bring into play the impulses
+of humble men. He sees clearly enough that wealth dominates the State;
+and his interpretation of history is throughout economic. Ogilvie is
+one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who, chiefly through
+Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special current of their own in
+the great tide of protest against the unjust situation of labor. Like
+them, he builds his system upon natural rights; though, unlike them, his
+natural rights are defended by expediency and in a style that is always
+clear and logical. The book itself has rather a curious history. At its
+appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind. Mackintosh
+knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against the amiable
+delusion that its excellence would persuade the British government to
+force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the East India Company.
+Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby, it was intended to
+instruct the Chartists in the secret of their oppression; and therein it
+may well have contributed to the tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus
+O'Connor. In 1891 the problem of the land was again eagerly debated
+under the stimulus of Mr. Henry George; and a patriotic Scotchman
+published the book with biographical notes that constitute one of the
+most amazing curiosities in English political literature.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Against the school of Rousseau's English disciples it is comparatively
+easy to multiply criticisms. They lacked any historic sense. Government,
+for them, was simply an instrument which was made and unmade at the
+volition of men. How complex were its psychological foundations they had
+no conception; with the single factor of consent they could explain the
+most marvellous edifice of any time. They were buried beneath a mountain
+of metaphysical right which they never related to legal facts or to
+political possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions
+of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to
+investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led. They
+overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy themselves
+with political affairs. They made no proper allowance for the protective
+armour each social system must acquire by the mere force of
+prescription. Nor is there sufficient allowance in their attitude for
+those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman must
+of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to say, so
+completely with _staatslehre_ that they do not admit the mollifying
+influence of _politik_. They search for principles of universal right,
+without the perception that a right which is to be universal must
+necessarily be so general in character as to be useless in its
+application.
+
+Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their
+insight. They were protesting against a system strongly upheld on
+grounds which now appear to have been simply indefensible. The business
+of government had been made the private possession of a privileged
+class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from
+the minds of most men engaged in its direction. The loss of America, the
+heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the
+Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and
+North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most
+to the fact that principle is a vital part of policy. The revolutionists
+recalled men to the need of explaining, no less than carrying on, the
+government of the Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by
+elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid
+intrigues of the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government
+as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful
+reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the
+governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political
+controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle
+of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind
+and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had
+in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his
+Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer
+like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated,
+unconvinced. It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part
+of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes of
+Europe and America before they would give serious heed; and even then
+they met antagonism with nothing save oppression and hate. Yet the
+doctrines remained; for thought, after all, is killed by reasoned answer
+alone. And when the first gusts of war and revolution had passed, the
+cause for which they stood was found to have permeated all classes save
+that which had all to lose by learning.
+
+We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and
+Priestley as representing more than an important segment of opinion. The
+opposition to their theories was not less articulate than their own
+defence of them. Some, like Burke, desired a purification of the
+existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had no sort of sympathy with
+new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least, deserves some mention less for
+the inherent value of what he had to say, than for the nature of the
+opinions he expounded. Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a
+reputation alike in political and economic enquiry. He represents the
+sturdy nationalism of Arbuthnot's _John Bull_, the unreasoned prejudice
+against all foreigners, the hatred of all metaphysics as inconsistent
+with common sense, the desire to let things be on the ground that the
+effort after change is worse than the evil of which men complain. His
+_Treatise on Civil Government_ (1781) is in many ways a delightful book,
+bluff, hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that
+is all its own. He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the first
+place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the second, to
+explode the new bubble of Rousseau's followers. The second point takes
+the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as Tucker shrewdly saw,
+the theories of the school may trace their ancestry. He analyses the
+theory of consent in such fashion as to show that if its adherents could
+be persuaded to be logical, they would have to admit themselves
+anarchists. He has no sympathy with the state of nature; the noble
+savage, on investigation, turns out to be a barbaric creature with a
+club and scalping knife. Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or,
+as he prefers, somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that
+does not mean that the actual governors can be dismissed when any
+eccentric happens to take exception to their views. He has no sympathy
+with parliamentary reform. Give the mob an increase of power, he says,
+and nothing is to be expected but outrage and violence. He thinks the
+constitution very well as it is, and those who preach the evils of
+corruption ought to prove their charges instead of blasphemously
+asserting that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
+
+Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own. He does not doubt that
+the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered upon them.
+Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as ever George III
+himself could have desired. But not for one moment would he fight them
+to compel their return to British allegiance. If the American colonies
+want to go, let them by all means cut adrift. They are only a useless
+source of expenditure. The trade they represent does not depend upon
+allegiance but upon wants that England can supply if she keeps shop in
+the proper way, if, that is, she makes it to their interest to buy in
+her market. Indeed, colonies of all kinds seem to him quite useless.
+They ever are, he says, and ever were, "a drain to and an incumbrance on
+the Mother-country, requiring perpetual and expensive nursing in their
+infancy, and becoming headstrong and ungovernable in proportion as they
+grow up." All wise relations depend upon self-interest, and that needs
+no compulsion. If Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up,
+the result would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and
+contracts effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal
+industry encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that
+mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-century
+before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean crustily explaining
+his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had just rejected Edmund
+Burke for advocating free trade with Ireland.
+
+No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr. Johnson.
+Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of gloomy
+prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of the source
+from which they come. He thought life a poor thing at the best and took
+a low view of human nature. "The notion of liberty," he told the
+faithful Boswell, "amuses the people of England and helps to keep off
+the _tedium vitae_." The idea of a society properly organized into ranks
+and societies he always esteemed highly. "I am a friend to
+subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of
+society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the
+offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he seems to
+have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as the worst of
+sins. He did not believe in the honesty of republicans; they levelled
+down, but were never inclined to level up. Men, he felt, had a part to
+act in society, and their business was to fulfil their allotted station.
+Rousseau was a very bad man: "I would sooner sign a sentence for his
+transportation than that of any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey
+these many years." Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth
+while was freedom in private concerns. He blessed the government in the
+case of general warrants and thought the power of the Crown too small.
+Toleration he considered due to an inapt distinction between freedom to
+think and freedom to talk, and any magistrate "while he thinks himself
+right ... ought to enforce what he thinks." The American revolt he
+ascribed to selfish faction; and in his _Taxation no Tyranny_ (1775) he
+defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite ground
+of the necessity of subordination. He was willing, he said, to love all
+mankind except an American.
+
+Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an
+acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and
+fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the
+letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He
+knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe
+under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the _Idler_ as
+one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish
+as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the
+sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt
+for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular.
+There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of
+the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time
+was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as
+elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental
+questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no age
+are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is
+diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require
+something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's attitude
+would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but
+where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to
+contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in
+a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to
+look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BURKE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the
+king stands outside the categories of political conflict. He is the
+dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory,
+is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is
+largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came
+to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has
+passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent
+widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have
+secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first
+twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort
+of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once
+more the balance of power. Nor was the effort defeated without a
+struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.
+
+And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time
+highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost much credit
+during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the
+elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended
+for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power. A
+generation of corrupt practice and the final defeat of Stuart hopes had
+already deprived the Whigs of any special hold on their past ideals.
+They were divided already into factions the purpose of which was no more
+than the avid pursuit of place and pension. Government by connection
+proved itself irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also
+that once corruption was centralized there was no limit to its
+influence, granted only the absence of great questions. When George III
+transferred that organization from the office of the minister to his own
+court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his success. For more
+than forty years the Tories had been excluded from office; and they
+were more than eager to sell their support. The Church had become the
+creature of the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was
+towards benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind
+of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He
+had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and a
+reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's first book
+can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor was it obvious
+that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the
+great Whig families.
+
+What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of the
+king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined somewhat
+to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was excessively ignorant
+and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no one but himself, and he
+totally misunderstood the true nature of his office. There is no
+question which arose in the first forty years of his reign in which he
+was not upon the wrong side and proud of his error. He was wrong about
+Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about France. He
+demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked every measure for
+the purification of the political system. He supported the Slave trade
+and he opposed the repeal of the Test Act. He prevented the grant of
+Catholic emancipation at the one moment when it might have genuinely
+healed the wounds of Ireland. He destroyed by his perverse creations the
+value of the House of Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly
+determined to make his will the criterion of policy; and his design
+might have succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to
+its greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen
+with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in politics.
+The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the court upon a
+broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as the event proved,
+could be as subservient to the king as to his minister.
+
+Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with characteristic
+stupidity, the king did not know the proper instruments for his
+purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the suspicion of
+the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder Pitt. In the Wilkes
+affair he threw the clearest light of the century upon the true nature
+of the House of Commons. His own system of proscription restored to the
+Whig party not a little of the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to
+supply them with a philosophy. Chatham remained the idol of the people
+despite his hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of
+representative government and of personal liberty. He lost America and
+it was not his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he
+received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had made
+him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt was to
+compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George's
+effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature
+of things, survive that analysis.
+
+Not, of course, that George ever lacked defenders. As early as 1761, the
+old rival of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage had condemned to
+obsolescence, published his _Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the
+new Reign_. Pulteney urged the sovereign no longer to be content with
+the "shadow of royalty." He should use his "legal prerogatives" to check
+"the illegal claims of factious oligarchy." Government had become the
+private possession of a few powerful men. The king was but a puppet in
+leading strings. The basis of government should be widened, for every
+honest man was aware that distinctions of party were now merely nominal.
+The Tories should be admitted to place. They were now friendly to the
+accession and they no longer boasted their hostility to dissent. They
+knew that Toleration and the Establishment were of the essence of the
+Constitution. Were once the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would
+cease and Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom. "The
+ministers," he said, "will depend on the Crown not the Crown on
+ministers" if George but showed "his resolution to break all factitious
+connections and confederacies." The tone is Bolingbroke's, and it was
+the lesson George had insistently heard from early youth. How sinister
+was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in political
+exile, with Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants threatening the whole
+basis of past liberties.
+
+The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the meaning of
+the new synthesis was Junius. That his anonymity concealed the malignant
+talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now beyond denial. Junius, indeed,
+can hardly claim a place in the history of political ideas. His genius
+lay not in the discussion of principle but the dissection of
+personality. His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled
+him to inform the general public of facts which were the private
+possession of the inner political circle. His mind was narrow and
+pedantic. He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he
+maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough
+was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He
+was never generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his
+calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness the nature of the
+issue and he was a powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king.
+He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the
+unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover, appearing as
+they did in the daily journals gave the press a significance in politics
+which it has never lost. He made the significance of George's effort
+known to the mass of men at a time when no other means of information
+was at hand. The opposition was divided; the king's friends were in a
+vast majority; the publication of debates was all but impossible.
+English government was a secret conflict in which the entrance of
+spectators was forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate.
+It was the glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. Not even the
+combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord Mansfield's
+doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of his vituperation
+and Wilkes' courage. Bad men have sometimes been the instruments of
+noble destiny; and there are few more curious episodes in English
+history than the result of this alliance between revengeful hate and
+insolent ambition.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was the
+ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict its real
+place in philosophy. There is no immortality save in ideas; and it was
+Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in which he was the
+liberal protagonist. His career is illustrative at once of the merits
+and defects of English politics in the eighteenth century. The son of an
+Irish Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, he served, after learning
+what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to
+politics in the upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied,
+along with Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal;
+though the _Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful_ (1756) shows
+his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special
+possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub Street that he appears
+to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge
+which made him without equal in the House of Commons. His earliest
+production was a _Vindication of Natural Society_ (1756), written in the
+manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative
+satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the
+basis of Godwin's _Political Justice_. After a vain attempt to serve in
+Ireland with "Single-Speech" Hamilton, he became the private secretary
+to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the one section of the Whig party to
+which an honorable record still remained. That connection secured for
+him a seat in Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six;
+and henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading
+members. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very
+outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still, in the
+eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in the short
+months during which he held office, the minor office of
+Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom all
+England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a place at
+the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great
+lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has
+endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which
+statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.
+
+For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain
+acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep
+comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a singularly lovable
+figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said Johnson; and Goldsmith
+has told us how he wound his way into a subject like a serpent. Macaulay
+thought him the greatest man since Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest
+master of civil wisdom in our tongue." "No English writer," says Sir
+Leslie Stephen, "has received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics."
+Even when the last criticism has been made, detraction from these
+estimates is impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent
+was his temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which
+he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with
+Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal
+antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in
+self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone
+delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal
+a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of
+comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe.
+His alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics,
+unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never
+guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public welfare.
+No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to the service of
+the nation with less regard for personal advancement. No English
+statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a mass of details to the
+principle they involve.
+
+He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no influence to
+whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics, indeed, bear upon
+their face the preoccupation with the immediate problems of the House of
+Commons. Yet through them all the principles that emerge form a
+consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the
+passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw it
+with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to
+challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the maxims
+of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London out to India
+and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian ryot's wrongs as for
+the iniquities of English policy to Ireland. With less width of mind
+than Hume and less intensity of gaze than Adam Smith, he yet had a width
+and intensity which, fused with his own imaginative sympathy, gave him
+more insight than either. He had an unerring eye for the eternal
+principles of politics. He knew that ideals must be harnessed to an Act
+of Parliament if they are not to cease their influence. Admitting while
+he did that politics must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find
+good reason why expediency should be identified with what he saw as
+right. It is a stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English
+politics to whom a greater immediate influence may be ascribed, just as
+in political philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of
+Hobbes and Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and
+speculation his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like
+him before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer
+Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his practical
+insight was far less profound. Hamilton had Burke's full grasp of
+political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation. So that he remains
+a figure of uniqueness. He may, as Goldsmith said, have expended upon
+his party talents that should have illuminated the universal aspect of
+the State. Yet there is no question with which he dealt that he did not
+leave the richer for his enquiry.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the
+immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he was at
+every point upon the side of the future. Where constitutional reform was
+in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy;
+though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid
+conservatism. In the last decade of his life he encountered the greatest
+cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the Reformation, and it is not too
+much to say that at every point he missed the essence of its meaning.
+Yet even upon France and the English Constitution he was full of
+practical sagacity. Had his warning been uttered without the fury of
+hate that accompanied it, he might well have guided the forces of the
+Revolution into channels that would have left no space for the military
+dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real evils
+of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently inveighed,
+forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch of wise and
+continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had
+little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he
+was ready to praise. What impressed him was less the evils of the
+constitution than its possibilities, could the defects quite alien from
+its nature but be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a deeper
+vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke's
+conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was too much the
+apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles involved in the
+overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense of a Divine Providence
+taking thought for the welfare of men to interfere with violence in his
+handiwork. The tinge of caution is never absent, even from his most
+liberal moments; and he was willing to endure great evil if it seemed
+dangerous to estimate the cost of change.
+
+His American speeches are the true text-book for colonial
+administration. He put aside the empty plea of right which satisfied
+legal pedants like George Grenville. What moved him was the tragic
+fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not
+maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom. He never
+concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the
+maintenance of English liberties. "Armies," he said many years later,
+"first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English
+constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though
+in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection,
+would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself." He had
+firm hold of that insidious danger which belittles freedom itself in the
+interest of curtailing some special desire. "In order to prove that the
+Americans have no right to their liberties," he said in the famous
+_Speech on Conciliation with America_ (1775), "we are every day
+endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our
+own." The way for the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke
+saw, prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character
+of the American contest. His own receipt was sounder. In the _Speech on
+American Taxation_ (1774) he had riddled the view that the fiscal
+methods of Lord North were likely to succeed. The true method was to
+find a way of peace. "Nobody shall persuade me," he told a hostile House
+of Commons, "when a whole people are concerned that acts of lenity are
+not means of conciliation." "Magnanimity in politics," he said in the
+next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and
+little minds go ill together." He did not know, in the most superb of
+all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment against a whole people. He
+would win the colonies by binding them to England with the ties of
+freedom. "The question with me," he said, "is not whether you have a
+right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your
+interest to make them happy." The problem, in fact, was one not of
+abstract right but of expediency; and nothing could be lost by
+satisfying American desire. Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was
+apparent to every first-class mind in England. But the obstinate king
+prevailed; and Burke's great protest remained no more than material for
+the legislation of the future. Yet it was something that ninety years
+after his speech the British North America Act should have given his
+dreams full substance.
+
+Ireland had always a place apart in Burke's affections, and when he
+first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in his
+thoughts was the desire to assist its freedom. He saw that here, as in
+America, no man will be argued into slavery. A government which defied
+the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster. How could
+it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its
+subjects? Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the
+Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan? The system of Protestant
+control, he said in the _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_ (1792), was
+"well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a
+people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself." The
+Catholics paid their taxes; they served with glory in the army and navy.
+Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth. "Common sense," he
+said, "and common justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a
+people for their slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for
+great, general and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will
+destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that
+the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress
+them. "No man will assert seriously," he said, "that when people are of
+a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them
+with something to complain of." The advantages of subjects were, as he
+urged, their right; and a wise government would regard "all their
+reasonable wishes as so many claims." To neglect them was to have a
+nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.
+
+There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to
+mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research may well have
+shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has
+so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there
+maintained. He was the first English statesman fully to understand the
+moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make
+impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an
+eternal challenge to their malignant complacency. He did not ask the
+abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the
+wisdom of its conquest. All that he insisted upon was this, that in
+imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code. A
+lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white. The European must
+respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by
+law to respect them in his own State. "If we are not able," he said, "to
+contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity
+become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for
+their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that
+country to our constitution." England must be in India for India's
+benefit or not at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as
+the East India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are
+instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was the
+antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a magnificent
+passage, "before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless
+prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites
+continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting." Sympathy
+with the native, regard for his habits and wants, the Company's servants
+failed to display. "The English youth in India drink the intoxicating
+draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear
+it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in
+principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert
+themselves for the excesses of their premature power. The consequences
+of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably
+such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the
+rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries
+of India are given to seas and winds to be blown about in every breaking
+up of the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean." More than a
+century was to pass before the wisest of Burke's interpreters attempted
+the translation of his maxims into statute. But there has never, in any
+language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in
+imperial adventure. "The situation of man," said Burke, "is the
+preceptor of his duty." He saw how a nation might become corrupted by
+the spoils of other lands. He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of
+a later cruelty at home. Men will complain of their wrongdoing in the
+remoter empire; and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in
+unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield. He denied that the
+government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction.
+Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit.
+He abhorred the politics of prestige. He knew the difficulties involved
+in administering distant territories, the ignorance and apathy of the
+public, the consequent erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong
+will fail of discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let
+us do what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can
+do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national
+reputation." That is a general truth not less in Africa and China than
+in India itself. The main thought in Burke's mind was the danger lest
+colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of arbitrary ideas. That
+his own safeguards were inadequate is clear enough at the present time.
+He knew that the need was good government. He did not nor could he
+realize how intimately that ideal was connected with self-government.
+Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final outcome of his teaching.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+A background so consistent as this in the inflexible determination to
+moralize political action resulted in a noble edifice. Yet, through it
+all, the principles of policy are rather implied than admitted. It was
+when he came to deal with domestic problems and the French Revolution
+that Burke most clearly showed the real trend of his thought. That trend
+is unmistakable. Burke was a utilitarian who was convinced that what was
+old was valuable by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity. The State
+appeared to him an organic compound that came but slowly to its full
+splendour. It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible. Political
+philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from
+experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty. While he
+did not belittle the value of reason, he was always impressed by the
+immense part played by prejudice in the determination of policy. He had
+no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb
+prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates. Nor must we
+miss the religious aspect of his philosophy. He never doubted that
+religion was the foundation of the English State. "Englishmen," he said
+in the _Reflections on the French Revolution_ (1790), "know, and what is
+better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society
+and the source of all good and of all comfort." The utterance is
+characteristic, not merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its
+ultimate reliance upon a mystic explanation of social facts. Nothing was
+more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. The
+only safeguard he could find was in empiricism.
+
+This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his earliest
+publication; but it remained with him to the end. He would not discuss
+America in terms of right. "I do not enter into these metaphysical
+distinctions," he said in the _Speech on American Taxation_, "I hate the
+very sound of them." "One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state," he
+wrote in the _Reflections_, "is the propensity of the people to resort
+to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a _Speech on the
+Duration of Parliament_, "when men are driven to search into the
+foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of a social contract he
+declared "at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles," and he
+found no sense in the doctrine of popular sovereignty. "The lines of
+morality," he said in the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_ (1791),
+"are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as
+well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These
+exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic but
+by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of the
+virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the
+standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious
+conclusion. "This," he said, "is the true touchstone of all theories
+which regard man and the affairs of men--does it suit his nature in
+general, does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?"
+
+Of the truth of this general attitude it is difficult to make denial.
+But when Burke came to apply it to the British Constitution the "rules
+of prudence" he was willing to admit are narrow enough to cause
+surprised enquiry. He did not doubt that the true end of a legislature
+was "to give a direction, a form, a technical dress ... to the general
+sense of the community"; he admitted that popular revolt is so much the
+outcome of suffering that in any dispute between government and people,
+the presumption is at least equal in the latter's favor. He urged the
+acceptance of Grenville's bill for improving the method of decision upon
+disputed elections. He made a magnificent defence of the popular cause
+in the Middlesex election. He was in favor of the publication of
+parliamentary debates and of the voting lists in divisions. He supported
+almost with passion the ending of that iniquitous system by which the
+enfranchisement of revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir
+of electoral support. His _Speech on Economical Reform_ (1780) was the
+prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack upon the waste of the
+Civil list.
+
+Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go. He was
+against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that
+the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible. He
+opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason
+that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature. He would
+not, as in the great speech at Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that
+a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather
+than a representative of his own convictions. "Government and
+legislation," he said, "are matters of reason and of judgment"; and once
+the private member had honorably arrived at a decision which he thought
+was for the interest of the whole community, his duty was done. All
+this, in itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke's admirable
+grasp of the practical application of attractive theories to the event.
+But it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic
+constitutional change which is more dubious. He had no sympathy with the
+Radicals. "The bane of the Whigs," he said, "has been the admission
+among them of the corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by
+persuading many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs
+inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers." "If the
+nation at large," he wrote in another letter, "has disposition enough to
+oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of government is, in
+my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the general disposition be
+against a virtuous and manly line of public conduct, there is no form
+into which it can be thrown that will improve its nature or add to its
+energy"; and in the same letter he foreshadows a possible retirement
+from the House of Commons as a protest against the growth of radical
+opinion in his party. He resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage
+qualification. He had no sympathy with the effort either to add to the
+county representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs. The framework
+of the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent. He deplored all
+criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials. "Our
+representation," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the necessary
+imperfections of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to
+be." It was in the same temper that he resisted all effort at the
+political relief of the Protestant dissenters. "The machine itself," he
+had said, "is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the
+materials were sound"; and he never moved from that opinion.
+
+Burke's attitude was obsolete even while he wrote; yet the
+suggestiveness of his very errors makes examination of their ground
+important. Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the name
+of expediency. His opponents argued that, since men are by nature equal,
+it must follow that they have an equal right to self-government. To
+Burke, the admission of this principle would have meant the overthrow of
+the British constitution. Its implication was that every institution not
+of immediate popular origin should be destroyed. To secure their ends,
+he thought, the radicals were compelled to preach the injustice of those
+institutions and thus to injure that affection for government upon which
+peace and security depend. Here was an effort to bring all institutions
+to the test of logic which he thought highly dangerous. "No rational man
+ever did govern himself," he said, "by abstractions and universals." The
+question for him was not the abstract rightness of the system upon some
+set of _a priori_ principles but whether, on the whole, that system
+worked for the happiness of the community. He did not doubt that it did;
+and to overthrow a structure so nobly tested by the pressure of events
+in favor of some theories outside historic experience seemed to him
+ruinous to society. Government, for him, was the general harmony of
+diverse interests; and the continual adjustments and exquisite
+modifications of which it stood in need were admirably discovered in the
+existing system. Principles were thus unimportant compared to the
+problem of their application. "The major," he said of all political
+premises, "makes a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory depends
+upon the little minor of circumstances."
+
+To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription. The
+presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change,
+we act at our peril. "Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid
+of all titles, not only to property, but to what is to secure that
+property, to government." Because he saw the State organically he was
+impressed by the smallness both of the present moment and the
+individual's thought. It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the
+species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost
+always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had the
+opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to
+preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a reason; and
+that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So the prescriptive
+title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the
+soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and
+man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by
+prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not
+less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution. So, too,
+his main attack on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be
+discussed." He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but
+at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a
+past experience which built according to the general need. Nor does he
+doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist
+that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth,"
+he said, "may be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that
+certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the
+truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company
+charity, the highest of the virtues."
+
+Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of
+political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that
+danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was
+balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must
+always govern the immediate decision. "When the reason of old
+establishments is gone," he said in his _Speech on Economical Reform_,
+"it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them." "A
+disposition to preserve and an ability to improve," he wrote in the
+_Reflections on the French Revolution_, "taken together would be my
+standard of a statesman." But that "ability to improve" conceals two
+principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold. "All the reformations
+we have hitherto made," he said, "have proceeded upon the principle of
+reference to antiquity"; and the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_,
+which is the most elaborate exposition of his general attitude, proceeds
+upon the general basis that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future.
+Nor is this all. "If I cannot reform with equity," said Burke, "I will
+not reform at all"; and equity seems here to mean a sacrifice of the
+present and its passionate demands to the selfish errors of past policy.
+
+Burke, indeed, was never a democrat, and that is the real root of his
+philosophy. He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the
+necessity of some degree of popular representation. But he was entirely
+satisfied with current Whig principles, could they but be purged of
+their grosser deformities. He knew too well how little reason is wont to
+enter into the formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice of
+innovation to its power. He saw so much of virtue in the old order, that
+he insisted upon the equation of virtue with quintessence. Men of great
+property and position using their influence as a public trust, delicate
+in their sense of honor, and acting only from motives of right--these
+seemed to him the men who should with justice exercise political power.
+He did not doubt that "there is no qualification for government but
+virtue and wisdom ... wherever they are actually found, they have, in
+whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport to heaven";
+but he is careful to dissociate the possibility that they can be found
+in those who practice the mechanical arts. He did not mean that his
+aristocracy should govern without response to popular demand. He had no
+objection to criticism, nor to the public exercise of government. There
+was no reason even for agreement, so long as each party was guided by an
+honorable sense of the public good. This, so he urged, was the system
+which underlay the temporary evils of the British Constitution. An
+aristocracy delegated to do its work by the mass of men was the best
+form of government his imagination could conceive. It meant that
+property must be dominant in the system of government, that, while
+office should be open to all, it should be out of the reach of most.
+"The characteristic essence of property," he wrote in the _Reflections_,
+"... is to be unequal"; and he thought the perpetuation of that
+inequality by inheritance "that which tends most to the perpetuation of
+society itself." The system was difficult to maintain, and it must be
+put out of the reach of popular temptation. "Our constitution," he said
+in the _Present Discontents_, "stands on a nice equipoise, with sharp
+precipices and deep waters on all sides of it. In removing it from a
+dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a danger towards
+oversething it on the other." In straining, that is to say, after too
+large a purification, we may end with destruction. And Burke, of course,
+was emphatic upon the need that property should be undisturbed. It was
+always, he thought, at a great disadvantage in any struggle with
+ability; and there are many passages in which he urges the consequent
+special representation which the adequate defence of property requires.
+
+The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the
+sanctity of past experience. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, Taine and
+Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and Lecky in England, have all urged
+what is in effect a similar plea. We must not break what Bagehot called
+the cake of custom, for men have been trained to its digestion, and new
+food breeds trouble. Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a
+people, and while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform. The true
+idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of
+the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be
+drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness;
+and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society
+would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance
+of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel
+impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance,
+we should disturb beyond repair the intricate equilibrium of countless
+ages. The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present
+is thus the true guide to our policy. "We ought," he said in a famous
+sentence, "to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend."
+
+It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the
+French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the destiny
+which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth
+century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to
+hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of
+religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious
+edifice. He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant
+abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an
+overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than
+the English Parliament. Privileges were scattered to the winds in a
+single night. Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical
+theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred. The
+doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and
+noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect
+justification. On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by
+the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past
+history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the
+truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious
+spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before
+a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared
+incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of
+social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive
+privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body
+politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became
+convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their
+disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves.
+In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of
+ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less
+barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and
+Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not
+unnatural thing. But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty
+years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too
+great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.
+
+Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point
+consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported the
+Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for
+in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the
+other. And when we make allowances for the grave errors of personal
+taste, the gross exaggeration, the inability to see the Revolution as
+something more than a single point in time, it becomes obvious enough
+that his criticism, de Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we
+possess from the generation which knew the movement as a living thing.
+The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as
+the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to
+the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that
+freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of
+doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form
+which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he
+exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom.
+"The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the _Reflections_, "the
+objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and
+therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable
+either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs." The note
+recurs in substance throughout his criticism. Much of its application,
+indeed, will not stand for one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for
+instance, he correlates the monarchical government of France with the
+English constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688.
+The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles,
+but the roots were absent from their national experience.
+
+A year after the publication of the _Reflections_ he himself perceived
+the narrowness of that judgment. In the _Thoughts on French Affairs_
+(1791) he saw that the essence of the Revolution was its foundation in
+theoretic dogma. It was like nothing else in the history of the world
+except the Reformation; which last event it especially resembles in its
+genius for self-propagation. Herein he has already envisaged the
+importance of that "_patrie intellectuelle_" which Tocqueville
+emphasized as born of the Revolution. That led Burke once again to
+insist upon the peculiar genius of each separate state, the difficulties
+of a change, the danger of grafting novelties upon an ancient fabric. He
+saw the certainty that in adhering to an abstract metaphysical scheme
+the French were in truth omitting human nature from their political
+equation; for general ideas can find embodiment in institutional forms
+only after they have been moulded by a thousand varieties of
+circumstance. The French created an universal man not less destructive
+of their practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists.
+They omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must
+demand; with the result that, despite themselves, they came rather to
+destroy than to fulfil. Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the
+harvest of their failure.
+
+Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of the past
+which played so large a part in the revolutionary consciousness. "We are
+afraid," he wrote in the _Reflections_, "to put men to live and trade
+each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this
+stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to
+avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of
+ages." Of Siéyès' building constitutions overnight, this is no unfair
+picture; but it points a more general truth never long absent from
+Burke's mind. Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much
+a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought
+finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small. For
+Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie
+buried in the remote experience of the state. So that men like
+Robespierre were asking from their subjects an impossible task. That
+which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations
+was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to
+be enduring. Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the
+English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories
+with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical
+landmarks of his own neighborhood. For the motives which underlie all
+human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard.
+That upon which they feed submits to change; but the effort is slow and
+the disappointments many. The Revolution taught the populace the thirst
+for power. But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human
+effort without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it
+exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers
+limitation to right ends.
+
+The later part of Burke's attack upon the Revolution does not belong to
+political philosophy. No man is more responsible than he for the temper
+which drew England into war. He came to write rather with the zeal of a
+fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted
+with new ideas. Yet even the _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ (1796) have
+flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that even in the
+midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. So that it is
+permissible to think he did not lightly pen those sentences on peace
+which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert of extravagant rhetoric. "War
+never leaves where it found a nation," he wrote, "it is never to be
+entered upon without mature deliberation." That was a lesson his
+generation had still to learn; nor did it take to heart the even nobler
+passage that follows. "The blood of man," he said, "should never be shed
+but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our
+friends, for our God, for our country, for mankind. The rest is vanity;
+the rest is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that
+century's history that these words were written to justify an effort of
+which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two angles. It
+is easy to show that his picture of the British Constitution was remote
+from the facts even when he wrote. Every change that he opposed was
+essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed
+none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed. Such criticism
+would be at almost every point just; and yet it would fail to touch the
+heart of Burke's position. What is mainly needed is analysis at once of
+his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke
+came to his maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we
+have it upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so
+clearly apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in
+what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian changes
+of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment even for him who
+burdened himself unduly to restore the Beaconsfield estate. No man was
+more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries
+of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious
+inference that once the means of government were made known those who
+possessed the knowledge would demand their share in its application. He
+did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself
+the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which
+Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the
+adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has
+been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a sense to
+have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining the foundations
+of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant
+dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the
+expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the
+facts at issue. No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained
+why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever
+to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy
+and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized
+that Wilkes was but the symptom.
+
+Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of
+political privilege was drawing to its close. That is the real meaning
+of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream of tendency
+not less active in England than abroad. In France, indeed, the lines
+were more sharply drawn than elsewhere. The rights men craved were not,
+as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the
+result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries. A
+power that knew no responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only
+from the accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation
+to offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay,
+these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his generation
+to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past. It is not
+difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the tennis-court at
+Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to be condemned. Burke's
+caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils
+rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good. In a less degree,
+the same is true of England. The constitution that Burke called upon
+men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford
+powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old
+Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the statute-book a
+penal code which hardly yielded to the noble attack of Romilly. These,
+which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble
+ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform
+they were willing to destroy.
+
+The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past
+as the very institutions it came to condemn. The innovations were the
+inevitable outcome of past oppression. Burke refused to see that aspect
+of the picture. He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to
+the half-wilful errors of the past. The man who grounded his faith in
+historic experience refused to admit as history the elements alien from
+his special outlook. He took that liberty not to venerate where he was
+unable to comprehend which he denied to his opponents. Nor did he admit
+the uses to which his doctrine of prescription was bound to be put in
+the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men. No one will object to
+privilege for a Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a
+different thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of
+whom Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham
+will one day emerge. He justifies the privileges of the English Church
+in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to see what men
+like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do with religion. The
+doctrine of prescription might be admirable if all statesmen were so
+wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men it becomes no more than
+the protective armour of vested interests into the ethics of which it
+refuses us leave to examine.
+
+That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke's philosophy, and it
+deserves more examination than it has received. In part it is a
+rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning animal. It
+puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human action; and it
+thus is distrustful of thought as leading into channels to which the
+nature of man is not adapted. Novelty, which is assumed to be the
+outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon which
+civilization depends. Thought is destructive of peace; and it is argued
+that we know too little of political phenomena to make us venture into
+the untried places to which thought invites us. Yet the first of many
+answers is surely the most obvious fact that if man is so much the
+creature of his custom no reason would prevail save where they proved
+inadequate. If thought is simply a reserve power in society, its
+strength must obviously depend upon common acceptance; and that can only
+come when some routine has failed to satisfy the impulses of men. But we
+may urge a difficulty that is even more decisive. No system of habits
+can ever hope to endure long in a world where the cumulative power of
+memory enables change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure
+at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a
+general desire. It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and,
+indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it
+is conscious of itself. The uncritical routine of which Burke is the
+sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of virtue. Yet in modern
+civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that
+consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy. Our
+real need is less the automatic response to ancient stimulus than power
+to know what stimulus has social value. We need, that is to say, the
+gift of criticism rather than the gift of inert acceptance. Not, of
+course, that the habits which Burke so earnestly admired are at all part
+of our nervous endowment in any integral sense. The short space of the
+French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an
+essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian
+school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take
+that as proof of the ease with which essential habit may be acquired.
+Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized
+life. It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered;
+but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous
+response to the chords struck by another hand.
+
+Burke's answer would, of course, have been that he was not a democrat.
+He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity as low. He
+thought of the people--it was obviously a generalization from his
+time--as consistently prone to disorder and checked only by the force of
+ancient habit. Yet he has himself supplied the answer to that attitude.
+"My observation," he said in his _Speech on the East India Bill_, "has
+furnished me with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or
+education which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of
+government." We can go further than that sober caution. We know that
+there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that
+is the training of the mass of men to interest in it. We know that no
+State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without
+representation. Indeed, if proof were here wanting, an examination of
+the eighteenth century would supply it. Few would deny that statesmen
+are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life
+they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the
+dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion of a
+part of the State from sharing in its guidance. Nor did Burke remember
+his own wise saying that "in all disputes between the people and their
+rulers the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people";
+and he quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully's which traces
+popular violence to popular suffering. No one can watch the economic
+struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the
+pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they
+represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too
+intolerable to be borne. Burke himself, as his own speeches show, knew
+little or nothing of the pain involved in the agrarian changes of his
+age. The one way to avoid violent outbreak is not exclusion of the
+people from power but their participation in it. The popular sense of
+right may often, as Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of
+statesmen. It is not necessary to equate the worth of untrained
+commonsense with experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run,
+neglect of common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.
+
+This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground. For the case against Burke's
+aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal. He did not
+inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors
+of a whole people. Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham
+was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent. Once it is
+admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect
+institutional room must be found for its expression. The State is
+morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped. There is something
+curious here in Burke's inability to suspect deformity in a system which
+gave his talents but partial place. He must have known that no one in
+the House of Commons was his equal. He must have known how few of those
+he called upon to recognize the splendor of their function were capable
+of playing the part he pictured for them. The answer to a morally
+bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in
+its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact
+that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for
+power. Burke gave no hint of how the level of his governing class could
+be maintained. He said nothing of what education might accomplish for
+the people. He did not examine the obvious consequences of their
+economic status. Had his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of
+that States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in
+their inexperience, might have given him pause. The "obscure provincial
+advocates ... stewards of petty local jurisdictions ... the fomenters
+and conductors of the petty war of village vexation" legislated, out of
+their inexperience, for the world. Their resolution, their constancy,
+their high sense of the national need, were precisely the qualities
+Burke demanded in his governing class; and the States-General did not
+move from the straight path he laid down until they met with intrigue
+from those of whom Burke became the licensed champion.
+
+Nor is it in the least clear that his emphasis upon expediency is, in
+any real way, a release from metaphysical inquiry. Rather may it be
+urged that what was needed in Burke's philosophy was the clear avowal
+of the metaphysic it implied. Nothing is more greatly wanted in
+political inquiry than discovery of that "intuition more subtle than any
+articulate major premise" which, as Mr. Justice Holmes has said, is the
+true foundation of so many of our political judgments. The theory of
+natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong rather in
+its form than in its substance. It clearly suffered from its mistaken
+effort to trace to an imaginary state of nature what was due to a
+complex experience. It suffered also from its desire to lay down
+universal formulæ. It needed to state the rights demanded in terms of
+the social interests they involved rather than in the abstract ethic
+they implied. But the demands which underlay the thought of men like
+Price and Priestley was as much the offspring of experience as Burke's
+own doctrine. They made, indeed, the tactical mistake of seeking to give
+an unripe philosophic form to a political strategy wherein, clearly
+enough, Burke was their master. But no one can read the answers of Paine
+and Mackintosh, who both were careful to avoid the panoply of
+metaphysics, to the _Reflections_, without feeling that Burke failed
+to move them from their main position. Expediency may be admirable in
+telling the statesmen what to do; but it does not explain the sources of
+his ultimate act, nor justify the thing finally done. The unconscious
+deeps which lie beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent
+than the motives that are avowed. Action is less their elimination than
+their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we have
+the full materials for judgment.
+
+Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is surely
+unanswerable. The things that men desire correspond, in some rough
+fashion, to the things they need. Natural rights are nothing more than
+the armour evolved to protect their vital interests. Upon the narrow
+basis of legal history it is, of course, impossible to protect them.
+History is rather the record of the thwarting of human desire than of
+its achievement. But upon the value of certain things there is a
+sufficient and constant opinion to give us assurance that repression
+will ultimately involve disorder. Nor is there any difference between
+the classes of men in this regard. Forms, indeed, will vary; and the
+power we have of answering demand will always wait upon the discoveries
+of science. Our natural rights, that is to say, will have a changing
+content simply because this is not a static world. But that does not
+mean, as Burke insisted, that they are empty of experience. They come,
+of course, mainly from men who have been excluded from intimate contact
+with the fruits of power. Nonconformists in religion, workers without
+land or capital save the power of their own hands, it is from the
+disinherited that they draw, as demands, their strength. Yet it is
+difficult to see, as Burke would undoubtedly have insisted, that they
+are the worse from the source whence they derive. Rather do they point
+to grave inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of
+which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience. The
+unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack
+of moral insight into the problem he confronted.
+
+That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation; and its
+cause seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic outlook. He was profoundly
+religious; and he did not doubt that the order of the universe was the
+command of God. It was, as a consequence, beneficent; and to deny its
+validity was, for him, to doubt the wisdom of God. "Having disposed," he
+wrote, "and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will,
+but to His, He had, in and by that disposition, vitally subjected us to
+act the part which belongs to the place assigned us." The State, in
+fact, it is to be built upon the sacrifice of men; and this they must
+accept as of the will of God. We are to do our duty in our allotted
+station without repining, in anticipation, doubtless, of a later reward.
+What we are is thus the expression of his goodness; and there is a real
+sense in which Burke may be said to have maintained the inherent
+rightness of the existing order. Certainly he throws a cloak of
+religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property;
+and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely
+part of the same attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect this
+background with his antagonism to the French Revolution. What there was
+most distressing to him was the overthrowal of the Church, and he did
+not hesitate, in very striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion
+with infidelity. Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced
+that a social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his _Letters on a
+Regicide Peace_ have a good deal of that relentless illogic which made
+de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from ultramontanism with
+the road to a denial of all faith. Nothing is more difficult than to
+deal with a thinker who has had a revelation; and this sense that the
+universe was a divine mystery not to be too nearly scrutinized by man
+grew greatly upon Burke in his later years. It was not an attitude which
+reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the
+presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.
+
+There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like
+later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with
+something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him was the
+idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it,
+was not of the essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that
+the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the
+purpose itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the
+deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of
+the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it
+should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper. It
+never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic
+purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur.
+We do not come to grips with the facts. What we are bidden to remember
+is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be. The existing order
+is beatified as a necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to
+separate out the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts
+in time and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do
+not at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.
+
+Yet it is surely evident that in the heat and stress of social life, we
+cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our judgment. We may
+well enough regard the corruption of the monarchy under the later
+Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under Victoria;
+but that does not make it any the less corrupt. We may even see how a
+monistic view of society is possible to one who, like Burke, is uniquely
+occupied with the public good. But the men who, like Muir and Hardy in
+the treason trials of the Revolution, think rather in terms of the
+existing disharmonies than the beauty of the purpose upon which they
+rest, are only human if they think those disharmonies more real than the
+purpose they do not meet. They were surely to be pardoned if, reading
+the _Reflections_ of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more
+vital than their harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with
+which privileges they did not share were defended. It is even possible
+to understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as Burke
+had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it was against
+that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that they were in
+revolt. For them the fact of discontinuity was vital. They could not but
+ask for happiness in their own individual lives no less than in the
+State of which they were part. They came to see that without
+self-government in the sense of their own active participation in power,
+such happiness must go unfulfilled. The State, in fact, may have the
+noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also
+mortal men. The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic. The
+test of allegiance to established institutions became immediately the
+achievement for which they were responsible. The achievement, as they
+urged, was hardly written with adequacy in terms of the lives of humble
+men. That was why they judged no attitude of worth which sought the
+equation of the real and the ideal. The first lesson of their own
+experience of power was the need for its limitation by the instructed
+judgment of free minds.[18]
+
+[Footnote 18: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, pp. 65-9.]
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the romantic
+movement, to the _Contrat Social_ of Rousseau and the _Political
+Justice_ of Godwin, than was Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the
+romantics that Burke's fundamental influence remains. His attitude to
+reason, his exaltation of passion and imagination over the conscious
+logic of men, were of the inmost stuff of which they were made. In that
+sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative revolution
+of the generation which followed him. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, de
+Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the later Wordsworth in
+England, are in a true sense his disciples. That does not mean that any
+of them were directly conscious of his work but that the movement he
+directed had its necessary outcome in their defence of his ideals. The
+path of history is strewn with undistributed middles; and it is possible
+that in the clash between his attitude and that of Bentham there were
+the materials for a fuller synthesis in a later time. Certainly there is
+no more admirable corrective in historical politics that the contrast
+they afford.
+
+It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the greatness of his
+effort. Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless to live rather as
+the author of some maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than
+as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished implications,
+is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or Bentham. His very defects
+are lessons in themselves. His unhesitating inability to see how
+dangerous is the concentration of property is standing proof that men
+are over-prone to judge the rightness of a State by their own wishes.
+His own contempt for the results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless
+lesson in the virtue of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His
+disregard of popular desire suggests the fatal ease with which we
+neglect the opinion of those who stand outside the active centre of
+political conflict. Above all, his hostility to the Revolution should at
+least make later generations beware lest novelty of outlook be unduly
+confounded with erroneous doctrine.
+
+Yet even when such deduction has been made, there is hardly a greater
+figure in the history of political thought in England. Without the
+relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the moral insight of
+T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties of each. He brought to
+the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a
+lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as
+no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of insight are things
+that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political
+complexity. Unquestionably, his speculation is rather that of the orator
+in the tribune than of the thinker in his study. He never forgot his
+party, and he wrote always in that House of Commons atmosphere which
+makes a man unjust to the argument and motives of his opponent. Yet,
+when the last word of criticism has been made, the balance of
+illumination is immense. He illustrates at its best the value of that
+party-system the worth of which made so deep an impression on all he
+wrote. He showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate
+great principles. He showed also that allegiance to party is never
+inconsistent with the deeper allegiance to the demand of conscience.
+When he came to the House of Commons, the prospects of representative
+government were very dark; and it is mainly to his emphasis upon its
+virtues that its victory must be attributed. Institutional change is
+likely to be more rapid than in his generation; for we seem to have
+reached that moment when, as he foresaw, "they who persist in opposing
+that mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of
+Providence itself than the mere designs of men." The principles upon
+which we proceed are doubtless different from those that he commended;
+yet his very challenge to their wisdom only gives to his warning a
+deeper inspiration for our effort.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The Industrial Revolution is hardly less a fundamental change in the
+habits of English thought than in the technique of commercial
+production. Alongside the discoveries of Hargreaves and Crompton, the
+ideas of Hume and Adam Smith shifted the whole perspective of men's
+minds. The Revolution, indeed, like all great movements, did not
+originate at any given moment. There was no sudden invention which made
+the hampering system of government-control seem incompatible with
+industrial advance. The mercantilism against which the work of Adam
+Smith was so magistral a protest was already rather a matter of external
+than internal commerce when he wrote. He triumphed less because he
+suddenly opened men's eyes to a truth hitherto concealed than because he
+represented the culmination of certain principles which, under various
+aspects, were common to his time. The movement for religious toleration
+is not only paralleled in the next century by the movement for economic
+freedom, but is itself in a real sense the parent of the latter. For it
+is not without significance that the pre-Adamite economists were almost
+without exception the urgent defenders of religious toleration. The
+landowners were churchmen, the men of commerce largely Nonconformist;
+and religious proscription interfered with the balance of trade. When
+the roots of religious freedom had been secured, it was easy for them to
+transfer their argument to the secular sphere.
+
+Nothing, indeed, is more important in the history of English political
+philosophy than to realize that from Stuart times the Nonconformists
+were deeply bitten with distrust of government. Its courts of special
+instance hampered industrial life at every turn in the interest of
+religious conformity. Their heavy fines and irritating restrictions upon
+foreign workmen were nothing so much as a tax upon industrial progress.
+What the Nonconformists wanted was to be left alone; and Davenant
+explained the root of their desire when he tells of the gaols crowded
+with substantial tradesmen whose imprisonment spelt unemployment for
+thousands of workmen. Sir William Temple, in his description of Holland,
+represents economic prosperity as the child of toleration. The movement
+for ecclesiastical freedom in England, moreover, became causally linked
+with that protest against the system of monopolies with which it was the
+habit of the court to reward its favorites. Freedom in economic matters,
+like freedom in religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity
+shall exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition.
+The latter easily became imbued with religious significance. English
+puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work was the will
+of God and its performance the test of grace. The greater the energy of
+its performance, the greater the likelihood of prosperity; and thence it
+is but a step to argue that the free development of a man's industrial
+worth is the law of God. Success in business, indeed, became for many a
+test of religious grace, and poverty the proof of God's disfavor. Books
+like Steele's _Religious Tradesman_ (1684) show clearly how close is the
+connection. The hostility of the English landowners to the commercial
+classes in the eighteenth century is at bottom the inheritance of
+religious antagonism. The typical qualities of dissent became a certain
+pushful exertion by which the external criteria of salvation could be
+secured.
+
+Much of the contemporary philosophy, moreover, fits in with this
+attitude. From the time of Bacon, the main object of speculation was to
+disrupt the scholastic teleology. In the result the State becomes
+dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the self-interest of
+each is the starting-point of all inquiry. Hobbes built his state upon
+the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the individual enter political
+life for the benefits that accrue therefrom. The cynicism of Mandeville,
+the utilitarianism of Hume, are only bypaths of the same tradition. The
+organic society of the middle ages gives place to an individual who
+builds the State out of his own desires. Liberty becomes their
+realization; and the object of the State is to enable men in the
+fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their private wants. How far
+is that conception from the Anglican outlook of the seventeenth century,
+a sermon of Laud's makes clear. "If any man," he said,[19] "be so
+addicted to his private interest that he neglects the common State, he
+is void of the sense of piety, and wishes peace and happiness for
+himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the
+commonwealth and in the body of the Church." So Platonic an outlook was
+utterly alien from the temper of puritanism. They had no thought of
+sacrificing themselves to an institution which they had much ground for
+thinking existed only for their torment. The development of the
+religious instinct to the level of salvation found its philosophic
+analogue in the development of the economic sense of fitness. The State
+became the servant of the individual from being his master; and service
+became equated with an internal policy of _laissez-faire_.
+
+[Footnote 19: Sermon of June 19, 1621. Works (ed. of 1847), p. 28.]
+
+Such summary, indeed, abridges the long process of release from which
+the eighteenth century had still to suffer; nor does it sufficiently
+insist upon the degree to which the old idea of state control still held
+sway in external policies of trade. Mercantilism was still in the
+ascendant when Adam Smith came to write. Few statesmen of importance
+before the younger Pitt had learned the secret of its fallacies; and,
+indeed, the chief ground for difference between Chatham and Burke was
+the former's suspicion that Burke had embraced the noxious doctrine of
+free trade. Mercantilism, by the time of Locke, is not the simple error
+that wealth consists in bullion but the insistence that the balance of
+trade must be preserved. Partly it was doubtless derived from the
+methods of the old political arithmetic of men like Petty and Davenant;
+the individual seeks a balance at the end of his year's accounting and
+so, too, the State must have a balance. "A Kingdom," said Locke, "grows
+rich or poor just as a farmer does, and no other way"; and while there
+is a sense in which this is wholly true, the meaning attached to it by
+the mercantilists was that foreign competition meant national weakness.
+They could not conceive a commercial bargain which was profitable to
+both sides. Nations grow prosperous at each other's expense; wherefore a
+woolen trade in Ireland necessarily spells English unemployment. Even
+Davenant, who was in many respects on the high road to free trade, was
+in this problem adamant. Protection was essential in the colonial
+market; for unless the trade of the colonies was directed through
+England they might be dangerous rivals. So Ireland and America were
+sacrificed to the fear of British merchants, with the inevitable result
+that repression brought from both the obvious search for remedy.
+
+Herein it might appear that Adam Smith had novelty to contribute; yet
+nothing is more certain than that his full sense of the world as the
+only true unit of marketing was fully grasped before him. In 1691 Sir
+Dudley North published his _Discourses upon Trade_. Therein he clearly
+sees that commercial barriers between Great Britain and France are
+basically as senseless as would be commercial barriers between Yorkshire
+and Middlesex. Indeed, in one sense, North goes even further than Adam
+Smith, for he argues against the usury laws in terms Bentham would
+hardly have disowned. Ten years later an anonymous writer in a tract
+entitled _Considerations on the East India Trade_ (1701) has no
+illusions about the evil of monopoly. He sees with striking clarity that
+the real problem is not at any cost to maintain the industries a nation
+actually possesses, but to have the national capital applied in the most
+efficient channels. So, too, Hume dismissed the Mercantile theory with
+the contemptuous remark that it was trying to keep water beyond its
+proper level. Tucker, as has been pointed out, was a free trader, and
+his opinion of the American war was that it was as mad as those who
+fought "under the peaceful Cross to recover the Holy Land"; and he
+urged, indeed, prophesied, the union with Ireland in the interest of
+commercial amity. Nor must the emphasis of the Physiocrats upon free
+trade be forgotten. There is no evidence now that Adam Smith owed this
+perception to his acquaintance with Quesnay and Turgot; but they may
+well have confirmed him in it, and they show that the older philosophy
+was attacked on every side.
+
+Nor must we miss the general atmosphere of the time. On the whole his
+age was a conservative one, convinced, without due reason, that
+happiness was independent of birth or wealth and that natural law
+somehow could be made to justify existing institutions. The poets, like
+Pope, were singing of the small part of life which kings and laws may
+hope to cure; and that attitude is written in the general absence of
+economic legislation during the period. Religiously, the Church exalted
+the _status quo_; and where, as with Wesley, there was revolt, its
+impetus directed the mind to the source of salvation in the individual
+act. It may, indeed, be generally argued that the religious teachers
+acted as a social soporific. Where riches accumulated, they could be
+regarded as the blessing of God; where they were absent their
+unimportance for eternal happiness could be emphasized. Burke's early
+attack on a system which condemned "two hundred thousand innocent
+persons ... to so intolerable slavery" was, in truth, a justification of
+the existing order. The social question which, in the previous century,
+men like Bellers and Winstanley had brought into view, dropped out of
+notice until the last quarter of the century. There was, that is to say,
+no organized resistance possible to the power of individualism; and
+resistance was unlikely to make itself heard once the resources of the
+Industrial Revolution were brought into play. Men discovered with
+something akin to ecstasy the possibilities of the new inventions; and
+when the protest came against the misery they effected, it was answered
+that they represented the working of that natural law by which the
+energies of men may raise them to success. And discontent could easily,
+as with the saintly Wilberforce, be countered by the assertion that it
+was revolt against the will of God.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Few lives represent more splendidly than that of Adam Smith the
+speculative ideal of a dispassionate study of philosophy. He was
+fortunate in his teachers and his friends. At Glasgow he was the pupil
+of Francis Hutcheson; and even if he was taught nothing at Oxford, at
+least six years of leisure gave him ample opportunity to learn. His
+professorship at Glasgow not only brought him into contact with men like
+Hume, but also admitted him to intercourse with a group of business men
+whose liberal sentiments on commerce undoubtedly strengthened, if they
+did not originate, his own liberal views. At Glasgow, too, in 1759, he
+published his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, written with sufficient
+power of style to obscure its inner poverty of thought. The book brought
+him immediately a distinguished reputation from a public which exalted
+elegance of diction beyond all literary virtues. The volatile Charles
+Townshend made him tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch, through whom Smith
+not only secured comparative affluence for the rest of his days, but
+also a French tour in which he met at its best the most brilliant
+society in Europe. The germ of his _Wealth of Nations_ already lay
+hidden in those Glasgow lectures which Mr. Cannan has so happily
+recovered for us; and it was in a moment of leisure in France that he
+set to work to put them together in systematic fashion. Not, indeed,
+that the Frenchmen whom he met, Turgot, Quesnay and Dupont de Nemours,
+can be said to have done more than confirm the truths he had already
+been teaching. When he returned to Scotland and a competence ten years
+of constant labor were necessary before the _Wealth of Nations_ was
+complete. After its publication, in 1776, Adam Smith did little save
+attend to the administrative duties of a minor, but lucrative office in
+the Customs. Until the end, indeed, he never quite gave up the hope,
+foreshadowed first in the _Moral Sentiments_ of completing a gigantic
+survey of civilized institutions. But he was a slow worker, and his
+health was never robust. It was enough that he should have written his
+book and cherished friendships such as it is given to few men to
+possess. Hume and Burke, Millar the jurist, James Watt, Foulis the
+printer, Black the chemist and Hutton of geological fame--it is an
+enviable circle. He had known Turgot on intimate terms and visited
+Voltaire on Lake Geneva. Hume had told him that his book had "depth and
+solidity and acuteness"; the younger Pitt had consulted him on public
+affairs. Few men have moved amid such happy peace within the very centre
+of what was most illustrious in their age.
+
+We are less concerned here with the specific economic details of the
+_Wealth of Nations_ than with its general attitude to the State. But
+here a limitation upon criticism must be noted. The man of whom Smith
+writes is man in search of wealth; by definition the economic motive
+dominates his actions. Such abuse, therefore, as Ruskin poured upon him
+is really beside the point when his objective is borne in mind. What
+virtually he does is to assume the existence of a natural economic order
+which tends, when unrestrained by counter-tendencies, to secure the
+happiness of men. "That order of things which necessity imposes in
+general," he writes, "... is, in every particular country promoted by
+the natural inclinations of man"; and he goes on to explain what would
+have resulted "if human institutions had never thwarted those natural
+inclinations." "All systems either of preference or of restraint,
+therefore, being thus completely taken away," he writes again, "the
+obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its
+own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of
+justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own
+way.... The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty in the
+attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable
+delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or
+knowledge would ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the
+industry of private people and of directing it towards the employments
+most suitable to the interests of the society."
+
+The State, in this conception has but three functions--defence, justice
+and "the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and
+certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of
+any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain."
+The State, in fact, is simply to provide the atmosphere in which
+production is possible. Nor does Smith conceal his thought that the main
+function of justice is the protection of property. "The affluence of
+the rich," he wrote, "excites the indignation of the poor, who are often
+both driven by want and prompted by envy to invade their possessions. It
+is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that
+valuable property, acquired by the labor of many years, or perhaps many
+successive generations, can sleep a single night in security." The
+attitude, indeed, is intensified by his constant sense that the capital
+which makes possible new productivity is the outcome of men's sacrifice;
+to protect it is thus to safeguard the sources of wealth itself. And
+even if the State is entrusted with education and the prevention of
+disease, this is rather for the general benefit they confer and the
+doubt that private enterprise would find them profitable than as the
+expression of a general rule. Collective effort of every kind awakened
+in him a deep distrust. Trade regulations such as the limitation of
+apprenticeship he condemned as "manifest encroachment upon the just
+liberty of the workman and of those who may be disposed to employ him."
+Even educational establishments are suspect on the ground--not
+unnatural after his own experience of Oxford--that their possibilities
+of comfort may enervate the natural energies of men.
+
+The key to this attitude is clear enough. The improvement of society is
+due, he thinks not to the calculations of government but to the natural
+instincts of economic man. We cannot avoid the impulse to better our
+condition; and the less its effort is restrained the more certain it is
+that happiness will result. We gain, in fact, some sense of its inherent
+power when we bear in mind the magnitude of its accomplishment despite
+the folly and extravagance of princes. Therein we have some index of
+what it would achieve if left unhindered to work out its own destinies.
+Human institutions continually thwart its power; for those who build
+those institutions are moved rather "by the momentary fluctuations of
+affairs" than their true nature. "That insidious and crafty animal,
+vulgarly called a politician or statesman" meets little mercy for his
+effort compared to the magic power of the natural order. "In all
+countries where there is a tolerable security," he writes, "every man
+of common understanding will endeavor to employ whatever stock he can
+command in procuring either present enjoyment or future profit."
+Individual spontaneity is thus the root of economic good; and the real
+justification of the state is the protection it affords to this impulse.
+Man, in fact, is by nature a trader and he is bound by nature to
+discover the means most apt to progress.
+
+Nor was he greatly troubled by differences of fortune. Like most of the
+Scottish school, especially Hutcheson and Hume, he thought that men are
+much alike in happiness, whatever their station or endowments. For there
+is a "never-failing certainty" that "all men sooner or later accommodate
+themselves to whatever becomes their permanent situation"; though he
+admits that there is a certain level below which poverty and misery go
+hand in hand. But, for the most part, happiness is simply a state of
+mind; and he seems to have had but little suspicion that differences of
+wealth might issue in dangerous social consequence. Men, moreover, he
+regarded as largely equal in their original powers; and differences of
+character he ascribes to the various occupations implied in the
+division of labor. Each man, therefore, as he follows his self-interest
+promotes the general happiness of society. That principle is inherent in
+the social order. "Every man," he wrote in the _Moral Sentiments_, "is
+by nature first and principally recommended to his own care" and therein
+he is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of
+his intention." The State, that is to say, is the sum of individual
+goods; whereby to better ourselves is clearly to its benefit. And that
+desire "which comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go
+to the grave" is the more efficacious the less it is restrained by
+governmental artifice. For we know so well what makes us happy that none
+can hope to help us so much as we help ourselves.
+
+Enlightened selfishness is thus the root of prosperity; but we must not
+fall into the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf to the plaint of the
+poor. He urged the employer to have regard to the health and welfare of
+the worker, a regard which was the voice of reason and humanity. Where
+there was conflict between love of the _status quo_ and a social good
+which Revolution alone could achieve, he did not, at least in the _Moral
+Sentiments_, hesitate to choose the latter. Order was, for the most
+part, indispensable; but "the greatest and noblest of all characters" he
+made the reformer of the State. Yet he is too impressed by the working
+of natural economic laws to belittle their influence. Employers, in his
+picture, are little capable of benevolence or charity. Their rule is the
+law of supply and demand and not the Sermon on the Mount. They combine
+without hesitation to depress wages to the lowest point of subsistence.
+They seize every occasion of commercial misfortune to make better terms
+for themselves; and the greater the poverty the more submissive do
+servants become so that scarcity is naturally regarded as more favorable
+to industry.
+
+Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is Smith's
+conception of nature. Nor can there be much doubt of what he thought its
+inner substance. Facile distinctions such as the effort of Buckle to
+show that while in the _Moral Sentiments_ Adam Smith was dealing with
+the unselfish side of man's nature, in the _Wealth of Nations_ he was
+dealing with a group of facts which required the abstraction of such
+altruistic elements, are really beside the point. Nature for Smith is
+simply the spontaneous action of human character unchecked by hindrances
+of State. It is, as Bonar has aptly said, "a vindication of the
+unconscious law present in the separate actions of men when these
+actions are directed by a certain strong personal motive." Adam Smith's
+argument is an assumption that the facts can be made to show the
+relative powerlessness of institutions in the face of economic laws
+grounded in human psychology. The psychology itself is relatively
+simple, and, at least in the _Wealth of Nations_ not greatly different
+from the avowed assumptions of utilitarianism. He emphasizes the
+strength of reason in the economic field, and his sense that it enables
+men to judge much better of their best interests than an external
+authority can hope to do. And therefore the practices accomplished by
+this reason are those in which the impulses of men are to be found. The
+order they represent is the natural order; and whatever hinders its full
+operation is an unwise check upon the things for which men strive.
+
+Obviously enough, this attitude runs the grave risk of seeming to
+abstract a single motive--the desire for wealth--from the confused
+welter of human impulses and to make it dominant at the expense of human
+nature itself. A hasty reading of Adam Smith would, indeed, confirm that
+impression; and that is perhaps why he seemed to Ruskin to blaspheme
+human nature. But a more careful survey, particularly when the _Moral
+Sentiments_ is borne in mind suggests a different conclusion. His
+attitude is implicit in the general medium in which he worked. What he
+was trying to do was less to emphasize that men care above all things
+for the pursuit of wealth than that no institutional modifications are
+able to destroy the power of that motive to labor. There is too much
+history in the _Wealth of Nations_ to make tenable the hypothesis of
+complete abstraction. And there is even clear a sense of a nature behind
+his custom when he speaks of a "sacred regard" for life, and urges that
+every man has property in his own labor. The truth here surely is that
+Smith was living in a time of commercial expansion. What was evident to
+him was the potential wealth to be made available if the obsolete system
+of restraint could be destroyed. Liberty to him meant absence of
+restraint not because its more positive aspect was concealed from him
+but rather because the kind of freedom wanted in the environment in
+which he moved was exactly that for which he made his plea. There is a
+hint that freedom as a positive thing was known to him from the fact
+that he relied upon education to relieve the evils of the division of
+labor. But the general context of his book required less emphasis upon
+the virtues of state-interference than upon its defects. His cue was to
+show that all the benefits of regulation had been achieved despite its
+interference; from which, of course, it followed that restraint was a
+matter of supererogation.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It would be tedious to praise the _Wealth of Nations_. It may be
+doubtful whether Buckle's ecstatic judgment that it has had more
+influence than any other book in the world was justified even when he
+wrote; but certainly it is one of the seminal books of the modern time.
+What is more important is to note the perspective in which its main
+teaching was set. He wrote in the midst of the first significant
+beginnings of the Industrial Revolution; and his emphatic approval of
+Watt's experiments suggests that he was not unalive to its importance.
+Yet it cannot in any full sense be said that the Industrial Revolution
+has a large part in his book. The picture of industrial organization and
+its possibilities is too simple to suggest that he had caught any far
+reaching glimpse into the future. Industry, for him, is still in the
+last stage of handicraft; it is a matter of skillful workmanship and not
+of mechanical appliance. Capital is still the laborious result of
+parsimony. Credit is spoken of rather in the tones of one who sees it
+less as a new instrument of finance than a dangerous attempt by the
+aspiring needy to scale the heights of wealth. Profits are always a
+justified return for productive labor; interest the payment for the use
+of the owner's past parsimony. Business is still the middleman
+distributing to the consumer on a small scale. He did not, or could not,
+conceive of an industry either so vast or so depersonalized as at
+present. He was rather writing of a system which, like the politics of
+the eighteenth century, had reached an equilibrium of passable comfort.
+His natural order was, at bottom, the beatification of that to which
+this equilibrium tended. Its benefits might be improved by free trade
+and free workmanship; but, upon the whole, he saw no reason to call in
+question its fundamental dogmas.
+
+Therein, of course, may be found the main secret of his omissions. The
+problem of labor finds no place in his book. The things that the poor
+have absent from their lives, that concept of a national minimum below
+which no State can hope to fulfil even the meanest of its aims, of these
+he has no conception. Rather the note of the book is a quiet optimism,
+impressed by the possibilities of constant improvement which lie
+imbedded in the human impulse to better itself. What he did not see is
+the way in which the logical outcome of the system he describes may
+well be the attainment of great wealth at a price in human cost that is
+beyond its worth. Therein, it is clear, all individualistic theories of
+the state miss the true essence of the social bond. Those who came after
+Adam Smith saw only half his problem. He wrote a consumer's theory of
+value. But whereas he had in mind a happy and contented people, the
+economics of Ricardo and Malthus seized upon a single element in human
+nature as that which alone the State must serve. Freedom from restraint
+came ultimately to mean a judgment upon national well-being in terms of
+the volume of trade. "It is not with happiness," said Nassau Senior,
+"but with wealth that I am concerned as a political economist; and I am
+not only justified in omitting, but am perhaps bound to omit, all
+considerations which have no influence upon wealth."
+
+In such an aspect, it was natural for the balance of investigation to
+swing towards the study of the technique of production; and with the
+growing importance of capital, as machinery was introduced, the worker,
+without difficulty, became an adjunct, easily replaced, to the machine.
+What was remembered then was the side of Adam Smith which looked upon
+enlightened selfishness as the key to social good. Regulation became
+anathema even when the evils it attempted to restrain were those which
+made the mass of the people incapable of citizenship. Even national
+education was regarded as likely to destroy initiative; or, as a
+pauper's dole which men of self-respect would regard with due
+abhorrence. The State, in short, ceased to concern itself with justice
+save insofar as the administration of a judicial code spelled the
+protection of the new industrial system. Nothing is more striking in the
+half-century after Adam Smith than the optimism of the economist and the
+business man in contrast to the hopeless despair of labor. That men can
+organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that until
+Francis Place even the workers themselves were half-convinced. The
+manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of
+economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation. The
+literature of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray,
+exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and Robert Owen
+was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet of a new hope.
+The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out to the letter the
+unstated assumptions of Puritan economics. The poor were consigned to a
+God whose dictates were by definition beneficent; and if they failed to
+understand the curious incidence of his rewards that was because his
+ways were inscrutable. No one who reads the tracts of writers like
+Harriet Martineau can fail to see how pitiless was the operation of this
+attitude. Life is made a struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its
+ultimate meaning from the misery incident to it. The tragedy is excused
+because the export-trade increases in its volume. The iron law of wages,
+the assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of wealth,
+the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better his
+condition be sapped by giving to him that which his self-respect can
+better win--these became the unconscious assumptions of all economic
+discussion.
+
+In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided it, we
+must not miss the element of truth that it contains. No poison is more
+subtly destructive of the democratic State than paternalism; and the
+release of the creative impulses of men must always be the coping-stone
+of public policy. Adam Smith is the supreme representative of a
+tradition which saw that release effected by individual effort. Where
+each man cautiously pursued the good as he saw it, the realization was
+bound, in his view, to be splendid. A population each element of which
+was active and alert to its economic problems could not escape the
+achievement of greatness. All that is true; but it evades the obvious
+conditions we have inherited. For even when the psychological
+inadequacies of Smith's attitude are put aside, we can judge his theory
+in the light of the experience it summarizes. Once it is admitted that
+the object of the State is the achievement of the good life, the final
+canon of politics is bound to be a moral one. We have to inquire into
+the dominant conception of the good life, the number of those upon whom
+it is intended that good shall be conferred.
+
+In the light of this conception it is obvious enough that Smith's view
+is impossible. No mere conflict of private interests, however pure in
+motive, seems able to achieve a harmony of interest between the members
+of the State. Liberty, in the sense of a positive and equal opportunity
+for self-realization, is impossible save upon the basis of the
+acceptance of certain minimal standards which can get accepted only
+through collective effort. Smith did not see that in the processes of
+politics what gets accepted is not the will that is at every moment a
+part of the state-purpose, but the will of those who in fact operate the
+machinery of government. In the half-century after he wrote the men who
+dominated political life were, with the best intentions, moved by
+motives at most points unrelated to the national well-being. The
+fellow-servant doctrine would never have obtained acceptance in a state
+where, as he thought, employer and workman stood upon an equal footing.
+Opposition to the Factory Acts would never have developed in a community
+where it was realized that below certain standards of subsistence the
+very concept of humanity is impossible. Modern achievement implies a
+training in the tools of life; and that, for most, is denied even in our
+own day to the vast majority of men. In the absence of legislation, it
+is certain that those who employ the services of men will be their
+political masters; and it will follow that their Acts of Parliament will
+be adapted to the needs of property. That shrinkage of the purpose of
+the State will mean for most not merely hardship but degradation of all
+that makes life worthy. Upon those stunted existences, indeed, a wealthy
+civilization may easily be builded. Yet it will be a civilization of
+slaves rather than of men.
+
+The individualism, that is to say, for which Adam Smith was zealous
+demands a different institutional expression from that which he gave it.
+We must not assume an _a priori_ justification for the forces of the
+past. The customs of men may represent the thwarting of the impulses of
+the many at the expense of the few not less easily than they may embody
+a general desire; and it is surely a mistaken usage to dignify as
+natural whatever may happen to have occurred. A man may find
+self-realization not less in working for the common good than in the
+limited satisfaction of his narrow desire for material advancement. And
+that, indeed, is the starting-point of modern effort. Our liberty means
+the consistent expression of our personality in media where we find
+people like-minded with ourselves in their conception of social life.
+The very scale of civilization implies collective plans and common
+effort. The constant revision of our basic notions was inevitable
+immediately science was applied to industry. There was thus no reason to
+believe that the system of individual interests for which Smith stood
+sponsor was more likely to fit requirements of a new time than one which
+implied the national regulation of business enterprise. The danger in
+every period of history is lest we take our own age as the term in
+institutional evolution. Private enterprise has the sanction of
+prescription; but since the Industrial Revolution the chief lesson we
+have had to learn is the unsatisfactory character of that title. History
+is an unenviable record of bad metaphysics used to defend obsolete
+systems. It took almost a century after the publication of the _Wealth
+of Nations_ for men to realize that its axioms represented the
+experience of a definite time. Smith thought of freedom in the terms
+most suitable to his generation and stated them with a largeness of view
+which remains impressive even at a century's distance.
+
+But nothing is more certain in the history of political philosophy than
+that the problem of freedom changes with each age. The nineteenth
+century sought release from political privilege; and it built its
+success upon the system prepared by its predecessor. It can never be too
+greatly emphasized that in each age the substance of liberty will be
+found in what the dominating forces of that age most greatly want. With
+Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is
+always the summary of some special experience universalized. That does
+not mean that the past is worthless. Politics, as Seeley said, are
+vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed
+to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its
+novelties upon foundations of sand. Suspicions of collective effort in
+the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to
+think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so
+finely criticized Hegel. It is as though one were to confound the
+accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis
+of property itself. From such an error it is the task of history above
+all to free us. For it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as
+a perennial challenge to the coming time.
+
+The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double
+tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth. On the one hand he is the
+founder of the classic political economy. With Ricardo, the elder Mill
+and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the production of wealth
+without regard to its moral environment; and the state for them is
+merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in which business men achieve
+their labors. There is nothing in them of that fine despair which made
+Stuart Mill welcome socialism itself rather than allow the continuance
+of the new capitalist system. Herein the State is purged of moral
+purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the greatest happiness by
+insisting that the technique of production must dominate all other
+circumstances. Until the Reform Act of 1867, the orthodox economists
+remained unchallenged. The use of the franchise was only beginning to be
+understood. The "new model" of trade unionism had not yet been tested in
+the political field. But it was discovered impossible to act any longer
+upon the assumptions of the abstract economic man. The infallible sense
+of his own interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for
+the simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously
+required training if they were to be applied to a complex world.
+Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because it
+failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be found
+for the creative energies of humble men.
+
+It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to understand
+the inner significance of the protest against this economic liberalism.
+Adam Smith had declared the source of value to lie in labor; and, at
+the moment of its deepest agony, there were men willing to point the
+moral of his tale. That it represented an incautious analysis was, for
+them, unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path
+whereby economics could be reclaimed for moral science. For if labor was
+the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as
+though degradation was the sole payment for its services. They did not
+ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically profitable,
+but whether it was ethically right. No one can read the history of these
+years and fail to understand their uncompromising denial of its
+rightness. Their negation fell upon unheeding ears; but twenty years
+later, the tradition for which they stood came into Marx's hands and was
+fashioned by him into an interpretation of history. With all its faults
+of statement and of emphasis, the doctrine of the English socialists has
+been, in later hands, the most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics.
+It was a deliberate effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith's ideas, to
+create a commonwealth in the interests of the masses. Wealth, in its
+view, was less the mere production of goods than the accumulated
+happiness of humble men. The impulses it praised and sought through
+state-action to express were, indeed, different from those upon which
+Smith laid emphasis; and he would doubtless have stood aghast at the way
+in which his thought was turned to ends of which he did not dream. Yet
+he can hardly have desired a greater glory. He thus made possible not
+only knowledge of a State untrammelled in its economic life by moral
+considerations; but also the road to those categories wherein the old
+conception of co-operative effort might find a new expression. Those who
+trod in his footsteps may have repudiated the ideal for which he stood,
+but they made possible a larger hope in which he would have been proud
+and glad to share.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+This bibliography makes no pretence to completeness. It attempts only to
+enumerate the more obvious sources that an interested reader would care
+to examine.
+
+
+
+GENERAL
+
+
+LESLIE STEPHEN. _History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_.
+1876. Vol. II, Chapters IX and X.
+
+W.E.H. LECKY. _History of England in the Eighteenth Century._
+
+A.L. SMITH. _Political Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth and
+Eighteenth Centuries_ in the _Cambridge Modern History_. Vol. VI,
+Chapter XXIII.
+
+J. BONAR. _Philosophy and Political Economy_. Chapters V-IX.
+
+F.W. MAITLAND. _An Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality_ in
+_Collected Papers_. Vol. I.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+JOHN LOCKE. _Works_ (Eleventh Edition), 10 volumes. London, 1812.
+
+H.R. FOX-BOURNE. _Life of John Locke_. London, 1876.
+
+T.H. GREEN. _The Principles of Political Obligation_ in _Collected
+Works_. Vol. II. London, 1908.
+
+PETER. LORD KING. _The Life and Letters of John Locke_. London, 1858.
+
+SIR F. POLLOCK. _Locke's Theory of the State_ in _Proc. Brit. Acad._.
+Vol. I. London, 1904.
+
+S.P. LAMPRECHT. _The Moral and Political Philosophy of Locke_. New York,
+1918.
+
+A.A. SEATON. _The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts_.
+Cambridge, 1911.
+
+J.N. FIGGIS. _The Divine Right of Kings_. Cambridge, 1914.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+JEREMY COLLIER. _The History of Passive Obedience_. London, 1689.
+
+WILLIAM SHERLOCK. _The Case of Resistance_. London, 1684.
+
+CHARLES LESLIE. _The Case of the Regale_ (Collected Works). Vol. III,
+                   p. 291.
+                _The Rehearsal_.
+                _The New Association_.
+                _Cassandra_.
+                _The Finishing Stroke_.
+                _Obedience to Civil Government Clearly Stated_.
+                _The Best Answer_.
+                _The Best of All_.
+
+SAMUEL GRASCOM. _A Brief Answer_.
+
+E. SHELLINGFLEET. _A Vindication of their Majesties Authoritie_.
+
+B. SHOWER. _A Letter to a Convocation Man._
+
+W. WAKE. _The Authority of Christian Princes_. _The State of the Church_
+(1703).
+
+FRANCIS ATTERBURY. _Rights, Powers and Privileges of an English
+Convocation_ (1701).
+
+BENJAMIN HOADLY. _Origins of Civil Government_ (1710).
+                 _Preservative Against Nonjurors_ (1716).
+                 _Works_, 3 vols. London (1773).
+
+WILLIAM LAW. _A Defence of Church Principles_ (ed. Gore). Edinburgh,
+1904.
+
+W. WARBURTON. _Alliance between Church and State_ (1736).
+
+J.H. OVERTON. _The Nonjurors._ New York, 1903.
+
+T. LATHEBURY. _History of Convocation._ London, 1842.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+BERKELEY. _Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721).
+
+H. ST. JOHN (Viscount Bolingbroke). _Works._ 5 vols. London, 1754.
+
+LORD EGMONT. _Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts_ (1742).
+
+DAVID HUME. _Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals_ (1752).
+            _Essays_. (1742-1752) ed. Green & Grose. London, 1876.
+
+W. SICHEL. _Life of Bolingbroke_. 2 vols. 1900-4.
+
+J. CHURTON COLLINS. _Bolingbroke and Voltaire in England_.
+
+J. HILL BURTON. _Life of Hume_.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+MONTESQUIEU. _L'Esprit des Lois_ (1748).
+
+J.J. ROUSSEAU. _Du Contrat Social_ (1762). See ed. by Vaughan, 1918.
+
+JOHN BROWN. _Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_
+(1757).
+
+ADAM FERGUSON. _Essay on the History of Civil Society_ (1767).
+
+WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. _Commentaries_ (1765-9).
+
+JEREMY BENTHAM. _A Fragment on Government_ (1776). Ed. F.C. Montague,
+1891.
+
+J. DE LOLME. _The Constitution of England_ (1775).
+
+ROBERT WALLACE. _Various Prospects_ (1761).
+
+JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. _Essay on the First Principles of Government_ (1768).
+
+RICHARD PRICE. _Observations on Civil Liberty_ (1776). _Additional
+Observations_ (1777).
+
+WILLIAM OGILVIE. _The Right of Property in Land_ (1781). Ed. Macdonald,
+1891.
+
+JOSIAH TUCKER. _Treatise on Civil Government_ (1781).
+
+SAMUEL JOHNSON. _Taxation No Tyranny_ (1775).
+
+M. BEER. _History of British Socialism_ (1919).
+
+JAMES BOSWELL. _Life of Samuel Johnson_ (1791).
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+EDMUND BURKE. _Collected Works_. London, 1808.
+
+JOHN MORLEY. _Edmund Burke_ (1867). _Life of Burke_ (1887).
+
+J. MACCUNN. _The Political Philosophy of Burke_ (1908).
+
+JUNIUS. _Letters_ (1769-72). London, 1812.
+
+THOMAS PAINE. _The Rights of Man_ (1791-2).
+
+JAMES MACKINTOSH. _Vendiciæ Gallicæ_ (1791).
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+CHARLES DAVENANT. _Works_. London, 1771.
+
+SIR DUDLEY NORTH. _A Discourse upon Trade_ (1691).
+
+ADAM SMITH. _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ (1759).
+            _Wealth of Nations_ (1776).
+            _Lectures on Justice and Police_. (Ed. Cannan, 1896).
+
+W.R. SCOTT. _Life of Francis Hutcheson_ (1900).
+
+JOHN RAE. _Life of Adam Smith_ (1895).
+
+W. BAGEHOT. _Adam Smith as a Person_ in _Coll. Works_. Vol. VII.
+
+F.W. HIRST. _Adam Smith_ (1904).
+
+W. HASBACH. _Untersuchungen über Adam Smith_ (1891).
+
+J. BONAR. _A Catalogue of Adam Smith's Library_ (1894).
+
+T. CLIFFE LESLIE. _Adam Smith_ in _Essays in Moral and Political
+Philosophy_ (1879).
+
+E. TROELTSCH. _Die Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirchen_ (1912).
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Addison, 69
+Andrewes, 83
+Ashley, 33-4
+Atterbury, 102
+Austin, 62
+
+Bagehot, 9, 249
+Barbeyrac, 68
+Barrow, 84
+Bellarmine, 83, 121
+Bentham, 23, 62, 72, 151, 157, 175, 194
+Berkeley, 10, 129
+Blackstone, 163-4, 174f
+Bolingbroke, 69, 131f
+Bonald, 277
+Bonar, 300
+Bonwicke, 82
+Boswell, 209
+Bray, 307, 315
+Brown (J.), 168
+Brown (R.), 52
+Burke, 7, 8, 16, 30, 157, 159, 166, 221f, 286
+Burnet, 80, 87, 93
+Busher, 52
+
+Cartwright, 97
+Chatham, 132, 167, 188, 262
+Chillingworth, 52
+Chubb, 128
+Coleridge, 277
+Collier, 84n
+Cowper, 20
+Crabbe, 20
+
+Dalrymple, 8
+Darwin, 67
+Davenant, 283, 287
+Defoe, 8, 128, 132
+Dicey, 175, 179
+Disraeli, 132
+Divine Right, 7, 30
+Dodwell, 82
+Dupont de Nemours, 292
+
+Egmont, 142
+Eldon, 159
+
+Ferguson, 172-4
+Fielding, 160
+Filmer, 7, 38
+
+Galsworthy, 171-2
+George III, 13, 15, 158, 188, 213f
+Godwin, 10, 163, 222, 276
+Goldsmith, 19, 223
+Goodman, 57
+Grascom, 86
+Gray, 160
+Green (T.H.), 61, 279
+
+Haldane, 126
+Hales, 52
+Halifax, 8, 27
+Hall, 17, 307
+Hamilton (J.L. & B.), 19
+Harrington, 147
+Hegel, 249, 277, 212-3
+Hickes, 83
+Hoadly, 9, 22, 69, 107f
+Hobbes, 8, 16, 30, 40f, 72, 91, 278, 284
+Hodgskin, 17, 307
+Holmes (O.W.), 63n, 269
+Holt, 14,
+Hooker, 44
+Hotman, 57, 68
+Hume, 8, 11, 71, 92, 143f, 278, 284, 297
+Hutcheson, 11, 153, 155, 291, 297
+
+Independents, 40
+
+Jackson, 84
+James II, 24f, 35
+Johnson (Dr.), 18, 210f, 223, 230
+Junius, 21, 219
+
+Keble, 82
+Kerr, 82
+Knox, 57, 83, 97
+
+Lassalle, 313
+Laud, 285
+Law, 22, 108f
+Leslie, 80, 85, 88, 90, 97, 104, 132
+Locke, 7, 11, 21, 29-76, 79, 197, 207, 273, 287
+de Lolme, 10, 183f
+
+Mackintosh, 269
+Madison, 63
+Maine, 66, 249
+Maistre, 91, 252, 273
+Malthus, 305
+Mandeville, 129, 284
+Mariana, 57
+Martin, 69
+Marx, 312, 315
+Melville, 121
+Mill, 157
+Milton, 52
+Molyneux, 68
+Montesquieu, 12, 63, 160f, 173, 183
+Morley, 132, 223
+
+Newton, 37
+Newman, 81, 122, 125
+North, 287
+
+Ogilvie, 199f
+Owen, 17, 307
+Oxford Movement, 81
+
+Paine, 202, 269
+Paley, 157
+Pattison, 10
+Penn, 58
+Place, 306
+Pope, 69, 128, 132
+Price, 196f
+Priestley, 72, 190f
+Proast, 64
+Prynne, 8, 55
+Pufendorf, 68
+Pulteney, 217
+
+Quesnay, 288, 292
+
+Renan, 249
+Ricardo, 305
+Richardson, 160
+Richardson (S.), 52
+Rousseau, 8, 74, 162f, 188, 197, 276
+Royer-Collard, 226
+Ruskin, 293, 301
+
+Sanderson, 84
+Savigny, 249, 277
+Seeley, 312
+Selden, 9
+Senior, 304
+Separation of Powers, 63f
+Shaftesbury, 11, 128, 155
+Sherlock (T.), 108
+Sherlock (W.), 87
+Shower, 99
+Sidney, 7, 57
+Smith (Adam), 9, 16, 152, 195, 258, 281f
+Smith (A.L.), 140
+Snape, 108
+Social Contract, 57
+Spelman, 9
+Spence, 202
+Stammler, 60
+Steele, 284
+Stephen (F.), 65
+Stephen (L.), 108, 223
+Stillingfleet, 37, 87, 93
+Suarez, 57
+
+Taylor, 52, 57
+Temple, 283
+Thompson, 307, 215
+Tindal, 123
+Tocqueville, 254
+Toleration, 52, 64
+Tucker, 71, 206f, 288
+Turgot, 288, 292
+
+Voltaire, 12, 132, 160
+
+Wake, 80, 100f
+Wallace, 188
+Walpole, 13, 21, 128-30
+Warburton, 69, 118f, 192
+Wilberforce, 290
+Wilkes, 167, 188, 220
+William III, 25f
+Williams (Roger), 52
+Woolston, 128
+Wordsworth, 277
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Political Thought in England from
+Locke to Bentham, by Harold J. Laski
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14735 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14735 ***</div>
+
+<div id="titlepages"><br />
+<h2>HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY<br />
+OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE</h2>
+<h3>No. 103</h3>
+<p class="center"><i>Editors:</i></p>
+<div class="editors">
+<p class="small">HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.<br />
+PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D. LL.D., F.B.A.<br />
+PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.<br />
+PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="long" />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="page1" id="page1"></a>
+<h1>POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND<br />
+<br />
+FROM<br />
+LOCKE TO BENTHAM</h1>
+<br />
+<p class="center">BY</p>
+<h2>HAROLD J. LASKI</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="small">SOMETIME EXHIBITIONER OF NEW
+COLLEGE, OXFORD, OF THE<br />
+DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY,<br />
+AUTHOR OF STUDIES IN THE PROBLEM OF<br />
+SOVEREIGNTY AND AUTHORITY IN<br />
+THE MODERN STATE</span></p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<p class="center"><img src="images/image01.png" width="96" height=
+"126" alt="" /></p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<p class="center">NEW YORK<br />
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY<br />
+<span class="small">LONDON</span><br />
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<br />
+<a name="page2" id="page2"></a>
+<p class="center">1920</p>
+<br />
+<hr class="long" /></div>
+<div id="preface"><a name="page3" id="page3"></a>
+<h2>NOTE</h2>
+<p class="indent">It is impossible for me to publish this book
+without some expression of the debt it owes to Leslie Stephen's
+<i>History of the English Thought in the Eighteenth Century</i>. It
+is almost insolent to praise such work; but I may be permitted to
+say that no one can fully appreciate either its wisdom or its
+knowledge who has not had to dig among the original texts.</p>
+<p class="indent">Were so small a volume worthy to bear a
+dedication, I should associate it with the name of my friend Walter
+Lippmann. He and I have so often discussed the substance of its
+problems that I am certain a good deal of what I feel to be my own
+is, where it has merit, really his. This volume is thus in great
+part a tribute to him; though there is little that can repay such
+friendship as he gives.</p>
+<p class="right">H.J.L.</p>
+<p class="small">HARVARD UNIVERSITY<br />
+<span class="in2">Sept. 15, 1919</span></p>
+<hr class="long" /></div>
+<div id="toc"><a name="page5" id="page5"></a>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<br />
+<div class="center">
+<table width="100%" summary="Table of Contents">
+<tr>
+<td class="right"><span class="tiny">CHAPTER</span></td>
+<td class="center8">&nbsp;</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="right"><span class="tiny">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">I.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>INTRODUCTION</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page7">7</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">II.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page24">24</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">III.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>CHURCH AND STATE</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page77">77</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">IV.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>THE ERA OF STAGNATION</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page127">127</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">V.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>SIGNS OF CHANGE</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page159">159</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">VI.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>BURKE</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page213">213</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">VII.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page281">281</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="3">BIBLIOGRAPHY</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page317">317</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="3">INDEX</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page321">321</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+<br /></div>
+<hr class="long" />
+<div id="content"><a name="page7" id="page7"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>INTRODUCTION</h3>
+<p>The eighteenth century may be said to begin with the Revolution
+of 1688; for, with its completion, the dogma of Divine Right
+disappeared for ever from English politics. Its place was but
+partially filled until Hume and Burke supplied the outlines of a
+new philosophy. For the observer of this age can hardly fail, as he
+notes its relative barrenness of abstract ideas, to be impressed by
+the large part Divine Right must have played in the politics of the
+succeeding century. Its very absoluteness made for keen
+partisanship on the one side and the other. It could produce at
+once the longwinded rhapsodies of Filmer and, by repulsion, the
+wearisome reiterations of Algernon Sidney. Once the foundations of
+Divine Right had been destroyed by Locke, the basis of passionate
+controversy was <a name="page8" id="page8"></a>absent. The theory
+of a social contract never produced in England the enthusiasm it
+evoked in France, for the simple reason that the main objective of
+Rousseau and his disciples had already been secured there by other
+weapons. And this has perhaps given to the eighteenth century an
+urbaneness from which its predecessor was largely free. Sermons are
+perhaps the best test of such a change; and it is a relief to move
+from the addresses bristling with Suarez and Bellarmine to the
+noble exhortations of Bishop Butler. Not until the French
+Revolution were ultimate dogmas again called into question; and it
+is about them only that political speculation provokes deep
+feeling. The urbanity, indeed, is not entirely new. The Restoration
+had heralded its coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common
+with Bolingbroke and Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the
+eighteenth century an historical profundity to compare with that of
+the zealous pamphleteers in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like
+Prynne find very different substitutes in brilliant journalists
+like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and Blackstone are <a name="page9" id=
+"page9"></a>respectable, they bear no comparison with masters like
+Selden and Sir Henry Spelman.</p>
+<p>Yet urbanity must not deceive us. The eighteenth century has an
+importance in English politics which the comparative absence of
+systematic speculation can not conceal. If its large constitutional
+outlines had been traced by a preceding age, its administrative
+detail had still to be secured. The process was very gradual; and
+the attempt of George III to arrest it produced the splendid effort
+of Edmund Burke. Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and
+stumbling; but it gave to the principle of consent a permanent
+place in English politics. It is the age which saw the
+crystallization of the party-system, and therein it may perhaps lay
+claim to have recognized what Bagehot called the vital principle of
+representative government. Few discussions of the sphere of
+government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith gave
+a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite
+its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of
+Church and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed
+its name. <a name="page10" id="page10"></a>De Lolme is the real
+parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in Bagehot's
+hands, become not the least fruitful type of political method.
+Blackstone, in a real sense, may be called the ancestor of
+Professor Dicey. The very calmness of the atmosphere only the more
+surely paved the way for the surprising novelties of Godwin and the
+revolutionists.</p>
+<p>Nor must we neglect the relation between its ethics and its
+politics. The eighteenth century school of British moralists has
+suffered somewhat beside the greater glories of Berkeley and Hume.
+Yet it was a great work to which they bent their effort, and they
+knew its greatness. The deistic controversy involved a fresh
+investigation of the basis of morals; and it is to the credit of
+the investigators that they attempted to provide it in social
+terms. It is, indeed, one of the primary characteristics of the
+British mind to be interested in problems of conduct rather than of
+thought. The seventeenth century had, for the most part, been
+interested in theology and government; and its preoccupation, in
+both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its <a name=
+"page11" id="page11"></a>conclusions unfitted for a period
+dominated by rationalism. Locke regarded his <i>Human
+Understanding</i> as the preliminary to an ethical enquiry; and
+Hume seems to have considered his <i>Principles of Morals</i> the
+most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of
+Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have
+been represented as the proper study of man, and his only business,
+have been periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no
+one will be inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the
+spiritual idealism of the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson
+and the Wesleyan revival will make us generalize with caution. But
+the truth was that theological ethics had become empty and
+inadequate, and the problem was therefore urgent. That is why
+Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith&mdash;to take only men
+of the first eminence&mdash;were thinking not less for politics
+than for ethics when they sought to justify the ways of man to man.
+For all of them saw that a theory of society is impossible without
+the provision of psychological foundations; and those <a name=
+"page12" id="page12"></a>must, above all, result in a theory of
+conduct if the social bond is to be maintained. That sure insight
+is, of course, one current only in a greater English stream which
+reaches back to Hobbes at its source and forward to T.H. Green at
+perhaps its fullest. Its value is its denial of politics as a
+science distinct from other human relations; and that is why Adam
+Smith can write of moral sentiments no less than of the wealth of
+nations. The eighteenth century saw clearly that each aspect of
+social life must find its place in the political equation.</p>
+<p>Yet it is undoubtedly an age of methods rather than of
+principles; and, as such its peaceful prosperity was well suited to
+its questions. Problems of technique, such as the cabinet and the
+Bank of England required the absence of passionate debate if they
+were in any fruitful fashion to be solved. Nor must the achievement
+of the age in politics be minimized. It was, of course, a
+complacent time; but we ought to note that foreigners of
+distinction did not wonder at its complacency. Voltaire and
+Montesquieu look back to England in the eighteenth century for the
+substance <a name="page13" id="page13"></a>of political truths. The
+American colonies took alike their methods and their arguments from
+English ancestors; and Burke provided them with the main elements
+of justification. The very quietness, indeed, of the time was the
+natural outcome of a century of storm; and England surely had some
+right to be contented when her political system was compared with
+the governments of France and Germany. Not, indeed, that the full
+fruit of the Revolution was gathered. The principle of consent
+came, in practice and till 1760, to mean the government of the Whig
+Oligarchy; and the <i>Extraordinary Black Book</i> remains to tell
+us what happened when George III gave the Tory party a new lease of
+power. There is throughout the time an over-emphasis upon the value
+of order, and a not unnatural tendency to confound the private good
+of the governing class with the general welfare of the state. It
+became the fixed policy of Walpole to make prosperity the mask for
+political stagnation. He turned political debate from principles to
+personalities, and a sterile generation was the outcome of his
+cunning.</p>
+<a name="page14" id="page14"></a>
+<p>Not that this barrenness is without its compensations. The
+theories of the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within
+a generation. The constitutional ideas of the seventeenth century
+had no substance for an England where Anglicanism and agriculture
+were beginning to lose the rigid outlines of overwhelming
+predominance. What was needed was the assurance of safety for the
+Church that her virtue might be tested in the light of
+nonconformist practice on the one hand, and the new rationalism on
+the other. What was needed also was the expansion of English
+commerce into the new channels opened for it by the victories of
+Chatham. Mr. Chief Justice Holt had given it the legal categories
+it would require; and Hume and Adam Smith were to explain that
+commerce might grow with small danger to agricultural prosperity.
+Beneath the apparent calm of Walpole's rule new forces were fast
+stirring. That can be seen on every side. The sturdy morality of
+Johnson, the new literary forms of Richardson and Fielding, the
+theatre which Garrick founded upon the ruins produced by Collier's
+indignation, <a name="page15" id="page15"></a>the revival of which
+Law and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the stagnation was
+sleep rather than death. The needed events of shock were close at
+hand. The people of England would never have discovered the real
+meaning of 1688 if George III had not denied its principles. When
+he enforced the resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once
+of Edmund Burke and English radicalism were born; for the
+<i>Present Discontents</i> and the <i>Society for the Support of
+the Bill of Rights</i> are the dawn of a splendid recovery. And
+they made possible the speculative ferment which showed that
+England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and
+Rousseau. Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the
+Tudor despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the
+complacency of the eighteenth century. But the peace of the Tudors
+was the death-bed of the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism
+of the early eighteenth century which made possible the birth of
+democratic England.</p>
+<p>The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is deep-rooted in the
+conditions of the past. Locke could not have written had not
+<a name="page16" id="page16"></a>Hobbes and Filmer defended in set
+terms the ideal of despotic government. He announced the advent of
+the modern system of parliamentary government; and from his time
+the debate has been rather of the conditions under which it is to
+work, than of the foundations upon which it is based. Burke, for
+example, wrote what constitutes the supreme analysis of the
+statesman's art. Adam Smith discussed in what fashion the
+prosperity of peoples could be best advanced. From Locke, that is
+to say, the subject of discussion is rather <i>politik</i> than
+<i>staatslehre</i>. The great debate inaugurated by the Reformation
+ceased when Locke had outlined an intelligible basis for
+parliamentary government. Hume, Bolingbroke, Burke, are all of them
+concerned with the detail of political arrangement in a fashion
+which presupposes the acceptance of a basis previously known.
+Burke, indeed, toward the latter part of his life, awoke to the
+realization that men were dissatisfied with the traditional
+substance of the State. But he met the new desires with hate
+instead of understanding, and the Napoleonic wars drove the current
+of democratic opinion <a name="page17" id="page17"></a>underground.
+Hall and Owen and Hodgskin inherited the thoughts of Ogilvie and
+Spence and Paine; and if they did not give them substance, at least
+they gave them form for a later time.</p>
+<p>Nor is the reason for this preoccupation far to seek. The
+advance of English politics in the preceding two centuries was
+mainly an advance of structure; yet relative at least to
+continental fact, it appeared liberal enough to hide the
+disharmonies of its inner content. The King was still a mighty
+influence. The power of the aristocracy was hardly broken until the
+Reform Bill of 1867. The Church continued to dominate the political
+aspect of English religious life until, after 1832, new elements
+alien from her ideals were introduced into the House of Commons.
+The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial Revolution,
+when a new class of men attained control of the nation's economic
+power. Only then was a realignment of political forces essential.
+Only then, that is to say, had the time arrived for a new theory of
+the State.</p>
+<p>The political ideas of the eighteenth <a name="page18" id=
+"page18"></a>century are thus in some sort a comment upon the
+system established by the Revolution; and that is, in its turn, the
+product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in the
+preceding age. But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or
+its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still
+dominantly aristocratic. From no accusation were its statesmen more
+anxious to be free than from that of a belief in democratic
+government. Whether Whigs or Tories were in power, it was always
+the great families who ruled. For them the Church, at least in its
+higher branches, existed; and the difference between nobleman and
+commoner at Oxford is as striking as it is hideous to this
+generation. For them also literature and the theatre made their
+display; and if Dr. Johnson could heap an immortal contumely upon
+the name of patron, we all know of the reverence he felt in the
+presence of the king. Divine Right and non-resistance were dead,
+but they had not died without a struggle. Freedom of the press and
+legal equality may have been obtained; but it was not until the
+passage of Fox's Libel Act that the first became <a name="page19"
+id="page19"></a>secure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have recently
+illumined for us the inward meaning of the second. The populace
+might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt upon
+an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the
+unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons.
+Such outbursts are yet the exception to the prevailing temper. The
+deliberations of Parliament were still, at least technically, a
+secret; and membership therein, save for one or two anomalies like
+Westminster and Bristol, was still the private possession of a
+privileged class. The Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract
+and general freedom, than a special release from the arbitrary will
+of a stupid monarch who aroused against himself every deep-seated
+prejudice of his generation. The England which sent James II upon
+his travels may be, as Hume pointed out, reduced to a pathetic
+fragment even of its electorate. The masses were unknown and
+undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to protest
+against some wise reform like Walpole's Excise Scheme, or to
+become, as in Goldsmith <a name="page20" id="page20"></a>and Cowper
+and Crabbe, the object of half-pitying poetic sentiment. How
+deep-rooted was the notion of aristocratic control was to be shown
+when France turned into substantial fact Rousseau's demand for
+freedom. The protest of Burke against its supposed anarchy swept
+England like a flame; and only a courageous handful could be found
+to protest against Pitt's prostitution of her freedom.</p>
+<p>Such an age could make but little pretence to discovery; and,
+indeed, it is most largely absent from its speculation. In its
+political ideas this is necessarily and especially the case. For
+the State is at no time an unchanging organization; it reflects
+with singular exactness the dominating ideas of its environment.
+That division into government and subjects which is its main
+characteristic is here noteworthy for the narrowness of the class
+from which the government is derived, and the consistent inertia of
+those over whom it rules. There is curiously little controversy
+over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most men
+acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament. What balance of
+forces is necessary to its most <a name="page21" id=
+"page21"></a>perfect equilibrium may arouse dissension when George
+III forgets the result of half a century's evolution. Junius may
+have to explain in invective what Burke magistrally demonstrated in
+terms of political philosophy. But the deeper problems of the state
+lay hidden until Bentham and the revolutionists came to insist upon
+their presence. That did not mean that the eighteenth century was a
+soulless failure. Rather did it mean that a period of transition
+had been successfully bridged. The stage was set for a new effort
+simply because the theories of the older philosophy no longer
+represented the facts at issue.</p>
+<p>It was thus Locke only in this period who confronted the general
+problems of the modern State. Other thinkers assumed his structure
+and dealt with the details he left undetermined. The main problems,
+the Church apart, arose when a foreigner occupied the English
+throne and left the methods of government to those who were
+acquainted with them. That most happy of all the happy accidents in
+English history made Walpole the fundamental statesman of the time.
+He used his opportunity to the full. Inheriting the <a name=
+"page22" id="page22"></a>possibilities of the cabinet system he
+gave it its modern expression by creating the office of Prime
+Minister. The party-system was already inevitable; and with his
+advent to full power in 1727 we have the characteristic outlines of
+English representative government. Thenceforward, there are, on the
+whole, but three large questions with which the age concerned
+itself. Toleration had already been won by the persistent
+necessities of two generations, and the noble determination of
+William III; but the place of the Church in the Revolution State
+and the nature of that State were still undetermined. Hoadly had
+one solution, Law another; and the genial rationalism of the time,
+coupled with the political affiliations of the High Church party,
+combined to give Hoadly the victory; but his opponents, and Law
+especially, remained to be the parents of a movement for
+ecclesiastical freedom of which it has been the good fortune of
+Oxford to supply in each succeeding century the leaders. America
+presented again the problem of consent in the special perspective
+of the imperial relation; and the decision which grew out of
+<a name="page23" id="page23"></a>the blundering obscurantism of the
+King enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the
+principles of 1688. Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster
+empire; and the industrial system which his effort quickened could
+not live under an economic r&eacute;gime which still bore traces of
+the narrow nationalism of the Tudors. No man was so emphatically
+representative of his epoch as Adam Smith; and no thinker has ever
+stated in such generous terms the answer of his time to the most
+vital of its questions. The answer, indeed, like all good answers,
+revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the prospect of
+its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age that
+was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real
+appreciation of it. The American War and the two great revolutions
+brought a new race of thinkers into being. The French seed at last
+produced its harvest. Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even
+while he rejected his methods. For a time, indeed, the heat and
+dust of war obscured the issue that Bentham raised. But the
+certainties of the future lay on his side.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page24" id="page24"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the
+attempt of James II to establish a despotism in alliance with
+France and Rome. It was almost entirely a movement of the
+aristocracy, and, for the most part, it was aristocratic opposition
+that it encountered. What it did was to make for ever impossible
+the thought of reunion with Rome and the theory that the throne
+could be established on any other basis than the consent of
+Parliament. For no one could pretend that William of Orange ruled
+by Divine Right. The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the
+deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not
+calculated to deceive even the warmest of William's adherents. An
+unconstitutional Parliament thereupon declared the throne <a name=
+"page25" id="page25"></a>vacant; and after much negotiation William
+and Mary were invited to occupy it. To William the invitation was
+irresistible. It gave him the assistance of the first maritime
+power in Europe against the imperialism of Louis XIV. It ensured
+the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an enemy
+who never slumbered. Nor did England find the new r&eacute;gime
+unwelcome. Every widespread conviction of her people had been
+wantonly outraged by the blundering stupidity of James. If a large
+fraction of the English Church held aloof from the new order on
+technical grounds, the commercial classes gave it their warm
+support; and many who doubted in theory submitted in practice. All
+at least were conscious that a new era had dawned.</p>
+<p>For William had come over with a definite purpose in view. James
+had wrought havoc with what the Civil Wars had made the essence of
+the English constitution; and it had become important to define in
+set terms the conditions upon which the life of kings must in the
+future be regulated. The reign of William is nothing so much as the
+period of that definition; <a name="page26" id="page26"></a>and the
+fortunate discovery was made of the mechanisms whereby its
+translation into practice might be secured. The Bill of Rights
+(1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701) are the foundation-stones
+of the modern constitutional system.</p>
+<p>What, broadly, was established was the dependence of the crown
+upon Parliament. Finance and the army were brought under
+Parliamentary control by the simple expedient of making its annual
+summons essential. The right of petition was re-affirmed; and the
+independence of the judges and ministerial responsibility were
+secured by the same act which forever excluded the legitimate heirs
+from their royal inheritance. It is difficult not to be amazed at
+the almost casual fashion in which so striking a revolution was
+effected. Not, indeed, that the solution worked easily at the
+outset. William remained to the end a foreigner, who could not
+understand the inwardness of English politics. It was the
+necessities of foreign policy which drove him to admit the immense
+possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his own best
+safeguard in the foundation of the Bank of England. <a name=
+"page27" id="page27"></a>The Cabinet, towards the close of his
+reign, had already become the fundamental administrative
+instrument. Originally a committee of the Privy Council, it had no
+party basis until the ingenious Sunderland atoned for a score of
+dishonesties by insisting that the root of its efficiency would be
+found in its selection from a single party. William acquiesced but
+doubtfully; for, until the end of his life, he never understood why
+his ministers should not be a group of able counsellors chosen
+without reference to their political affiliations. Sunderland knew
+better for the simple reason that he belonged to that period when
+the Whigs and Tories had gambled against each other for their
+heads. He knew that no council-board could with comfort contain
+both himself and Halifax; just as William himself was to learn
+quite early that neither honor nor confidence could win unswerving
+support from John Churchill. There is a certain feverishness in the
+atmosphere of the reign which shows how many kept an anxious eye on
+St. Germain even while they attended the morning levee at
+Whitehall.</p>
+<p>What secured the permanence of the <a name="page28" id=
+"page28"></a>settlement was less the policy of William than the
+blunder of the French monarch. Patience, foresight and generosity
+had not availed to win for William more than a grudging recognition
+of his kingship. He had received only a half-hearted support for
+his foreign policy. The army, despite his protests, had been
+reduced; and the enforced return of his own Dutch Guards to Holland
+was deliberately conceived to cause him pain. But at the very
+moment when his strength seemed weakest James II died; and Louis
+XIV, despite written obligation, sought to comfort the last moments
+of his tragic exile by the falsely chivalrous recognition of the
+Old Pretender as the rightful English king. It was a terrible
+mistake. It did for William what no action of his own could ever
+have achieved. It suggested that England must receive its ruler at
+the hands of a foreign sovereign. The national pride of the people
+rallied to the cause for which William stood. He was king&mdash;so,
+at least in contrast to Louis' decision, it appeared&mdash;by their
+deliberate choice and the settlement of which he was the symbol
+would be maintained. Parliament granted <a name="page29" id=
+"page29"></a>to William all that his foreign policy could have
+demanded. His own death was only the prelude to the victories of
+Marlborough. Those victories seemed to seal the solution of 1688. A
+moment came when sentiment and intrigue combined to throw in
+jeopardy the Act of Settlement. But Death held the stakes against
+the gambler's throw of Bolingbroke; and the accession of George I
+assured the permanence of Revolution principles.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his
+conscious effort to justify the innovations of 1688. He sought, as
+he said, "to establish the throne of our great Restorer, our
+present King William, and make good his title in the consent of the
+people." In the debate which followed his argument remained
+unanswered, for the sufficient reason that it had the common sense
+of the generation on his side. Yet Locke has suffered not a little
+at the hands of succeeding thinkers. Though his influence upon his
+own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed <a name="page30" id=
+"page30"></a>to him the acutest of his insights; though the
+principles of the American Revolution are in large part an
+acknowledged adoption of his own; he has become one of the
+political classics who are taken for granted rather than read. It
+is a profound and regrettable error. Locke may not possess the
+clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing
+into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the
+first of English political thinkers. He yet stated more clearly
+than either the general problem of the modern State. Hobbes, after
+all, worked with an impossible psychology and sought no more than
+the prescription against disorder. Burke wrote rather a text-book
+for the cautious administrator than a guide for the liberal
+statesman. But Locke saw that the main problem of the State is the
+conquest of freedom and it was for its definition in terms of
+individual good that he above all strove.</p>
+<p>Much, doubtless, of his neglect is due to the medium in which he
+worked. He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only
+possible retort to the theory of Divine Right. He so <a name=
+"page31" id="page31"></a>emphasized the principle of consent that
+when contractualism came in its turn to be discarded, it was
+discovered that Locke suffered far more than Hobbes by the change
+so made. For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as
+strong government could be shown to be implicit in the natural
+badness of men, while Locke assumed their goodness and made his
+contract essential to their opportunity for moral expression. Nor
+did he, like Rousseau, seize upon the organic nature of the State.
+To him the State was always a mere aggregate, and the convenient
+simplicity of majority-rule solved, for him, the vital political
+problems. But Rousseau was translated into the complex dialectic of
+Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he would have
+doubtless been the first to disown. Nor was Locke aided by his
+philosophic outlook. Few great thinkers have so little perceived
+the psychological foundations of politics. What he did was rather
+to fasten upon the great institutional necessity of his
+time&mdash;the provision of channels of assent&mdash;and emphasize
+its importance to the exclusion of all other factors. The problem
+is in fact <a name="page32" id="page32"></a>more complex; and the
+solution he indicated became so natural a part of the political
+fabric that the value of his emphasis upon its import was largely
+forgotten when men again took up the study of foundations.</p>
+<p>John Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset on the 29th of
+August, 1632. His father was clerk to the county justices and acted
+as a captain in a cavalry regiment during the Civil War. Though he
+suffered heavy losses, he was able to give his son as good an
+education as the time afforded. Westminster under Dr. Busby may not
+have been the gentlest of academies, but at least it provided Locke
+with an admirable training in the classics. He himself, indeed, in
+the <i>Thoughts on Education</i> doubted the value of such
+exercises; nor does he seem to have conceived any affection for
+Oxford whither he proceeded in 1652 as a junior student of Christ
+Church. The university was then under the Puritan control of Dr.
+John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from
+its reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the
+"wrangling and ostentation" of the <a name="page33" id=
+"page33"></a>peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that he
+encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to
+metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and
+Wallis the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his
+respect. In 1659 he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college,
+which he retained until he was deemed politically undesirable in
+1684. After toying with his father's desire that he should enter
+the Church, he began the study of medicine. Scientific interest won
+for him the friendship of Boyle; and while he was administering
+physic to the patients of Dr. Thomas, he was making the
+observations recorded in Boyle's <i>History of the Air</i> which
+Locke himself edited after the death of his friend.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile accident had turned his life into far different paths.
+An appointment as secretary to a special ambassador opened up to
+him a diplomatic career; but his sturdy commonsense showed him his
+unfitness for such labors. After his visit to Prussia he returned
+to Oxford, and there, in 1667, in the course of his medical work,
+he met Anthony Ashley, the later <a name="page34" id=
+"page34"></a>Lord Shaftesbury and the Ahitophel of Dryden's great
+satire. The two men were warmly attracted to each other, and Locke
+accepted an appointment as physician to Lord Ashley's household.
+But he was also much more than this. The tutor of Ashley's
+philosophic grandson, he became also his patron's confidential
+counsellor. In 1663 he became part author of a constitutional
+scheme for Carolina which is noteworthy for its emphasis, thus
+early, upon the importance of religious toleration. In 1672, when
+Ashley became Lord Chancellor, he became Secretary of Presentations
+and, until 1675, Secretary to the Council of Trade and Foreign
+Plantations. Meanwhile he carried on his medical work and must have
+obtained some reputation in it; for he is honorably mentioned by
+Sydenham, in his <i>Method of Curing Fevers</i> (1676), and had
+been elected to the Royal Society in 1668. But his real genius lay
+in other directions.</p>
+<p>Locke himself has told us how a few friends began to meet at his
+chamber for the discussions of questions which soon passed into
+metaphysical enquiry; and a page from a commonplace book of 1671
+<a name="page35" id="page35"></a>is the first beginning of his
+systematic work. Relieved of his administrative duties in 1675, he
+spent the next four years in France, mainly occupied with medical
+observation. He returned to England in 1679 to assist Lord
+Shaftesbury in the passionate debates upon the Exclusion Bill.
+Locke followed his patron into exile, remaining abroad from 1683
+until the Revolution. Deprived of his fellowship in 1684 through
+the malice of Charles II, he would have been without means of
+support had not Shaftesbury bequeathed him a pension. As it was, he
+had no easy time. His extradition was demanded by James II after
+the Monmouth rebellion; and though he was later pardoned he refused
+to return to England until William of Orange had procured his
+freedom. A year after his return he made his appearance as a
+writer. The <i>Essay Concerning Human Understanding</i> and the
+<i>Two Treatises of Government</i> were both published in 1690.
+Five years earlier the <i>Letter Concerning Toleration</i> was
+published in its Latin dress; and four years afterwards an English
+translation appeared. This last, however, perhaps on <a name=
+"page36" id="page36"></a>grounds of expediency, Locke never
+acknowledged until his will was published; for the time was not yet
+suited to such generous speculations. Locke was thus in his
+fifty-eighth year when his first admitted work appeared. But the
+rough attempts at the essay date from 1671, and hints towards the
+<i>Letter on Toleration</i> can be found in fragments of various
+dates between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years of his life.
+Of the <i>Two Treatises</i> the first seems to have been written
+between 1680 and 1685, the second in the last year of his Dutch
+exile.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref1" id="fnref1" href=
+"#fn1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn1" id="fn1" href=
+"#fnref1">[1]</a></span> On the evidence for these dates see the
+convincing argument of Mr. Fox-Bourne in his <i>Life of Locke</i>,
+Vol. II, pp. 165-7.</div>
+<p>The remaining fourteen years of Locke's life were passed in
+semi-retirement in East Anglia. Though he held public office, first
+as Commissioner of Appeals, and later of Trade, for twelve years,
+he could not stand the pressure of London writers, and his public
+work was only intermittent. His counsel, nevertheless, was highly
+valued; and he seems to have won no small confidence from William
+in diplomatic matters. Somers and Charles Montagu held him in high
+respect, and he <a name="page37" id="page37"></a>had the warm
+friendship of Sir Isaac Newton. He published some short discussions
+on economic matters, and in 1695 gave valuable assistance in the
+destruction of the censorship of the press. Two years earlier he
+had published his <i>Thoughts on Education</i>, in which the
+observant reader may find the germ of most of Emile's ideas. He did
+not fail to revise the <i>Essay</i> from time to time; and his
+<i>Reasonableness of Christianity</i>, which, through Toland,
+provoked a reply from Stillingfleet and showed Locke in retort a
+master of the controversial art, was in some sort the foundation of
+the deistic debate in the next epoch. But his chief work had
+already been done, and he spent his energies in rewarding the
+affection of his friends. Locke died on October 28, 1704, amid
+circumstances of singular majesty. He had lived a full life, and
+few have so completely realized the medieval ideal of specializing
+in omniscience. He left warm friends behind him; and Lady Masham
+has said of him that beyond which no man may dare to
+aspire.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref2" id="fnref2" href=
+"#fn2">[2]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn2" id="fn2" href=
+"#fnref2">[2]</a></span> Fox-Bourne, <i>op. cit</i>. Letter from
+Lady Masham to Jean le Clerc.</div>
+<a name="page38" id="page38"></a>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>Locke's <i>Two Treatises of Government</i> are different both in
+object and in value. The first is a detailed and tiresome response
+to the historic imagination of Sir Robert Filmer. In his
+<i>Patriarcha</i>, which first saw the light in 1680, though it had
+been written long before, the latter had sought to reach the
+ultimate conclusion of Hobbes without the element of contract upon
+which the great thinker depended. "I consent with him," said Filmer
+of Hobbes, "about the Rights of <i>exercising</i> Government, but I
+cannot agree to his means of acquiring it." That power must be
+absolute, Filmer, like Hobbes, has no manner of doubt; but his
+method of proof is to derive the title of Charles I from Adam.
+Little difficulties like the origin of primogeniture, or whence, as
+Locke points out, the universal monarchy of Shem can be derived,
+the good Sir Robert does not satisfactorily determine. Locke takes
+him up point by point, and there is little enough left, save a
+sense that history is the root of institutions, when he has done.
+What troubles us is rather why <a name="page39" id=
+"page39"></a>Locke should have wasted the resources of his
+intelligence upon so feeble an opponent. The book of Hobbes lay
+ready to his hand; yet he almost ostentatiously refused to grapple
+with it. The answer doubtless lies in Hobbes' unsavory fame. The
+man who made the Church a mere department of the State and
+justified not less the title of Cromwell than of the Stuarts was
+not the opponent for one who had a very practical problem in hand.
+And Locke could answer that he was answering Hobbes implicitly in
+the second <i>Treatise</i>. And though Filmer might never have been
+known had not Locke thus honored him by retort, he doubtless
+symbolized what many a nobleman's chaplain preached to his master's
+dependents at family prayers.</p>
+<p>The <i>Second Treatise</i> goes to the root of the matter. Why
+does political power, "a Right of making Laws and Penalties of
+Death and consequently all less Penalties," exist? It can only be
+for the public benefit, and our enquiry is thus a study of the
+grounds of political obedience. Locke thus traverses the ground
+Hobbes had covered in his <i>Leviathan</i> though he rejects
+<a name="page40" id="page40"></a>every premise of the earlier
+thinker. To Hobbes the state of nature which precedes political
+organization had been a state of war. Neither peace nor reason
+could prevail where every man was his neighbor's enemy; and the
+establishment of absolute power, with the consequent surrender by
+men of all their natural liberties, was the only means of escape
+from so brutal a r&eacute;gime. That the state of nature was so
+distinguished Locke at the outset denies. The state of nature is
+governed by the law of nature. The law of nature is not, as Hobbes
+had made it, the antithesis of real law, but rather its condition
+antecedent. It is a body of rules which governs, at all times and
+all places, the conduct of men. Its arbiter is reason and, in the
+natural state, reason shows us that men are equal. From this
+equality are born men's natural rights which Locke, like the
+Independents in the Puritan Revolution, identifies with life,
+liberty and property. Obviously enough, as Hobbes had also granted,
+the instinct to self-preservation is the deepest of human impulses.
+By liberty Locke means the right of the individual to follow his
+own <a name="page41" id="page41"></a>bent granted only his
+observance of the law of nature. Law, in such an aspect, is clearly
+a means to the realization of freedom in the same way that the rule
+of the road will, by its common acceptance, save its observers from
+accident. It promotes the initiative of men by defining in terms
+which by their very statement obtain acknowledgment the conditions
+upon which individual caprice may have its play. Property Locke
+derives from a primitive communism which becomes transmuted into
+individual ownership whenever a man has mingled his labor with some
+object. This labor theory of ownership lived, it may be remarked,
+to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the parent of
+modern socialism.</p>
+<p>The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of
+Hobbes, pre-eminently social in character. There may be war or
+violence; but that is only when men have abandoned the rule of
+reason which is integral to their character. But the state of
+nature is not a civil State. There is no common superior to enforce
+the law of nature. Each man, as best he may, works out his own
+interpretation of it. But <a name="page42" id="page42"></a>because
+the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient
+variety in the conceptions of justice. The result is uncertainty
+and chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which
+the weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable. It is here
+that the social contract emerges. But just as Locke's natural state
+implies a natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture,
+so does Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of
+reason than of hard necessity. It is a contract of each with all, a
+surrender by the individual of his personal right to fulfil the
+commands of the law of nature in return for the guarantee that his
+rights as nature ordains them&mdash;life and liberty and
+property&mdash;will be preserved. The contract is thus not general
+as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character. Nor is it, as
+Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of some
+single man or group. On the contrary, it is a contract with the
+community as a whole which thus becomes that common political
+superior&mdash;the State&mdash;which is to enforce the law of
+nature and punish infractions of it. Nor <a name="page43" id=
+"page43"></a>is Locke's state a sovereign State: the very word
+"sovereignty" does not occur, significantly enough, throughout the
+treatise. The State has power only for the protection of natural
+law. Its province ends when it passes beyond those boundaries.</p>
+<p>Such a contract, in Locke's view, involves the pre-eminent
+necessity of majority-rule. Unless the minority is content to be
+bound by the will of superior numbers the law of nature has no more
+protection than it had before the institution of political society.
+And it is further to be assumed that the individual has surrendered
+to the community his individual right of carrying out the judgment
+involved in natural law. Whether Locke conceived the contract so
+formulated to be historical, it is no easy matter to determine.
+That no evidence of its early existence can be adduced he ascribes
+to its origin in the infancy of the race; and the histories of Rome
+and Sparta and Venice seem to him proof that the theory is somehow
+demonstrable by facts. More important than origins, he seems to
+deem its implications. He has placed consent in the foreground of
+the argument; and he <a name="page44" id="page44"></a>was anxious
+to establish the grounds for its continuance. Can the makers of the
+original contract, that is to say, bind their successors? If
+legitimate government is based upon the consent of its subjects,
+may they withdraw their consent? And what of a child born into the
+community? Locke is at least logical in his consent. The contract
+of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously
+insisted, it is not a contract. Yet Locke urged that the primitive
+members of a State are bound to its perpetuation simply because
+unless the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in
+any satisfactory sense, would be impossible. With children the case
+is different. They are born subjects of no government or country;
+and their consent to its laws must either be derived from express
+acknowledgment, or by the tacit implication of the fact that the
+protection of the State has been accepted. But no one is bound
+until he has shown by the rule of his mature conduct that he
+considers himself a common subject with his fellows. Consent
+implies an act of will and we must have evidence to infer its
+presence before the rule of subjection can be applied.</p>
+<a name="page45" id="page45"></a>
+<p>We have thus the State, though the method of its organization is
+not yet outlined. For Locke there is a difference, though he did
+not explicitly describe its nature, between State and Government.
+Indeed he sometimes approximates, without ever formally adopting,
+the attitude of Pufendorf, his great German contemporary, where
+government is derived from a secondary contract dependent upon the
+original institution of civil society. The distinction is made in
+the light of what is to follow. For Locke was above all anxious to
+leave supreme power in a community whose single will, as manifested
+by majority-verdict, could not be challenged by any lesser organ
+than itself. Government there must be if political society is to
+endure; but its form and substance are dependent upon popular
+institution.</p>
+<p>Locke follows in the great Aristotelian tradition of dividing
+the types of government into three. Where the power of making laws
+is in a single hand we have a monarchy; where it is exercised by a
+few or all we have alternatively oligarchy and democracy. The
+disposition of the legislative power is the fundamental test of
+<a name="page46" id="page46"></a>type; for executive and judiciary
+are clearly dependent on it. Nor, as Hobbes argued, is the form of
+government permanent in character; the supreme community is as
+capable of making temporary as of registering irrevocable
+decisions. And though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness
+to the family, is the most primitive type of government, he denies
+Hobbes' assertion that it is the best. It seems, in his view,
+always to degenerate into the hands of lesser men who betray the
+contract they were appointed to observe. Nor is oligarchy much
+better off since it emphasizes the interest of a group against the
+superior interest of the community as a whole. Democracy alone
+proffers adequate safeguards of an enduring good rule; a democracy,
+that is to say, which is in the hands of delegates controlled by
+popular election. Not that Locke is anxious for the abolition of
+kingship. His letters show that he disliked the Cromwellian system
+and the republicanism which Harrington and Milton had based upon
+it. He was content to have a kingship divested of legislative power
+so long as hereditary succession was <a name="page47" id=
+"page47"></a>acknowledged to be dependent upon popular consent. The
+main thing was to be rid of the Divine Right of kings.</p>
+<p>We have thus an organ for the interpretation of natural law free
+from the shifting variety of individual judgment. We have a means
+for securing impartial justice between members of civil society,
+and to that means the force of men has been surrendered. The
+formulation of the rules by which life, liberty and property are to
+be secured is legislation and this, from the terms of the original
+contract, is the supreme function of the State. But, in Locke's
+view, two other functions still remain. Law has not only to be
+declared. It must be enforced; and the business of the executive is
+to secure obedience to the command of law. But Locke here makes a
+third distinction. The State must live with other States, both as
+regards its individual members, and as a collective body; and the
+power which deals with this aspect of its relationships, Locke
+termed "federative." This last distinction, indeed, has no special
+value; and its author's own defence of it is far from clear. More
+important, especially, for future history, <a name="page48" id=
+"page48"></a>was his emphasis of the distinction between
+legislature and executive. The making of laws is for Locke a
+relatively simple and rapid task; the legislature may do its work
+and be gone. But those who attend to their execution must be
+ceaseless in their vigilance. It is better, therefore, to separate
+the two both as to powers and persons. Otherwise legislators "may
+exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit
+the law, both in its making and its execution, to their own private
+wish, and thereby come to have a distinct interest from the rest of
+the community, contrary to the end of society and government." The
+legislator must therefore be bound by his own laws; and he must be
+chosen in such fashion that the representative assembly may fairly
+represent its constituencies. It was the patent anomalies of the
+existent scheme of distribution which made Locke here proffer his
+famous suggestion that the rotten boroughs should be abolished by
+executive act. One hundred and forty years were still to pass
+before this wise suggestion was translated into statute.</p>
+<p>Though Locke thus insisted upon the <a name="page49" id=
+"page49"></a>separation of powers, he realized that emergencies are
+the parent of special need; and he recognized that not only may the
+executive, as in England, share in the task of legislation, but
+also may issue ordinances when the legislature is not in session,
+or act contrary to law in case of grave danger. Nor can the
+executive be forced to summon the legislature. Here, clearly
+enough, Locke is generalizing from the English constitution; and
+its sense of compromise is implicit in his remarks. Nor is his
+surrender here of consent sufficient to be inconsistent with his
+general outlook. For at the back of each governmental act, there
+is, in his own mind, an active citizen body occupied in judging it
+with single-minded reference to the law of nature and their own
+natural rights. There is thus a standard of right and wrong
+superior to all powers within the State. "A government," as he
+says, "is not free to do as it pleases ... the law of nature stands
+as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others." The
+social contract is secreted in the interstices of public
+statutes.</p>
+<p>Its corollary is the right of revolution. <a name="page50" id=
+"page50"></a>It is interesting that he should have adopted this
+position; for in 1676 he had uttered the thought that not even the
+demands of conscience<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref3" id=
+"fnref3" href="#fn3">[3]</a></span> can justify rebellion. That
+was, however, before the tyranny of Charles had driven him into
+exile with his patron, and before James had attempted the
+subversion of all constitutional government. To deny the right of
+revolution was to justify the worst demands of James, and it is in
+its favor that he exerts his ablest controversial power. "The true
+remedy," he says, "of force without authority is to oppose force to
+it." Let the sovereign but step outside the powers derived from the
+social contract and resistance becomes a natural right. But how
+define such invasion of powers? The instances Locke chose show how
+closely, here at least, he was following the events of 1688. The
+substitution of arbitrary will for law, the corruption of
+Parliament by packing it with the prince's instruments, betrayal to
+a foreign prince, prevention of the due assemblage of
+Parliament&mdash;all these are a perversion of the trust imposed
+and operate to effect the <a name="page51" id=
+"page51"></a>dissolution of the contract. The state of nature again
+supervenes, and a new contract may be made with one more fitted to
+observe it. Here, also, Locke takes occasion to deny the central
+position of Hobbes' thesis. Power, the latter had argued, must be
+absolute and there cannot, therefore, be usurpation. But Locke
+retorts that an absolute government is no government at all since
+it proceeds by caprice instead of reason; and it is comparable only
+to a state of war since it implies the absence of judgment upon the
+character of power. It lacks the essential element of consent
+without which the binding force of law is absent. All government is
+a moral trust, and the idea of limitation is therein implied. But a
+limitation without the means of enforcement would be worthless, and
+revolution remains as the reserve power in society. The only
+hindrance to its exertion that Locke suggests is that of number.
+Revolution should not, he urges, be the act of a minority; for the
+contract is the action of the major portion of the people and its
+consent should likewise obtain to the dissolution of the
+covenant.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn3" id="fn3" href=
+"#fnref3">[3]</a></span> King, <i>Life of Locke</i>, pp. 62,
+63.</div>
+<a name="page52" id="page52"></a>
+<p>The problem of Church and State demanded a separate discussion;
+and it is difficult not to feel that the great <i>Letter on
+Toleration</i> is the noblest of all his utterances. It came as the
+climax to a long evolution of opinion; and, in the light of
+William's own conviction, it may be said to have marked a decisive
+epoch of thought. Already in the sixteenth century Robert Brown and
+William the Silent had denounced the persecution of sincere belief.
+Early Baptists like Busher and Richardson had finely denied its
+validity. Roger Williams in America, Milton in England had attacked
+its moral rightness and political adequacy; while churchmen like
+Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth had shown the
+incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate.
+Nor had example been wanting. The religious freedom of Holland was
+narrow, as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom. Rhode
+Island, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Massachusetts had all
+embarked upon admirable experiment; and Penn himself had aptly said
+that a man may go to chapel instead of church, even while he
+remains <a name="page53" id="page53"></a>a good constable. And in
+1687, in the preface to his translation of Lactantius, Burnet had
+not merely attacked the moral viciousness of persecution, but had
+drawn a distinction between the spheres of Church and State which
+is a remarkable anticipation of Locke's own theory.</p>
+<p>Locke himself covers the whole ground; and since his opinions on
+the problem were at least twenty years old, it is clear that he was
+consistent in a worthy outlook. He proceeds by a denial that any
+element of theocratic government can claim political validity. The
+magistrate is concerned only with the preservation of social peace
+and does not deal with the problem of men's souls. Where, indeed,
+opinions destructive of the State are entertained or a party
+subversive of peace makes its appearance, the magistrate has the
+right of suppression; though in the latter case force is the worst
+and last of remedies. In the English situation, it follows that all
+men are to be tolerated save Catholics, Mahomedans and atheists.
+The first are themselves deniers of the rights they would seek, and
+they find the centre of their political allegiance in a foreign
+<a name="page54" id="page54"></a>power. Mahomedan morals are
+incompatible with European civil systems; and the central factor in
+atheism is the absence of the only ultimately satisfactory sanction
+of good conduct. Though Church and State are thus distinct, they
+act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is thus important to see why
+Locke insists on the invalidity of persecution. For such an end as
+the cure of souls, he argues, the magistrate has no divine
+legation. He cannot, on other grounds, use force for the simple
+reason that it does not produce internal conviction. But even if
+that were possible, force would still be mistaken; for the majority
+of the world is not Christian, yet it would have the right to
+persecute in the belief that it was possessed of truth. Nor can the
+implication that the magistrate has the keys of heaven be accepted.
+"No religion," says Locke finely, "which I believe not to be true
+can be either true or profitable to me." He thus makes of the
+Church an institution radically different from the ruling
+conceptions of his time. It becomes merely a voluntary society,
+which can exert no power save over its members. It may use its own
+ceremonies, <a name="page55" id="page55"></a>but it cannot impose
+them on the unwilling; and since persecution is alien from the
+spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the limit of
+ecclesiastical disciplinary power. Nor must we forget the
+advantages of toleration. Its eldest child is charity, and without
+it there can be no honesty of opinion. Later controversy did not
+make him modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay's
+hands, to be a vital weapon in the political method of the
+nineteenth century.</p>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p>Any survey of earlier political theory would show how little of
+novelty there is in the specific elements of Locke's general
+doctrine. He is at all points the offspring of a great and unbroken
+tradition; and that not the least when he seems unconscious of it.
+Definite teachers, indeed, he can hardly be said to have had; no
+one can read his book without perceiving how much of it is rooted
+in the problems of his own day. He himself has expressed his sense
+of Hooker's greatness, and he elsewhere had recommended the works
+of <a name="page56" id="page56"></a>Grotius and Pufendorf as an
+essential element in education. But his was a nature which learned
+more from men than books; and he more than once insisted that his
+philosophy was woven of his own "coarse thoughts." What, doubtless,
+he therein meant was to emphasize the freshness of his contact with
+contemporary fact in contrast with the technical jargon of the
+earlier thinkers. At least his work is free from the mountains of
+allusion which Prynne rolled into the bottom of his pages; and if
+the first Whig was the devil, he is singularly free from the
+irritating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet even with these
+novelties, no estimate of his work would be complete which failed
+to take account of the foundations upon which he builded.</p>
+<p>Herein, perhaps, the danger is lest we exaggerate Locke's
+dependence upon the earlier current of thought. The social contract
+is at least as old as when Glaucon debated with Socrates in the
+market-place at Athens. The theory of a state of nature, with the
+rights therein implied, is the contribution, through Stoicism, of
+the Roman lawyers, and the great medieval <a name="page57" id=
+"page57"></a>contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism. To the
+latter, also, may be traced the separation of powers; and it was
+then but little more than a hundred years since Bodin had been
+taken to make the doctrine an integral part of scientific politics.
+Nor is the theory of a right to revolution in any sense his
+specific creation. So soon as the Reformation had given a new
+perspective to the problem of Church and State every element of
+Locke's doctrine had become a commonplace of debate. Goodman and
+Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among Catholics, the
+author of the <i>Vindici&aelig;</i> and Francis Hotman among the
+Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the concept of public power
+as a trust; with, of course, the necessary corollary that its abuse
+entails resistance. Algernon Sydney was at least his acquaintance;
+and he must have been acquainted with the tradition, even if
+tragedy spared him the details, of the <i>Discourses on
+Government</i>. Even his theory of toleration had in every detail
+been anticipated by one or other of a hundred controversialists;
+and his argument can hardly claim either the lofty eloquence
+<a name="page58" id="page58"></a>of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent
+simplicity of William Penn.</p>
+<p>What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the
+manner of his writing on the one hand, and the fact of the
+Revolution on the other. Every previous thinker save
+Sydney&mdash;the latter's work was not published until
+1689&mdash;was writing with the Church hardly less in mind than the
+purely political problems of the State; even the secular Hobbes had
+devoted much thought and space to that "kingdom of darkness" which
+is Rome. And, Sydney apart, the resistance they had justified was
+always resistance to a religious tyrant; and Cartwright was as
+careful to exclude political oppression from the grounds of
+revolution as Locke was to insist upon it as the fundamental
+excuse. Locke is, in fact, the first of English thinkers the basis
+of whose argument is mainly secular. Not, indeed, that he can
+wholly escape the trammels of ecclesiasticism; not until the
+sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible. But it is
+clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground from
+that which arrested the attention of his predecessors. <a name=
+"page59" id="page59"></a>He is attempting, that is to say, a
+separation between Church and State not merely in that Scoto-Jesuit
+sense which aimed at ecclesiastical independence, but in order to
+assert the pre-eminence of the State as such. The central problem
+is with him political, and all other questions are subsidiary to
+it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any previous writer save
+Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of medieval ideals.
+Church and State have become transposed in their significance. The
+way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.</p>
+<p>The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since
+made an end of the social contract as an explanation of
+state-origins; and with it, of necessity, has gone the conception
+of natural rights as anterior to organized society. The problem, as
+we now know, is far more complex than the older thinkers imagined.
+Yet Locke's insistence on consent and natural rights has received
+new meaning from each critical period of history since he wrote.
+The theory of consent is vital because without the provision of
+channels for its administrative expression, men tend to <a name=
+"page60" id="page60"></a>become the creatures of a power ignorant
+at once and careless of their will. Active consent on the part of
+the mass of men emphasizes the contingent nature of all power and
+is essential to the full realization of freedom; and the purpose of
+the State, in any sense save the mere satisfaction of material
+appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled. The concept of natural
+right is most closely related to this position. For so long as we
+regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there is at no
+point adequate safeguard against their usurpation. A merely legal
+theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of
+political philosophy.</p>
+<p>No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if
+his effort to make rights something more than interests under
+juridical protection can not be accepted in the form he made it,
+the underlying purpose remains. A State, that is to say, which aims
+at giving to men the full capacity their trained initiative would
+permit is compelled to regard certain things as beyond the action
+of an ordinary legislature. What Stammler calls a <a name="page61"
+id="page61"></a>"natural law with changing content"<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref4" id="fnref4" href=
+"#fn4">[4]</a></span>&mdash;a content which changes with our
+increasing power to satisfy demand&mdash;is essential if the state
+is to live the life of law. For here was the head and centre of
+Locke's enquiry. "What he was really concerned about," said T.H.
+Green, "was to dispute 'the right divine of kings to govern
+wrong.'" The method, as he conceived, by which this could be
+accomplished was the limitation of power. This he effected by two
+distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in
+character.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn4" id="fn4" href=
+"#fnref4">[4]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Authority in the Modern
+State</i>, p. 64., and the references there cited.</div>
+<p>The external method has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the
+first place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the
+state. To Locke the State is little more than a negative
+institution, a kind of gigantic limited liability company; and if
+we are inclined to cavil at such restraint, we may perhaps remember
+that even to neo-Hegelians like Green and Bosanquet this negative
+sense is rarely absent, in the interest of individual exertion. But
+for Locke the real guarantee of right lies in another direction.
+What his whole work <a name="page62" id="page62"></a>amounts to in
+substance&mdash;it is a significant anticipation of
+Rousseau&mdash;is a denial that sovereignty can exist anywhere save
+in the community as a whole. A common political superior there
+doubtless must be; but government is an organ to which omnipotence
+is wanting. So far as there is a sovereign at all in Locke's book,
+it is the will of that majority which Rousseau tried to disguise
+under the name of the general will; but obviously the conception
+lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the means
+of operation. The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen,
+under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there
+is lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof
+that an unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember
+that the shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the
+direction of Locke's attitude. That omnicompetence of Parliament
+which Bentham and Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke
+admits, in later hands, of exactly the amelioration he had in mind;
+and its ethical inadequacy becomes the more obvious the more
+closely it is studied.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref5" id=
+"fnref5" href="#fn5">[5]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn5" id="fn5" href=
+"#fnref5">[5]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Problem of Sovereignty</i>,
+Chap. I.</div>
+<a name="page63" id="page63"></a>
+<p>The internal limitation Locke suggested is of more doubtful
+value. Government, he says, in substance, is a trustee and trustees
+abuse their power; let us therefore divide it as to parts and
+persons that the temptation to usurp may be diminished. There is a
+long history to this doctrine in its more obvious form, and it is a
+lamentable history. It tied men down to a tyrannous classification
+which had no root in the material it was supposed to distinguish.
+Montesquieu took it for the root of liberty; Blackstone, who should
+have known better, repeated the pious phrases of the Frenchman; and
+they went in company to America to persuade Madison and the Supreme
+Court of the United States that only the separation of powers can
+prevent the approach of tyranny. The facts do not bear out such
+assumption. The division of powers means in the event not less than
+their confusion. None can differentiate between the judge's
+declaration of law and his making of it.<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref6" id="fnref6" href="#fn6">[6]</a></span>
+Every government department is compelled to legislate, and, often
+enough, to undertake <a name="page64" id="page64"></a>judicial
+functions. The American history of the separation of powers has
+most largely been an attempt to bridge them; and all that has been
+gained is to drive the best talent, save on rare occasion, from its
+public life. In France the separation of powers meant, until recent
+times, the excessive subordination of the judiciary to the cabinet.
+Nor must we forget, as Locke should have remembered, the plain
+lesson of the Cromwellian constitutional experiments. That the
+dispersion of power is one of the great needs of the modern State
+at no point justifies the rigid categories into which Locke sought
+its division.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref7" id="fnref7" href=
+"#fn7">[7]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn6" id="fn6" href=
+"#fnref6">[6]</a></span> Cf. Mr. Justice Holmes' remarks in
+<i>Jensen</i> v. <i>Southern Pacific</i>, 244 U.S. 221.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="fnnum"><a name="fn7" id="fn7" href=
+"#fnref7">[7]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Authority in the Modern
+State</i>, pp. 70 f.</div>
+<p>Nor must we belittle the criticism, in its clearest form the
+work of Fitz James Stephen,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref8" id=
+"fnref8" href="#fn8">[8]</a></span> that has been levelled at
+Locke's theory of toleration. For the larger part of the modern
+world, his argument is acceptable enough; and its ingenious
+compromises have made it especially representative of the English
+temper. Yet much of it hardly meets the argument that some of his
+opponents, as Proast for example, <a name="page65" id=
+"page65"></a>had made. His conception of the visible church as no
+part of the essence of religion could win no assent from even a
+moderate Anglican; and, once the visible church is admitted,
+Locke's facile distinction between Church and State falls to the
+ground. Nor can it be doubted that he underestimated the power of
+coercion to produce assent; the policy of Louis XIV to the
+Huguenots may have been brutal, but its efficacy must be
+unquestionable. And it is at least doubtful whether his theory has
+any validity for a man who held, as Roman Catholics of his
+generation were bound to hold, that the communication of his
+particular brand of truth outweighed in value all other questions.
+"Every Church," he wrote, "is orthodox to itself; to others,
+erroneous or heretical"; but to any earnest believer this would
+approximate to blasphemy. Nor could any serious Christian accept
+the view that "under the gospel '...there is no such thing as a
+Christian commonwealth'"; to Catholics and Presbyterians this must
+have appeared the merest travesty of their faith.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn8" id="fn8" href=
+"#fnref8">[8]</a></span> Cf. also Coleridge's apt remark. <i>Table
+Talk</i>, Jan. 3, 1834.</div>
+<p>Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the <a name="page66" id=
+"page66"></a>true progenitor of Benthamism, and his work can hardly
+be understood save in this context. Just as in his ethical
+enquiries it was always the happiness of the individual that he
+sought, so in his politics it was the happiness of the subject he
+had in view. In each case it was to immediate experience that he
+made his appeal; and this perhaps explains the clear sense of a
+contempt for past tradition which pervades all his work. "That
+which is for the public welfare," he said, "is God's will"; and
+therein we have the root of that utilitarianism which, as Maine
+pointed out, is the real parent of all nineteenth century change.
+And with Locke, as with the Benthamites, his clear sense of what
+utilitarianism demanded led to an over-emphasis of human
+rationalism. No one can read the <i>Second Treatise</i> without
+perceiving that Locke looked upon the State as a machine which can
+be built and taken to pieces in very simple fashion. Herein,
+undoubtedly, he over-simplified the problem; and that made him miss
+some of the cardinal points a true psychology of the State must
+seize. His very contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection
+for the <a name="page67" id="page67"></a>rational. It resulted in
+his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives imbedded
+in the political act. The significance of herd instinct and the
+vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him.
+All this is of defect; and yet excusably. For it needed the
+demonstration by Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to
+see the real substance of Aristotle's vision that man is embedded
+in political society.</p>
+<h4>V</h4>
+<p>Once Locke's work had become known, its reputation was secure.
+Not, indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation. Men
+were not wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and
+felt that anything but reason must be the test of truth. Those who
+stood by the ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism
+and the roots of atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the
+theories of Filmer could find defenders against him in the Indian
+summer of prerogative under Queen Anne. John Hutton informed a
+friend that he was not less dangerous <a name="page68" id=
+"page68"></a>than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the
+nonjuring sect. But these, after all, were but the eddies of a
+stream fast burying itself in the sands. For most, the Revolution
+was a final settlement, and Locke was welcome as a writer who had
+discovered the true source of political comfort. So it was that
+William Molyneux could embody the ideas of the "incomparable
+treatise" in his demand for Irish freedom; a book which, even in
+those days, occasioned some controversy. Nor is it uninteresting to
+discover that the translation of Hotman's <i>Franco-Gallia</i>
+should have been embellished with a preface from one who, as
+Molyneux wrote to Locke,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref9" id=
+"fnref9" href="#fn9">[9]</a></span> never met the Irish writer
+without conversing of their common master. How rapidly the doctrine
+spread we learn from a letter of Bayle's in which, as early as
+1693, Locke has already became "the gospel of the Protestants." Nor
+was his immediate influence confined to England. French Huguenots
+and the Dutch drew naturally upon so happy a defender; and
+Barbeyrac, in the translation of Pufendorf which he published in
+1706, cites no <a name="page69" id="page69"></a>writer so often as
+Locke. The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell
+were almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the
+accused counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his
+speech for the defence.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn9" id="fn9" href=
+"#fnref9">[9]</a></span> Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX. 435.</div>
+<p>More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the <i>Spectator</i>,
+on six separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose
+possession is a national glory. Defoe in his <i>Original Power of
+the People of England</i> made Locke the common possession of the
+average man, and offered his acknowledgments to his master. Even
+the malignant genius of Swift softened his hate to find the epithet
+"judicious" for one in whose doctrines he can have found no
+comfort. Pope summarized his teaching in the form that Bolingbroke
+chose to give it. Hoadly, in his <i>Original and Institution of
+Civil Government</i>, not only dismisses Filmer in a first part
+each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second
+section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to
+conceal the care with which the <i>Second Treatise</i> had also
+been pillaged. Even Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of
+belittling <a name="page70" id="page70"></a>all rivals in the field
+he considered his own to call him, in that <i>Divine Legation</i>
+which he considered his masterpiece, "the honor of this age and the
+instructor of the future"; but since Warburton's attack on the High
+Church theory is at every point Locke's argument, he may have
+considered this self-eulogy instead of tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis,
+on the eve of English Radicalism, published a noble edition of his
+book. And there is perhaps a certain humor in the remembrance that
+it was to Locke's economic tracts that Bolingbroke went for the
+arguments with which, in the <i>Craftsman</i>, he attacked the
+excise scheme of Walpole. That is irrefutable evidence of the
+position he had attained.</p>
+<p>Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons.
+There still remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he
+made Locke's separation of powers the keystone of his own more
+splendid arch. The most splendid of all sciolists was still to use
+his book for the outline of a social contract more daring even than
+his own. The authors of the <i>Declaration of Independence</i> had
+still, in words taken from Locke, to reassert the <a name="page71"
+id="page71"></a>state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of
+North Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the
+Philadelphia Convention. Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned
+against him and what was permanent in his work was being cast into
+the new form required by the time. A few sentences of Hume were
+sufficient to make the social contract as worthless as the Divine
+Right of kings, and when Blackstone came to sum up the result of
+the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual terms it was with a full
+admission that he was making use of fiction so far as he went
+behind the settlement of 1688. Nor is the work of Dean Tucker
+without significance. The failure of England in the American war
+was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked
+to Locke as the author of their principles. "The Americans," he
+wrote, "have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present
+war"; and in his <i>Treatise Concerning Civil Government</i> and
+his <i>Four Letters</i> he declares himself unable to understand on
+what Locke's reputation was based. Meanwhile the English disciples
+of Rousseau in the persons of Price <a name="page72" id=
+"page72"></a>and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol
+of the levellers of England," was the parent also of French
+destructiveness. Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he
+had dealt with the contract theory it ceased to influence political
+speculation in England. Its place was taken by the utilitarian
+doctrine which Hume had outlined; and once Bentham's
+<i>Fragment</i> had begun to make its way, a new epoch opened in
+the history of political ideas.</p>
+<p>Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this
+renaissance; but, once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to
+other gods men turned. For Bentham made an end of natural rights;
+and his contempt for the past was even more unsparing than Locke's
+own. It is more instructive to compare his work with Hobbes and
+Rousseau than with later thinkers; for after Hume English
+speculation works in a medium Locke would not have understood.
+Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which made
+Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English
+philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or <a name="page73"
+id="page73"></a>pungent grasp of the grimness of facts about him.
+Yet he need not fear the comparison with the earlier thinker. If
+Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of the commonplaces of
+jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy ourselves with
+erecting about it a system of limitations each one of which is in
+some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's view of
+the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil character
+is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept Hobbes'
+Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a
+kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges;
+but Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the
+other, pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the
+Hobbesian view. And anyone who surveys the history of Church and
+State in America will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred
+years the separateness for which Locke contended is not without its
+justification. Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity
+of men; Hobbes makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a
+power he forbids <a name="page74" id="page74"></a>them to judge.
+Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where Hobbes
+dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder. At every
+point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the
+future has been on Locke's side. He may have defended his cause
+less splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by
+most that he had a more splendid cause to defend.</p>
+<p>With Rousseau there is no contrast, for the simple reason that
+his teaching is only a broadening of the channel dug by Locke. No
+element integral to the <i>Two Treatises</i> is absent from the
+<i>Social Contract</i>. Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw
+deeper than his predecessor. The form into which he threw his
+questions gave them an eternal significance Locke can perhaps
+hardly claim. He understood the organic character of the State,
+where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow
+individualism. It is yet difficult to see that the contribution
+upon which Rousseau's fame has mainly rested is at any point a real
+advance upon Locke. The general will, in practical instead of
+semi-mystic terms, <a name="page75" id="page75"></a>really means
+the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we enquire how
+that general will is to be known, we come, after much shuffling,
+upon the will of that majority in which Locke also put his trust.
+Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an
+assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also
+Locke was anxious. But he did not think an infallible criterion
+existed for its detection; and he was satisfied with the
+convenience of a simple numerical test. Nor would it be difficult
+to show that Locke's state has more real room for individuality
+than Rousseau's. The latter made much show of an impartible and
+inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in the people; but in
+practice its exercise is impossible outside the confines of a
+city-state. Once, that is to say, we deal with modern problems our
+real enquiry is still the question of Locke&mdash;what limits shall
+we place upon the power of government? Rousseau has only emphasized
+the urgency of the debate.</p>
+<p>Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's
+teaching and our own time may be discovered is in our <a name=
+"page76" id="page76"></a>sense of the impossibility that a final
+answer can be found to political questions. Each age has new
+materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would
+condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the
+attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right
+invites disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless,
+even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did. In the largest
+sense, his questions are still our own. In the largest sense, also,
+we are near enough to his time to profit at each step of our own
+efforts by the hints he proffers. The point at which he stood in
+English history bears not a little resemblance to our own. The
+emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem of freedom. The problem,
+now as then, was its translation into institutional terms. It is
+the glory of Locke that he brought a generous patience and a
+searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his
+generation.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page77" id="page77"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>CHURCH AND STATE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>The Revolution of 1688 drew its main source of strength from the
+traditional dislike of Rome, and the eager desire to place the
+Church of England beyond the reach of James' aggression. Yet it was
+not until a generation had passed that the lines of ecclesiastical
+settlement were, in any full sense clear. The difficulties involved
+were mostly governmental, and it can hardly even yet be said that
+they have been solved. The nature of the relation between Church
+and State, the affiliation between the Church and Nonconformist
+bodies, the character of its internal government&mdash;all these
+had still to be defined. Nor was this all. The problem of
+definition was made more complex by schism and disloyalty. An
+important fraction of <a name="page78" id="page78"></a>the Church
+could not accept at all the fact of William's kingship; and if the
+larger part submitted, it cannot be said to have been
+enthusiastic.</p>
+<p>Nor did the Church make easy the situation of the
+Nonconformists. Toleration of some kind was rapidly becoming
+inevitable; and with a Calvinist upon the throne persecution of, at
+any rate, the Presbyterians became finally impossible. Yet the
+definition of what limits were to be set to toleration was far from
+easy. The Church seemed like a fortress beleaguered when Nonjurors,
+Deists, Nonconformists, all alike assaulted her foundations. To
+loosen her hold upon political privilege seemed to be akin to
+self-destruction. And, after all, if Church and State were to stand
+in some connection, the former must have some benefit from the
+alliance. Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege
+for all who could not accept the special brand of religious
+doctrine? Locke, at least, denied the assumption, and argued that
+since Churches are voluntary societies, they cannot and ought not
+to have reciprocal relation with the State. But Locke's theory was
+meat <a name="page79" id="page79"></a>too strong for the digestion
+of his time; and no statesman would then have argued that a
+government could forego the advantage of religious support. And
+William, after all, had come to free the church from her oppressor.
+Freedom implied protection, and protection in that age involved
+establishment. It was thus taken for granted by most members of the
+Church of England that her adoption by the State meant her
+superiority to every other form of religious organization.
+Superiority is, by its nature exclusive, the more especially when
+it is united to a certainty of truth and a kinship with the
+dominant political interest of the time. Long years were thus to
+pass before the real meaning of the Toleration Act secured
+translation into more generous statutes.</p>
+<p>The problem of the Church's government was hardly less complex.
+The very acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are
+in an age of settlement. Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless
+due to the dislike of all High Churchmen for William; with their
+consequent unwillingness to admit the full meaning of <a name=
+"page80" id="page80"></a>his ecclesiastical supremacy. Much also is
+due to the fact that the bench of bishops, despite great figures
+like Tillotson and Wake, was necessarily chosen for political
+aptitude rather than for religious value. Nor did men like Burnet
+and Hoadly, for all their learning, make easy the path for brethren
+of more tender consciences. The Church, moreover, must have felt
+its powers the more valuable from the very strength of the assault
+to which she was subjected. And the direct interference with her
+governance implied by the Oaths of Allegiance and of Abjuration
+raised questions we have not yet solved. It suggested the
+subordination of Church to State; and men like Hickes and Leslie
+were quick to point out the Erastianism of the age. It is a fact
+inevitable in the situation of the English Church that the charge
+of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick
+resentment. She cannot be a church unless she is a <i>societas
+perfecta</i>; she cannot have within herself the elements of
+perfect fellowship if what seem the plain commands of Christ are to
+be at the mercy of the king in Parliament. That is the difficulty
+which lies at <a name="page81" id="page81"></a>the bottom of the
+debate with Wake in one age and with Hoadly in the next. In some
+sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and
+it is in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked
+with the Oxford Movement. But Newman and his followers are the
+unconscious sponsors of a debate which grows in volume; and to
+discuss the thoughts of Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a vital
+aspect, the study of contemporary ideas.</p>
+<p>We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William's
+advisers who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy. It
+raised in acute form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more
+than a century, been the main foundation of the alliance between
+throne and altar in England. The demand precipitated a schism which
+lingered on, though fitfully, until the threshold of the nineteenth
+century. The men who could not take the oath were, many of them,
+among the most distinguished churchmen of the time. Great
+ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of Canterbury and one
+of the seven who had gained immortality by his <a name="page82" id=
+"page82"></a>resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of
+Bath and Wells, scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men
+like Charles Leslie, born with a genius for recrimination; much, it
+is clear, of what was best in the Church of England was to be found
+amongst them. There is not a little of beauty, and much of pathos
+in their history. Most, after their deprivation, were condemned to
+poverty; few of them recanted. The lives of men like Sancroft and
+Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are part of the great Anglican
+tradition of earnest simplicity which later John Keble was to
+illustrate for the nineteenth century. The Nonjurors, as they were
+called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of their
+effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph Taylor,
+to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that the
+history even of their decline is without its interest; and the
+study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the
+Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for
+students of ecclesiastical history.</p>
+<p>Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring <a name="page83" id=
+"page83"></a>schism was political rather than religious; and its
+roots go out to vital events of the past. At the bottom it is the
+obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they represent. That
+theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular state
+against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the
+allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent,
+had declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main
+opponents, moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men
+like Andrewes must have felt that when they answered Bellarmine
+they were in substance also defenders of their Church. After the
+great controversy of James I's reign resistance as a duty had come
+to be regarded as a main element in Jesuit and Nonconformist
+teaching; with the result that its antithesis became, as a
+consequence of the political situation, no less integral a part of
+Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that the
+Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to
+the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made
+it, the main weapon of the <a name="page84" id=
+"page84"></a>dissenting churches there was little hope that it
+would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is
+this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like
+Barrow and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper.
+When they urge the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in
+truth the sovereignty of the Church; and that means the triumph of
+men who looked with contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of
+every sect. The Church of England taught non-resistance as the
+condition of its own survival.</p>
+<p>How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the
+seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and
+Sanderson sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates
+its widespread acceptance as the result of the Revolution. Four
+hundred clergy abandoned their preferment because James ruled by
+Divine Right; and they could not in conscience resist even his
+iniquities. An able tract of 1689<span class="fnref"><a name=
+"fnref10" id="fnref10" href="#fn10">[10]</a></span> had collected
+much material to show how <a name="page85" id="page85"></a>integral
+the doctrine was to the beliefs of the Church. Had William's
+government, indeed, refrained from the imposition of the oath, it
+is possible that there might have been no schism at all; for the
+early Nonjurors at least&mdash;perhaps Hickes and Turner are
+exceptions&mdash;would probably have welcomed anything which
+enabled the avoidance of schism. Once, however, the oath was
+imposed three vital questions were raised. Deprivation obviously
+involved the problem of the power of the State over the Church. If
+the act of a convention whose own legality was at best doubtful
+could deprive the consecrated of their position, was the Church a
+Church at all, or was it the mere creature of the secular power?
+And what, moreover, of conscience? It could not be an inherent part
+of the Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the
+sake of peace. Later thinkers added the purely secular argument
+that resistance in one case made for resistance in all. Admit, it
+was argued by Leslie, the right to disobey, and the fabric of
+society is at a stroke dissolved. The attitude is characteristic of
+that able controversialist; and <a name="page86" id="page86"></a>it
+shows how hardly the earlier notions of Divine Right were to
+die.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn10" id="fn10" href=
+"#fnref10">[10]</a></span> <i>The History of Passive Obedience</i>.
+Its author was Jeremy Collier.</div>
+<p>These theories merit a further examination. Williams, later the
+Bishop of Chichester, had argued that separation on the basis of
+the oath was unreasonable. "All that the civil power here pretends
+to," he wrote "is to secure itself against the practices of
+dissatisfied persons." The Nonjurors, in this view, were making an
+ecclesiastical matter of a purely secular issue. He was answered,
+among others, by Samuel Grascom, in an argument which found high
+favor among the stricter of his sect. "The matter and substance of
+these Oaths," he said, "is put into the prayers of the Church, and
+so far it becomes a matter of communion. What people are enjoined
+in the solemn worship to pray for, is made a matter of communion;
+and if it be simple, will not only justify, but require a
+separation." Here is the pith of the matter. For if the form and
+substance of Church affairs is thus to be left to governmental
+will, then those who obey have left the Church and it is the
+faithful remnant only who constitute the true fellowship. The
+schism, in this <a name="page87" id="page87"></a>view, was the
+fault of those who remained subject to William's dominion. The
+Nonjurors had not changed; and they were preserving the Church in
+its integrity from men who strove to betray it to the civil
+power.</p>
+<p>This matter of integrity is important. The glamour of Macaulay
+has somewhat softened the situation of those who took the oaths;
+and in his pages the Nonjurors appear as stupid men unworthily
+defending a dead cause. It is worth while to note that this is the
+merest travesty. Tillotson, who succeeded Sancroft on the latter's
+deprivation, and Burnet himself had urged passive resistance upon
+Lord William Russell as essential to salvation; Tenison had done
+likewise at the execution of Monmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick,
+White Kennett, had all written in its favor; and to William
+Sherlock belongs the privilege of having defended and attacked it
+in two pamphlets each of which challenges the pithy brilliance of
+the other. Clearly, so far as consistency is in question, the
+Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their
+side. And even if it is said that the policy of <a name="page88"
+id="page88"></a>James introduced a new situation the answer surely
+is that Divine Right and non-resistance can, by their very nature,
+make no allowance for novelty.</p>
+<p>The root, then, of this ecclesiastical contention is the
+argument later advanced by Leslie in his "Case of the Regale and
+the Pontificate" in which he summarized the Convocation dispute.
+The State, he argues, has no power over bishops whose relationship
+to their flock is purely spiritual and derived from Christ. The
+Church is independent of all civil institution, and must have
+therefore within herself the powers necessary to her life as a
+society. Leslie repudiates Erastianism in the strongest terms. Not
+only is it, for him, an encroachment upon the rights of Christ, but
+it leads to deism in the gentry and to dissent among the common
+people. The Church of England comes to be regarded as no more than
+the creature of Parliamentary enactment; and thus to leave it as
+the creature of human votes, is to destroy its divinity.</p>
+<p>It is easy enough to see that men who felt in this fashion could
+hardly have decided otherwise than as they did. The <a name=
+"page89" id="page89"></a>matter of conscience, indeed, was
+fundamental to their position. "I think," said the Bishop of
+Worcester on his death-bed, "I could suffer at a stake rather than
+take this oath." That, indeed, represents the general temper. Many
+of them did not doubt that James had done grievous wrong; but they
+had taken the oath of allegiance to him, and they saw in their
+conscience no means of escape from their vow. "Their Majesties,"
+writes the author of the account of Bishop Lake's death, "are the
+two persons in the world whose reign over them, their interest and
+inclination oblige them most to desire, and nothing but conscience
+could restrain them from being as forward as any in all expressions
+of loyalty." In such an aspect, even those who believe their
+attitude to have been wrong, can hardly doubt that they acted
+rightly in their expression of it. For, after all, experience has
+shown that the State is built upon the consciences of men. And the
+protest they made stands out in the next generation in vivid
+contrast to a worldly-minded and politically-corrupt Church which
+only internal revolution could awaken from its slumbers.</p>
+<a name="page90" id="page90"></a>
+<p>No one represents so admirably as Charles Leslie the political
+argument of the case. At bottom it is an argument against anarchy
+that he constructs, and much of what he said is medieval enough in
+tone to suggest de Maistre's great defence of papalism as the
+secret of world-order. He stands four square upon divine right and
+passive obedience. "What man is he who can by his own natural
+authority bend the conscience of another? That would be far more
+than the power of life, liberty or prosperity. Therefore they saw
+the necessity of a divine original." Such a foundation, he argued
+elsewhere, is necessary to order, for "if the last resort be in the
+people, there is no end of controversy at all, but endless and
+unremediable confusion." Nor had he sympathy for the Whig attack on
+monarchy. "The reasons against Kings," he wrote, "are as strong
+against all powers, for men of any titles are subject to err, and
+numbers more than fewer." And nothing can unloose the chain.
+"Obedience," he said in the <i>Best of All</i>, "is due to
+commonwealths by their subjects even for conscience' sake, where
+<a name="page91" id="page91"></a>the princes from whom they have
+revolted have given up their claim."</p>
+<p>The argument has a wider history than its controversial
+statement might seem to warrant. At bottom, clearly enough, it is
+an attack upon the new tradition which Locke had brought into
+being. What seems to impress it most is the impossibility of
+founding society upon other than a divine origin. Anything less
+will not command the assent of men sufficiently to be immune from
+their evil passions. Let their minds but once turn to resistance,
+and the bonds of social order will be broken. Complete submission
+is the only safeguard against anarchy. So, a century later, de
+Maistre could argue that unless the whole world became the subject
+of Rome, the complete dissolution of Christian society must follow.
+So, too, fifty years before, Hobbes had argued for an absolute
+dominion lest the ambitions and desires of men break through the
+fragile boundaries of the social estate.</p>
+<p>The answer is clear enough; and, indeed, the case against the
+Nonjurors is nowhere so strong as on its political side. Men cannot
+be confined within the limits <a name="page92" id="page92"></a>of
+so narrow a logic. They will not, with Bishop Ken, rejoice in
+suffering as a doctrine of the Cross. Rather will oppression in its
+turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience
+which provokes to action. Here was the root of Locke's doctrine of
+consent; for unless the government, as Hume was later to point out,
+has on its side the opinion of men, it cannot hope to endure. The
+fall of James was caused, not as the Nonjurors were tempted to
+think, by popular disregard of Divine personality, but by his own
+misunderstanding of the limits to which misgovernment may go. Here
+their opponents had a strong case to present; for, as Stillingfleet
+remarked, if William had not come over there might have been no
+Church of England for the Nonjurors to preserve. And other
+ingenious compromises were suggested. Non-resistance, it was argued
+by Sherlock, applied to government in general; and the oath, as a
+passage in the <i>Convocation Book</i> of Overall seemed to
+suggest, might be taken not less to a <i>de facto</i> monarch than
+to one <i>de jure</i>. Few, indeed would have taken the ground of
+Bishop Burnet, and allotted the <a name="page93" id=
+"page93"></a>throne to William and Mary as conquerors of the
+Kingdom; at least the pamphlet in which this uncomfortable doctrine
+was put forward the House of Commons had burned by the common
+hangman.</p>
+<p>What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense. Much
+the ablest attack upon their position was Stillingfleet's defence
+of the policy employed in filling up the sees vacated by
+deprivation; and it is remarkable that the theory he employs is to
+insist that unless the lawfulness of what had been done is
+admitted, the Nonjuror's position is inevitable. "If it be unlawful
+to succeed a deprived bishop," he wrote,<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref11" id="fnref11" href="#fn11">[11]</a></span>
+"then he is the bishop of the diocese still: and then the law that
+deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament
+that made that law no king and Parliament: and how can this be
+reconciled with the Oath of Allegiance, unless the Doctor can swear
+allegiance to him who is no King and hath no authority to govern."
+All this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the <a name=
+"page94" id="page94"></a>mere fact that it could be used as
+argument against them is proof that they were out of touch with the
+national temper. What they wanted was a legal revolution which is
+in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was
+deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly
+pressed. But the leaders of a revolution "tread a path of fire";
+and the fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in
+the fact that this was an age when men acted on their principles.
+William and his advisers, with the condition of Ireland and
+Scotland a cause for agitation, with France hostile, with treason
+and plot not absent from the episcopate itself, had no easy task;
+what, in the temper of the time, gives most cause for
+consideration, is the moderate spirit in which they accomplished
+it.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn11" id="fn11" href=
+"#fnref11">[11]</a></span> <i>A Vindication of their Majesties'
+Authority to fill the Sees of the Deprived Bishops</i>
+(1691).</div>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which
+the Church of England had to confront in these troubled years. The
+definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the
+moment it <a name="page95" id="page95"></a>aroused less bitterness,
+was in the long run more intricate in its nature. That some sort of
+toleration was inevitable few, save a group of prejudiced
+irreconcilables, would have denied. But greater things were in the
+air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of
+Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would
+have been admitted to the Church. It is this which explains the
+acrimonious debates of the next two years. The hatred of the Church
+for dissent can only be understood by those who study with care the
+insults heaped upon her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars.
+That men who had striven for her dissolution should be admitted to
+her privileges seemed to Churchmen as tragic as ironical. Nor must
+we miss the political aspect of the matter. William had received an
+eager, if natural, support from Nonconformists; and since the vast
+majority of them was Whig in temper, the greater the degree of
+toleration, the greater likelihood there was of an attack upon the
+Church. Exclusion thus became a fundamental article of the Tory
+creed; and it was the more valued <a name="page96" id=
+"page96"></a>because it enabled them to strike at their opponents
+through an institution which at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710,
+still showed an overwhelming hold upon the mass of the people.</p>
+<p>The attitude of mind herein implied is in large part the
+reaction from the Erastian temper of the government. Under William,
+that temper is intelligible enough; for unless he held the Church
+in strict control, he must have felt that he was giving a large
+handle to his enemies. Under Anne, the essence of the situation
+remained unchanged, even though her eager sympathy with the Church
+was beyond all question. William had relieved Nonconformists from
+the burden of penal statute; the Occasional Conformity Act of 1713
+broadly continued the exclusion of all save the more yielding of
+them from political office. When the Hanoverians succeeded they
+were willing to repeal its more rigid intolerance; but the Test Act
+remained as evidence that the Dissenters were not yet regarded as
+in a full sense part of the national life.</p>
+<p>The reasons for the hatred of dissent go back in part <a name=
+"page97" id="page97"></a>to the Civil War and in part also to the
+feeling of common ground between the dissenting interest and Rome
+which was born of the struggle under Elizabeth and James. The
+pamphlets are innumerable; and most of them deserve the complete
+obliquity into which they have fallen. We are told, in the
+eighteenth as in the seventeenth century, that the Presbyterian
+theory of government is inconsistent with the existence of the
+civil power. "They claim," said Leslie, "power to abrogate the laws
+of the land touching ecclesiastical matters, if they judge them
+hurtful or unprofitable... They require the civil magistrate to be
+subject to their power." Of Knox or Cartwright this is no unfair
+account; but of the later Presbyterians it is the merest travesty.
+It supposes that they would be willing to push to the utmost limit
+the implications of the theory of the two kingdoms&mdash;a
+supposition which their passive submission to the Act of 1712
+restoring lay patronage decisively refutes. Bramhall had no doubt
+that their discipline was "the very quintessence of refined
+popery," and the argument is repeated by a hundred less learned
+pamphleteers. Neither the grim irony of <a name="page98" id=
+"page98"></a>Defoe nor the proven facts of the case could wean
+either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of the people from
+the belief that the Revolution endangered the very existence of the
+Church and that concession would be fatal. So stoutly did the
+Church resist it that the accession of George I alone, in Lecky's
+view, prevented the repeal of the Toleration Act and the
+destruction of the political benefits of the Revolution.</p>
+<p>But nowhere was the temper of the time more clearly displayed
+than in the disputes over Convocation. To William's advisers,
+perhaps, more than to the Church itself their precipitation is due;
+for had they not, at the outset of the reign, suggested large
+changes in the liturgy suspicions then aroused might well have
+slumbered. As it was, the question of the royal supremacy
+immediately came into view and the clergy spared no effort to meet
+the issue so raised. And this they felt the more bitterly because
+the upper house of Convocation, two-thirds of which were William's
+nominees, naturally inclined to his side. Both under William and
+Anne the dispute continued, <a name="page99" id="page99"></a>and
+the lower clergy shrank from no opportunity of conflict. They
+fought the king, the archbishop, the upper house. They attacked the
+writings of Toland and Burnet, the latter's book since recognized
+as one of the great treasures of Anglican literature. In the main,
+of course, the struggle was part of the perennial conflict between
+High Church doctrine and latitudinarianism. But that was only a
+fragment of the issue. What really was in question was the nature
+of the State's power over the Church. That could be left unanswered
+so long, as with James I and Charles, the two powers had but a
+single thought. The situation changed only when State and Church
+had different policies to fulfil and different means for their
+attainment.</p>
+<p>The controversy had begun on the threshold of William's
+accession; but its real commencement dates from 1697. In that year
+was published the <i>Letter to a Convocation Man</i>, probably
+written by Sir Bartholomew Shower, an able if unscrupulous Jacobite
+lawyer, which maliciously, though with abounding skill, raised
+every question that peaceful <a name="page100" id=
+"page100"></a>churchmen must have been anxious to avoid. The
+<i>Letter</i> pointed out the growth of infidelity and the
+increasing suspicion that the Church was becoming tainted with
+Socinian doctrine. Only the assembly of Convocation could arrest
+these evils. The author did not deny that the king's assent was
+necessary to its summons. But he argued that once the Convocation
+had met, it could, like Parliament, debate all questions relevant
+to its purpose. "The one of these courts," said Shower, "is of the
+same power and use with regard to the Church as the other is in
+respect to the State," and he insisted that the writ of summons
+could not at any point confine debate. And since the Convocation
+was an ecclesiastical Parliament, it followed that it could
+legislate and thus make any canons "provided they do not impugn
+common law, statutes, customs or prerogative." "To confer, debate
+and resolve," said Shower, "without the king's license, is at
+common law the undoubted right of convocation."</p>
+<p>Here was a clear challenge which was at once answered, in <i>The
+Authority of Christian Princes</i>, by William Wake, who <a name=
+"page101" id="page101"></a>was by far the most learned of the
+latitudinarian clergy, and the successor of Tenison in the see of
+Canterbury. His argument was purely historical. He endeavored to
+show that the right to summon ecclesiastical synods was always the
+prerogative of the early Christian princes until the aggression of
+the popes had won church independence. The Reformation resumed the
+primitive practice; and the Act of Submission of 1532 had made it
+legally impossible for the clergy to discuss ecclesiastical matters
+without royal permission. Historically, the argument of Wake was
+irrefutable; but what mostly impressed the Church was the
+uncompromising Erastianism of his tone. Princes, he said, "may make
+what laws or constitutions they think fit for the Church.... a
+canon is but as matter prepared for the royal stamp." In this view,
+obviously, the Church is more than a department of the State. But
+Wake went even farther, "I cannot see why the Supreme Magistrate,"
+he wrote, "who confessedly has a power to confirm or reject their
+(Convocation's) decrees, may not also make such other use of them
+as he pleases, and <a name="page102" id="page102"></a>correct,
+improve, or otherwise alter their resolutions, according to his own
+liking, before he gives his authority to them."</p>
+<p>So defined no Church could claim in any true sense the headship
+of Christ; for it was clearly left at the mercy of the governmental
+view of expedient conduct. Wake's answer aroused a sensation almost
+as acute as the original <i>Letter</i> of Shower. But by far the
+ablest criticism it provoked was that of Francis Atterbury, then a
+young student of Christ Church and on the threshold of his
+turbulent career. His <i>Rights, Powers and Privileges of an
+English Convocation Stated and Vindicated</i> not only showed a
+masterly historic sense in its effort to traverse the unanswerable
+induction of Wake, but challenged his position more securely on the
+ground of right. The historical argument, indeed, was not a safe
+position for the Church, and Wake's rejoinder in his <i>State of
+the Church</i> (1703) is generally conceded to have proved his
+point, so far as the claim of prescription is concerned. But when
+Atterbury moves to the deeper problem of what is involved in the
+nature of a church, he has a powerful plea to <a name="page103" id=
+"page103"></a>make. It is unnecessary now to deal with his
+contention that Wake's defence of the Royal Supremacy undermines
+the rights of Parliament; for Wake could clearly reply that the
+seat of that power had changed with the advent of the Revolution.
+Where the avoidance of sympathy is difficult is in his insistence
+that no Church can live without an assembly to debate its problems,
+and that no assembly can be real which is subject to external
+control. "Their body," as he remarks, "will be useless to the State
+and by consequence contemptible"; for its opinions will not be born
+of that free deliberation which can alone ensure respect. Like all
+High Churchmen, Atterbury has a clear sense that Church and State
+can no longer be equated, and he is anxious to preserve the
+personality of the Church from the invasions of an alien body. To
+be real, it must be independent, and to be independent, it must
+have organs of self-expression. But neither William nor Anne could
+afford to forego the political capital involved in ecclesiastical
+control and Erastian principles proceeded to their triumph.</p>
+<p>Here, as elsewhere, it was Charles <a name="page104" id=
+"page104"></a>Leslie who best summed up the feeling of High
+Churchmen. His <i>Case of the Regale</i> (1701) is by far the
+ablest of his many able performances. He saw at the outset that the
+real issue was defined by the Church's claim to be a divine
+society, with rights thus consecrated by the conditions of its
+origin. If it was divine, invasion did not touch its <i>de jure</i>
+rights. "How," he asked, "can rights that are divine be given up?
+If they are divine, no human authority can either supersede or
+limit them.... How can rights that are inherent be given up? If
+they are inherent, they are inseparable. The right to meet, to
+consult, to make rules or canons for the regulation of the society,
+is essential to every society as such ... can she then part with
+what is essential to her?" Nor could it be denied that "where the
+choice of the governors of one society is in the hands of another
+society, that society must be dependent and subject to the other."
+The Church, in the Latitudinarian view was thus either the creature
+of the state or an <i>imperium in imperio</i>; but Leslie would not
+admit that fruitful stumbling block to the debate. "The <a name=
+"page105" id="page105"></a>sacred and civil powers were like two
+parallel lines which could never meet or interfere ... the
+confusion arises ... when the civil power will take upon them to
+control or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her
+spiritual authority." He did not doubt that the Church should give
+securities for its loyalty to the king, and renounce any effort at
+the coercion of the civil magistrate. But the Church was entitled
+to a similar privilege, and kings should not "have their
+beneficence and protection to the Church of Christ understood as a
+bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their hands the powers
+committed into her charge by Christ." Nor did he fail to point out
+the suicidal nature of Erastianism. For the church's hold upon men
+is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her
+principles. "When they see bishops," he wrote wisely, "made by the
+Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court
+language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a
+judge at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand
+from the Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest
+security of her government."</p>
+<a name="page106" id="page106"></a>
+<p>The argument is powerful enough; though it should be noted that
+some of its implications remain undetermined. Leslie does not say
+how the spheres of Church and State are to be differentiated. He
+does not explain the methods whereby an establishment is to be made
+compatible with freedom. For it is obvious that the partnership of
+Church and State must be upon conditions; and once the State had
+permitted the existence of creeds other than that of its official
+adoption, it could not maintain the exclusive power for which the
+Church contended. And when the Church not only complained of
+State-betrayal, but attempted the use of political means to enforce
+remedial measures it was inevitable that statesmen would use the
+weapons ready to their hand to coerce it to their will. The real
+remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness but
+disestablishment.</p>
+<p>That this is the meaning of the struggle did not appear until
+the reign of George I. What is known as the Bangorian controversy
+was due to the posthumous publication, in 1716, of the papers of
+George Hickes, the most celebrated of the <a name="page107" id=
+"page107"></a>Nonjurors in his generation. The papers are of no
+special import; but taken in connection with the Jacobite rising of
+1715 they seemed to imply a new attack upon the Revolution
+settlement. So, at least, they were interpreted by Benjamin Hoadly,
+then Bishop of Bangor, and a stout upholder of the Latitudinarian
+school. The conflict today has turned to dust and ashes; and few
+who read the multitude of pamphlets it evoked, or stand amazed at
+their personal bitterness, can understand why more than a hundred
+writers should have thought it necessary to inform the world of
+their opinions, or why the London Stock Exchange should have felt
+so passionate an interest in the debate as to cease for a day the
+hubbub of its transactions. Nor can any one make heroes from the
+personalities of its protagonists. Hoadly himself was a typical
+bishop of the political school, who rose from humble circumstances
+to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester through a remarkable series
+of translations. Before the debate of 1716, he was chiefly known by
+two political tracts in which he had rewritten, in less cogent
+form, and <a name="page108" id="page108"></a>without adequate
+acknowledgment, the two treatises of Locke. He clearly realized how
+worthless the dogma of Divine Right had become, without being
+certain of the principles by which it was to be replaced. Probably,
+as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is the result of
+a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy. If God is
+to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we must
+seek a human explanation of political facts. And he became
+convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to
+ecclesiastical than to secular politics. Of his opponents, by far
+the ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be
+said to have respected, and the parent, through his mystical
+writings, of the Wesleyan movement. Snape, then Provost of Eton,
+was always incisive; and his pamphlet went through seventeen
+editions in a single year and provoked seven replies within three
+months. Thomas Sherlock would not be either himself or his father's
+son, were he not caustic, logical and direct. But Hoadly and Law
+between them exhaust the controversy, so far as it has <a name=
+"page109" id="page109"></a>meaning for our own day. The less
+essential questions like Hoadly's choice of friends, his attitude
+to prayer, the accuracy of the details in his account of the Test
+Act, the cause of his refusal to answer Law directly, are hardly
+now germane to the substance of the debate. Hoadly's position is
+most fully stated in his <i>Preservative against the Principles and
+Practice of Nonjurors</i> which he published in 1716 as a
+counterblast to the papers of Hickes; and they are briefly
+summarized in the sermon preached before the King on March 31,
+1717, on the text "My Kingdom is not of this world," and published
+by royal command. Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and
+qualifications, some simple points emerge. What he was doing was to
+deprive the priesthood of claims to supernatural authority that he
+might vindicate for civil government the right to preserve itself
+not less against persons in ecclesiastical office than against
+civil assailants. To do so he is forced to deny that the miraculous
+powers of Christ and the Apostles descended to their successors.
+For if that assumption is made we grant to fallible <a name=
+"page110" id="page110"></a>men privileges which confessedly belong
+to persons outside the category of fallibility. And, exactly in the
+fashion of Leslie in the <i>Regale</i> he goes on to show that if a
+Church is a supernatural institution, it cannot surrender one jot
+or tittle of its prerogative. It is, in fact, an <i>imperium in
+imperio</i> and its conflict with the state is inevitable. But if
+the Church is not a supernatural institution, what is its nature?
+Hoadly here attacks the doctrine which lies at the basis of all
+ecclesiastical debate. The Church, he claims, is not a visible
+society, presided over by men who have authority directly
+transmitted by Christ. There are not within it "viceregents who can
+be said properly to supply his place; no interpreters upon whom his
+subjects are absolutely to depend; no judges over the conscience or
+religion of his people. For if this were so that any such absolute
+viceregent authority, either for the making of new laws, or
+interpreting old ones, or judging his subjects, in religious
+matters, were lodged in any men upon earth, the consequence would
+be that what still retains the name of the Church of Christ would
+not be the kingdom of <a name="page111" id="page111"></a>Christ,
+but the kingdom of those men invested with such authority. For
+whoever hath such an authority of making laws is so far a king, and
+whoever can add new laws to those of Christ, equally obligatory, is
+as truly a king as Christ himself. Nay, whosoever hath an absolute
+authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, it is he who is
+truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes, and not the person
+who first wrote and spoke them."</p>
+<p>The meaning is clear enough. What Hoadly is attacking is the
+theory of a visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense
+superstructure of miracle and infallibility erected thereon. The
+true Church of Christ is in heaven; and the members of the earthly
+society can but try in a human, blundering way, to act with decency
+and justice. Apostolic succession, the power of excommunication,
+the dealing out of forgiveness for men's sins, the determination of
+true doctrine, insofar as the Church claims these powers, it is
+usurping an authority that is not its own. The relation of man to
+God is his private affair, and God will ask from him sincerity and
+honesty, rather than judge <a name="page112" id="page112"></a>him
+for his possession of some special set of dogmas. Clearly,
+therefore, if the Church is no more than this, it has no
+supernatural pretensions to oppose to the human claims of the
+State. And since the State must have within itself all the means of
+sufficient life, it has the right to resist the ecclesiastical
+onslaught as based upon the usurpation of power assumed without
+right. And in later treatises Hoadly did for ceremonial exactly
+what he had done for church government. The eucharist became a
+piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an
+announcement&mdash;"a mere external thing"&mdash;that the rules of
+the fellowship have been broken. It at no point is related to the
+sinner's opportunity of salvation.</p>
+<p>In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has
+no monopoly of truth. It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but
+reason alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes. Nor
+does its judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the
+truth of things. The real root of faith is not the possession of an
+infallible dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which
+you <a name="page113" id="page113"></a>happen to believe. For the
+magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the table of your
+springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based upon that
+table; from which it follows that things like the Test and
+Corporation Acts have no real political validity. They have been
+imposed upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping
+power; and the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem
+as valid as that of a member of the Church of England.</p>
+<p>All this sounds sensible enough; though it is curious doctrine
+in the mouth of a bishop of that church. And this, in fact, is the
+starting-point of Law's analysis of Hoadly. No one who reads the
+unsparing vigor of his criticism can doubt that Law must have been
+thoroughly happy in the composition of his defence; and, indeed,
+his is the only contribution to the debate which may claim a
+permanent place in political literature. In one sense, indeed, the
+whole of Law's answer is an <i>ignoratio elenchi</i>, for he
+assumes the truth of that which Hoadly sets out to examine, with
+the inevitable result that each writer is, for the most part,
+arguing from different <a name="page114" id="page114"></a>premises.
+But on the assumption that Hoadly is a Christian, Law's argument is
+an attack of great power. He shows conclusively that if the Church
+of England is no more than Hoadly imagines it to be, it cannot, in
+any proper historic sense, be called the Church of England at all.
+For every one of the institutions which Hoadly calls an usurpation,
+is believed by Churchmen to be integral to its nature. And if
+sincerity alone is to count as the test, then there cannot, for the
+existing world, be any such thing as objective religious truth. It
+subverted not merely absolute authority&mdash;which the Church of
+England did not claim&mdash;but any authority in the Church. It
+impugned the authority of the Crown to enforce religious belief by
+civil penalties. Hoadly's rejection of authority, moreover, is in
+Law's view fatal to government of any kind. For all lawful
+authority must affect eternal salvation insofar as to disobey it is
+to sin. The authority the Church possesses is inherent in the very
+nature of the Church; for the obligation to a belief in
+Christianity is the same thing as to a belief in that Church which
+can be shown to represent Christ's teaching.</p>
+<a name="page115" id="page115"></a>
+<p>From Law's own point of view, the logic of his position is
+undeniable; and in his third letter to Hoadly, the real heart of
+his attack, he touches the centre of the latter's argument. For if
+it is sincerity which is alone important it would follow that
+things false and wrong are as acceptable to God as things true and
+right, which is patently absurd. Nor has Hoadly given us means for
+the detection of sincerity. He seemed to think that anyone was
+sincere who so thought himself; but, says Law, "it is also possible
+and as likely for a man to be mistaken in those things which
+constitute true sincerity as in those things which constitute true
+religion." Clearly, sincerity cannot be the pith of the matter; for
+it may be mistaken and directed to wrong ends. The State, in fact,
+may respect conscience, but Hoadly is no more entitled to assume
+the infallibility of private belief than he is to deny the
+infallibility of the Church's teaching. That way lies anarchy.</p>
+<p>Here, indeed, the antagonists were on common ground. Both had
+denied the absolute character of any authority; but while Hoadly
+virtually postulates a <a name="page116" id="page116"></a>Church
+which logically is no more than those who accept the moral law as
+Christ described it, Law restricts the Church to that society which
+bears the traditional marks of the historic institution. On
+Hoadly's principles, there was no reason why anyone not hostile to
+the civil power should not enjoy political privilege; on Law's
+there was every reason simply because those who denied the
+doctrines of the High Church refused a truth open for their
+acceptance. Law, indeed, goes so far as to argue that in the light
+of his principles Hoadly should be a Deist; and there is ground for
+what, in that age, was a valuable point to make. The sum total of
+it all is that for the bishop the outward actions of men alone
+concern the State; while Law insists that the root of action and
+the test of fitness is whether men have seen a certain aspect of
+the truth and grasped it.</p>
+<p>The result, to say the least, was calamitous. In May of 1717,
+convocation met and the Lower House immediately adopted an
+unanimous report condemning the "Preservative" and the sermon. But
+Hoadly had the government behind him <a name="page117" id=
+"page117"></a>and the convocation was prorogued before further
+action could be taken. Snape, Hare, Mosse and Sherlock, all of whom
+were chaplains royal, and had been drawn into the conflict, were
+dismissed from their office; and for more than one hundred and
+thirty-five years convocation was not again summoned. It was a
+striking triumph for Erastianism, though the more liberal
+principles of Hoadly were less successful. Robert Walpole was on
+the threshold of his power, and, as a manager of Sacheverell's
+impeachment, he had seen the hold of the Church upon the common
+people, may even, indeed, have remembered that Hoadly's own
+dwelling had been threatened with destruction in the popular
+excitement. <i>Quieta non movere</i> was his motto; and he was not
+interested in the niceties of ecclesiastic metaphysic. So the Test
+Act remained immovable until 1828; while the annual Act of
+Indemnity for its infractions represented that English genius for
+illogical mitigation which solves the deeper problems of principle
+while avoiding the consideration of their substance.</p>
+<p>In the hundred and twenty years which <a name="page118" id=
+"page118"></a>passed between the Bangorian Controversy and the
+Oxford Movement, there is only one volume upon the problem of
+Church and State which deserves more than passing notice. Bishop
+Warburton was the Lord Brougham of his age; and as its
+self-constituted universal provider of intellectual fare, he deemed
+it his duty to settle this, amongst others of the eternal
+questions. The effort excited only the contempt of Leslie
+Stephen&mdash;"the peculiar Warburton mixture," he says "of sham
+logic and bluster." Yet that is hardly fair to the total result of
+Warburton's remarks. He tried to steer a middle path between the
+logical result of such Erastianism as that of the <i>Independent
+Whig</i>, on the one hand, and the excessive claim of High
+Churchmanship on the other. Naturally enough, or the writer would
+not be Warburton, the book is full of tawdry rhetoric and stupid
+quibbles. But the <i>Alliance between Church and State</i> (1736)
+set the temper of speculation until the advent of Newman, and is
+therefore material for something more than contempt. It acutely
+points out that societies generate a <a name="page119" id=
+"page119"></a>personality distinct from that of their members in
+words reminiscent of an historic legal pronouncement.<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref12" id="fnref12" href="#fn12">[12]</a></span>
+"When any number of men," he says, "form themselves into a society,
+whether civil or religious, this society becomes a body different
+from that aggregate which the number of individuals composed before
+the society was formed.... But a body must have its proper
+personality and will, which without these is no more than a shadow
+or a name."</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn12" id="fn12" href=
+"#fnref12">[12]</a></span> Dicey, <i>Law and Opinion in England</i>
+(2nd edition), p. 165.</div>
+<p>And that is the root of Warburton's pronouncement. The Church is
+a society distinct from the State, but lending to that body its
+assistance because without the sanction of religion the full
+achievement of the social purpose is impossible. There is thus an
+alliance between them, each lending its support to the other for
+their common benefit. The two remain distinct; the union between
+them is of a federal kind. But they interchange their powers, and
+this it is which explains at once the royal supremacy and the right
+of Churchmen to a share in the legislature. <a name="page120" id=
+"page120"></a>This also it is which explains the existence of a
+Test Act, whereby those who might injure that which the State has
+undertaken to protect are deprived of their power to evil. And, in
+return, the Church engages to "apply its utmost endeavors in the
+service of the State." It becomes attached to its benefactor from
+the privilege it receives; and the dangers which might arise from
+its natural independence are thus obviated. For a federal union
+precludes the grave problem of an <i>imperium in imperio</i>, and
+the "mischiefs which so terrified Hobbes" are met by the terms upon
+which it is founded.</p>
+<p>It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The
+contract does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton
+"in the same archive with the famous original compact between
+monarch and people" which has been the object of vast but fruitless
+searches. Nor does the Act of Submission bear upon its face the
+marks of that tender care of the protection of an independent
+society which Warburton declared a vital tenet of the Union. Yet
+such criticisms miss the real significance of the theory. It is
+really the <a name="page121" id="page121"></a>introduction into
+English politics of that notion of the two societies which, a
+century before, Melville and Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With
+neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit was the separation complete, for
+the simple reason that each had a secret conviction that the
+ecclesiastical society was at bottom the superior. Yet the theory
+was the parent of liberty, if only because it pointed the way to a
+balance of power between claims which, before, had seemed mutually
+exclusive.</p>
+<p>Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the
+English Church because its temper, under the &aelig;gis of Laudian
+views, had been in substance theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly
+expressed the compromise the dominant party of the Church had then
+in mind. They did, indeed, mistake the power of the Church, or,
+rather, they submitted to the State so fully that what they had
+intended for a partnership became an absorption. So that the
+Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep enough to make the
+Church no more than a moral police department of the State. Saints
+like Ken and preachers like South are <a name="page122" id=
+"page122"></a>replaced by fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who
+made Lambeth Palace an adjunct to Ranelagh Gardens, and
+self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The Church could not
+even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and its charity
+was the irritating and complacent patronage of the obstrusive
+Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence slumbered; and
+the main function it fulfilled until Newman's advent was the
+provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility.
+It is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church
+which was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.</p>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p>No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The
+opponents of Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate
+Church, and it was a plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were
+making. They saw that a Church whose patronage and discipline and
+debates were under the control of an alien body could not with
+honesty claim that Christ was in truth <a name="page123" id=
+"page123"></a>their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of
+private judgment and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic
+basis would have to be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the
+condemnation of Tindal and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their
+teaching, impossible for the Church to possess an ethos of her own.
+It was thus against the sovereignty of the State that they
+protested. Somewhere, a line must be drawn about its functions that
+the independence of the Church might be safeguarded. For its
+supporters could not be true to their divine mission if the
+accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to impose its
+will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious body to
+which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they
+repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived
+from the State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription
+was to usurp an authority not rightly its own.</p>
+<p>The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment.
+For here the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life
+must be lived upon terms of her own <a name="page124" id=
+"page124"></a>definition. That was possible before the Reformation;
+but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of rationalism
+the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become
+unacceptable. If the Church was to become so intimately involved
+with the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to
+complain, if statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to
+sacrifice it to the attainment of that ideal. For the real secret
+of independence is, after all, no more than independence. The
+Church sought it without being willing to pay the price. And this
+it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge triumphant from an ordeal
+where logically he should have failed. The State, by definition is
+an absorptive animal; and the Church had no right to complain if
+the price of its privileges was royal supremacy. A century so
+self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the
+difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High
+Church theory.</p>
+<p>Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next
+century. The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the
+seventeenth century, to <a name="page125" id="page125"></a>the
+ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref13" id="fnref13" href="#fn13">[13]</a></span>
+In fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law. Like them, it
+was searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like
+them it discovered that connection with the State means, in the
+end, the sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political
+situation. "The State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words
+might have been written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement,
+indeed, like its predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and
+when Lord Brougham told the House of Lords that the idea of the
+Church possessing "absolute and unalienable rights" was a "gross
+and monstrous anomaly" because it would make impossible the
+supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the result of a
+doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first
+completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this
+controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury
+has told the House of Lords,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref14"
+id="fnref14" href="#fn14">[14]</a></span> <a name="page126" id=
+"page126"></a>"... see the absolute need, if a Church is to be
+strong and vigorous, for the Church, <i>qua</i> church, to be able
+to say what it can do as a church." "The rule of the sovereign, the
+rule of Parliament," replied Lord Haldane,<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref15" id="fnref15" href="#fn15">[15]</a></span>
+"extend as far as the rule of the Church. They are not to be
+distinguished or differentiated, and that was the condition under
+which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the Church of
+England." Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic
+theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the
+problem of its sovereignty. "A free church in a free state," now,
+as then, may be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to
+build it.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn13" id="fn13" href=
+"#fnref13">[13]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Problem of Sovereignty</i>,
+Chapter III.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="fnnum"><a name="fn14" id="fn14" href=
+"#fnref14">[14]</a></span> <i>Parliamentary Debates</i>. Fifth
+Series, Vol. 34, p. 992 (June 3, 1919).<br />
+<br />
+<span class="fnnum"><a name="fn15" id="fn15" href=
+"#fnref15">[15]</a></span> <i>Parliamentary Debates</i>. Fifth
+Series, Vol. 34, p 1002. The quotation does not fully represent
+Lord Haldane's views.</div>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page127" id="page127"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>THE ERA OF STAGNATION</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of
+unexampled calm in English politics, which lasted until the
+expulsion of Walpole from power in 1742. No vital questions were
+debated, nor did problems of principle force themselves into view;
+and if the Jacobites remained in the background as an element
+invincibly hostile to absorption, the failure of their effort in
+1715 showed how feeble was their hold on English opinion. Not,
+indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had nothing of that
+romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably recorded in
+Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and
+meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the
+reign of George III, they were amenable to management. In the
+result, <a name="page128" id="page128"></a>an opposition in the
+classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question to be
+considered was the personalities who were to share in power. The
+dominating temper of Walpole decided that issue; and he gave
+thereby to the political struggle the outlines in which it was
+encased for a generation.</p>
+<p>It is a dull period, but complacent; for it was not an
+unprosperous time. Agriculture and commerce both were abundant; and
+the increasing development of towns shows us that the Industrial
+Revolution loomed in the near distance. The eager continuance of
+the deistic controversy suggests that there was something of
+novelty beneath the calm; for Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck
+at the root of religious belief, and Shaftesbury's exaltation of
+Hellenism not only contributed to the <i>Aufklarung</i> in
+Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not to go
+unchallenged. But the literature of the time is summarized in Pope;
+and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of
+the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and
+the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to <a name="page129" id=
+"page129"></a>die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley, indeed,
+was convinced of the decadence of England; but his <i>Essay towards
+Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain</i> (1721) shows rather the
+effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea
+Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political
+thought. Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard
+with seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a
+tax upon the estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of
+Mandeville were, despite the indignation they aroused, more suited
+to the age that Walpole governed. It is, in fact, the character of
+the minister which sets the keynote of the time. An able speaker,
+without being a great orator, a superb administrator, eager rather
+for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting
+them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of
+mind or of temperament, to bring great questions to the foreground
+of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over the respect of
+the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from office. One
+by one, the younger men of <a name="page130" id=
+"page130"></a>talent, Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Pitt, were
+driven into hostility. He maintained himself in office by a
+corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically
+conceived. An opposition developed less on principle than on the
+belief that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for
+concentration. The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save
+personal animosity upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions
+could only seize upon a doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain
+as the pretext of the war it was Walpole's ambition no less than
+policy to avoid. From 1726 until 1735 the guiding spirit of the
+party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter year he quarrelled with
+Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in high dudgeon to
+France. But in the years of his leadership he had evolved a theory
+of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the intellectual
+bankruptcy of the time.</p>
+<p>To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to
+remember the peculiar character of his career. He had attained to
+the highest office under Anne at an exceptionally early age; and
+his <a name="page131" id="page131"></a>period of power had been
+distinguished by the vehemence with which he pursued the ideal of a
+strict division of parties and the expulsion of all alien elements
+from the government. But he had staked all his fortunes upon a
+scheme he had neither the resolution to plan nor the courage to
+execute; and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had
+been followed by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to
+his reputation and place; and through an enormous bribe to the
+bottomless pocket of the King's mistress St. John was enabled to
+return from exile, though not to political place. His restless mind
+was dissatisfied with exclusion from power, and he occupied himself
+with creating an alliance between the Tories and malcontent Whigs
+for Walpole's overthrow. The alliance succeeded, though too late
+for Bolingbroke to enjoy the fruits of success; but in effecting
+the purgation of the Tory party from its taint of Jacobitism he
+rendered no inconsiderable service. His foundation, moreover, of
+the <i>Craftsman</i>&mdash;the first official journal of a
+political party in England&mdash;showed his appreciation of the
+technique of political <a name="page132" id=
+"page132"></a>controversy. Most of it is dead now, and, indeed, no
+small part of its contemporary success is due to the making of
+comment in terms of the immediate situation, as also by its
+consistent use of a personal reference which has, save in the mass,
+no meaning for today. Though, doubtless, the idea of its inception
+was derived from journals like Defoe's <i>Review</i> and Leslie's
+<i>Rehearsal</i>, which had won success, its intimate connection
+with the party leadership was a novel element; and it may therein
+claim a special relation to the official periodicals of a later
+generation.</p>
+<p>The reputation of Bolingbroke as a political philosopher is
+something that our age can hardly understand. "A solemn trifler,"
+Lord Morley has called him; and it is difficult to know why his
+easy declamation was so long mistaken for profound thought. Much,
+doubtless, is due to that personal fascination which made him the
+inspiration of men so different as Pope and Voltaire; and the man
+who could supply ideas to Chatham and Disraeli cannot be wholly
+devoid of merit. Certainly he wrote well, in that easy elegance of
+style which was the delight of the <a name="page133" id=
+"page133"></a>eighteenth century; and he is consistently happy in
+his choice of adjectives. But his work is at every point
+embellished with that affectation of classical learning which was
+the curse of his age. He sought no general truths, and he is free
+from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any enthusiasm save
+that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his political
+writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize his
+animosity. The <i>Dissertation on Parties</i> (1734) and the
+<i>Idea of a Patriot King</i> (1738) might have betrayed us, taken
+alone, into regarding their author as a disinterested observer
+watching with regret the development of a fatal system; but taken
+in conjunction with the <i>Letter to Sir W. Windham</i> (1717),
+which was not published until after his death, and is written with
+an acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to honesty, they reveal the
+opinions as no more than a mask for ambition born of hate.</p>
+<p>The whole, of course, must have some sort of background; and the
+<i>Letters on the Study of History</i> (1735) was doubtless
+intended to supply it. Experience is to be the test of truth, since
+history is <a name="page134" id="page134"></a>philosophy teaching
+by example. But Bolingbroke's own argument supplies its refutation.
+His history is an arbitrary selection of instances intended to
+illustrate the particular ideas which happened to be uppermost in
+his mind. The Roman consuls were chosen by annual election; whence
+it is clear that England should have, if not an annual, at least a
+triennial parliament. He acknowledges that the past in some degree
+unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks
+upon the evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from
+a larger aspect than their immediate environment. But his history
+is intended less to illustrate the working of principle than to
+collect cases worthy of citation. Time and space do not exist as
+categories; he is as content with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart
+illustration. He is willing, indeed, to look for the causes of the
+Revolution as far back as the reign of James I; though he shows his
+lack of true perception when he ascribes the true inwardness of the
+Reformation to the greed of the monarch for the spoils of the
+clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses him is the immense <a name=
+"page135" id="page135"></a>influence of personal accident upon
+events. Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of
+gossip, here is the real root of great changes. And when he
+expresses a "thorough contempt" for the kind of work scholars such
+as Scaliger and Petavius had achieved, he shows his entire
+ignorance of the method whereby alone a knowledge of general
+principle can be attained.</p>
+<p>A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by
+high notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings
+is too stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes
+a king important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the
+Church; for Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with
+such matters as the apostolic succession. He makes great show of
+his love of liberty, which is the true end of government; and we
+are informed with a vast solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in
+which it always stands. So that the chief end of patriotism is its
+maintenance; though we are never told what liberty is, nor how it
+is to be maintained. The social compact seems to win his
+approbation and we learn that the <a name="page136" id=
+"page136"></a>secret of the British constitution is the balance of
+powers and their mutual independency. But what the powers are, and
+how their independence is preserved we do not learn, save by an
+insistence that the safety of Europe is to be found in playing off
+the ambitions of France and Austria against each other; an analogy
+the rejection of which has been the secret of English
+constitutional success. We learn of the evil of standing armies and
+the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told that parties are
+mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and vast patronage;
+and a great enough show is made of his hatred for corruption as to
+convince at least some critics of distinction of his sincerity. The
+parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no
+difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us
+how completely the principles of the Revolution had become
+exhausted. He wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He
+would have disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen
+from Parliament. The press was to be free; and there is at least a
+degree of generous insight in his plea for a wider <a name=
+"page137" id="page137"></a>commercial freedom in colonial matters.
+Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man
+with the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the
+committee for the settlement of disputed elections? And what else
+can we see in his desire for liberty of the press save a desire to
+fight Walpole in the open, without fear of the penalties his former
+treason had incurred?</p>
+<p>His value can be tested in another way. His <i>Idea of a Patriot
+King</i> is the remedy for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty
+years old when it appeared, and he had then been in active politics
+for thirty-five years, so that we are entitled to regard it as the
+fruit of his mature experience. He was too convinced that the
+constitution was "in the strictest sense a bargain, a conditional
+contract between the prince and the people" to attempt again the
+erection of a system of prerogative. Yet it is about the person of
+the monarch that the theory hinges. He is to have no powers
+inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for such restraints
+will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil propensities
+of a bad king. What is needed is a <a name="page138" id=
+"page138"></a>patriot king who will destroy corruption and awaken
+the spirit of liberty. His effective government will synchronize
+with the commencement of his reign; and he will at once dismiss the
+old and cunning ministers, to replace them by servants who are
+wise. He will not stand upon party, but upon the State. He will
+unite the forces of good counsel into a single scheme. Complaints
+will be answered, the evildoers punished. Commerce will flow on
+with uninterrupted prosperity, and the navy of England receive its
+due meed of attention. His conduct must be dignified, and he must
+acquire his influence not apart from, but on account of, the
+affection of his people. "Concord," says Bolingbroke in rhapsodical
+prospection, "will appear breeding peace and prosperity on every
+hand"; though he prudently hopes also that men will look back with
+affection upon one "who desired life for nothing so much as to see
+a King of Great Britain the most powerful man in the country, and a
+patriot King at the head of a united people."</p>
+<p>Bolingbroke himself has admitted that such a monarch would be a
+"sort of <a name="page139" id="page139"></a>standing miracle," and
+perhaps no other comment upon his system is required. A smile in
+Plato at the sight of his philosopher-King in such strange company
+might well be pardoned. It is only necessary to point out that the
+person whom Bolingbroke designates for this high function was
+Frederick, Prince of Wales, to us the most meagre of a meagre
+generation, but to Bolingbroke, by whose grace he was captivated,
+"the greatest and most glorious of human beings." This exaltation
+of the monarch came at a time when a variety of circumstances had
+combined to show the decrease of monarchical sentiment. It bears
+upon its every page the marks of a personal antagonism. It is too
+obviously the programme of a party to be capable of serious
+interpretation as a system. The minister who is to be impeached,
+the wise servants who are to gain office, the attack on corruption,
+the spirited foreign policy&mdash;all these have the earmarks of a
+platform rather than of a philosophy. Attacks on corruption hardly
+read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the one solid
+evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger <a name=
+"page140" id="page140"></a>of finance in politics. For none of the
+Tories save Barnard, who owed his party influence thereto,
+understood the financial schemes of Walpole; and since they were
+his schemes obviously they represented the triumph of devilish
+ingenuity. The return of landed men to power would mean the return
+of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country squires,
+the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that
+Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a r&eacute;gime
+which already faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power. The
+pamphlet was the cornerstone in the education of Frederick's son;
+and when George III came to the throne he proceeded to give such
+heed to his master as the circumstances permitted. It is perhaps,
+as Mr. A.L. Smith has argued, unfair to visit Bolingbroke with
+George's version of his ideal; yet they are sufficiently connected
+for the one to give the meaning to the other. Chatham, indeed, was
+later intrigued by this ideal of a national party; and before
+Disraeli discovered that England does not love coalitions he
+expended much rhetoric upon the beauties of a patriotic king.
+<a name="page141" id="page141"></a>But Chatham was a wayward genius
+who had nothing of that instinct for common counsel which is of the
+essence of party government; while it is necessary to draw a firm
+line between Disraeli's genial declamation and his practice when in
+office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort founded upon
+the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that his own
+last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of the
+event which he looked to as the inauguration of the golden age.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political
+thought; the system continued, though the men were different. What
+alone can be detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which
+found its sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the
+strength of which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an
+unwilling king. An able pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival
+of this unlooked-for portent. <i>Faction detected by the Evidence
+of Facts</i> (1742) <a name="page142" id="page142"></a>was, though
+it is anonymous,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref16" id="fnref16"
+href="#fn16">[16]</a></span> obviously written by one in touch with
+the inner current of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of
+Walpole, though he sees the chaos in its result. "A republican
+spirit," he says, "has strangely arisen"; and he goes on to tell
+how the electors of London and Westminster were now regarding their
+members as delegates to whom instructions might be issued. "A new
+party of malcontents" had arisen, "assuming to themselves, though
+very falsely, the title of the People." They affect, he tells us,
+"superiority to the whole legislature ... and endeavor in effect to
+animate the people to resume into their own hands that vague and
+loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the people of no
+country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so obvious
+that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society, to
+divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from
+themselves." The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike,
+that temper which produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible
+for Cartwright and Horne Tooke and Sir <a name="page143" id=
+"page143"></a>Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English
+radicalism.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn16" id="fn16" href=
+"#fnref16">[16]</a></span> It was probably written by Lord
+Egmont.</div>
+<p>Yet the influence of that temper still lay a generation ahead;
+and the next piece of import comes from a mind which, though
+perhaps the most powerful of all which have applied themselves to
+political philosophy in England, was, from its very scepticism,
+incapable of constructive effort. David Hume was thirty-one years
+of age when he published (1742) the first series of his essays; and
+his <i>Treatise of Human Nature</i> which had fallen "dead-born
+from the press" was in some sort compensated by the success of the
+new work. The second part, entitled <i>Political Discourses</i>,
+was published in 1752, almost simultaneously with the "<i>Inquiry
+concerning the Principles of Morals</i>." As in the case of Hume's
+metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful dissolvent
+the century was to see. Yet nowhere was so clearly to be
+demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had
+fallen.</p>
+<p>Hume, of course, is always critical and suggestive, and even if
+he had no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new <a name=
+"page144" id="page144"></a>turn to speculation. There is something
+almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes divine right
+and the social contract. The one is an inevitable deduction from
+theism, but it protects an usurper not less than an hereditary
+king, and gives a "divine commission" as well to a constable as to
+the most majestic prince. The proponents of the social contract are
+in no better case. "Were you to preach," he remarks, "in most parts
+of the world that political connections are founded altogether on
+voluntary consent, or on a mutual promise, the magistrate would
+soon imprison you as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience;
+if your friends did not before shut you up as delirious for
+advancing such absurdities." The original contract could not be
+produced, and, even if it were, it would suppose the "consent of
+the fathers to bind the children even to the most remote
+generations." The real truth, as he remarks, is that "almost all
+the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains
+any record in story, have been founded originally on usurpation, or
+on conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair <a name=
+"page145" id="page145"></a>consent or voluntary subjection of the
+people." If we then ask why obedience is possible, the sufficient
+answer is that "it becomes so familiar that most men never make any
+inquiry about its origin or cause, any more than about the
+principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of
+nature."</p>
+<p>Government, in short, is dependent upon the inescapable facts of
+psychology. It might be unnecessary if all desires could be
+individually fulfilled by making them, or if man showed to his
+fellow-men the same tender regard he has for himself. So happy a
+condition does not exist; and government is the most useful way of
+remedying the defects of our situation. A theologian might say that
+Hume derives government from original sin; to which he would have
+replied by denying the fall. His whole attitude is simply an
+insistence that utility is the touchstone of institutions, and he
+may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its application to
+the whole field of political science. He knows that opinion is the
+sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie at the
+base of the thoughts which get <a name="page146" id=
+"page146"></a>accepted. He does not, indeed, deny that fear and
+consent enter into the attitude of men; he simply asserts that
+these also are founded upon a judgment of utility in the thing
+judged. We obey because otherwise "society could not subsist," and
+society subsists for its utility. "Men," he says "could not live at
+all in society, at least in a civilized society, without laws and
+magistrates and judges, to prevent the encroachments of the strong
+upon the weak, of the violent upon the just and equitable."</p>
+<p>Utilitarianism is, of course, above all a method; and it is not
+unfair to say of Hume that he did not get very far beyond
+insistence on that point. He sees that the subjection of the many
+to the few is rooted in human impulse; but he has no penetrating
+inquiry, such as that of Locke or Hobbes, into the purpose of such
+subjection. So, too, it is the sense of public interest which
+determines men's thoughts on government, on who should rule, and
+what should be the system of property; but the ethical substance of
+these questions he leaves undetermined. Politics, he thinks, may
+one day be a science; though <a name="page147" id="page147"></a>he
+considers the world still too young for general truths therein. The
+maxims he suggests as of permanent value, "that a hereditary
+prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their
+representatives form the best monarchy, autocracy and democracy";
+that "free governments ... are the most ruinous and oppressive to
+their provinces"; that republics are more favorable to science,
+monarchies to art; that the death of a political body is
+inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most
+thinkers at the present time. And when he constructs an ideal
+constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be
+regarded as practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is
+obvious that the historical method had not yet come fully into
+being.</p>
+<p>Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an
+avoidance of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic
+insight that he had. He has a keen eye for the absurdity of Pope's
+maxim that administration is all in all; nothing can ever make the
+forms of government immaterial. He accepts Harrington's <a name=
+"page148" id="page148"></a>dictum that the substance of government
+corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as
+later thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces.
+He sees that the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or
+withstand the new balance of property in the State; a prophecy of
+which the accuracy was demonstrated by the failure of George III.
+"In all governments," as he says, "there is a perpetual intestinal
+struggle, open or secret," between Authority and Liberty; though
+his judgment that neither "can ever absolutely prevail," shows us
+rather that we are on the threshold of <i>laissez-faire</i> than
+that Hume really understood the problem of freedom. He realized
+that the House of Commons had become the pivot of the State; though
+he looked with dread upon the onset of popular government. He saw
+the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency to persist in
+terms of men instead of principles. He was convinced of the
+necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and
+no one, save Adam Smith, has more acutely insisted upon the evil
+effect on commerce of an absolute <a name="page149" id=
+"page149"></a>government. He emphasized the value of freedom of the
+press, in which he saw the secret whereby the mixed government of
+England was maintained. "It has also been found," he said in a
+happy phrase, "... that the people are no such dangerous monsters
+as they have been represented, and that it is in every respect
+better to guide them like rational creatures than to lead or drive
+them like brute beasts." There is, in fact, hardly a page of his
+work in which some such acuteness may not be found.</p>
+<p>Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is absent. Hume was a
+typical child of one aspect of the eighteenth century in his hatred
+of enthusiasm, and the form in which he most abominates it is
+religious. Why people's religious opinions should lead to
+antagonism he could no more understand than why people should
+refuse to pass one another on a road. Wars of religion thus seemed
+to him based upon a merely frivolous principle; and in his ideal
+commonwealth he made the Church a department of the State lest it
+should get out of hand. He was, moreover, a static philosopher,
+disturbed by signs of political <a name="page150" id=
+"page150"></a>restlessness; and this led to the purgation of Whig
+doctrines from his writings, and their consistent replacement by a
+cynical conservatism. He was always afraid that popular government
+would mean mob-rule; and absolute government is accordingly
+recommended as the euthanasia of the British constitution. Not even
+the example of Sweden convinced him that a standing army might
+exist without civil liberty being endangered; and he has all the
+noxious fallacies of his time upon the balance of power. Above all,
+it is striking to see his helplessness before the problem of
+national character. Mainly he ascribes it to the form of
+government, and that in turn to chance. Even the friend of
+Montesquieu can see no significance in race or climate. The idea,
+in fact, of evolution is entirely absent from his political
+speculation. Political life, like human life, ends in death; and
+the problem is to make our egress as comfortable as we can, for the
+prime evil is disturbance. It is difficult not to feel that there
+is almost a physical basis in his own disease for this love of
+quiet. The man who put indolence among the primary motives of human
+<a name="page151" id="page151"></a>happiness was not likely to view
+novel theories with unruffled temper.</p>
+<p>Hume has an eminent place among economists, and for one to whom
+the study of such phenomena was but a casual inquiry, it is
+marvelous how much he saw. He is free from the crude errors of
+mercantilism; and twenty years before Adam Smith hopes, "as a
+British subject," for the prosperity of other countries. "Free
+communication and exchange" seems to him an ordinance of nature;
+and he heaps contempt upon those "numberless bars, obstructions and
+imposts which all nations of Europe, and none more than England,
+have put upon trade." Specie he places in its true light as merely
+a medium of exchange. The supposed antagonism between commerce and
+agriculture he disposes of in a half-dozen effective sentences. He
+sees the place of time and distance in the discussion of economic
+want. He sees the value of a general level of economic equality,
+even while he is sceptical of its attainment. He insists upon the
+economic value of high wages, though he somewhat belittles the
+importance of wealth in the achievement of <a name="page152" id=
+"page152"></a>happiness. Before Bentham, who on this point
+converted Adam Smith, he knew that the rate of interest depends
+upon the supply of and demand for loans. He insists that commerce
+demands a free government for its progress, pointing out, doubtless
+from his abundant French experience, that an absolute government
+gives to the commercial class an insufficient status of honor. He
+pointed out, doubtless with France again in his mind, the evils of
+an arbitrary system of taxation. "They are commonly converted," he
+says with unwonted severity, "into punishments on industry; and
+also, by their unavoidable inequality, are more grievous, than by
+the real burden which they impose." And he emphasizes his belief
+that the best taxes are those which, like taxes upon luxury, press
+least upon the poor.</p>
+<p>Such insight is extraordinary enough in the pre-Adamite epoch;
+but even more remarkable are his psychological foundations. The
+wealth of the State, he says, is the labor of its subjects, and
+they work because the wants of man are not a stated sum, but
+"multiply every moment upon <a name="page153" id=
+"page153"></a>him." The desire for wealth comes from the idea of
+pleasure; and in the <i>Treatise on Human Nature</i> he discusses
+with superb clarity the way in which the idea of pleasure is
+related at once to individual satisfaction and to that sympathy for
+others which is one of the roots of social existence. He points out
+the need for happiness in work. "The mind," he writes, "acquires
+new vigor, enlarges its powers and faculties, and by an assiduity
+in honest industry both satisfies its own appetites and prevents
+growth of unnatural ones"; though, like his predecessor, Francis
+Hutcheson, he overemphasizes the delights opened by civilization to
+the humbler class of men. He gives large space in his discussion to
+the power of will; and, indeed, one of the main advantages he
+ascribed to government was the compulsion it puts upon us to allow
+the categories of time and space a part in our calculations. He
+does not, being in his own life entirely free from avarice, regard
+the appetite for riches as man's main motive to existence; though
+no one was more urgent in his insistence that "the avidity of
+acquiring goods and possessions for <a name="page154" id=
+"page154"></a>ourselves and our nearest friends is ... destructive
+of society" unless balanced by considerations of justice. And what
+he therein intended may be gathered from the liberal notions of
+equality he manifested. "Every person," he wrote in a famous
+passage, "if possible ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor in a
+full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the
+conveniences of life. No one can doubt but such an equality is most
+suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less the happiness of
+the rich than it adds to that of the poor." It is clear that we
+have moved far from the narrow confines of the old political
+arithmetic. The theory of utility enables Hume to see the scope of
+economics&mdash;the word itself he did not know&mdash;in a more
+generous perspective than at any previous time. It would be too
+much to say that his grasp of its psychological foundation enabled
+him entirely to move from the limitations of the older concept of a
+national prosperity expressed only in terms of bullion to the view
+of economics as a social science. But at least he saw that
+economics is rooted in the nature of men and therein he had the
+<a name="page155" id="page155"></a>secret of its true
+understanding. <i>The Wealth of Nations</i> would less easily have
+made its way had not the insight of Hume prepared the road for its
+reception.</p>
+<p>What, then, and in general, is his place in the history of
+political thought? Clearly enough, he is not the founder of a
+system; his work is rather a series of pregnant hints than a
+consecutive account of political facts. Nor must we belittle the
+debt he owes to his predecessors. Much, certainly, he owed to
+Locke, and the full radiance of the Scottish enlightenment emerges
+into the day with his teaching. Francis Hutcheson gave him no small
+inspiration; and Hutcheson means that he was indebted to
+Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy commonsense of the
+Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in that
+interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is
+characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle
+seventeenth century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the
+nineteenth.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref17" id="fnref17" href=
+"#fn17">[17]</a></span> He is entitled to be considered <a name=
+"page156" id="page156"></a>the real founder of utilitarianism. He
+first showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction
+between ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He
+brings to an end what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical
+school." After him we are done with the abuse of history to bolster
+up Divine Right and social contract; for there is clearly present
+in his use of facts a true sense of historical method. He put an
+end also to the confusion which resulted from the effort of
+thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong independent of all
+positive law. He took the facts as phenomena to be explained rather
+than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be maintained in
+part defiance of them. Conventional Whiggism has no foothold after
+he has done with its analysis. His utilitarianism was the first
+efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract
+school; and even if he was not the first to see through its
+pretensions&mdash;that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury&mdash;he
+was the first to show the grounds of their uselessness. He saw that
+history and psychology together provide the materials for <a name=
+"page157" id="page157"></a>a political philosophy. So that even if
+he could not himself construct it the hints at least were
+there.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn17" id="fn17" href=
+"#fnref17">[17]</a></span> There are few books which show so
+clearly as Lorimer's <i>Institutes of Nations</i> (1872) how fully
+the Scottish school was in the midstream of European thought.</div>
+<p>His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion.
+The metaphysics of Burke, so far as one may use a term he would
+himself have repudiated, are largely those of Hume. The place of
+habit and of social instinct alongside of consent, the perception
+that reason alone will not explain political facts, the emphasis
+upon resistance as of last resort, the denial that allegiance is a
+mere contract to be presently explained, the deep respect for
+order&mdash;all these are, after all, the fabric from which the
+thought of Burke was woven. Nor is there in Bentham's defence of
+Utilitarianism argument in which he would have recognized novelty.
+Herein, at least, his proof that morality is no more than general
+opinion of utility constructs, in briefer form, the later arguments
+of Bentham, Paley and the Mills, nor can their mode of statement
+claim superiority to Hume's. So that on either side of his work he
+foreshadows the advent of the two great schools of modern political
+thought. His utilitarianism is the real <a name="page158" id=
+"page158"></a>path by which radical opinion at last found means of
+acceptance. His use of history is, through Burke, the ancestor of
+that specialized conservatism begotten of the historical method. If
+there is thus so much, it is, of course, tempting to ask why there
+is not more. If Hume has the materials why did he fail to build up
+a system from them? The answer seems twofold. In part it is the man
+himself. His genius, as his metaphysics show, lay essentially in
+his power of destruction; and the man who gave solipsism to
+philosophy was not likely to effect a new creation in politics. In
+part, also, the condition of the time gave little stimulus to
+novelty. Herein Hume was born a generation too early. Had he
+written when George III attempted the destruction of the system of
+the Revolution, and when America and France combined to raise again
+the basic questions of politics, he might have done therein what
+Adam Smith effected in his own field. But the time had not yet
+come; and it was left to Burke and Bentham to reap where he had
+sown.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page159" id="page159"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>SIGNS OF CHANGE</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>From Hume until the publication of Burke's <i>Present
+Discontents</i> (1770) there is no work on English politics of the
+first importance. Walpole had fallen in 1742; but for the next
+fifteen years his methods dominated the parliamentary scene. It was
+only with the advent of the elder Pitt to power that a new temper
+may be observed, a temper quickened by what followed on the
+accession of George III. Henceforward, it is not untrue to say that
+the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it was no
+longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French
+Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim
+satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the
+standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight,
+though collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for
+men to <a name="page160" id="page160"></a>grumble where, as under
+Walpole, each harvest brought them greater prosperity, or where, as
+under Chatham, they leaped from victory to victory. Something of
+the exhilaration of these years we can still catch in the letters
+which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to turn off
+with easy laughter his deep sense of pride. In the House of
+Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show
+that a new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and
+Fielding, the first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and
+Collins, above all in the awakening of political science, that
+novelty is apparent.</p>
+<p>So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a
+single source, the French influence is the effective cause of
+change. Voltaire and Montesquieu had both visited England in the
+period of Walpole's administration, and both had been greatly
+influenced by what they saw. Rousseau, indeed, came later on that
+amazing voyage which the good-natured Hume insisted would save him
+from his dread of persecution, and there is evidence enough that he
+did not relish his <a name="page161" id="page161"></a>experience.
+Yet when he came, in 1762, to publish the <i>Contrat Social</i> it
+was obvious that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real
+meaning of their work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they
+gave to English institutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast
+difference between the simplicity of a government where sovereignty
+was the monarch's will and one in which a complex distribution of
+powers was found to secure a general freedom. The Frenchmen were
+amazed at the generous equality of English judicial procedure. The
+liberty of unlicensed printing&mdash;less admirable than they
+accounted it&mdash;the difference between a <i>Habeas Corpus</i>
+and a <i>lettre de cachet</i>, the regular succession of
+Parliaments, all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of
+their absence, as a magnificent achievement. The English
+constitution revealed to France an immense and unused reservoir of
+philosophic illustration. Even to Englishmen itself that meaning
+was but partly known. Locke's system was a generalization from its
+significance at a special crisis. Hume had partial glimpses of its
+inner substance. But for most it <a name="page162" id=
+"page162"></a>had become a discreet series of remedies for
+particular wrongs. Its analysis as a connected whole invigorated
+thought as nothing had done since the Civil Wars had elaborated the
+theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was more significant was
+the realization of Montesquieu's import simultaneously with the
+effort of George III to revive crown influence. Montesquieu thus
+became the prophet of a new race of thinkers. Rousseau's time was
+not yet; though within a score of years it was possible to see him
+as the rival to Burke's conservatism.</p>
+<p>It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which
+underlies the <i>Esprit des Lois</i> (1748). It is a commonplace
+now that Montesquieu is to be regarded as the founder of the
+historical method. The present is to be explained by its ancestry.
+Laws, governments, customs are not truths absolute and universal,
+but relative to the time of their origin and the country from which
+they derive. It would be inaccurate, with Rousseau on the
+threshold, to say that his influence demolished the systems of
+political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in the most
+<a name="page163" id="page163"></a>complete unreality, are to be
+found in Godwin's <i>Political Justice</i>; but it is not beyond
+the mark to affirm that after his time such abstract systems were
+on the defensive. Therein, with all his faults, he had given Burke
+the clue to those truths he so profoundly saw&mdash;the sense of
+the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the high regard
+for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past wisdom. He
+was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened this
+age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But
+Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the
+main mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of
+that decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first
+revealed the true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time
+so emphasized the importance of liberty as the true end of
+government; even the placid Blackstone adopted the utterance from
+him in his inaugural lecture as Vinerian professor. He insisted,
+too, on the danger of perversion to which political principle lies
+open; a feeling which found consistent utterance both in <a name=
+"page164" id="page164"></a>the debates of the Philadelphia
+Convention, and in the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What,
+perhaps, is most immediately significant is his famous praise of
+the British Constitution&mdash;the secret of which he entirely
+misapprehended&mdash;and his discovery of its essence in the
+separation of powers. The short sixth chapter of his eleventh book
+is the real keynote of Blackstone and De Lolme. It led them to
+investigate, on principles of at least doubtful validity, an
+edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the last
+criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth
+antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated
+structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That
+it was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have
+been made. The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines
+have been more noxious in their consequence than this theory of
+checks and balances. But Blackstone's <i>Commentaries</i> (1765-9)
+produced Bentham's <i>Fragment on Government</i> (1776), and with
+that book we enter upon the realistic study of the British
+Constitution.</p>
+<a name="page165" id="page165"></a>
+<p>Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from
+English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an
+influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were
+those that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had
+sought to avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real
+difference between them is no more than a removal of the
+limitations upon the power of government which Locke had proposed.
+It is a removal at every point conditioned by the interest of the
+people. For Rousseau declared that the existing distribution of
+power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and he made the people
+sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their achievement in
+the shape of sinister interest. The powers of the people thus
+became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for
+innovation. It is easy enough then to understand why such a
+philosophy should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager
+sympathy for humble men, his optimistic faith in the immediate
+prospect of popular power were to Burke the symptoms of insane
+delusion and their author "the great <a name="page166" id=
+"page166"></a>professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in
+England." But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's
+influence was the success of the American Revolution; and no one
+had done more than Burke himself to promote its cause and justify
+its principles. That revolution established what Europe might well
+consider a democracy; and its statesmen were astonished not less at
+the vigilance with which America guarded against the growth of
+autocratic government, than at the soberness with which it checked
+the supposed weakness of the sovereign people. America made herself
+independent while what was best in Europe combined in enthusiastic
+applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of Rousseau had been
+taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of power could
+remove what deliberation was impotent to secure. Here Rousseau had
+a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage denied. Nor,
+at the moment, was it influential except in the general impetus it
+gave to thought. But from the moment of its appearance it is an
+undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its <a name=
+"page167" id="page167"></a>metaphysical form it failed to command
+acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its results were victorious.
+Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the conclusions he recommends
+so much as in the language in which he clothes them. Either make a
+final end of the optimism of men like Hume and Blackstone, or the
+veneration for the past which is at the root of Burke's own
+teaching.</p>
+<p>It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the
+stimulus it did. Montesquieu came to praise the British
+constitution at a time when good men were aghast at its perversion.
+There was no room in many years for revolution, but at least there
+was place for hearty discontent and a seeking after new methods. Of
+that temper two men so different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are
+the political symbols. The former's rise to power upon the
+floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant nothing so much as a protest
+against the cynical corruption of the previous generation. Wilkes
+was a sign that the populace was slowly awaking to a sense of its
+own power. The French creed was too purely logical, too obviously
+the outcome <a name="page168" id="page168"></a>of alien conditions,
+to fit in its entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted,
+memories of wooden shoes played not a little part in its rejection.
+The rights of man made only a partial appeal until the miseries of
+Pitt's wars showed what was involved in that rejection; and then it
+was too late. But no one could feel without being stirred the
+illumination of Montesquieu; and Rousseau's questions, even if they
+proved unanswerable, were stuff for thought. The work of the forty
+years before the French Revolution is nothing so much as a
+preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes. The theorists
+build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is attuned
+to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the
+French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least,
+would have been a supreme achievement.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757. John
+Brown's <i>Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times</i>
+is largely forgotten now; <a name="page169" id="page169"></a>though
+it went through seven editions in a year and was at once translated
+into French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in the vast
+Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of comment
+upon the <i>Characteristics</i> of Shaftesbury. His book is too
+evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with
+reverence, to make us doubt its derivation. There is the same
+reliance upon Livy and Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking
+generalization; though the argument upon which Brown's conclusions
+are based is seldom given, perhaps because his geometric clarity of
+statement impressed him as self-demonstrative. Brown's volumes are
+an essay upon the depravity of the times. He does not deny it
+humanitarianism, and a still lingering sense of freedom, but it is
+steeped in corruption and displays nothing so much as a luxurious
+and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the universities out of hand,
+in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would not have rejected. He
+deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men trifle with Hume's
+gay impieties, and could not, if they would, <a name="page170" id=
+"page170"></a>appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton.
+Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish
+interests. The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them
+lost their former virtues. The neurotic temper of the times is
+known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of
+Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the
+kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every
+nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote
+themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize money.
+Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour
+brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman. The poor,
+indeed, the middle class, and the legal and medical professions,
+Brown specifically exempts from this indictment. But he emphasizes
+his belief that this is unimportant. "The manners and principles of
+those who lead," he says, "... not of those who are governed ...
+will ever determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the
+continuance or dissolution of a state."</p>
+<p>This profligacy Brown compares to the <a name="page171" id=
+"page171"></a>languid vice which preceded the fall of Carthage and
+of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great Britain at the
+hands of France, unless it can be cured. So far as he has an
+explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the
+decay of religious sentiment. His remedy is only Bolingbroke's
+Patriot King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen
+to the height of power. What mainly stirred Englishmen was the
+prophecy of defeat on the morrow of the disastrous convention of
+Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe and Clive repaired that royal
+humiliation Brown seems to have died a natural death. What is more
+interesting than his prophecies was the evidence of a close reading
+of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is the product of the
+climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and sullen temper.
+Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of England is
+the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the
+simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by
+enervation. Brown has no passion, and his book reads rather like
+Mr. Galsworthy's <i>Island Pharisees</i> sufficiently <a name=
+"page172" id="page172"></a>expurgated to be declaimed by a
+well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of
+attention to the evils of his time. It describes undoubted facts,
+and it shows that the era of content has gone. But its careful
+periods and strangely far-off air lack the eagerness for truth
+which Rousseau put into his questions. Brown can neither explain
+nor can he proffer remedy. He sees that Pitt is somehow
+significant; but when he rules out the popular voice as devoid of
+all importance, he deprives himself of the means whereby to grasp
+the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted. Nothing could prove
+more strongly the exactitude of Burke's <i>Present Discontents</i>.
+Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of Junius.</p>
+<p>Hume was the friend of Montesquieu, though twenty years his
+junior; and the <i>Esprit des Lois</i> travelled rapidly to
+Scotland. There it caught the eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a
+treatise on refinement, and by the influence of Hume and Adam
+Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of
+Edinburgh. Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular in his
+time, and certainly <a name="page173" id="page173"></a>he has a
+skill for polished phrase, and a genial paraphrase of other men's
+ideas. His <i>Essay on the History of Civil Society</i> (1767),
+which in a quarter of a century went through six editions, was
+thought by Helv&eacute;tius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume
+himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its
+suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make
+some fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the
+investigation of savage life will throw some light upon the origins
+of government. He sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the
+state of nature. He insists, probably after conversation with Adam
+Smith, upon the social value of the division of functions. He does
+not doubt the original equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his
+age has reached the limit of its useful growth. Property he traces
+back to a parental desire to make a better provision for children
+"than is found under the promiscuous management of many
+copartners." Climate has the new importance upon which Montesquieu
+has insisted; or, at least, as it "ripens the pineapple and the
+tamarina," <a name="page174" id="page174"></a>so it "inspires a
+degree of mildness that can even assuage the rigours of despotical
+government." The priesthood&mdash;this is Hume&mdash;becomes a
+separate influence under the sway of superstition. Liberty, he
+says, "is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions
+of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in behalf of equitable
+government." The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is certainly not
+here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in the
+obscurity into which he has fallen. The <i>Esprit des Lois</i> took
+twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of
+men like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped.
+Facile popularisers of this sort may have mollified the
+drawing-room; but they did not add to political ideas.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the
+students of constitutional law. Blackstone's <i>Commentaries on the
+Laws of England</i> (1765-9) has had ever since its first
+publication an authority such as Coke only before <a name="page175"
+id="page175"></a>possessed. "He it is," said Bentham, "who, first
+of all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the
+language of the Scholar and the Gentleman." Certainly, as Professor
+Dicey has remarked, "the book contains much real learning about our
+system of government." We are less concerned here with Blackstone
+as an antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy.
+Here his purpose seems obvious enough. The English constitution
+raised him from humble means through a Professorship at Oxford to a
+judgeship in the Court of Common Pleas. He had been a member of
+Parliament and refused the office of Solicitor-General. He had thus
+no reason to be dissatisfied with the conditions of his time; and
+the first book of the <i>Commentaries</i> is nothing so much as an
+attempt to explain why English constitutional law is a miracle of
+wisdom.</p>
+<p>Constitutional law, as such, indeed, found no place in
+Blackstone's book. It creeps in under the rights of persons, where
+he deals with the power of king and Parliament. His treatment
+implies a whole philosophy. Laws are of three <a name="page176" id=
+"page176"></a>kinds&mdash;of nature, of God, and of the civil
+state. Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is "a rule of
+civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state,
+commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong." It is, he
+tells us, "called a rule to distinguish it from a compact or
+agreement." It derives from the sovereign power, of which the chief
+character is the making of laws. Society is based upon the "wants
+and fears" of men; and it is coeval with their origin. The idea of
+a state of nature "is too wild to be seriously admitted," besides
+being contrary to historical knowledge. Society implies government,
+and whatever its origins or its forms there "must be in all of them
+a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which
+the <i>jura summa imperii</i>, or rights of sovereignty reside."
+The forms of government are classified in the usual way; and the
+British constitution is noted as a happy mixture of them all. "The
+legislature of the Kingdom," Blackstone writes, "is entrusted to
+three powers entirely independent of each other; first the King,
+secondly the lords spiritual and temporal, which is an <a name=
+"page177" id="page177"></a>aristocratical assembly of persons,
+chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour or
+their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen
+by the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of
+democracy; and as this aggregate body, actuated by different
+springs and attentive to different interests, composes the British
+Parliament and has the supreme disposal of everything; there can be
+no inconvenience attempted by either of the three branches, but
+will be withstood by one of the other two; each branch being armed
+with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it
+shall think inexpedient or dangerous." It is in the king in
+Parliament that British sovereignty resides. Eschewing the notion
+of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the
+implications of it are secured. "The constitutional government of
+this island," he says, "is so admirably tempered and compounded,
+that nothing can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the
+equilibrium of power between one branch of the legislature and the
+rest."</p>
+<p>All this is not enough; though, as <a name="page178" id=
+"page178"></a>Bentham was to show in his <i>Fragment on
+Government</i>, it is already far too much. "A body of nobility,"
+such is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, "is
+also more peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded
+constitution, in order to support the rights of both the Crown and
+people, by forming a barrier to withstand the encroachments of both
+... if they were confounded with the mass of the people, and like
+them had only a vote in electing representatives, their privileges
+would soon be borne down and overwhelmed by the popular torrent,
+which would effectually level all distinctions." "The Commons," he
+says further, "consist of all such men of property in the kingdom
+as have not seats in the House of Lords." The legal
+irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. "He is not only
+incapable of doing wrong," says Blackstone, "but even of thinking
+wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no
+folly or weakness," though he points out that the constitution "has
+allowed a latitude of supposing the contrary." The powers of the
+King are described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of
+<a name="page179" id="page179"></a>William the Norman than to the
+backstairs corruption of George III. The right of revolution is
+noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals rather
+than of law.</p>
+<p>"Its true defect," says Professor Dicey of the
+<i>Commentaries</i>, "is the hopeless confusion both of language
+and of thought introduced into the whole subject of constitutional
+law by Blackstone's habit&mdash;common to all the lawyers of his
+time&mdash;of applying old and inapplicable terms to new
+institutions." This is severe enough; yet Blackstone's sins are
+deeper than the criticism would suggest. He introduced into English
+political philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of
+substance upon which the whole vicious theory of checks and
+balances was erected. He made no distinction between the unlimited
+sovereignty of law and the very obviously limited sovereignty of
+reality. He must have known that to talk of the independence of the
+branches of the legislature was simple nonsense at a time when King
+and peers competed for the control of elections to the House of
+Commons. His idealization of a peerage whose <a name="page180" id=
+"page180"></a>typical spiritual member was Archbishop Cornwallis
+and whose temporal embodiment was the Duke of Bedford would not
+have deceived a schoolboy had it not provided a bulwark against
+improvement. It was ridiculous to describe the Commons as
+representative of property so long as places like Manchester and
+Sheffield were virtually disfranchised. His picture of the royal
+prerogative was a portrait against every detail of which what was
+best in England had struggled in the preceding century and a half.
+He has nothing to say of the cabinet, nothing of ministerial
+responsibility, nothing of the party system. What he did was to
+produce the defence of a non-existent system which acted as a
+barrier to all legal, and much political, progress in the next
+half-century. He gave men material without cause for
+satisfaction.</p>
+<p>As a description of the existing government there is thus hardly
+an element of Blackstone's work which could stand the test of
+critical inquiry. But even worse was its philosophy. As Bentham
+pointed out, he was unaware of the distinction between society and
+government. The state <a name="page181" id="page181"></a>of nature
+exists, or fails to exist, with startling inconsistency.
+Blackstone, in fact, was a Lockian who knows that Hume and
+Montesquieu have cut the ground from under his master's feet, and
+yet cannot understand how, without him, a foundation is to be
+supplied. Locke, indeed, seems to him, as a natural conservative,
+to go too far, and he rejects the original contract as without
+basis in history; yet contractual notions are present at every
+fundamental stage of his argument. The sovereign power, so we are
+told, is irresistible; and then because Blackstone is uncertain
+what right is to mean, we hear of moral limitations upon its
+exercise. He speaks continually of representation without any
+effort to examine into the notions it conveys. The members of
+society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify
+existent inequalities. "The natural foundations of sovereignty," he
+writes, "are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and
+power." Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have
+been taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the
+actual exertion of authority. Nor has he <a name="page182" id=
+"page182"></a>clear notions of the way in which property is to be
+founded. Communism, he writes in seventeenth century fashion, is
+the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the earth to
+men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the
+soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions. This
+is pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are
+utterly remote from the logical result of his own premises.</p>
+<p>The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these
+questions, only the most confused sort of notions. He had to
+preface his work with some sort of philosophic theory because the
+conditions of the age demanded it. The one source of enlightenment
+when he wrote was Hume; but for some uncertain reason, perhaps his
+piety, Blackstone makes no reference to the great sceptic's
+speculations. So that he was driven back upon notions he felt to be
+false, without a proper realization of their falsity. His use of
+Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a great idea can be
+in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than the
+fertility it contained. The merit of <a name="page183" id=
+"page183"></a>Blackstone is his learning, which was substantial,
+his realization that the powers of law demand some classification,
+his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is right alike in
+searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying the
+historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was
+little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the
+conditions of his time to question its assumptions.</p>
+<p>De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with
+Blackstone, what he failed to see was even more remarkable than
+what he did perceive, his book has real ability and merit. De Lolme
+was a citizen of Geneva, who published his <i>Constitution of
+England</i> in 1775, after a twelve months' visit to shores
+sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to die in obscurity and
+want. His book, as he tells us in his preface, was no mean success,
+though he derived no profit from it. Like Blackstone, he was
+impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional
+equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty. The attitude
+was not unnatural in one who, with his head full of <a name=
+"page184" id="page184"></a>Montesquieu, was a witness of the
+struggle between Junius and the King. He has, of course, the
+limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of
+government in purely mechanical terms. "It is upon the passions of
+mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable,
+that the action of the various parts of a state depends. The
+machine may vary as to its dimensions; but its movement and acting
+springs still remain intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks
+of government as "a great ballet or dance in which ... everything
+depends upon the disposition of the figures." He does not deal,
+that is to say, with men as men, but only as inert adjuncts of a
+machine by which they are controlled. Such an attitude is bound to
+suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction. It regards
+historic forces as distinct from the men related to them. Every
+mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to
+unstability. The English avoid these dangers by playing off the
+royal power against the popular. The King's interest is safeguarded
+by the division of Parliament into two Houses, each of <a name=
+"page185" id="page185"></a>which rejects the encroachment of the
+other upon the executive. His power is limited by parliamentary
+privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and so
+forth. The theory was not true; though it represented with some
+accuracy the ideals of the time.</p>
+<p>Nor must we belittle what insight De Lolme possessed. He saw
+that the early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented
+the continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with
+the result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the
+English people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior
+power. He understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was
+the independence of the judges. He realized that the
+party-system&mdash;he never used the actual term&mdash;while it
+provides room for men's ambitions at the same time prevents the
+equation of ambition with indispensability. "Woe to him," says De
+Lolme, "... who should endeavor to make the people believe that
+their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single citizen."
+He sees the paramount value of freedom of the press. This, as
+<a name="page186" id="page186"></a>he says, with the necessity that
+members should be re-elected, "has delivered into the hands of the
+people at large the exercise of the censorial power." He has no
+doubt but that resistance is the remedy whereby governmental
+encroachment can be prevented; "resistance," he says, "is the
+ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of power." He
+points out how real is the guarantee of liberty where the onus of
+proof in criminal cases is thrown upon the government. He regards
+with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military arm,
+and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it
+has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding
+to the royal power. Nor can he fail to admire the insight which
+organizes "the agitation of the popular mind," not as "the
+forerunner of violent commotions" but to "animate all parts of the
+state." Therein De Lolme had grasped the real essence of party
+government.</p>
+<p>It was, of course, no more than symptomatic of his time that
+cabinet and prime minister should have escaped his notice. A more
+serious defect was his inability, <a name="page187" id=
+"page187"></a>with the Wilkes contest prominently in his notice, to
+see that the people had assumed a new importance. For the masses,
+indeed, De Lolme had no enthusiasm. "A passive share," he thought,
+"was the only one that could, with safety to the state, be trusted"
+to the humble man. "The greater part," he wrote, "of those who
+compose this multitude, taken up with the care of providing for
+their subsistence, have neither sufficient leisure, nor even, in
+consequence of their imperfect education, the degree of
+information, requisite for functions of this kind." Such an
+attitude blinded him to the significance of the American conflict,
+which he saw unattended by its moral implications. He trusted too
+emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that
+institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George
+III could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a
+sense of its own power. The real social forces of the time found
+there no channels of activity; and the difference between De Lolme
+and Bagehot is the latter's power to go behind the screen of
+statute to the inner sources of power.</p>
+<a name="page188" id="page188"></a>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p>The basis of revolutionary doctrine was already present in
+England when, in 1762, Rousseau published his <i>Contrat
+Social</i>. With its fundamental doctrines Locke had already made
+his countrymen familiar; and what was needed for the appreciation
+of its teaching was less a renaissance than discontent. So soon as
+men are dissatisfied with the traditional foundations of the State,
+a gospel of natural rights is certain to make its appearance. And,
+once the design of George III had been made familiar by his
+treatment of Chatham and Wilkes, the discontent did not fail to
+show itself. Indeed, in the year before the publication of
+Rousseau's book, Robert Wallace, a Scottish chaplain royal, had
+written in his <i>Various Prospects</i> (1761) a series of essays
+which are at once an anticipation of the main thesis of Malthus and
+a plea for the integration of social forces by which alone the mass
+of men could be raised from misery. In the light of later
+experience it is difficult not to be impressed by the modernist
+flavour of Wallace's attack. <a name="page189" id="page189"></a>He
+insists upon the capacity of men and the disproportion between
+their potential achievement and that which is secured by actual
+society. Men are in the mass condemned to ignorance and toil; and
+the lust of power sets man against his neighbor to the profit of
+the rich. Wallace traces these evils to private property and the
+individualistic organization of work, and he sees no remedy save
+community of possessions and a renovated educational system. Yet he
+does not conceal from himself that it is to the interest of the
+governing class to prevent a revolution which, beneficent to the
+masses, would be fatal to themselves; nor does he conceive it
+possible until the fertility of men has been reduced to the
+capacity of the soil. He speculates upon the chances of a new
+spirit among men, of an all-wise legislator, and of the beneficent
+example of colonies upon the later Owenite model. But his book is
+contemporaneous with our own ideas rather than with the thoughts of
+his generation. Nor does it seem to have excited any general
+attention.</p>
+<p>It is five years after Rousseau that we see the first clear
+signs of his influence. <a name="page190" id=
+"page190"></a>Naturally enough the men amongst whom the new spirit
+spread abroad were the Nonconformists. For more than seventy years
+they had been allowed existence without recognition. None had more
+faithfully supported the new dynasty than they; none had been paid
+less for their allegiance. Their utmost effort could secure only a
+sparing mitigation of the Test Act. All of them were Whigs, and the
+doctrines of Locke suited exactly their temper and their wants.
+There were amongst them able men in every walk of life, and they
+were apt to publication. Joseph Priestley, in particular, gave up
+with willingness to mankind what was obviously meant for chemical
+science. A few years previously Brown of the <i>Estimate</i> had
+submitted a scheme for national education, in which the essential
+principle was Church control. Priestley had answered him, and was
+encouraged by friends to expand his argument into a general
+treatise. His <i>Essay on the First Principles of Government</i>
+appeared in 1768; and, if for nothing else, it would be noteworthy
+because it was therein that the significance of the "greatest
+happiness principle" first <a name="page191" id=
+"page191"></a>flashed across Bentham's mind. But the book shows
+more than this. "I had placed," says Priestley with due modesty,
+"the foundation of some of the most valuable interests of mankind
+on a broader and firmer basis than Mr. Locke"; and the breadth and
+firmness are Rousseau's contribution.</p>
+<p>Certainly we herein meet new elements. On the very threshold of
+the book we meet the dogma of the perfectibility of man.
+"Whatever," Priestley rhapsodizes, "was the beginning of this
+world, the end will be glorious and paradisaical, beyond what our
+imaginations can now conceive." "The instrument of this progress
+... towards this glorious state" is government; though a little
+later we are to find that the main business of government is
+noninterference. Men are all equal, and their natural rights are
+indefeasible. Government must be restrained in the interests of
+liberty. No man can be governed without his consent; for government
+is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in
+exchange for a power to share in public decisions. It thus follows
+that the people must be <a name="page192" id=
+"page192"></a>sovereign, and interference with their natural rights
+will justify resistance. Every government, he says, is "in its
+original principles, and antecedent to its present form an equal
+republic"; wherefore, of course, it follows that we must restore to
+men the equality they have lost. And, equally, of course, this
+would bestow upon the Nonconformists their full citizenship; for
+Warburton's <i>Alliance</i>, to attack which Priestley exhausts all
+the resources of his ingenuity, has been one of the main
+instruments in their degradation. "Unbounded liberty in matters of
+religion," which means the abolition of the Establishment, promises
+to be "very favorable to the best interests of mankind."</p>
+<p>So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for
+English Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import. It can
+never be forgotten in the history of political ideas that the
+alliance of Church and State made Nonconformists suspicious of
+government interference. Their original desire to be left unimpeded
+was soon exalted into a definite theory; and since political
+conditions had confined them so largely to trade none felt as they
+<a name="page193" id="page193"></a>did the hampering influence of
+State-restrictions. The result has been a great difficulty in
+making liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the
+organic nature of the State. It remains for them almost entirely a
+police institution which, once it aims at the realization of right,
+usurps a function far better performed by individuals. There is no
+sense of the community; all that exists is a sum of private
+sentiments. "Civil liberty," says Priestley, "has been greatly
+impaired by an abuse of the maxim that the joint understanding of
+all the members of a State, properly collected, must be preferable
+to that of individuals; and consequently that the more the cases
+are in which mankind are governed by this united reason of the
+whole community, so much the better; whereas, in truth, the greater
+part of human actions are of such a nature, that more inconvenience
+would follow from their being fixed by laws than from their being
+left to every man's arbitrary will." If my neighbor assaults me, he
+suggests, I may usefully call in the police; but where the object
+is the discovery of truth, the means of education, <a name=
+"page194" id="page194"></a>the method of religious belief,
+individual initiative is superior to State action. The latter
+produces an uniform result "incompatible with the spirit of
+discovery." Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just to
+posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future. Men
+are too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all
+action.</p>
+<p>Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past
+tradition; and the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered
+broadcast over his pages. Nevertheless the basis upon which he
+defended his ideas was a utilitarianism hardly less complete than
+that which Bentham made the instrument of revolution. "Regard to
+the general good," he says, "is the main method by which natural
+rights are to be defended." "The good and happiness of the members,
+that is, the majority of the members of any State, is the great
+standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be
+determined." In substance, that is to say, if not completely in
+theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to those of
+expediency. His chief <a name="page195" id="page195"></a>attack
+upon religious legislation is similarly based upon considerations
+of policy. His view of the individual as a never-ending source of
+fruitful innovation anticipates all the later Benthamite arguments
+about the well-spring of individual energy. Interference and
+stagnation are equated in exactly similar fashion to Adam Smith and
+his followers. Priestley, of course, was inconsistent in urging at
+the outset that government is the chief instrument of progress; but
+what he seems to mean is less that government has the future in its
+hands than that government action may well be decisive for good or
+evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism is his glorification of
+reason as the great key which is to unlock all doors. That is, of
+course, natural in a scientist who had himself made discoveries of
+vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school which
+scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of
+unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices
+of that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every
+problem it encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a
+confidence <a name="page196" id="page196"></a>in the energies of
+men was better than the complacent stagnation of the previous
+age.</p>
+<p>It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley
+exerted; certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small.
+Dr. Richard Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he
+might have had has been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents.
+His sinking-fund scheme was taken up by the younger Pitt, and
+proved, though the latter believed in it to the last, to be founded
+upon an arithmetical fallacy which did not sit well upon a fellow
+of the Royal Society. His sermon on the French Revolution provoked
+the <i>Reflections</i> of Burke; and, though much of the right was
+on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he survived
+Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day, and
+he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English
+revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb
+optimism; for the rigid <i>a priori</i> morality of which he was
+the somewhat muddled defender was less favorable to a confidence in
+reason. He had a good deal of John Brown's fear that <a name=
+"page197" id="page197"></a>luxury was the seed of English
+degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the
+population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were
+unessential to the general thesis he had to make.</p>
+<p>Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to
+print by the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely
+popular, his <i>Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty</i>
+(1776) attained its eighth edition within a decade. This, with its
+supplement <i>Additional Observations</i> (1777), presents a
+perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their ancestry concealed. They
+represent the tradition of Locke, modified by the importations of
+Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume, and he takes
+sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has little or
+nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument is
+upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government,
+and self-government means the right of every man to be his own
+legislator. Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to
+its last consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public
+services"; laws are "particular <a name="page198" id=
+"page198"></a>provisions or regulations established by Common
+Consent for gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are
+"trustees or deputies for carrying these regulations into
+execution." And almost in the words of Rousseau, Price goes on to
+admit that liberty, "in its most perfect degree, can be enjoyed
+only in small states where every independent agent is capable of
+giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen into public
+offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though he
+thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize
+the sacrifice of liberty involved.</p>
+<p>But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized.
+"Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust;
+and all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects
+the theory of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with
+self-government; if the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its
+life, it would betray its constituents and dissolve itself. "If
+omnipotence," he writes, "can with any sense be ascribed to a
+legislature, it must be lodged where all legislative authority
+originates; that is, in <a name="page199" id="page199"></a>the
+People." Such a system is alone compatible with the ends of
+government, since it cannot be supposed that men "combine into
+communities and institute government" for self-enslavement. Nor is
+any other political system "consistent with the natural equality of
+mankind"; by which Price means that no man "is constituted by the
+author of nature the vassal or subject of another, or has any right
+to give law to him, or, without his consent, to take away any part
+of his property or to abridge him of his liberty." From all of
+which it is concluded that liberty is inalienable; and a people
+which has lost it "must have a right to emancipate themselves as
+soon as they can." The aptness of the argument to the American
+situation is obvious enough; and nowhere is Price more happy or
+more formidable than when he applies his precepts to phrases like
+"the unity of the empire" and the "honor of the kingdom" which were
+so freely used to cover up the inevitable results of George's
+obstinacy.</p>
+<p>The <i>Essay on the Right of Property in Land</i> (1781) of
+William Ogilvie deserves at least a passing notice. The author, who
+<a name="page200" id="page200"></a>published his book anonymously,
+was a Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen and an
+agriculturist of some success. His own career was distinctly
+honorable. The teacher of Sir James Mackintosh, he had a high
+reputation as a classical scholar and deserves to be remembered for
+his effort to reform a college which had practically ceased to
+perform its proper academic functions. His book is virtually an
+essay upon the natural right of men to the soil. He does not doubt
+that the distress of the times is due to the land monopoly. The
+earth being given to men in common, its invasion by private
+ownership is a dangerous perversion. Men have the right to the full
+product of their labor; but the privileges of the landowner prevent
+the enjoyment of that right. The primary duty of every State is the
+increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation is that which
+has the greatest number of free and independent cultivators. But
+governments attend rather to the interest of the higher classes,
+even while they hold out the protection of the common people as the
+main pretext of their authority. <a name="page201" id=
+"page201"></a>The result is their maintenance of land-monopoly even
+though it affects the prime material of all essential industries,
+prevents the growth of population, and makes the rich wealthier at
+the expense of the poor. It breeds oppression and ignorance, and
+poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative. He points
+out how a nation is dominated by its landlords, and how they have
+consistently evaded the fiscal burdens they should bear. Only in a
+return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source
+of an increase in happiness.</p>
+<p>Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to
+speak of actual changes, he had little more to propose than a
+system of peasant proprietorship. What is striking in the book is
+its sense of great, impending changes, its thorough grasp of the
+principle of utility, its realization of the immense agricultural
+improvement that is possible if the landed system can be so changed
+as to bring into play the impulses of humble men. He sees clearly
+enough that wealth dominates the State; and his interpretation of
+history is throughout economic. Ogilvie <a name="page202" id=
+"page202"></a>is one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who,
+chiefly through Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special
+current of their own in the great tide of protest against the
+unjust situation of labor. Like them, he builds his system upon
+natural rights; though, unlike them, his natural rights are
+defended by expediency and in a style that is always clear and
+logical. The book itself has rather a curious history. At its
+appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind.
+Mackintosh knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against
+the amiable delusion that its excellence would persuade the British
+government to force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the
+East India Company. Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby,
+it was intended to instruct the Chartists in the secret of their
+oppression; and therein it may well have contributed to the
+tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus O'Connor. In 1891 the problem of
+the land was again eagerly debated under the stimulus of Mr. Henry
+George; and a patriotic Scotchman published the book with
+biographical notes that constitute one of the most <a name=
+"page203" id="page203"></a>amazing curiosities in English political
+literature.</p>
+<h4>V</h4>
+<p>Against the school of Rousseau's English disciples it is
+comparatively easy to multiply criticisms. They lacked any historic
+sense. Government, for them, was simply an instrument which was
+made and unmade at the volition of men. How complex were its
+psychological foundations they had no conception; with the single
+factor of consent they could explain the most marvellous edifice of
+any time. They were buried beneath a mountain of metaphysical right
+which they never related to legal facts or to political
+possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions of
+the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to
+investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led.
+They overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy
+themselves with political affairs. They made no proper allowance
+for the protective armour each social system must acquire by the
+mere force of prescription. Nor is <a name="page204" id=
+"page204"></a>there sufficient allowance in their attitude for
+those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman
+must of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to
+say, so completely with <i>staatslehre</i> that they do not admit
+the mollifying influence of <i>politik</i>. They search for
+principles of universal right, without the perception that a right
+which is to be universal must necessarily be so general in
+character as to be useless in its application.</p>
+<p>Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of
+their insight. They were protesting against a system strongly
+upheld on grounds which now appear to have been simply
+indefensible. The business of government had been made the private
+possession of a privileged class; and eagerness for desirable
+change was, in the mass, absent from the minds of most men engaged
+in its direction. The loss of America, the heartless treatment of
+Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the Wilkes affair, the
+heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and North at the
+direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of <a name=
+"page205" id="page205"></a>most to the fact that principle is a
+vital part of policy. The revolutionists recalled men to the need
+of explaining, no less than carrying on, the government of the
+Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by elements of
+which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid intrigues of
+the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government as in its
+nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful reminder
+that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the
+governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on
+political controversy as though no public opinion existed outside
+the small circle of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its
+idol was, in a blind and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that
+Price and Priestley had in mind. For the moment, they were
+unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his Constitutional Societies, might
+capture the support of an eccentric peer like the Duke of Richmond;
+but the vast majority remained, if irritated, unconvinced. It
+needed the realization that the new doctrines were part of a vaster
+synthesis which swept within its purview <a name="page206" id=
+"page206"></a>the fortunes of Europe and America before they would
+give serious heed; and even then they met antagonism with nothing
+save oppression and hate. Yet the doctrines remained; for thought,
+after all, is killed by reasoned answer alone. And when the first
+gusts of war and revolution had passed, the cause for which they
+stood was found to have permeated all classes save that which had
+all to lose by learning.</p>
+<p>We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and
+Priestley as representing more than an important segment of
+opinion. The opposition to their theories was not less articulate
+than their own defence of them. Some, like Burke, desired a
+purification of the existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had
+no sort of sympathy with new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least,
+deserves some mention less for the inherent value of what he had to
+say, than for the nature of the opinions he expounded. Josiah
+Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a reputation alike in political
+and economic enquiry. He represents the sturdy nationalism of
+Arbuthnot's <i>John Bull</i>, the unreasoned <a name="page207" id=
+"page207"></a>prejudice against all foreigners, the hatred of all
+metaphysics as inconsistent with common sense, the desire to let
+things be on the ground that the effort after change is worse than
+the evil of which men complain. His <i>Treatise on Civil
+Government</i> (1781) is in many ways a delightful book, bluff,
+hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that is
+all its own. He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the
+first place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the
+second, to explode the new bubble of Rousseau's followers. The
+second point takes the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as
+Tucker shrewdly saw, the theories of the school may trace their
+ancestry. He analyses the theory of consent in such fashion as to
+show that if its adherents could be persuaded to be logical, they
+would have to admit themselves anarchists. He has no sympathy with
+the state of nature; the noble savage, on investigation, turns out
+to be a barbaric creature with a club and scalping knife.
+Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or, as he prefers,
+somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that does not
+mean <a name="page208" id="page208"></a>that the actual governors
+can be dismissed when any eccentric happens to take exception to
+their views. He has no sympathy with parliamentary reform. Give the
+mob an increase of power, he says, and nothing is to be expected
+but outrage and violence. He thinks the constitution very well as
+it is, and those who preach the evils of corruption ought to prove
+their charges instead of blasphemously asserting that the voice of
+the people is the voice of God.</p>
+<p>Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own. He does not doubt
+that the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered
+upon them. Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as
+ever George III himself could have desired. But not for one moment
+would he fight them to compel their return to British allegiance.
+If the American colonies want to go, let them by all means cut
+adrift. They are only a useless source of expenditure. The trade
+they represent does not depend upon allegiance but upon wants that
+England can supply if she keeps shop in the proper way, if, that
+is, she makes it to their interest to buy in her market. Indeed,
+colonies of all kinds <a name="page209" id="page209"></a>seem to
+him quite useless. They ever are, he says, and ever were, "a drain
+to and an incumbrance on the Mother-country, requiring perpetual
+and expensive nursing in their infancy, and becoming headstrong and
+ungovernable in proportion as they grow up." All wise relations
+depend upon self-interest, and that needs no compulsion. If
+Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up, the result
+would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and contracts
+effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal industry
+encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that
+mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism
+half-a-century before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean
+crustily explaining his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had
+just rejected Edmund Burke for advocating free trade with
+Ireland.</p>
+<p>No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr.
+Johnson. Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of
+gloomy prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of
+the source from which they come. He <a name="page210" id=
+"page210"></a>thought life a poor thing at the best and took a low
+view of human nature. "The notion of liberty," he told the faithful
+Boswell, "amuses the people of England and helps to keep off the
+<i>tedium vitae</i>." The idea of a society properly organized into
+ranks and societies he always esteemed highly. "I am a friend to
+subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of
+society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the
+offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he
+seems to have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as
+the worst of sins. He did not believe in the honesty of
+republicans; they levelled down, but were never inclined to level
+up. Men, he felt, had a part to act in society, and their business
+was to fulfil their allotted station. Rousseau was a very bad man:
+"I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of
+any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years."
+Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth while was
+freedom in private concerns. He blessed the government in the case
+of general warrants and thought the power <a name="page211" id=
+"page211"></a>of the Crown too small. Toleration he considered due
+to an inapt distinction between freedom to think and freedom to
+talk, and any magistrate "while he thinks himself right ... ought
+to enforce what he thinks." The American revolt he ascribed to
+selfish faction; and in his <i>Taxation no Tyranny</i> (1775) he
+defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite
+ground of the necessity of subordination. He was willing, he said,
+to love all mankind except an American.</p>
+<p>Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure
+in an acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank
+and fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who
+wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of
+abasement. He knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that
+will keep us safe under every form of government." He defined a
+courtier in the <i>Idler</i> as one "whose business it is to watch
+the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself." Much of what he
+felt was in part a revolt against the sentimental aspect of
+contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt for <a name=
+"page212" id="page212"></a>the talk of degeneracy that men such as
+Brown had made popular. There is, indeed, in all his political
+observations a strong sense of the virtue of order, and a
+perception that the radicalism of the time was too abstract to
+provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as elsewhere,
+Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental
+questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no
+age are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is
+diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require
+something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's
+attitude would have been admirable where there were no questions to
+debate; but where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had
+nothing to contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain
+weapon of utility in a different and complex world; and it was
+because the age refused to look it in the face that it invited the
+approach of revolution.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page213" id="page213"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>BURKE</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>It is the special merit of the English constitutional system
+that the king stands outside the categories of political conflict.
+He is the dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at
+least in theory, is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The
+merit, indeed, is largely accidental; and we shall miss the real
+fashion in which it came to be established unless we remark the
+vicissitudes through which it has passed. The foreign birth of the
+first two Hanoverians, the insistent widowhood of Queen Victoria,
+these rather than deliberate foresight have secured the elevated
+nullification of the Crown. Yet the first twenty-five years of
+George III's reign represent the deliberate effort of an obstinate
+man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once more the
+balance of <a name="page214" id="page214"></a>power. Nor was the
+effort defeated without a struggle which went to the root of
+constitutional principle.</p>
+<p>And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a
+time highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost
+much credit during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke,
+Carteret and the elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a
+system which depended for its existence upon the exclusion of able
+men from power. A generation of corrupt practice and the final
+defeat of Stuart hopes had already deprived the Whigs of any
+special hold on their past ideals. They were divided already into
+factions the purpose of which was no more than the avid pursuit of
+place and pension. Government by connection proved itself
+irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also that once
+corruption was centralized there was no limit to its influence,
+granted only the absence of great questions. When George III
+transferred that organization from the office of the minister to
+his own court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his
+success. For more than forty years the Tories had <a name="page215"
+id="page215"></a>been excluded from office; and they were more than
+eager to sell their support. The Church had become the creature of
+the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was towards
+benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind of
+George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He
+had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and
+a reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's
+first book can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor
+was it obvious that a genuine kingship would have been worse than
+the oligarchy of the great Whig families.</p>
+<p>What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of
+the king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined
+somewhat to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was
+excessively ignorant and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no
+one but himself, and he totally misunderstood the true nature of
+his office. There is no question which arose in the first forty
+years of his reign in which he was not upon the wrong side and
+proud of his error. He was <a name="page216" id="page216"></a>wrong
+about Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about
+France. He demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked
+every measure for the purification of the political system. He
+supported the Slave trade and he opposed the repeal of the Test
+Act. He prevented the grant of Catholic emancipation at the one
+moment when it might have genuinely healed the wounds of Ireland.
+He destroyed by his perverse creations the value of the House of
+Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly determined to make
+his will the criterion of policy; and his design might have
+succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to its
+greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen
+with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in
+politics. The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the
+court upon a broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as
+the event proved, could be as subservient to the king as to his
+minister.</p>
+<p>Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with
+characteristic stupidity, the <a name="page217" id=
+"page217"></a>king did not know the proper instruments for his
+purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the
+suspicion of the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder
+Pitt. In the Wilkes affair he threw the clearest light of the
+century upon the true nature of the House of Commons. His own
+system of proscription restored to the Whig party not a little of
+the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to supply them with a
+philosophy. Chatham remained the idol of the people despite his
+hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of representative
+government and of personal liberty. He lost America and it was not
+his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he
+received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had
+made him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt
+was to compel attention once again to the foundations of politics;
+and George's effort, in the light of his immense failures, could
+not, in the nature of things, survive that analysis.</p>
+<p>Not, of course, that George ever lacked defenders. As early as
+1761, the old rival of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage <a name=
+"page218" id="page218"></a>had condemned to obsolescence, published
+his <i>Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the new Reign</i>.
+Pulteney urged the sovereign no longer to be content with the
+"shadow of royalty." He should use his "legal prerogatives" to
+check "the illegal claims of factious oligarchy." Government had
+become the private possession of a few powerful men. The king was
+but a puppet in leading strings. The basis of government should be
+widened, for every honest man was aware that distinctions of party
+were now merely nominal. The Tories should be admitted to place.
+They were now friendly to the accession and they no longer boasted
+their hostility to dissent. They knew that Toleration and the
+Establishment were of the essence of the Constitution. Were once
+the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would cease and
+Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom. "The
+ministers," he said, "will depend on the Crown not the Crown on
+ministers" if George but showed "his resolution to break all
+factitious connections and confederacies." The tone is
+Bolingbroke's, and it was the lesson George had <a name="page219"
+id="page219"></a>insistently heard from early youth. How sinister
+was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in
+political exile, with Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants
+threatening the whole basis of past liberties.</p>
+<p>The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the
+meaning of the new synthesis was Junius. That his anonymity
+concealed the malignant talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now
+beyond denial. Junius, indeed, can hardly claim a place in the
+history of political ideas. His genius lay not in the discussion of
+principle but the dissection of personality. His power lay in his
+style and the knowledge that enabled him to inform the general
+public of facts which were the private possession of the inner
+political circle. His mind was narrow and pedantic. He stood with
+Grenville on American taxation; and he maintained without
+perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough was a freehold
+beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He was never
+generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his
+calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness <a name=
+"page220" id="page220"></a>the nature of the issue and he was a
+powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king. He won a new
+audience for political conflict and that audience was the
+unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover,
+appearing as they did in the daily journals gave the press a
+significance in politics which it has never lost. He made the
+significance of George's effort known to the mass of men at a time
+when no other means of information was at hand. The opposition was
+divided; the king's friends were in a vast majority; the
+publication of debates was all but impossible. English government
+was a secret conflict in which the entrance of spectators was
+forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate. It was the
+glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. Not even the
+combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord
+Mansfield's doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of
+his vituperation and Wilkes' courage. Bad men have sometimes been
+the instruments of noble destiny; and there are few more curious
+episodes in English history than the result of this alliance
+between revengeful hate and insolent ambition.</p>
+<a name="page221" id="page221"></a>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was
+the ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict
+its real place in philosophy. There is no immortality save in
+ideas; and it was Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in
+which he was the liberal protagonist. His career is illustrative at
+once of the merits and defects of English politics in the
+eighteenth century. The son of an Irish Protestant lawyer and a
+Catholic mother, he served, after learning what Trinity College,
+Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to politics in the
+upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied, along with
+Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal; though
+the <i>Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful</i> (1756)
+shows his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made
+the special possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub
+Street that he appears to have attained that amazing amount of
+varied yet profound knowledge which made him without equal in the
+House of Commons. <a name="page222" id="page222"></a>His earliest
+production was a <i>Vindication of Natural Society</i> (1756),
+written in the manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in
+its imitative satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but
+also to become the basis of Godwin's <i>Political Justice</i>.
+After a vain attempt to serve in Ireland with "Single-Speech"
+Hamilton, he became the private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the
+leader of the one section of the Whig party to which an honorable
+record still remained. That connection secured for him a seat in
+Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six; and
+henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading
+members. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very
+outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still,
+in the eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in
+the short months during which he held office, the minor office of
+Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom
+all England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a
+place at the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a
+memory of great lovableness <a name="page223" id="page223"></a>and
+Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has endured as the
+permanent manual of political wisdom without which statesmen are as
+sailors on an uncharted sea.</p>
+<p>For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to
+obtain acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but
+to give deep comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a
+singularly lovable figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said
+Johnson; and Goldsmith has told us how he wound his way into a
+subject like a serpent. Macaulay thought him the greatest man since
+Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest master of civil wisdom in our
+tongue." "No English writer," says Sir Leslie Stephen, "has
+received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics." Even when the
+last criticism has been made, detraction from these estimates is
+impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent was his
+temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which he
+allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations
+with Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of <a name=
+"page224" id="page224"></a>his personal antipathies. As an orator,
+his speeches are often turgid, wanting in self-control, and full of
+those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone delighted to obscure
+his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal a magnificent
+loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of comparative
+poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe. His
+alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics,
+unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never
+guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public
+welfare. No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to
+the service of the nation with less regard for personal
+advancement. No English statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a
+mass of details to the principle they involve.</p>
+<p>He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no
+influence to whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics,
+indeed, bear upon their face the preoccupation with the immediate
+problems of the House of Commons. Yet through them all the
+principles that <a name="page225" id="page225"></a>emerge form a
+consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the
+passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw
+it with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to
+challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the
+maxims of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London
+out to India and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian
+ryot's wrongs as for the iniquities of English policy to Ireland.
+With less width of mind than Hume and less intensity of gaze than
+Adam Smith, he yet had a width and intensity which, fused with his
+own imaginative sympathy, gave him more insight than either. He had
+an unerring eye for the eternal principles of politics. He knew
+that ideals must be harnessed to an Act of Parliament if they are
+not to cease their influence. Admitting while he did that politics
+must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find good reason why
+expediency should be identified with what he saw as right. It is a
+stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English politics
+to whom a greater immediate <a name="page226" id=
+"page226"></a>influence may be ascribed, just as in political
+philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of Hobbes and
+Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and speculation
+his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like him
+before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer
+Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his
+practical insight was far less profound. Hamilton had Burke's full
+grasp of political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation. So
+that he remains a figure of uniqueness. He may, as Goldsmith said,
+have expended upon his party talents that should have illuminated
+the universal aspect of the State. Yet there is no question with
+which he dealt that he did not leave the richer for his
+enquiry.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the
+immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he
+was at every point upon the side of the future. Where
+constitutional reform was in debate no man <a name="page227" id=
+"page227"></a>saw more clearly than he the evils that needed
+remedy; though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the
+mark of timid conservatism. In the last decade of his life he
+encountered the greatest cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the
+Reformation, and it is not too much to say that at every point he
+missed the essence of its meaning. Yet even upon France and the
+English Constitution he was full of practical sagacity. Had his
+warning been uttered without the fury of hate that accompanied it,
+he might well have guided the forces of the Revolution into
+channels that would have left no space for the military
+dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real
+evils of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently
+inveighed, forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch
+of wise and continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and,
+at bottom, he had little regard for that popular sense of right
+which, upon occasion, he was ready to praise. What impressed him
+was less the evils of the constitution than its possibilities,
+could the defects quite alien from its nature but <a name="page228"
+id="page228"></a>be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a
+deeper vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to
+Burke's conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was
+too much the apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles
+involved in the overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense
+of a Divine Providence taking thought for the welfare of men to
+interfere with violence in his handiwork. The tinge of caution is
+never absent, even from his most liberal moments; and he was
+willing to endure great evil if it seemed dangerous to estimate the
+cost of change.</p>
+<p>His American speeches are the true text-book for colonial
+administration. He put aside the empty plea of right which
+satisfied legal pedants like George Grenville. What moved him was
+the tragic fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they
+could not maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom.
+He never concealed from himself that the success of America was
+bound up with the maintenance of English liberties. "Armies," he
+said many years later, "first victorious over Englishmen, in a
+conflict <a name="page229" id="page229"></a>for English
+constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated
+(though in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject
+subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of
+England itself." He had firm hold of that insidious danger which
+belittles freedom itself in the interest of curtailing some special
+desire. "In order to prove that the Americans have no right to
+their liberties," he said in the famous <i>Speech on Conciliation
+with America</i> (1775), "we are every day endeavoring to subvert
+the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own." The way for
+the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke saw,
+prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character
+of the American contest. His own receipt was sounder. In the
+<i>Speech on American Taxation</i> (1774) he had riddled the view
+that the fiscal methods of Lord North were likely to succeed. The
+true method was to find a way of peace. "Nobody shall persuade me,"
+he told a hostile House of Commons, "when a whole people are
+concerned that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation."
+<a name="page230" id="page230"></a>"Magnanimity in politics," he
+said in the next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a
+great empire and little minds go ill together." He did not know, in
+the most superb of all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment
+against a whole people. He would win the colonies by binding them
+to England with the ties of freedom. "The question with me," he
+said, "is not whether you have a right to render your people
+miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy."
+The problem, in fact, was one not of abstract right but of
+expediency; and nothing could be lost by satisfying American
+desire. Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was apparent to every
+first-class mind in England. But the obstinate king prevailed; and
+Burke's great protest remained no more than material for the
+legislation of the future. Yet it was something that ninety years
+after his speech the British North America Act should have given
+his dreams full substance.</p>
+<p>Ireland had always a place apart in Burke's affections, and when
+he first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in
+his thoughts was the <a name="page231" id="page231"></a>desire to
+assist its freedom. He saw that here, as in America, no man will be
+argued into slavery. A government which defied the fundamental
+impulses of men was bound to court disaster. How could it seek
+security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its
+subjects? Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the
+Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan? The system of
+Protestant control, he said in the <i>Letter to Sir Hercules
+Langrishe</i> (1792), was "well fitted for the oppression,
+impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in
+them of human nature itself." The Catholics paid their taxes; they
+served with glory in the army and navy. Yet they were denied a
+share in the commonwealth. "Common sense," he said, "and common
+justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a people for their
+slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for great, general
+and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them,
+or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that the body
+of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress them.
+"No man will <a name="page232" id="page232"></a>assert seriously,"
+he said, "that when people are of a turbulent spirit the best way
+to keep them in order is to furnish them with something to complain
+of." The advantages of subjects were, as he urged, their right; and
+a wise government would regard "all their reasonable wishes as so
+many claims." To neglect them was to have a nation full of
+uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.</p>
+<p>There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long
+attempt to mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research
+may well have shown that in some details he pressed the case too
+far; yet nothing has so far come to light to cast doubt upon the
+principles he there maintained. He was the first English statesman
+fully to understand the moral import of the problem of subject
+races; and if he did not make impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the
+future, at least he flung an eternal challenge to their malignant
+complacency. He did not ask the abandonment of British dominion in
+India, though he may have doubted the wisdom of its conquest. All
+that he insisted upon was this, that in imperial adventure the
+<a name="page233" id="page233"></a>conquering race must abide by a
+moral code. A lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white.
+The European must respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he
+would be compelled by law to respect them in his own State. "If we
+are not able," he said, "to contrive some method of governing India
+well which will not of necessity become the means of governing
+Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for their eternal separation,
+but none for sacrificing the people of that country to our
+constitution." England must be in India for India's benefit or not
+at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as the East
+India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are
+instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was
+the antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a
+magnificent passage, "before the eyes of the natives but an
+endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and
+passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is
+continually wasting." Sympathy with the native, regard for his
+habits and wants, the Company's servants failed to display. "The
+English youth in <a name="page234" id="page234"></a>India drink the
+intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads
+are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long
+before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have
+any opportunity to exert themselves for the excesses of their
+premature power. The consequences of their conduct, which in good
+minds (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce
+penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their
+flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are
+given to seas and winds to be blown about in every breaking up of
+the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean." More than a century
+was to pass before the wisest of Burke's interpreters attempted the
+translation of his maxims into statute. But there has never, in any
+language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in
+imperial adventure. "The situation of man," said Burke, "is the
+preceptor of his duty." He saw how a nation might become corrupted
+by the spoils of other lands. He knew that cruelty abroad is the
+parent of a later cruelty at home. Men will complain of <a name=
+"page235" id="page235"></a>their wrongdoing in the remoter empire;
+and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in
+unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield. He denied that
+the government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial
+transaction. Its problem was not to secure dividends but to
+accomplish moral benefit. He abhorred the politics of prestige. He
+knew the difficulties involved in administering distant
+territories, the ignorance and apathy of the public, the consequent
+erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong will fail of
+discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let us do
+what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can
+do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national
+reputation." That is a general truth not less in Africa and China
+than in India itself. The main thought in Burke's mind was the
+danger lest colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of
+arbitrary ideas. That his own safeguards were inadequate is clear
+enough at the present time. He knew that the need was good
+government. He did not nor could he realize how intimately that
+ideal was <a name="page236" id="page236"></a>connected with
+self-government. Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final
+outcome of his teaching.</p>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p>A background so consistent as this in the inflexible
+determination to moralize political action resulted in a noble
+edifice. Yet, through it all, the principles of policy are rather
+implied than admitted. It was when he came to deal with domestic
+problems and the French Revolution that Burke most clearly showed
+the real trend of his thought. That trend is unmistakable. Burke
+was a utilitarian who was convinced that what was old was valuable
+by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity. The State appeared to
+him an organic compound that came but slowly to its full splendour.
+It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible. Political
+philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from
+experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty.
+While he did not belittle the value of reason, he was always
+impressed by the immense part played by prejudice in the <a name=
+"page237" id="page237"></a>determination of policy. He had no doubt
+that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb
+prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates. Nor must
+we miss the religious aspect of his philosophy. He never doubted
+that religion was the foundation of the English State.
+"Englishmen," he said in the <i>Reflections on the French
+Revolution</i> (1790), "know, and what is better, we feel inwardly,
+that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all
+good and of all comfort." The utterance is characteristic, not
+merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its ultimate reliance
+upon a mystic explanation of social facts. Nothing was more alien
+from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. The only
+safeguard he could find was in empiricism.</p>
+<p>This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his
+earliest publication; but it remained with him to the end. He would
+not discuss America in terms of right. "I do not enter into these
+metaphysical distinctions," he said in the <i>Speech on American
+Taxation</i>, "I hate the very sound of them." "One sure symptom of
+an ill-conducted state," he wrote in the <a name="page238" id=
+"page238"></a><i>Reflections</i>, "is the propensity of the people
+to resort to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a
+<i>Speech on the Duration of Parliament</i>, "when men are driven
+to search into the foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of
+a social contract he declared "at best a confusion of judicial with
+civil principles," and he found no sense in the doctrine of popular
+sovereignty. "The lines of morality," he said in the <i>Appeal from
+the New to the Old Whigs</i> (1791), "are not like ideal lines of
+mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of
+exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and
+modifications are made, not by the process of logic but by the
+rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of the
+virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the
+regulator, the standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw
+the obvious conclusion. "This," he said, "is the true touchstone of
+all theories which regard man and the affairs of men&mdash;does it
+suit his nature in general, does it suit his nature as modified by
+his habits?"</p>
+<a name="page239" id="page239"></a>
+<p>Of the truth of this general attitude it is difficult to make
+denial. But when Burke came to apply it to the British Constitution
+the "rules of prudence" he was willing to admit are narrow enough
+to cause surprised enquiry. He did not doubt that the true end of a
+legislature was "to give a direction, a form, a technical dress ...
+to the general sense of the community"; he admitted that popular
+revolt is so much the outcome of suffering that in any dispute
+between government and people, the presumption is at least equal in
+the latter's favor. He urged the acceptance of Grenville's bill for
+improving the method of decision upon disputed elections. He made a
+magnificent defence of the popular cause in the Middlesex election.
+He was in favor of the publication of parliamentary debates and of
+the voting lists in divisions. He supported almost with passion the
+ending of that iniquitous system by which the enfranchisement of
+revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir of electoral
+support. His <i>Speech on Economical Reform</i> (1780) was the
+prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack upon the waste of
+the Civil list.</p>
+<a name="page240" id="page240"></a>
+<p>Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go.
+He was against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent
+ground that the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons
+less responsible. He opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the
+good and sufficient reason that it gave the executive an interest
+against the legislature. He would not, as in the great speech at
+Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that a member of Parliament was
+a mere delegate of his constituents rather than a representative of
+his own convictions. "Government and legislation," he said, "are
+matters of reason and of judgment"; and once the private member had
+honorably arrived at a decision which he thought was for the
+interest of the whole community, his duty was done. All this, in
+itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke's admirable grasp of
+the practical application of attractive theories to the event. But
+it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic
+constitutional change which is more dubious. He had no sympathy
+with the Radicals. "The bane of the Whigs," he said, "has been the
+admission <a name="page241" id="page241"></a>among them of the
+corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by persuading
+many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs
+inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers." "If
+the nation at large," he wrote in another letter, "has disposition
+enough to oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of
+government is, in my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the
+general disposition be against a virtuous and manly line of public
+conduct, there is no form into which it can be thrown that will
+improve its nature or add to its energy"; and in the same letter he
+foreshadows a possible retirement from the House of Commons as a
+protest against the growth of radical opinion in his party. He
+resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage qualification. He had
+no sympathy with the effort either to add to the county
+representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs. The framework of
+the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent. He deplored all
+criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials.
+"Our representation," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the
+<a name="page242" id="page242"></a>necessary imperfections of human
+affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to be." It was in the
+same temper that he resisted all effort at the political relief of
+the Protestant dissenters. "The machine itself," he had said, "is
+well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were
+sound"; and he never moved from that opinion.</p>
+<p>Burke's attitude was obsolete even while he wrote; yet the
+suggestiveness of his very errors makes examination of their ground
+important. Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the
+name of expediency. His opponents argued that, since men are by
+nature equal, it must follow that they have an equal right to
+self-government. To Burke, the admission of this principle would
+have meant the overthrow of the British constitution. Its
+implication was that every institution not of immediate popular
+origin should be destroyed. To secure their ends, he thought, the
+radicals were compelled to preach the injustice of those
+institutions and thus to injure that affection for government upon
+which peace and security depend. Here was an effort <a name=
+"page243" id="page243"></a>to bring all institutions to the test of
+logic which he thought highly dangerous. "No rational man ever did
+govern himself," he said, "by abstractions and universals." The
+question for him was not the abstract rightness of the system upon
+some set of <i>a priori</i> principles but whether, on the whole,
+that system worked for the happiness of the community. He did not
+doubt that it did; and to overthrow a structure so nobly tested by
+the pressure of events in favor of some theories outside historic
+experience seemed to him ruinous to society. Government, for him,
+was the general harmony of diverse interests; and the continual
+adjustments and exquisite modifications of which it stood in need
+were admirably discovered in the existing system. Principles were
+thus unimportant compared to the problem of their application. "The
+major," he said of all political premises, "makes a pompous figure
+in the battle, but the victory depends upon the little minor of
+circumstances."</p>
+<p>To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription. The
+presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and <a name=
+"page244" id="page244"></a>when we change, we act at our peril.
+"Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid of all titles,
+not only to property, but to what is to secure that property, to
+government." Because he saw the State organically he was impressed
+by the smallness both of the present moment and the individual's
+thought. It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the species
+is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost
+always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had
+the opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should
+be to preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a
+reason; and that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So
+the prescriptive title becomes "not the creature, but the master,
+of positive law ... the soundest, the most general and the most
+recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or
+public jurisprudence." It is by prescription that he defends the
+existence of Catholicism in Ireland not less than the supposed
+deformities of the British Constitution. So, too, his main attack
+on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be <a name=
+"page245" id="page245"></a>discussed." He does not say that all
+which is has rightness in it; but at least he urges that to doubt
+it is to doubt the construction of a past experience which built
+according to the general need. Nor does he doubt the chance that
+what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist that at least it
+gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth," he said, "may
+be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that certainty in
+the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were
+evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company
+charity, the highest of the virtues."</p>
+<p>Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a
+defence of political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards
+against that danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past
+experience was balanced by a general admission that particular
+circumstances must always govern the immediate decision. "When the
+reason of old establishments is gone," he said in his <i>Speech on
+Economical Reform</i>, "it is absurd to preserve nothing but the
+burden of them." "A disposition to preserve and an ability <a name=
+"page246" id="page246"></a>to improve," he wrote in the
+<i>Reflections on the French Revolution</i>, "taken together would
+be my standard of a statesman." But that "ability to improve"
+conceals two principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold. "All
+the reformations we have hitherto made," he said, "have proceeded
+upon the principle of reference to antiquity"; and the <i>Appeal
+from the New to the Old Whigs</i>, which is the most elaborate
+exposition of his general attitude, proceeds upon the general basis
+that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future. Nor is this all. "If
+I cannot reform with equity," said Burke, "I will not reform at
+all"; and equity seems here to mean a sacrifice of the present and
+its passionate demands to the selfish errors of past policy.</p>
+<p>Burke, indeed, was never a democrat, and that is the real root
+of his philosophy. He saw the value of the party-system, and he
+admitted the necessity of some degree of popular representation.
+But he was entirely satisfied with current Whig principles, could
+they but be purged of their grosser deformities. He knew too well
+how little reason is wont to enter into the <a name="page247" id=
+"page247"></a>formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice
+of innovation to its power. He saw so much of virtue in the old
+order, that he insisted upon the equation of virtue with
+quintessence. Men of great property and position using their
+influence as a public trust, delicate in their sense of honor, and
+acting only from motives of right&mdash;these seemed to him the men
+who should with justice exercise political power. He did not doubt
+that "there is no qualification for government but virtue and
+wisdom ... wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever
+state, condition, profession or trade, the passport to heaven"; but
+he is careful to dissociate the possibility that they can be found
+in those who practice the mechanical arts. He did not mean that his
+aristocracy should govern without response to popular demand. He
+had no objection to criticism, nor to the public exercise of
+government. There was no reason even for agreement, so long as each
+party was guided by an honorable sense of the public good. This, so
+he urged, was the system which underlay the temporary evils of the
+British Constitution. An <a name="page248" id=
+"page248"></a>aristocracy delegated to do its work by the mass of
+men was the best form of government his imagination could conceive.
+It meant that property must be dominant in the system of
+government, that, while office should be open to all, it should be
+out of the reach of most. "The characteristic essence of property,"
+he wrote in the <i>Reflections</i>, "... is to be unequal"; and he
+thought the perpetuation of that inequality by inheritance "that
+which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself." The system
+was difficult to maintain, and it must be put out of the reach of
+popular temptation. "Our constitution," he said in the <i>Present
+Discontents</i>, "stands on a nice equipoise, with sharp precipices
+and deep waters on all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous
+leaning towards one side, there may be a danger towards oversething
+it on the other." In straining, that is to say, after too large a
+purification, we may end with destruction. And Burke, of course,
+was emphatic upon the need that property should be undisturbed. It
+was always, he thought, at a great disadvantage in any struggle
+with ability; and there are many <a name="page249" id=
+"page249"></a>passages in which he urges the consequent special
+representation which the adequate defence of property requires.</p>
+<p>The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers
+over-impressed by the sanctity of past experience. Hegel and
+Savigny in Germany, Taine and Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and
+Lecky in England, have all urged what is in effect a similar plea.
+We must not break what Bagehot called the cake of custom, for men
+have been trained to its digestion, and new food breeds trouble.
+Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a people, and
+while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform. The true idea of
+national development is always latent in the past experience of the
+race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be
+drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless
+unconsciousness; and without this loyalty to inherited institutions
+the fabric of society would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact,
+depends upon the performance of actions defined in preconceived
+channels; and if we obeyed those novel impulses of right which
+seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance, we <a name="page250"
+id="page250"></a>should disturb beyond repair the intricate
+equilibrium of countless ages. The experience of the past rather
+than the desires of the present is thus the true guide to our
+policy. "We ought," he said in a famous sentence, "to venerate
+where we are unable presently to comprehend."</p>
+<p>It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at
+the French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the
+destiny which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the
+eighteenth century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand
+but also to hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change
+in tests of religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard
+the whole religious edifice. He would not support the abolition
+even of the most flagrant abuses in the system of representation;
+and he was to see in France an overthrow of a monarchy even more
+august in its prescriptive rights than the English Parliament.
+Privileges were scattered to the winds in a single night. Peace was
+sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical theories of equality and
+justice which he most deeply abhorred. The <a name="page251" id=
+"page251"></a>doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in
+that last and noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps
+its most perfect justification. On all hands there was the sense of
+a new world built by the immediate thought of man upon the
+wholehearted rejection of past history. Politics was emphatically
+declared to be a system of which the truths could be stated in
+terms of mathematical certainty. The religious spirit which Burke
+was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before a general
+scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared
+incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the
+centre of social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of
+those prescriptive privileges which Burke regarded as the
+protective armour of the body politic. Above all, the men who
+seized the reins of power became convinced that theirs was a
+specific of universal application. Their disciples in England
+seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves. In a moment of
+time, the England which had been the example to Europe of ordered
+popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only <a name=
+"page252" id="page252"></a>less barbaric than the despotic princes
+of the continent. That Price and Priestley should suffer the
+infection was, even for Burke, a not unnatural thing. But when
+Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty years for its
+antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too great to pay
+for the overthrow of the Revolution.</p>
+<p>Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point
+consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported
+the Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without
+meaning; for in the one there is no word that can honorably be
+twisted to support the other. And when we make allowances for the
+grave errors of personal taste, the gross exaggeration, the
+inability to see the Revolution as something more than a single
+point in time, it becomes obvious enough that his criticism, de
+Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we possess from the
+generation which knew the movement as a living thing. The attempt
+to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as the
+essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private
+<a name="page253" id="page253"></a>to the king, the inevitable
+precursor of dictatorship. He realized that freedom is born of a
+certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of doctrinaire
+thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form which
+underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he
+exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political
+wisdom. "The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the
+<i>Reflections</i>, "the objects of society are of the greatest
+possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or
+direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the
+quality of his affairs." The note recurs in substance throughout
+his criticism. Much of its application, indeed, will not stand for
+one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for instance, he
+correlates the monarchical government of France with the English
+constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688. The
+French made every effort to find the secret of English principles,
+but the roots were absent from their national experience.</p>
+<p>A year after the publication of the <i>Reflections</i> he
+himself perceived the <a name="page254" id="page254"></a>narrowness
+of that judgment. In the <i>Thoughts on French Affairs</i> (1791)
+he saw that the essence of the Revolution was its foundation in
+theoretic dogma. It was like nothing else in the history of the
+world except the Reformation; which last event it especially
+resembles in its genius for self-propagation. Herein he has already
+envisaged the importance of that "<i>patrie intellectuelle</i>"
+which Tocqueville emphasized as born of the Revolution. That led
+Burke once again to insist upon the peculiar genius of each
+separate state, the difficulties of a change, the danger of
+grafting novelties upon an ancient fabric. He saw the certainty
+that in adhering to an abstract metaphysical scheme the French were
+in truth omitting human nature from their political equation; for
+general ideas can find embodiment in institutional forms only after
+they have been moulded by a thousand varieties of circumstance. The
+French created an universal man not less destructive of their
+practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists. They
+omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must
+demand; with the result <a name="page255" id="page255"></a>that,
+despite themselves, they came rather to destroy than to fulfil.
+Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the harvest of their
+failure.</p>
+<p>Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of
+the past which played so large a part in the revolutionary
+consciousness. "We are afraid," he wrote in the <i>Reflections</i>,
+"to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of
+reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,
+and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the
+general bank and capital of nations and of ages." Of
+Si&eacute;y&egrave;s' building constitutions overnight, this is no
+unfair picture; but it points a more general truth never long
+absent from Burke's mind. Man is for him so much the creature of
+prejudice, so much a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance
+of novel thought finding a peaceful place among his institutions is
+always small. For Burke, thought is always at the service of the
+instincts, and these lie buried in the remote experience of the
+state. So that men like Robespierre were asking from their subjects
+an impossible task. <a name="page256" id="page256"></a>That which
+they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations
+was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and
+desired to be enduring. Burke looks with sober admiration at the
+way in which the English revolution related itself at every point
+to ideas and theories with which the average man was as familiar as
+with the physical landmarks of his own neighborhood. For the
+motives which underlie all human effort are, he thought,
+sufficiently constant to compel regard. That upon which they feed
+submits to change; but the effort is slow and the disappointments
+many. The Revolution taught the populace the thirst for power. But
+it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human effort
+without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it
+exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it
+suffers limitation to right ends.</p>
+<p>The later part of Burke's attack upon the Revolution does not
+belong to political philosophy. No man is more responsible than he
+for the temper which drew England into war. He came to write rather
+with the zeal of a fanatic waging a holy <a name="page257" id=
+"page257"></a>war than in the temper of a statesman confronted with
+new ideas. Yet even the <i>Letters on a Regicide Peace</i> (1796)
+have flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that
+even in the midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. So
+that it is permissible to think he did not lightly pen those
+sentences on peace which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert of
+extravagant rhetoric. "War never leaves where it found a nation,"
+he wrote, "it is never to be entered upon without mature
+deliberation." That was a lesson his generation had still to learn;
+nor did it take to heart the even nobler passage that follows. "The
+blood of man," he said, "should never be shed but to redeem the
+blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for
+our God, for our country, for mankind. The rest is vanity; the rest
+is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that century's
+history that these words were written to justify an effort of which
+they supply an irrefutable condemnation.</p>
+<a name="page258" id="page258"></a>
+<h4>V</h4>
+<p>Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two
+angles. It is easy to show that his picture of the British
+Constitution was remote from the facts even when he wrote. Every
+change that he opposed was essential to the security of the next
+generation; and there followed none of the disastrous consequences
+he had foreshadowed. Such criticism would be at almost every point
+just; and yet it would fail to touch the heart of Burke's position.
+What is mainly needed is analysis at once of his omissions and of
+the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke came to his
+maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we have it
+upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so clearly
+apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in
+what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian
+changes of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment
+even for him who burdened himself unduly to restore the
+Beaconsfield estate. No man was more eager than he that the public
+should be admitted to the <a name="page259" id=
+"page259"></a>mysteries of political debate; yet he steadfastly
+refused to draw the obvious inference that once the means of
+government were made known those who possessed the knowledge would
+demand their share in its application. He did not see that the
+metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself the offspring of
+that contemptible worship of expediency which Blackstone
+generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the
+adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights
+has been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a
+sense to have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining
+the foundations of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that
+the constant dissatisfaction with those foundations his age
+expressed is the expression of serious ill in the body politic is
+wilfully blind to the facts at issue. No one had more faithfully
+than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete;
+yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative
+to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was
+the cause of that disquiet of which he realized that Wilkes was but
+the symptom.</p>
+<a name="page260" id="page260"></a>
+<p>Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign
+of political privilege was drawing to its close. That is the real
+meaning of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream
+of tendency not less active in England than abroad. In France,
+indeed, the lines were more sharply drawn than elsewhere. The
+rights men craved were not, as Burke insisted, the immediate
+offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the result of a determination to
+end the malignant wrong of centuries. A power that knew no
+responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only from the
+accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation to
+offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay,
+these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his
+generation to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past.
+It is not difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the
+tennis-court at Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to
+be condemned. Burke's caution was for them the timidity of one who
+embraces existent evils rather than fly to the refuge of an
+accessible good. In a less degree, <a name="page261" id=
+"page261"></a>the same is true of England. The constitution that
+Burke called upon men to worship was the constitution which made
+the Duke of Bedford powerful, that gave no representation to
+Manchester and a member to Old Sarum, which enacted the game laws
+and left upon the statute-book a penal code which hardly yielded to
+the noble attack of Romilly. These, which were for Burke merely the
+accidental excrescences of a noble ideal, were for them its inner
+essence; and where they could not reform they were willing to
+destroy.</p>
+<p>The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of
+the past as the very institutions it came to condemn. The
+innovations were the inevitable outcome of past oppression. Burke
+refused to see that aspect of the picture. He ascribed to the crime
+of the present what was due to the half-wilful errors of the past.
+The man who grounded his faith in historic experience refused to
+admit as history the elements alien from his special outlook. He
+took that liberty not to venerate where he was unable to comprehend
+which he denied to his opponents. Nor did he admit the uses to
+which his doctrine of <a name="page262" id=
+"page262"></a>prescription was bound to be put in the hands of
+selfish and unscrupulous men. No one will object to privilege for a
+Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a different
+thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of whom
+Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham
+will one day emerge. He justifies the privileges of the English
+Church in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to
+see what men like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do
+with religion. The doctrine of prescription might be admirable if
+all statesmen were so wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men
+it becomes no more than the protective armour of vested interests
+into the ethics of which it refuses us leave to examine.</p>
+<p>That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke's philosophy, and
+it deserves more examination than it has received. In part it is a
+rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning
+animal. It puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human
+action; and it thus is distrustful of thought as leading into
+channels to which the nature of man is not adapted. <a name=
+"page263" id="page263"></a>Novelty, which is assumed to be the
+outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon
+which civilization depends. Thought is destructive of peace; and it
+is argued that we know too little of political phenomena to make us
+venture into the untried places to which thought invites us. Yet
+the first of many answers is surely the most obvious fact that if
+man is so much the creature of his custom no reason would prevail
+save where they proved inadequate. If thought is simply a reserve
+power in society, its strength must obviously depend upon common
+acceptance; and that can only come when some routine has failed to
+satisfy the impulses of men.</p>
+<p>But we may urge a difficulty that is even more decisive. No
+system of habits can ever hope to endure long in a world where the
+cumulative power of memory enables change to be so swift; and no
+system of habits can endure at all unless its underlying idea
+represents the satisfaction of a general desire. It must, that is
+to say, make rational appeal; and, indeed, as Aristotle said, it
+can have virtue only to the point where it is conscious of itself.
+The uncritical routine of which Burke is <a name="page264" id=
+"page264"></a>the sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of
+virtue. Yet in modern civilization the whole strength of any custom
+depends upon exactly that consciousness of right which Burke
+restricted to his aristocracy. Our real need is less the automatic
+response to ancient stimulus than power to know what stimulus has
+social value. We need, that is to say, the gift of criticism rather
+than the gift of inert acceptance. Not, of course, that the habits
+which Burke so earnestly admired are at all part of our nervous
+endowment in any integral sense. The short space of the French
+Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an
+essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the
+Burkian school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in
+history, we take that as proof of the ease with which essential
+habit may be acquired. Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys
+the finer side of civilized life. It may leave a stratum to whom
+its riches have been discovered; but it leaves the mass of men
+soulless automata without spontaneous response to the chords struck
+by another hand.</p>
+<a name="page265" id="page265"></a>
+<p>Burke's answer would, of course, have been that he was not a
+democrat. He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity
+as low. He thought of the people&mdash;it was obviously a
+generalization from his time&mdash;as consistently prone to
+disorder and checked only by the force of ancient habit. Yet he has
+himself supplied the answer to that attitude. "My observation," he
+said in his <i>Speech on the East India Bill</i>, "has furnished me
+with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or education
+which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of
+government." We can go further than that sober caution. We know
+that there is one technique only capable of securing good
+government and that is the training of the mass of men to interest
+in it. We know that no State can hope for peace in which large
+types of experience are without representation. Indeed, if proof
+were here wanting, an examination of the eighteenth century would
+supply it. Few would deny that statesmen are capable of
+disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life they are
+ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the
+dominant class is <a name="page266" id="page266"></a>too intimate
+to permit with safety the exclusion of a part of the State from
+sharing in its guidance. Nor did Burke remember his own wise saying
+that "in all disputes between the people and their rulers the
+presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people"; and he
+quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully's which traces
+popular violence to popular suffering. No one can watch the
+economic struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or
+calculate the pain they have involved to humble men, without
+admitting that they represent the final protest of an outraged mind
+against oppression too intolerable to be borne. Burke himself, as
+his own speeches show, knew little or nothing of the pain involved
+in the agrarian changes of his age. The one way to avoid violent
+outbreak is not exclusion of the people from power but their
+participation in it. The popular sense of right may often, as
+Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of statesmen. It is not
+necessary to equate the worth of untrained commonsense with
+experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run, neglect of
+common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.</p>
+<a name="page267" id="page267"></a>
+<p>This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground. For the case against
+Burke's aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal.
+He did not inquire by what right a handful of men were to be
+hereditary governors of a whole people. Expediency is no answer to
+the question, for Bentham was presently to show how shallow was
+that basis of consent. Once it is admitted that the personality of
+men is entitled to respect institutional room must be found for its
+expression. The State is morally stunted where their powers go
+undeveloped. There is something curious here in Burke's inability
+to suspect deformity in a system which gave his talents but partial
+place. He must have known that no one in the House of Commons was
+his equal. He must have known how few of those he called upon to
+recognize the splendor of their function were capable of playing
+the part he pictured for them. The answer to a morally bankrupt
+aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in its
+purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact
+that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness
+<a name="page268" id="page268"></a>for power. Burke gave no hint of
+how the level of his governing class could be maintained. He said
+nothing of what education might accomplish for the people. He did
+not examine the obvious consequences of their economic status. Had
+his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of that
+States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in
+their inexperience, might have given him pause. The "obscure
+provincial advocates ... stewards of petty local jurisdictions ...
+the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation"
+legislated, out of their inexperience, for the world. Their
+resolution, their constancy, their high sense of the national need,
+were precisely the qualities Burke demanded in his governing class;
+and the States-General did not move from the straight path he laid
+down until they met with intrigue from those of whom Burke became
+the licensed champion.</p>
+<p>Nor is it in the least clear that his emphasis upon expediency
+is, in any real way, a release from metaphysical inquiry. Rather
+may it be urged that what was needed in Burke's philosophy was the
+<a name="page269" id="page269"></a>clear avowal of the metaphysic
+it implied. Nothing is more greatly wanted in political inquiry
+than discovery of that "intuition more subtle than any articulate
+major premise" which, as Mr. Justice Holmes has said, is the true
+foundation of so many of our political judgments. The theory of
+natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong
+rather in its form than in its substance. It clearly suffered from
+its mistaken effort to trace to an imaginary state of nature what
+was due to a complex experience. It suffered also from its desire
+to lay down universal formul&aelig;. It needed to state the rights
+demanded in terms of the social interests they involved rather than
+in the abstract ethic they implied. But the demands which underlay
+the thought of men like Price and Priestley was as much the
+offspring of experience as Burke's own doctrine. They made, indeed,
+the tactical mistake of seeking to give an unripe philosophic form
+to a political strategy wherein, clearly enough, Burke was their
+master. But no one can read the answers of Paine and Mackintosh,
+who both were careful to avoid the panoply of <a name="page270" id=
+"page270"></a>metaphysics, to the <i>Reflections</i>, without
+feeling that Burke failed to move them from their main position.
+Expediency may be admirable in telling the statesmen what to do;
+but it does not explain the sources of his ultimate act, nor
+justify the thing finally done. The unconscious deeps which lie
+beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent than the
+motives that are avowed. Action is less their elimination than
+their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we
+have the full materials for judgment.</p>
+<p>Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is
+surely unanswerable. The things that men desire correspond, in some
+rough fashion, to the things they need. Natural rights are nothing
+more than the armour evolved to protect their vital interests. Upon
+the narrow basis of legal history it is, of course, impossible to
+protect them. History is rather the record of the thwarting of
+human desire than of its achievement. But upon the value of certain
+things there is a sufficient and constant opinion to give us
+assurance that repression will ultimately involve disorder. Nor is
+there any difference between the <a name="page271" id=
+"page271"></a>classes of men in this regard. Forms, indeed, will
+vary; and the power we have of answering demand will always wait
+upon the discoveries of science. Our natural rights, that is to
+say, will have a changing content simply because this is not a
+static world. But that does not mean, as Burke insisted, that they
+are empty of experience. They come, of course, mainly from men who
+have been excluded from intimate contact with the fruits of power.
+Nonconformists in religion, workers without land or capital save
+the power of their own hands, it is from the disinherited that they
+draw, as demands, their strength. Yet it is difficult to see, as
+Burke would undoubtedly have insisted, that they are the worse from
+the source whence they derive. Rather do they point to grave
+inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of
+which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience. The
+unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his
+lack of moral insight into the problem he confronted.</p>
+<p>That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation;
+and its cause seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic <a name="page272"
+id="page272"></a>outlook. He was profoundly religious; and he did
+not doubt that the order of the universe was the command of God. It
+was, as a consequence, beneficent; and to deny its validity was,
+for him, to doubt the wisdom of God. "Having disposed," he wrote,
+"and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will,
+but to His, He had, in and by that disposition, vitally subjected
+us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us." The
+State, in fact, it is to be built upon the sacrifice of men; and
+this they must accept as of the will of God. We are to do our duty
+in our allotted station without repining, in anticipation,
+doubtless, of a later reward. What we are is thus the expression of
+his goodness; and there is a real sense in which Burke may be said
+to have maintained the inherent rightness of the existing order.
+Certainly he throws a cloak of religious veneration about the
+purely metaphysical concept of property; and his insistence upon
+the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely part of the same
+attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect this background with his
+antagonism to the French Revolution. What there was <a name=
+"page273" id="page273"></a>most distressing to him was the
+overthrowal of the Church, and he did not hesitate, in very
+striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion with infidelity.
+Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced that a
+social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his <i>Letters on a
+Regicide Peace</i> have a good deal of that relentless illogic
+which made de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from
+ultramontanism with the road to a denial of all faith. Nothing is
+more difficult than to deal with a thinker who has had a
+revelation; and this sense that the universe was a divine mystery
+not to be too nearly scrutinized by man grew greatly upon Burke in
+his later years. It was not an attitude which reason could
+overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the presence of
+facts to which reason is a stranger.</p>
+<p>There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him,
+like later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties
+with something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him
+was the idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought,
+deformed it, <a name="page274" id="page274"></a>was not of the
+essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that the degree
+to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the purpose
+itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the
+deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the
+beauty of the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic
+philosophy that it should come to the examination of facts in so
+optimistic a temper. It never sufficiently realizes that in the
+transition from theoretic purpose to practical realization a
+significant transformation may occur. We do not come to grips with
+the facts. What we are bidden to remember is the splendor of what
+the facts are trying to be. The existing order is beatified as a
+necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to separate out
+the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts in time
+and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do not
+at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.</p>
+<p>Yet it is surely evident that in the heat and stress of social
+life, we cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our
+judgment. We may well enough regard the <a name="page275" id=
+"page275"></a>corruption of the monarchy under the later
+Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under
+Victoria; but that does not make it any the less corrupt. We may
+even see how a monistic view of society is possible to one who,
+like Burke, is uniquely occupied with the public good. But the men
+who, like Muir and Hardy in the treason trials of the Revolution,
+think rather in terms of the existing disharmonies than the beauty
+of the purpose upon which they rest, are only human if they think
+those disharmonies more real than the purpose they do not meet.
+They were surely to be pardoned if, reading the <i>Reflections</i>
+of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more vital than their
+harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with which
+privileges they did not share were defended. It is even possible to
+understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as
+Burke had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it
+was against that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that
+they were in revolt. For them the fact of discontinuity was vital.
+They could not but ask for happiness in their own individual lives
+<a name="page276" id="page276"></a>no less than in the State of
+which they were part. They came to see that without self-government
+in the sense of their own active participation in power, such
+happiness must go unfulfilled. The State, in fact, may have the
+noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also
+mortal men. The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic.
+The test of allegiance to established institutions became
+immediately the achievement for which they were responsible. The
+achievement, as they urged, was hardly written with adequacy in
+terms of the lives of humble men. That was why they judged no
+attitude of worth which sought the equation of the real and the
+ideal. The first lesson of their own experience of power was the
+need for its limitation by the instructed judgment of free
+minds.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref18" id="fnref18" href=
+"#fn18">[18]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn18" id="fn18" href=
+"#fnref18">[18]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Authority in the Modern
+State</i>, pp. 65-9.</div>
+<h4>VI</h4>
+<p>No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the
+romantic movement, to the <i>Contrat Social</i> of Rousseau and the
+<i>Political Justice</i> of Godwin, than was <a name="page277" id=
+"page277"></a>Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the romantics
+that Burke's fundamental influence remains. His attitude to reason,
+his exaltation of passion and imagination over the conscious logic
+of men, were of the inmost stuff of which they were made. In that
+sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative
+revolution of the generation which followed him. Hegel and Savigny
+in Germany, de Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the
+later Wordsworth in England, are in a true sense his disciples.
+That does not mean that any of them were directly conscious of his
+work but that the movement he directed had its necessary outcome in
+their defence of his ideals. The path of history is strewn with
+undistributed middles; and it is possible that in the clash between
+his attitude and that of Bentham there were the materials for a
+fuller synthesis in a later time. Certainly there is no more
+admirable corrective in historical politics that the contrast they
+afford.</p>
+<p>It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the
+greatness of his effort. Perspective apart, he is destined
+doubtless to live rather as the author of some <a name="page278"
+id="page278"></a>maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than
+as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished
+implications, is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or
+Bentham. His very defects are lessons in themselves. His
+unhesitating inability to see how dangerous is the concentration of
+property is standing proof that men are over-prone to judge the
+rightness of a State by their own wishes. His own contempt for the
+results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless lesson in the virtue
+of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His disregard of popular
+desire suggests the fatal ease with which we neglect the opinion of
+those who stand outside the active centre of political conflict.
+Above all, his hostility to the Revolution should at least make
+later generations beware lest novelty of outlook be unduly
+confounded with erroneous doctrine.</p>
+<p>Yet even when such deduction has been made, there is hardly a
+greater figure in the history of political thought in England.
+Without the relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the
+moral insight of T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties
+of each. He <a name="page279" id="page279"></a>brought to the
+political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a
+lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity,
+such as no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of
+insight are things that go, as few men have ever gone, into the
+hidden deeps of political complexity. Unquestionably, his
+speculation is rather that of the orator in the tribune than of the
+thinker in his study. He never forgot his party, and he wrote
+always in that House of Commons atmosphere which makes a man unjust
+to the argument and motives of his opponent. Yet, when the last
+word of criticism has been made, the balance of illumination is
+immense. He illustrates at its best the value of that party-system
+the worth of which made so deep an impression on all he wrote. He
+showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate
+great principles. He showed also that allegiance to party is never
+inconsistent with the deeper allegiance to the demand of
+conscience. When he came to the House of Commons, the prospects of
+representative government were very dark; and it is mainly to his
+emphasis <a name="page280" id="page280"></a>upon its virtues that
+its victory must be attributed. Institutional change is likely to
+be more rapid than in his generation; for we seem to have reached
+that moment when, as he foresaw, "they who persist in opposing that
+mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of
+Providence itself than the mere designs of men." The principles
+upon which we proceed are doubtless different from those that he
+commended; yet his very challenge to their wisdom only gives to his
+warning a deeper inspiration for our effort.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page281" id="page281"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>The Industrial Revolution is hardly less a fundamental change in
+the habits of English thought than in the technique of commercial
+production. Alongside the discoveries of Hargreaves and Crompton,
+the ideas of Hume and Adam Smith shifted the whole perspective of
+men's minds. The Revolution, indeed, like all great movements, did
+not originate at any given moment. There was no sudden invention
+which made the hampering system of government-control seem
+incompatible with industrial advance. The mercantilism against
+which the work of Adam Smith was so magistral a protest was already
+rather a matter of external than internal commerce when he wrote.
+He triumphed less because he suddenly opened men's eyes to a truth
+hitherto concealed than because he represented the <a name=
+"page282" id="page282"></a>culmination of certain principles which,
+under various aspects, were common to his time. The movement for
+religious toleration is not only paralleled in the next century by
+the movement for economic freedom, but is itself in a real sense
+the parent of the latter. For it is not without significance that
+the pre-Adamite economists were almost without exception the urgent
+defenders of religious toleration. The landowners were churchmen,
+the men of commerce largely Nonconformist; and religious
+proscription interfered with the balance of trade. When the roots
+of religious freedom had been secured, it was easy for them to
+transfer their argument to the secular sphere.</p>
+<p>Nothing, indeed, is more important in the history of English
+political philosophy than to realize that from Stuart times the
+Nonconformists were deeply bitten with distrust of government. Its
+courts of special instance hampered industrial life at every turn
+in the interest of religious conformity. Their heavy fines and
+irritating restrictions upon foreign workmen were nothing so much
+as a tax upon industrial progress. What the Nonconformists <a name=
+"page283" id="page283"></a>wanted was to be left alone; and
+Davenant explained the root of their desire when he tells of the
+gaols crowded with substantial tradesmen whose imprisonment spelt
+unemployment for thousands of workmen. Sir William Temple, in his
+description of Holland, represents economic prosperity as the child
+of toleration. The movement for ecclesiastical freedom in England,
+moreover, became causally linked with that protest against the
+system of monopolies with which it was the habit of the court to
+reward its favorites. Freedom in economic matters, like freedom in
+religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity shall
+exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition.
+The latter easily became imbued with religious significance.
+English puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work
+was the will of God and its performance the test of grace. The
+greater the energy of its performance, the greater the likelihood
+of prosperity; and thence it is but a step to argue that the free
+development of a man's industrial worth is the law of God. Success
+in business, indeed, became for many a test of <a name="page284"
+id="page284"></a>religious grace, and poverty the proof of God's
+disfavor. Books like Steele's <i>Religious Tradesman</i> (1684)
+show clearly how close is the connection. The hostility of the
+English landowners to the commercial classes in the eighteenth
+century is at bottom the inheritance of religious antagonism. The
+typical qualities of dissent became a certain pushful exertion by
+which the external criteria of salvation could be secured.</p>
+<p>Much of the contemporary philosophy, moreover, fits in with this
+attitude. From the time of Bacon, the main object of speculation
+was to disrupt the scholastic teleology. In the result the State
+becomes dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the
+self-interest of each is the starting-point of all inquiry. Hobbes
+built his state upon the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the
+individual enter political life for the benefits that accrue
+therefrom. The cynicism of Mandeville, the utilitarianism of Hume,
+are only bypaths of the same tradition. The organic society of the
+middle ages gives place to an individual who builds the State out
+of his own desires. Liberty becomes their <a name="page285" id=
+"page285"></a>realization; and the object of the State is to enable
+men in the fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their
+private wants. How far is that conception from the Anglican outlook
+of the seventeenth century, a sermon of Laud's makes clear. "If any
+man," he said,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref19" id="fnref19"
+href="#fn19">[19]</a></span> "be so addicted to his private
+interest that he neglects the common State, he is void of the sense
+of piety, and wishes peace and happiness for himself in vain. For,
+whoever he be, he must live in the body of the commonwealth and in
+the body of the Church." So Platonic an outlook was utterly alien
+from the temper of puritanism. They had no thought of sacrificing
+themselves to an institution which they had much ground for
+thinking existed only for their torment. The development of the
+religious instinct to the level of salvation found its philosophic
+analogue in the development of the economic sense of fitness. The
+State became the servant of the individual from being his master;
+and service became equated with an internal policy of
+<i>laissez-faire</i>.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn19" id="fn19" href=
+"#fnref19">[19]</a></span> Sermon of June 19, 1621. Works (ed. of
+1847), p. 28.</div>
+<p>Such summary, indeed, abridges the <a name="page286" id=
+"page286"></a>long process of release from which the eighteenth
+century had still to suffer; nor does it sufficiently insist upon
+the degree to which the old idea of state control still held sway
+in external policies of trade. Mercantilism was still in the
+ascendant when Adam Smith came to write. Few statesmen of
+importance before the younger Pitt had learned the secret of its
+fallacies; and, indeed, the chief ground for difference between
+Chatham and Burke was the former's suspicion that Burke had
+embraced the noxious doctrine of free trade. Mercantilism, by the
+time of Locke, is not the simple error that wealth consists in
+bullion but the insistence that the balance of trade must be
+preserved. Partly it was doubtless derived from the methods of the
+old political arithmetic of men like Petty and Davenant; the
+individual seeks a balance at the end of his year's accounting and
+so, too, the State must have a balance. "A Kingdom," said Locke,
+"grows rich or poor just as a farmer does, and no other way"; and
+while there is a sense in which this is wholly true, the meaning
+attached to it by the mercantilists was that foreign <a name=
+"page287" id="page287"></a>competition meant national weakness.
+They could not conceive a commercial bargain which was profitable
+to both sides. Nations grow prosperous at each other's expense;
+wherefore a woolen trade in Ireland necessarily spells English
+unemployment. Even Davenant, who was in many respects on the high
+road to free trade, was in this problem adamant. Protection was
+essential in the colonial market; for unless the trade of the
+colonies was directed through England they might be dangerous
+rivals. So Ireland and America were sacrificed to the fear of
+British merchants, with the inevitable result that repression
+brought from both the obvious search for remedy.</p>
+<p>Herein it might appear that Adam Smith had novelty to
+contribute; yet nothing is more certain than that his full sense of
+the world as the only true unit of marketing was fully grasped
+before him. In 1691 Sir Dudley North published his <i>Discourses
+upon Trade</i>. Therein he clearly sees that commercial barriers
+between Great Britain and France are basically as senseless as
+would be commercial barriers between Yorkshire and <a name=
+"page288" id="page288"></a>Middlesex. Indeed, in one sense, North
+goes even further than Adam Smith, for he argues against the usury
+laws in terms Bentham would hardly have disowned. Ten years later
+an anonymous writer in a tract entitled <i>Considerations on the
+East India Trade</i> (1701) has no illusions about the evil of
+monopoly. He sees with striking clarity that the real problem is
+not at any cost to maintain the industries a nation actually
+possesses, but to have the national capital applied in the most
+efficient channels. So, too, Hume dismissed the Mercantile theory
+with the contemptuous remark that it was trying to keep water
+beyond its proper level. Tucker, as has been pointed out, was a
+free trader, and his opinion of the American war was that it was as
+mad as those who fought "under the peaceful Cross to recover the
+Holy Land"; and he urged, indeed, prophesied, the union with
+Ireland in the interest of commercial amity. Nor must the emphasis
+of the Physiocrats upon free trade be forgotten. There is no
+evidence now that Adam Smith owed this perception to his
+acquaintance with Quesnay and Turgot; but they may well have
+confirmed <a name="page289" id="page289"></a>him in it, and they
+show that the older philosophy was attacked on every side.</p>
+<p>Nor must we miss the general atmosphere of the time. On the
+whole his age was a conservative one, convinced, without due
+reason, that happiness was independent of birth or wealth and that
+natural law somehow could be made to justify existing institutions.
+The poets, like Pope, were singing of the small part of life which
+kings and laws may hope to cure; and that attitude is written in
+the general absence of economic legislation during the period.
+Religiously, the Church exalted the <i>status quo</i>; and where,
+as with Wesley, there was revolt, its impetus directed the mind to
+the source of salvation in the individual act. It may, indeed, be
+generally argued that the religious teachers acted as a social
+soporific. Where riches accumulated, they could be regarded as the
+blessing of God; where they were absent their unimportance for
+eternal happiness could be emphasized. Burke's early attack on a
+system which condemned "two hundred thousand innocent persons ...
+to so intolerable slavery" was, in truth, a justification of
+<a name="page290" id="page290"></a>the existing order. The social
+question which, in the previous century, men like Bellers and
+Winstanley had brought into view, dropped out of notice until the
+last quarter of the century. There was, that is to say, no
+organized resistance possible to the power of individualism; and
+resistance was unlikely to make itself heard once the resources of
+the Industrial Revolution were brought into play. Men discovered
+with something akin to ecstasy the possibilities of the new
+inventions; and when the protest came against the misery they
+effected, it was answered that they represented the working of that
+natural law by which the energies of men may raise them to success.
+And discontent could easily, as with the saintly Wilberforce, be
+countered by the assertion that it was revolt against the will of
+God.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>Few lives represent more splendidly than that of Adam Smith the
+speculative ideal of a dispassionate study of philosophy. He was
+fortunate in his teachers and his friends. At Glasgow he was the
+<a name="page291" id="page291"></a>pupil of Francis Hutcheson; and
+even if he was taught nothing at Oxford, at least six years of
+leisure gave him ample opportunity to learn. His professorship at
+Glasgow not only brought him into contact with men like Hume, but
+also admitted him to intercourse with a group of business men whose
+liberal sentiments on commerce undoubtedly strengthened, if they
+did not originate, his own liberal views. At Glasgow, too, in 1759,
+he published his <i>Theory of Moral Sentiments</i>, written with
+sufficient power of style to obscure its inner poverty of thought.
+The book brought him immediately a distinguished reputation from a
+public which exalted elegance of diction beyond all literary
+virtues. The volatile Charles Townshend made him tutor to the Duke
+of Buccleuch, through whom Smith not only secured comparative
+affluence for the rest of his days, but also a French tour in which
+he met at its best the most brilliant society in Europe. The germ
+of his <i>Wealth of Nations</i> already lay hidden in those Glasgow
+lectures which Mr. Cannan has so happily recovered for us; and it
+was in a moment of leisure in France <a name="page292" id=
+"page292"></a>that he set to work to put them together in
+systematic fashion. Not, indeed, that the Frenchmen whom he met,
+Turgot, Quesnay and Dupont de Nemours, can be said to have done
+more than confirm the truths he had already been teaching. When he
+returned to Scotland and a competence ten years of constant labor
+were necessary before the <i>Wealth of Nations</i> was complete.
+After its publication, in 1776, Adam Smith did little save attend
+to the administrative duties of a minor, but lucrative office in
+the Customs. Until the end, indeed, he never quite gave up the
+hope, foreshadowed first in the <i>Moral Sentiments</i> of
+completing a gigantic survey of civilized institutions. But he was
+a slow worker, and his health was never robust. It was enough that
+he should have written his book and cherished friendships such as
+it is given to few men to possess. Hume and Burke, Millar the
+jurist, James Watt, Foulis the printer, Black the chemist and
+Hutton of geological fame&mdash;it is an enviable circle. He had
+known Turgot on intimate terms and visited Voltaire on Lake Geneva.
+Hume had told him that his book had "depth and solidity <a name=
+"page293" id="page293"></a>and acuteness"; the younger Pitt had
+consulted him on public affairs. Few men have moved amid such happy
+peace within the very centre of what was most illustrious in their
+age.</p>
+<p>We are less concerned here with the specific economic details of
+the <i>Wealth of Nations</i> than with its general attitude to the
+State. But here a limitation upon criticism must be noted. The man
+of whom Smith writes is man in search of wealth; by definition the
+economic motive dominates his actions. Such abuse, therefore, as
+Ruskin poured upon him is really beside the point when his
+objective is borne in mind. What virtually he does is to assume the
+existence of a natural economic order which tends, when
+unrestrained by counter-tendencies, to secure the happiness of men.
+"That order of things which necessity imposes in general," he
+writes, "... is, in every particular country promoted by the
+natural inclinations of man"; and he goes on to explain what would
+have resulted "if human institutions had never thwarted those
+natural inclinations." "All systems either of preference or of
+restraint, <a name="page294" id="page294"></a>therefore, being thus
+completely taken away," he writes again, "the obvious and simple
+system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord.
+Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is
+left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way....
+The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty in the
+attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to
+innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no
+human wisdom or knowledge would ever be sufficient; the duty of
+superintending the industry of private people and of directing it
+towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the
+society."</p>
+<p>The State, in this conception has but three
+functions&mdash;defence, justice and "the duty of erecting and
+maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions
+which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small
+number of individuals, to erect and maintain." The State, in fact,
+is simply to provide the atmosphere in which production is
+possible. Nor does Smith conceal his thought that the main function
+of justice <a name="page295" id="page295"></a>is the protection of
+property. "The affluence of the rich," he wrote, "excites the
+indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want and
+prompted by envy to invade their possessions. It is only under the
+shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable
+property, acquired by the labor of many years, or perhaps many
+successive generations, can sleep a single night in security." The
+attitude, indeed, is intensified by his constant sense that the
+capital which makes possible new productivity is the outcome of
+men's sacrifice; to protect it is thus to safeguard the sources of
+wealth itself. And even if the State is entrusted with education
+and the prevention of disease, this is rather for the general
+benefit they confer and the doubt that private enterprise would
+find them profitable than as the expression of a general rule.
+Collective effort of every kind awakened in him a deep distrust.
+Trade regulations such as the limitation of apprenticeship he
+condemned as "manifest encroachment upon the just liberty of the
+workman and of those who may be disposed to employ him." Even
+educational establishments <a name="page296" id="page296"></a>are
+suspect on the ground&mdash;not unnatural after his own experience
+of Oxford&mdash;that their possibilities of comfort may enervate
+the natural energies of men.</p>
+<p>The key to this attitude is clear enough. The improvement of
+society is due, he thinks not to the calculations of government but
+to the natural instincts of economic man. We cannot avoid the
+impulse to better our condition; and the less its effort is
+restrained the more certain it is that happiness will result. We
+gain, in fact, some sense of its inherent power when we bear in
+mind the magnitude of its accomplishment despite the folly and
+extravagance of princes. Therein we have some index of what it
+would achieve if left unhindered to work out its own destinies.
+Human institutions continually thwart its power; for those who
+build those institutions are moved rather "by the momentary
+fluctuations of affairs" than their true nature. "That insidious
+and crafty animal, vulgarly called a politician or statesman" meets
+little mercy for his effort compared to the magic power of the
+natural order. "In all countries where there is a tolerable
+security," he writes, <a name="page297" id="page297"></a>"every man
+of common understanding will endeavor to employ whatever stock he
+can command in procuring either present enjoyment or future
+profit." Individual spontaneity is thus the root of economic good;
+and the real justification of the state is the protection it
+affords to this impulse. Man, in fact, is by nature a trader and he
+is bound by nature to discover the means most apt to progress.</p>
+<p>Nor was he greatly troubled by differences of fortune. Like most
+of the Scottish school, especially Hutcheson and Hume, he thought
+that men are much alike in happiness, whatever their station or
+endowments. For there is a "never-failing certainty" that "all men
+sooner or later accommodate themselves to whatever becomes their
+permanent situation"; though he admits that there is a certain
+level below which poverty and misery go hand in hand. But, for the
+most part, happiness is simply a state of mind; and he seems to
+have had but little suspicion that differences of wealth might
+issue in dangerous social consequence. Men, moreover, he regarded
+as largely equal in their original powers; and differences of
+<a name="page298" id="page298"></a>character he ascribes to the
+various occupations implied in the division of labor. Each man,
+therefore, as he follows his self-interest promotes the general
+happiness of society. That principle is inherent in the social
+order. "Every man," he wrote in the <i>Moral Sentiments</i>, "is by
+nature first and principally recommended to his own care" and
+therein he is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was
+no part of his intention." The State, that is to say, is the sum of
+individual goods; whereby to better ourselves is clearly to its
+benefit. And that desire "which comes with us from the womb and
+never leaves us till we go to the grave" is the more efficacious
+the less it is restrained by governmental artifice. For we know so
+well what makes us happy that none can hope to help us so much as
+we help ourselves.</p>
+<p>Enlightened selfishness is thus the root of prosperity; but we
+must not fall into the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf to the
+plaint of the poor. He urged the employer to have regard to the
+health and welfare of the worker, a regard which was the voice of
+reason and humanity. Where <a name="page299" id="page299"></a>there
+was conflict between love of the <i>status quo</i> and a social
+good which Revolution alone could achieve, he did not, at least in
+the <i>Moral Sentiments</i>, hesitate to choose the latter. Order
+was, for the most part, indispensable; but "the greatest and
+noblest of all characters" he made the reformer of the State. Yet
+he is too impressed by the working of natural economic laws to
+belittle their influence. Employers, in his picture, are little
+capable of benevolence or charity. Their rule is the law of supply
+and demand and not the Sermon on the Mount. They combine without
+hesitation to depress wages to the lowest point of subsistence.
+They seize every occasion of commercial misfortune to make better
+terms for themselves; and the greater the poverty the more
+submissive do servants become so that scarcity is naturally
+regarded as more favorable to industry.</p>
+<p>Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is
+Smith's conception of nature. Nor can there be much doubt of what
+he thought its inner substance. Facile distinctions such as the
+effort of Buckle to show that while in the <i>Moral <a name=
+"page300" id="page300"></a>Sentiments</i> Adam Smith was dealing
+with the unselfish side of man's nature, in the <i>Wealth of
+Nations</i> he was dealing with a group of facts which required the
+abstraction of such altruistic elements, are really beside the
+point. Nature for Smith is simply the spontaneous action of human
+character unchecked by hindrances of State. It is, as Bonar has
+aptly said, "a vindication of the unconscious law present in the
+separate actions of men when these actions are directed by a
+certain strong personal motive." Adam Smith's argument is an
+assumption that the facts can be made to show the relative
+powerlessness of institutions in the face of economic laws grounded
+in human psychology. The psychology itself is relatively simple,
+and, at least in the <i>Wealth of Nations</i> not greatly different
+from the avowed assumptions of utilitarianism. He emphasizes the
+strength of reason in the economic field, and his sense that it
+enables men to judge much better of their best interests than an
+external authority can hope to do. And therefore the practices
+accomplished by this reason are those in which the impulses of men
+are to be found. <a name="page301" id="page301"></a>The order they
+represent is the natural order; and whatever hinders its full
+operation is an unwise check upon the things for which men
+strive.</p>
+<p>Obviously enough, this attitude runs the grave risk of seeming
+to abstract a single motive&mdash;the desire for wealth&mdash;from
+the confused welter of human impulses and to make it dominant at
+the expense of human nature itself. A hasty reading of Adam Smith
+would, indeed, confirm that impression; and that is perhaps why he
+seemed to Ruskin to blaspheme human nature. But a more careful
+survey, particularly when the <i>Moral Sentiments</i> is borne in
+mind suggests a different conclusion. His attitude is implicit in
+the general medium in which he worked. What he was trying to do was
+less to emphasize that men care above all things for the pursuit of
+wealth than that no institutional modifications are able to destroy
+the power of that motive to labor. There is too much history in the
+<i>Wealth of Nations</i> to make tenable the hypothesis of complete
+abstraction. And there is even clear a sense of a nature behind his
+custom when he speaks of a "sacred <a name="page302" id=
+"page302"></a>regard" for life, and urges that every man has
+property in his own labor. The truth here surely is that Smith was
+living in a time of commercial expansion. What was evident to him
+was the potential wealth to be made available if the obsolete
+system of restraint could be destroyed. Liberty to him meant
+absence of restraint not because its more positive aspect was
+concealed from him but rather because the kind of freedom wanted in
+the environment in which he moved was exactly that for which he
+made his plea. There is a hint that freedom as a positive thing was
+known to him from the fact that he relied upon education to relieve
+the evils of the division of labor. But the general context of his
+book required less emphasis upon the virtues of state-interference
+than upon its defects. His cue was to show that all the benefits of
+regulation had been achieved despite its interference; from which,
+of course, it followed that restraint was a matter of
+supererogation.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>It would be tedious to praise the <i>Wealth of Nations</i>. It
+may be doubtful <a name="page303" id="page303"></a>whether Buckle's
+ecstatic judgment that it has had more influence than any other
+book in the world was justified even when he wrote; but certainly
+it is one of the seminal books of the modern time. What is more
+important is to note the perspective in which its main teaching was
+set. He wrote in the midst of the first significant beginnings of
+the Industrial Revolution; and his emphatic approval of Watt's
+experiments suggests that he was not unalive to its importance. Yet
+it cannot in any full sense be said that the Industrial Revolution
+has a large part in his book. The picture of industrial
+organization and its possibilities is too simple to suggest that he
+had caught any far reaching glimpse into the future. Industry, for
+him, is still in the last stage of handicraft; it is a matter of
+skillful workmanship and not of mechanical appliance. Capital is
+still the laborious result of parsimony. Credit is spoken of rather
+in the tones of one who sees it less as a new instrument of finance
+than a dangerous attempt by the aspiring needy to scale the heights
+of wealth. Profits are always a justified return for productive
+labor; <a name="page304" id="page304"></a>interest the payment for
+the use of the owner's past parsimony. Business is still the
+middleman distributing to the consumer on a small scale. He did
+not, or could not, conceive of an industry either so vast or so
+depersonalized as at present. He was rather writing of a system
+which, like the politics of the eighteenth century, had reached an
+equilibrium of passable comfort. His natural order was, at bottom,
+the beatification of that to which this equilibrium tended. Its
+benefits might be improved by free trade and free workmanship; but,
+upon the whole, he saw no reason to call in question its
+fundamental dogmas.</p>
+<p>Therein, of course, may be found the main secret of his
+omissions. The problem of labor finds no place in his book. The
+things that the poor have absent from their lives, that concept of
+a national minimum below which no State can hope to fulfil even the
+meanest of its aims, of these he has no conception. Rather the note
+of the book is a quiet optimism, impressed by the possibilities of
+constant improvement which lie imbedded in the human impulse to
+better itself. What he did not see is <a name="page305" id=
+"page305"></a>the way in which the logical outcome of the system he
+describes may well be the attainment of great wealth at a price in
+human cost that is beyond its worth. Therein, it is clear, all
+individualistic theories of the state miss the true essence of the
+social bond. Those who came after Adam Smith saw only half his
+problem. He wrote a consumer's theory of value. But whereas he had
+in mind a happy and contented people, the economics of Ricardo and
+Malthus seized upon a single element in human nature as that which
+alone the State must serve. Freedom from restraint came ultimately
+to mean a judgment upon national well-being in terms of the volume
+of trade. "It is not with happiness," said Nassau Senior, "but with
+wealth that I am concerned as a political economist; and I am not
+only justified in omitting, but am perhaps bound to omit, all
+considerations which have no influence upon wealth."</p>
+<p>In such an aspect, it was natural for the balance of
+investigation to swing towards the study of the technique of
+production; and with the growing importance of capital, as
+machinery was introduced, the <a name="page306" id=
+"page306"></a>worker, without difficulty, became an adjunct, easily
+replaced, to the machine. What was remembered then was the side of
+Adam Smith which looked upon enlightened selfishness as the key to
+social good. Regulation became anathema even when the evils it
+attempted to restrain were those which made the mass of the people
+incapable of citizenship. Even national education was regarded as
+likely to destroy initiative; or, as a pauper's dole which men of
+self-respect would regard with due abhorrence. The State, in short,
+ceased to concern itself with justice save insofar as the
+administration of a judicial code spelled the protection of the new
+industrial system. Nothing is more striking in the half-century
+after Adam Smith than the optimism of the economist and the
+business man in contrast to the hopeless despair of labor. That men
+can organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that
+until Francis Place even the workers themselves were
+half-convinced. The manufacturers were the State; and the whole
+intellectual strength of economics was massed to prove the
+rightness of the equation. The literature <a name="page307" id=
+"page307"></a>of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and
+Bray, exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and
+Robert Owen was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet
+of a new hope. The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out
+to the letter the unstated assumptions of Puritan economics. The
+poor were consigned to a God whose dictates were by definition
+beneficent; and if they failed to understand the curious incidence
+of his rewards that was because his ways were inscrutable. No one
+who reads the tracts of writers like Harriet Martineau can fail to
+see how pitiless was the operation of this attitude. Life is made a
+struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its ultimate meaning from
+the misery incident to it. The tragedy is excused because the
+export-trade increases in its volume. The iron law of wages, the
+assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of
+wealth, the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better
+his condition be sapped by giving to him that which his
+self-respect can better win&mdash;these became the unconscious
+assumptions of all economic discussion.</p>
+<a name="page308" id="page308"></a>
+<p>In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided
+it, we must not miss the element of truth that it contains. No
+poison is more subtly destructive of the democratic State than
+paternalism; and the release of the creative impulses of men must
+always be the coping-stone of public policy. Adam Smith is the
+supreme representative of a tradition which saw that release
+effected by individual effort. Where each man cautiously pursued
+the good as he saw it, the realization was bound, in his view, to
+be splendid. A population each element of which was active and
+alert to its economic problems could not escape the achievement of
+greatness. All that is true; but it evades the obvious conditions
+we have inherited. For even when the psychological inadequacies of
+Smith's attitude are put aside, we can judge his theory in the
+light of the experience it summarizes. Once it is admitted that the
+object of the State is the achievement of the good life, the final
+canon of politics is bound to be a moral one. We have to inquire
+into the dominant conception of the good life, the number of those
+upon whom it is intended that good shall be conferred.</p>
+<a name="page309" id="page309"></a>
+<p>In the light of this conception it is obvious enough that
+Smith's view is impossible. No mere conflict of private interests,
+however pure in motive, seems able to achieve a harmony of interest
+between the members of the State. Liberty, in the sense of a
+positive and equal opportunity for self-realization, is impossible
+save upon the basis of the acceptance of certain minimal standards
+which can get accepted only through collective effort. Smith did
+not see that in the processes of politics what gets accepted is not
+the will that is at every moment a part of the state-purpose, but
+the will of those who in fact operate the machinery of government.
+In the half-century after he wrote the men who dominated political
+life were, with the best intentions, moved by motives at most
+points unrelated to the national well-being. The fellow-servant
+doctrine would never have obtained acceptance in a state where, as
+he thought, employer and workman stood upon an equal footing.
+Opposition to the Factory Acts would never have developed in a
+community where it was realized that below certain standards of
+subsistence the <a name="page310" id="page310"></a>very concept of
+humanity is impossible. Modern achievement implies a training in
+the tools of life; and that, for most, is denied even in our own
+day to the vast majority of men. In the absence of legislation, it
+is certain that those who employ the services of men will be their
+political masters; and it will follow that their Acts of Parliament
+will be adapted to the needs of property. That shrinkage of the
+purpose of the State will mean for most not merely hardship but
+degradation of all that makes life worthy. Upon those stunted
+existences, indeed, a wealthy civilization may easily be builded.
+Yet it will be a civilization of slaves rather than of men.</p>
+<p>The individualism, that is to say, for which Adam Smith was
+zealous demands a different institutional expression from that
+which he gave it. We must not assume an <i>a priori</i>
+justification for the forces of the past. The customs of men may
+represent the thwarting of the impulses of the many at the expense
+of the few not less easily than they may embody a general desire;
+and it is surely a mistaken usage to dignify as natural <a name=
+"page311" id="page311"></a>whatever may happen to have occurred. A
+man may find self-realization not less in working for the common
+good than in the limited satisfaction of his narrow desire for
+material advancement. And that, indeed, is the starting-point of
+modern effort. Our liberty means the consistent expression of our
+personality in media where we find people like-minded with
+ourselves in their conception of social life. The very scale of
+civilization implies collective plans and common effort. The
+constant revision of our basic notions was inevitable immediately
+science was applied to industry. There was thus no reason to
+believe that the system of individual interests for which Smith
+stood sponsor was more likely to fit requirements of a new time
+than one which implied the national regulation of business
+enterprise. The danger in every period of history is lest we take
+our own age as the term in institutional evolution. Private
+enterprise has the sanction of prescription; but since the
+Industrial Revolution the chief lesson we have had to learn is the
+unsatisfactory character of that title. History is an unenviable
+record of bad metaphysics used <a name="page312" id=
+"page312"></a>to defend obsolete systems. It took almost a century
+after the publication of the <i>Wealth of Nations</i> for men to
+realize that its axioms represented the experience of a definite
+time. Smith thought of freedom in the terms most suitable to his
+generation and stated them with a largeness of view which remains
+impressive even at a century's distance.</p>
+<p>But nothing is more certain in the history of political
+philosophy than that the problem of freedom changes with each age.
+The nineteenth century sought release from political privilege; and
+it built its success upon the system prepared by its predecessor.
+It can never be too greatly emphasized that in each age the
+substance of liberty will be found in what the dominating forces of
+that age most greatly want. With Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and
+with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is always the summary of some
+special experience universalized. That does not mean that the past
+is worthless. Politics, as Seeley said, are vulgar unless they are
+liberalized by history; and a state which failed to see itself as a
+mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its <a name="page313"
+id="page313"></a>novelties upon foundations of sand. Suspicions of
+collective effort in the eighteenth century ought not to mean
+suspicion in the twentieth; to think in such fashion is to fall
+into the error for which Lassalle so finely criticized Hegel. It is
+as though one were to confound the accidental phases of the history
+of property with the philosophic basis of property itself. From
+such an error it is the task of history above all to free us. For
+it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as a perennial
+challenge to the coming time.</p>
+<p>The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the
+double tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth. On the one hand he
+is the founder of the classic political economy. With Ricardo, the
+elder Mill and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the
+production of wealth without regard to its moral environment; and
+the state for them is merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in
+which business men achieve their labors. There is nothing in them
+of that fine despair which made Stuart Mill welcome socialism
+itself rather than allow the continuance of the new capitalist
+system. Herein the <a name="page314" id="page314"></a>State is
+purged of moral purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the
+greatest happiness by insisting that the technique of production
+must dominate all other circumstances. Until the Reform Act of
+1867, the orthodox economists remained unchallenged. The use of the
+franchise was only beginning to be understood. The "new model" of
+trade unionism had not yet been tested in the political field. But
+it was discovered impossible to act any longer upon the assumptions
+of the abstract economic man. The infallible sense of his own
+interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for the
+simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously
+required training if they were to be applied to a complex world.
+Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because
+it failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be
+found for the creative energies of humble men.</p>
+<p>It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to
+understand the inner significance of the protest against this
+economic liberalism. Adam Smith had declared the source of value to
+lie in <a name="page315" id="page315"></a>labor; and, at the moment
+of its deepest agony, there were men willing to point the moral of
+his tale. That it represented an incautious analysis was, for them,
+unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path whereby
+economics could be reclaimed for moral science. For if labor was
+the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as
+though degradation was the sole payment for its services. They did
+not ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically
+profitable, but whether it was ethically right. No one can read the
+history of these years and fail to understand their uncompromising
+denial of its rightness. Their negation fell upon unheeding ears;
+but twenty years later, the tradition for which they stood came
+into Marx's hands and was fashioned by him into an interpretation
+of history. With all its faults of statement and of emphasis, the
+doctrine of the English socialists has been, in later hands, the
+most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics. It was a deliberate
+effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith's ideas, to create a
+commonwealth in the interests of the masses. Wealth, in <a name=
+"page316" id="page316"></a>its view, was less the mere production
+of goods than the accumulated happiness of humble men. The impulses
+it praised and sought through state-action to express were, indeed,
+different from those upon which Smith laid emphasis; and he would
+doubtless have stood aghast at the way in which his thought was
+turned to ends of which he did not dream. Yet he can hardly have
+desired a greater glory. He thus made possible not only knowledge
+of a State untrammelled in its economic life by moral
+considerations; but also the road to those categories wherein the
+old conception of co-operative effort might find a new expression.
+Those who trod in his footsteps may have repudiated the ideal for
+which he stood, but they made possible a larger hope in which he
+would have been proud and glad to share.</p>
+<hr class="long" /></div>
+<div id="bibliography"><br />
+<a name="page317" id="page317"></a>
+<h2>BIBLIOGRAPHY</h2>
+<p>This bibliography makes no pretence to completeness. It attempts
+only to enumerate the more obvious sources that an interested
+reader would care to examine.</p>
+<br />
+<h3>GENERAL</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>LESLIE STEPHEN.
+<ul>
+<li><i>History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century</i>.
+1876. Vol. II, Chapters IX and X.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W.E.H. LECKY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>History of England in the Eighteenth Century.</i></li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>A.L. SMITH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Political Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth and
+Eighteenth Centuries</i> in the <i>Cambridge Modern History</i>.
+Vol. VI, Chapter XXIII.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. BONAR.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Philosophy and Political Economy</i>. Chapters V-IX.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>F.W. MAITLAND.
+<ul>
+<li><i>An Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality</i> in
+<i>Collected Papers</i>. Vol. I.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<h3>CHAPTER II</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>JOHN LOCKE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Works</i> (Eleventh Edition), 10 volumes. London, 1812.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>H.R. FOX-BOURNE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of John Locke</i>. London, 1876.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>T.H. GREEN.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Principles of Political Obligation</i> in <i>Collected
+Works</i>. Vol. II. London, 1908.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>PETER. LORD KING.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Life and Letters of John Locke</i>. London, 1858.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>SIR F. POLLOCK.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Locke's Theory of the State</i> in <i>Proc. Brit. Acad.</i>.
+Vol. I. London, 1904.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>S.P. LAMPRECHT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Moral and Political Philosophy of Locke</i>. New York,
+1918.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>A.A. SEATON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts</i>.
+Cambridge, 1911.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J.N. FIGGIS.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Divine Right of Kings</i>. Cambridge, 1914.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<a name="page318" id="page318"></a>
+<h3>CHAPTER III</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>JEREMY COLLIER.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The History of Passive Obedience</i>. London, 1689.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>WILLIAM SHERLOCK.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Case of Resistance</i>. London, 1684.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>CHARLES LESLIE.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Case of the Regale</i> (Collected Works).
+Vol. Ill, p. 291.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Rehearsal</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The New Association</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Cassandra</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Finishing Stroke</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Obedience to Civil Government Clearly
+Stated</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Best Answer</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Best of All</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>SAMUEL GRASCOM.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Brief Answer</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>E. SHELLINGFLEET.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Vindication of their Majesties Authoritie</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>B. SHOWER.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Letter to a Convocation Man.</i></li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. WAKE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Authority of Christian Princes</i>. <i>The State of the
+Church</i> (1703).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>FRANCIS ATTERBURY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Rights, Powers and Privileges of an English Convocation</i>
+(1701).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>BENJAMIN HOADLY.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>Origins of Civil Government</i> (1710).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Preservative Against Nonjurors</i> (1716).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Works</i>, 3 vols. London (1773).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>WILLIAM LAW.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Defence of Church Principles</i> (ed. Gore). Edinburgh,
+1904.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. WARBURTON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Alliance between Church and State</i> (1736).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J.H. OVERTON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Nonjurors.</i> New York, 1903.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>T. LATHEBURY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>History of Convocation.</i> London, 1842.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<h3>CHAPTER IV</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>BERKELEY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain</i>
+(1721).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>H. ST. JOHN (Viscount Bolingbroke).
+<ul>
+<li><i>Works.</i> 5 vols. London, 1754.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>LORD EGMONT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts</i> (1742).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>DAVID HUME.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals</i>
+(1752).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Essays</i>. (1742-1752) ed. Green &amp; Grose.
+London, 1876.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. SICHEL.<a name="page319" id="page319"></a>
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Bolingbroke</i>. 2 vols. 1900-4.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. CHURTON COLLINS.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Bolingbroke and Voltaire in England</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. HILL BURTON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Hume</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<h3>CHAPTER V</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>MONTESQUIEU.
+<ul>
+<li><i>L'Esprit des Lois</i> (1748).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J.J. ROUSSEAU.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Du Contrat Social</i> (1762). See ed. by Vaughan, 1918.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOHN BROWN.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times</i>
+(1757).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>ADAM FERGUSON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Essay on the History of Civil Society</i> (1767).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>WILLIAM BLACKSTONE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Commentaries</i> (1765-9).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JEREMY BENTHAM.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Fragment on Government</i> (1776). Ed. F.C. Montague,
+1891.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. DE LOLME.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Constitution of England</i> (1775).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>ROBERT WALLACE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Various Prospects</i> (1761).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOSEPH PRIESTLEY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Essay on the First Principles of Government</i> (1768).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>RICHARD PRICE.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>Observations on Civil Liberty</i> (1776).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Additional Observations</i> (1777).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>WILLIAM OGILVIE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Right of Property in Land</i> (1781). Ed. Macdonald,
+1891.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOSIAH TUCKER.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Treatise on Civil Government</i> (1781).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>SAMUEL JOHNSON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Taxation No Tyranny</i> (1775).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>M. BEER.
+<ul>
+<li><i>History of British Socialism</i> (1919).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JAMES BOSWELL.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Samuel Johnson</i> (1791).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<h3>CHAPTER VI</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>EDMUND BURKE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Collected Works</i>. London, 1808.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOHN MORLEY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Edmund Burke</i> (1867). <i>Life of Burke</i> (1887).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. MACCUNN.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Political Philosophy of Burke</i> (1908).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JUNIUS.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Letters</i> (1769-72). London, 1812.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>THOMAS PAINE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Rights of Man</i> (1791-2).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JAMES MACKINTOSH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Vendici&aelig; Gallic&aelig;</i> (1791).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<a name="page320" id="page320"></a>
+<h3>CHAPTER VII</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>CHARLES DAVENANT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Works</i>. London, 1771.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>SIR DUDLEY NORTH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Discourse upon Trade</i> (1691).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>ADAM SMITH.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>Theory of Moral Sentiments</i> (1759).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Wealth of Nations</i> (1776).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Lectures on Justice and Police</i>. (Ed. Cannan,
+1896).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W.R. SCOTT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Francis Hutcheson</i> (1900).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOHN RAE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Adam Smith</i> (1895).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. BAGEHOT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Adam Smith as a Person</i> in <i>Coll. Works</i>. Vol.
+VII.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>F.W. HIRST.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Adam Smith</i> (1904).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. HASBACH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Untersuchungen &uuml;ber Adam Smith</i> (1891).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. BONAR.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Catalogue of Adam Smith's Library</i> (1894).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>T. CLIFFE LESLIE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Adam Smith</i> in <i>Essays in Moral and Political
+Philosophy</i> (1879).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>E. TROELTSCH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Die Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirchen</i> (1912).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<hr class="long" /></div>
+<div id="index"><br />
+<a name="page321" id="page321"></a>
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Addison, <a href="#page69">69</a></li>
+<li>Andrewes, <a href="#page83">83</a></li>
+<li>Ashley, <a href="#page33">33-4</a></li>
+<li>Atterbury, <a href="#page102">102</a></li>
+<li>Austin, <a href="#page62">62</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Bagehot, <a href="#page9">9</a>, <a href=
+"#page249">249</a></li>
+<li>Barbeyrac, <a href="#page68">68</a></li>
+<li>Barrow, <a href="#page84">84</a></li>
+<li>Bellarmine, <a href="#page83">83</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a></li>
+<li>Bentham, <a href="#page23">23</a>, <a href="#page62">62</a>,
+<a href="#page72">72</a>, <a href="#page151">151</a>, <a href=
+"#page157">157</a>, <a href="#page175">175</a>, <a href=
+"#page194">194</a></li>
+<li>Berkeley, <a href="#page10">10</a>, <a href=
+"#page129">129</a></li>
+<li>Blackstone, <a href="#page163">163-4</a>, <a href=
+"#page174">174f</a></li>
+<li>Bolingbroke, <a href="#page69">69</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131f</a></li>
+<li>Bonald, <a href="#page277">277</a></li>
+<li>Bonar, <a href="#page300">300</a></li>
+<li>Bonwicke, <a href="#page82">82</a></li>
+<li>Boswell, <a href="#page209">209</a></li>
+<li>Bray, <a href="#page307">307</a>, <a href=
+"#page315">315</a></li>
+<li>Brown (J.), <a href="#page168">168</a></li>
+<li>Brown (R.), <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Burke, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href=
+"#page16">16</a>, <a href="#page30">30</a>, <a href=
+"#page157">157</a>, <a href="#page159">159</a>, <a href=
+"#page166">166</a>, <a href="#page221">221f</a>, <a href=
+"#page286">286</a></li>
+<li>Burnet, <a href="#page80">80</a>, <a href="#page87">87</a>,
+<a href="#page93">93</a></li>
+<li>Busher, <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Cartwright, <a href="#page97">97</a></li>
+<li>Chatham, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a></li>
+<li>Chillingworth, <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Chubb, <a href="#page128">128</a></li>
+<li>Coleridge, <a href="#page277">277</a></li>
+<li>Collier, <a href="#page84">84n</a></li>
+<li>Cowper, <a href="#page20">20</a></li>
+<li>Crabbe, <a href="#page20">20</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Dalrymple, <a href="#page8">8</a></li>
+<li>Darwin, <a href="#page67">67</a></li>
+<li>Davenant, <a href="#page283">283</a>, <a href=
+"#page287">287</a></li>
+<li>Defoe, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page128">128</a>,
+<a href="#page132">132</a></li>
+<li>Dicey, <a href="#page175">175</a>, <a href=
+"#page179">179</a></li>
+<li>Disraeli, <a href="#page132">132</a></li>
+<li>Divine Right, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href=
+"#page30">30</a></li>
+<li>Dodwell, <a href="#page82">82</a></li>
+<li>Dupont de Nemours, <a href="#page292">292</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Egmont, <a href="#page142">142</a></li>
+<li>Eldon, <a href="#page159">159</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Ferguson, <a href="#page172">172-4</a></li>
+<li>Fielding, <a href="#page160">160</a></li>
+<li>Filmer, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href="#page38">38</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Galsworthy, <a href="#page171">171-2</a></li>
+<li>George III, <a href="#page13">13</a>, <a href="#page15">15</a>,
+<a href="#page158">158</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>, <a href=
+"#page213">213f</a></li>
+<li>Godwin, <a href="#page10">10</a>, <a href="#page163">163</a>,
+<a href="#page222">222</a>, <a href="#page276">276</a></li>
+<li>Goldsmith, <a href="#page19">19</a>, <a href=
+"#page223">223</a></li>
+<li>Goodman, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Grascom, <a href="#page86">86</a></li>
+<li>Gray, <a href="#page160">160</a></li>
+<li>Green (T.H.), <a href="#page61">61</a>, <a href=
+"#page279">279</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Haldane, <a href="#page126">126</a></li>
+<li>Hales, <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Halifax, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page27">27</a></li>
+<li>Hall, <a href="#page17">17</a>, <a href="#page307">307</a></li>
+<li>Hamilton (J.L. &amp; B.), <a href="#page19">19</a></li>
+<li>Harrington, <a href="#page147">147</a></li>
+<li>Hegel, <a href="#page249">249</a>, <a href="#page277">277</a>,
+<a href="#page212">212-3</a></li>
+<li>Hickes, <a href="#page83">83</a><a name="page322" id=
+"page322"></a></li>
+<li>Hoadly, <a href="#page9">9</a>, <a href="#page22">22</a>,
+<a href="#page69">69</a>, <a href="#page107">107f</a></li>
+<li>Hobbes, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page16">16</a>,
+<a href="#page30">30</a>, <a href="#page40">40f</a>, <a href=
+"#page72">72</a>, <a href="#page91">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page278">278</a>, <a href="#page284">284</a></li>
+<li>Hodgskin, <a href="#page17">17</a>, <a href=
+"#page307">307</a></li>
+<li>Holmes (O.W.), <a href="#page63">63n</a>, <a href=
+"#page269">269</a></li>
+<li>Holt, <a href="#page14">14</a>,</li>
+<li>Hooker, <a href="#page44">44</a></li>
+<li>Hotman, <a href="#page57">57</a>, <a href="#page68">68</a></li>
+<li>Hume, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page11">11</a>,
+<a href="#page71">71</a>, <a href="#page92">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page143">143f</a>, <a href="#page278">278</a>, <a href=
+"#page284">284</a>, <a href="#page297">297</a></li>
+<li>Hutcheson, <a href="#page11">11</a>, <a href=
+"#page153">153</a>, <a href="#page155">155</a>, <a href=
+"#page291">291</a>, <a href="#page297">297</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Independents, <a href="#page40">40</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Jackson, <a href="#page84">84</a></li>
+<li>James II, <a href="#page24">24f</a>, <a href=
+"#page35">35</a></li>
+<li>Johnson (Dr.), <a href="#page18">18</a>, <a href=
+"#page210">210f</a>, <a href="#page223">223</a>, <a href=
+"#page230">230</a></li>
+<li>Junius, <a href="#page21">21</a>, <a href=
+"#page219">219</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Keble, <a href="#page82">82</a></li>
+<li>Kerr, <a href="#page82">82</a></li>
+<li>Knox, <a href="#page57">57</a>, <a href="#page83">83</a>,
+<a href="#page97">97</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Lassalle, <a href="#page313">313</a></li>
+<li>Laud, <a href="#page285">285</a></li>
+<li>Law, <a href="#page22">22</a>, <a href="#page108">108f</a></li>
+<li>Leslie, <a href="#page80">80</a>, <a href="#page85">85</a>,
+<a href="#page88">88</a>, <a href="#page90">90</a>, <a href=
+"#page97">97</a>, <a href="#page104">104</a>, <a href=
+"#page132">132</a></li>
+<li>Locke, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href="#page11">11</a>,
+<a href="#page21">21</a>, <a href="#page29">29-76</a>, <a href=
+"#page79">79</a>, <a href="#page197">197</a>, <a href=
+"#page207">207</a>, <a href="#page273">273</a>, <a href=
+"#page287">287</a></li>
+<li>de Lolme, <a href="#page10">10</a>, <a href=
+"#page183">183f</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Mackintosh, <a href="#page269">269</a></li>
+<li>Madison, <a href="#page63">63</a></li>
+<li>Maine, <a href="#page66">66</a>, <a href=
+"#page249">249</a></li>
+<li>Maistre, <a href="#page91">91</a>, <a href="#page252">252</a>,
+<a href="#page273">273</a></li>
+<li>Malthus, <a href="#page305">305</a></li>
+<li>Mandeville, <a href="#page129">129</a>, <a href=
+"#page284">284</a></li>
+<li>Mariana, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Martin, <a href="#page69">69</a></li>
+<li>Marx, <a href="#page312">312</a>, <a href=
+"#page315">315</a></li>
+<li>Melville, <a href="#page121">121</a></li>
+<li>Mill, <a href="#page157">157</a></li>
+<li>Milton, <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Molyneux, <a href="#page68">68</a></li>
+<li>Montesquieu, <a href="#page12">12</a>, <a href=
+"#page63">63</a>, <a href="#page160">160f</a>, <a href=
+"#page173">173</a>, <a href="#page183">183</a></li>
+<li>Morley, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page223">223</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Newton, <a href="#page37">37</a></li>
+<li>Newman, <a href="#page81">81</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a>,
+<a href="#page125">125</a></li>
+<li>North, <a href="#page287">287</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Ogilvie, <a href="#page199">199f</a></li>
+<li>Owen, <a href="#page17">17</a>, <a href="#page307">307</a></li>
+<li>Oxford Movement, <a href="#page81">81</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Paine, <a href="#page202">202</a>, <a href=
+"#page269">269</a></li>
+<li>Paley, <a href="#page157">157</a></li>
+<li>Pattison, <a href="#page10">10</a></li>
+<li>Penn, <a href="#page58">58</a></li>
+<li>Place, <a href="#page306">306</a></li>
+<li>Pope, <a href="#page69">69</a>, <a href="#page128">128</a>,
+<a href="#page132">132</a></li>
+<li>Price, <a href="#page196">196f</a></li>
+<li>Priestley, <a href="#page72">72</a>, <a href=
+"#page190">190f</a></li>
+<li>Proast, <a href="#page64">64</a></li>
+<li>Prynne, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page55">55</a></li>
+<li>Pufendorf, <a href="#page68">68</a></li>
+<li>Pulteney, <a href="#page217">217</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Quesnay, <a href="#page288">288</a>, <a href=
+"#page292">292</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Renan, <a href="#page249">249</a></li>
+<li>Ricardo, <a href="#page305">305</a></li>
+<li>Richardson, <a href="#page160">160</a></li>
+<li>Richardson (S.), <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Rousseau, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page74">74</a>,
+<a href="#page162">162f</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>, <a href=
+"#page197">197</a>, <a href="#page276">276</a></li>
+<li>Royer-Collard, <a href="#page226">226</a></li>
+<li>Ruskin, <a href="#page293">293</a>, <a href=
+"#page301">301</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Sanderson, <a href="#page84">84</a></li>
+<li>Savigny, <a href="#page249">249</a>, <a href=
+"#page277">277</a></li>
+<li>Seeley, <a href="#page312">312</a></li>
+<li>Selden, <a href="#page9">9</a></li>
+<li>Senior, <a href="#page304">304</a></li>
+<li>Separation of Powers, <a href="#page63">63f</a></li>
+<li>Shaftesbury, <a href="#page11">11</a>, <a href=
+"#page128">128</a>, <a href="#page155">155</a><a name="page323" id=
+"page323"></a></li>
+<li>Sherlock (T.), <a href="#page108">108</a></li>
+<li>Sherlock (W.), <a href="#page87">87</a></li>
+<li>Shower, <a href="#page99">99</a></li>
+<li>Sidney, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Smith (Adam), <a href="#page9">9</a>, <a href="#page16">16</a>,
+<a href="#page152">152</a>, <a href="#page195">195</a>, <a href=
+"#page258">258</a>, <a href="#page281">281f</a></li>
+<li>Smith (A.L.), <a href="#page140">140</a></li>
+<li>Snape, <a href="#page108">108</a></li>
+<li>Social Contract, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Spelman, <a href="#page9">9</a></li>
+<li>Spence, <a href="#page202">202</a></li>
+<li>Stammler, <a href="#page60">60</a></li>
+<li>Steele, <a href="#page284">284</a></li>
+<li>Stephen (F.), <a href="#page65">65</a></li>
+<li>Stephen (L.), <a href="#page108">108</a>, <a href=
+"#page223">223</a></li>
+<li>Stillingfleet, <a href="#page37">37</a>, <a href=
+"#page87">87</a>, <a href="#page93">93</a></li>
+<li>Suarez, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Taylor, <a href="#page52">52</a>, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Temple, <a href="#page283">283</a></li>
+<li>Thompson, <a href="#page307">307</a>, <a href=
+"#page215">215</a></li>
+<li>Tindal, <a href="#page123">123</a></li>
+<li>Tocqueville, <a href="#page254">254</a></li>
+<li>Toleration, <a href="#page52">52</a>, <a href=
+"#page64">64</a></li>
+<li>Tucker, <a href="#page71">71</a>, <a href="#page206">206f</a>,
+<a href="#page288">288</a></li>
+<li>Turgot, <a href="#page288">288</a>, <a href=
+"#page292">292</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Voltaire, <a href="#page12">12</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a>,
+<a href="#page160">160</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Wake, <a href="#page80">80</a>, <a href=
+"#page100">100f</a></li>
+<li>Wallace, <a href="#page188">188</a></li>
+<li>Walpole, <a href="#page13">13</a>, <a href="#page21">21</a>,
+<a href="#page128">128-30</a></li>
+<li>Warburton, <a href="#page69">69</a>, <a href=
+"#page118">118f</a>, <a href="#page192">192</a></li>
+<li>Wilberforce, <a href="#page290">290</a></li>
+<li>Wilkes, <a href="#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>,
+<a href="#page220">220</a></li>
+<li>William III, <a href="#page25">25f</a></li>
+<li>Williams (Roger), <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Woolston, <a href="#page128">128</a></li>
+<li>Wordsworth, <a href="#page277">277</a></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14735 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14735 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14735)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Political Thought in England from Locke to
+Bentham, by Harold J. Laski
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham
+
+Author: Harold J. Laski
+
+Release Date: January 19, 2005 [EBook #14735]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David King and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+No. 103
+
+_Editors:_
+
+HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D. LL.D., F.B.A.
+PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
+PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND
+
+FROM LOCKE TO BENTHAM
+
+
+BY
+
+HAROLD J. LASKI
+
+
+SOMETIME EXHIBITIONER OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD, OF THE DEPARTMENT OF
+HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF STUDIES IN THE PROBLEM OF
+SOVEREIGNTY AND AUTHORITY IN THE MODERN STATE
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+LONDON
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+It is impossible for me to publish this book without some expression of
+the debt it owes to Leslie Stephen's _History of the English Thought in
+the Eighteenth Century_. It is almost insolent to praise such work; but
+I may be permitted to say that no one can fully appreciate either its
+wisdom or its knowledge who has not had to dig among the original texts.
+
+Were so small a volume worthy to bear a dedication, I should associate
+it with the name of my friend Walter Lippmann. He and I have so often
+discussed the substance of its problems that I am certain a good deal of
+what I feel to be my own is, where it has merit, really his. This volume
+is thus in great part a tribute to him; though there is little that can
+repay such friendship as he gives.
+
+H.J.L.
+
+HARVARD UNIVERSITY
+Sept. 15, 1919
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                                       PAGE
+
+  I. INTRODUCTION                                7
+
+ II. THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION           24
+
+III. CHURCH AND STATE                           77
+
+ IV. THE ERA OF STAGNATION                     127
+
+  V. SIGNS OF CHANGE                           159
+
+ VI. BURKE                                     213
+
+VII. THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM    281
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY                                   317
+
+INDEX                                          321
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The eighteenth century may be said to begin with the Revolution of 1688;
+for, with its completion, the dogma of Divine Right disappeared for ever
+from English politics. Its place was but partially filled until Hume and
+Burke supplied the outlines of a new philosophy. For the observer of
+this age can hardly fail, as he notes its relative barrenness of
+abstract ideas, to be impressed by the large part Divine Right must have
+played in the politics of the succeeding century. Its very absoluteness
+made for keen partisanship on the one side and the other. It could
+produce at once the longwinded rhapsodies of Filmer and, by repulsion,
+the wearisome reiterations of Algernon Sidney. Once the foundations of
+Divine Right had been destroyed by Locke, the basis of passionate
+controversy was absent. The theory of a social contract never produced
+in England the enthusiasm it evoked in France, for the simple reason
+that the main objective of Rousseau and his disciples had already been
+secured there by other weapons. And this has perhaps given to the
+eighteenth century an urbaneness from which its predecessor was largely
+free. Sermons are perhaps the best test of such a change; and it is a
+relief to move from the addresses bristling with Suarez and Bellarmine
+to the noble exhortations of Bishop Butler. Not until the French
+Revolution were ultimate dogmas again called into question; and it is
+about them only that political speculation provokes deep feeling. The
+urbanity, indeed, is not entirely new. The Restoration had heralded its
+coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common with Bolingbroke and
+Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an
+historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers
+in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different
+substitutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and
+Blackstone are respectable, they bear no comparison with masters like
+Selden and Sir Henry Spelman.
+
+Yet urbanity must not deceive us. The eighteenth century has an
+importance in English politics which the comparative absence of
+systematic speculation can not conceal. If its large constitutional
+outlines had been traced by a preceding age, its administrative detail
+had still to be secured. The process was very gradual; and the attempt
+of George III to arrest it produced the splendid effort of Edmund Burke.
+Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and stumbling; but it
+gave to the principle of consent a permanent place in English politics.
+It is the age which saw the crystallization of the party-system, and
+therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called
+the vital principle of representative government. Few discussions of the
+sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith
+gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite
+its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of Church
+and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed its name. De
+Lolme is the real parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in
+Bagehot's hands, become not the least fruitful type of political method.
+Blackstone, in a real sense, may be called the ancestor of Professor
+Dicey. The very calmness of the atmosphere only the more surely paved
+the way for the surprising novelties of Godwin and the revolutionists.
+
+Nor must we neglect the relation between its ethics and its politics.
+The eighteenth century school of British moralists has suffered somewhat
+beside the greater glories of Berkeley and Hume. Yet it was a great work
+to which they bent their effort, and they knew its greatness. The
+deistic controversy involved a fresh investigation of the basis of
+morals; and it is to the credit of the investigators that they attempted
+to provide it in social terms. It is, indeed, one of the primary
+characteristics of the British mind to be interested in problems of
+conduct rather than of thought. The seventeenth century had, for the
+most part, been interested in theology and government; and its
+preoccupation, in both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its
+conclusions unfitted for a period dominated by rationalism. Locke
+regarded his _Human Understanding_ as the preliminary to an ethical
+enquiry; and Hume seems to have considered his _Principles of Morals_
+the most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of
+Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have been
+represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been
+periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no one will be
+inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the spiritual idealism of
+the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson and the Wesleyan revival
+will make us generalize with caution. But the truth was that theological
+ethics had become empty and inadequate, and the problem was therefore
+urgent. That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith--to take
+only men of the first eminence--were thinking not less for politics than
+for ethics when they sought to justify the ways of man to man. For all
+of them saw that a theory of society is impossible without the provision
+of psychological foundations; and those must, above all, result in a
+theory of conduct if the social bond is to be maintained. That sure
+insight is, of course, one current only in a greater English stream
+which reaches back to Hobbes at its source and forward to T.H. Green at
+perhaps its fullest. Its value is its denial of politics as a science
+distinct from other human relations; and that is why Adam Smith can
+write of moral sentiments no less than of the wealth of nations. The
+eighteenth century saw clearly that each aspect of social life must find
+its place in the political equation.
+
+Yet it is undoubtedly an age of methods rather than of principles; and,
+as such its peaceful prosperity was well suited to its questions.
+Problems of technique, such as the cabinet and the Bank of England
+required the absence of passionate debate if they were in any fruitful
+fashion to be solved. Nor must the achievement of the age in politics be
+minimized. It was, of course, a complacent time; but we ought to note
+that foreigners of distinction did not wonder at its complacency.
+Voltaire and Montesquieu look back to England in the eighteenth century
+for the substance of political truths. The American colonies took alike
+their methods and their arguments from English ancestors; and Burke
+provided them with the main elements of justification. The very
+quietness, indeed, of the time was the natural outcome of a century of
+storm; and England surely had some right to be contented when her
+political system was compared with the governments of France and
+Germany. Not, indeed, that the full fruit of the Revolution was
+gathered. The principle of consent came, in practice and till 1760, to
+mean the government of the Whig Oligarchy; and the _Extraordinary Black
+Book_ remains to tell us what happened when George III gave the Tory
+party a new lease of power. There is throughout the time an
+over-emphasis upon the value of order, and a not unnatural tendency to
+confound the private good of the governing class with the general
+welfare of the state. It became the fixed policy of Walpole to make
+prosperity the mask for political stagnation. He turned political debate
+from principles to personalities, and a sterile generation was the
+outcome of his cunning.
+
+Not that this barrenness is without its compensations. The theories of
+the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within a generation. The
+constitutional ideas of the seventeenth century had no substance for an
+England where Anglicanism and agriculture were beginning to lose the
+rigid outlines of overwhelming predominance. What was needed was the
+assurance of safety for the Church that her virtue might be tested in
+the light of nonconformist practice on the one hand, and the new
+rationalism on the other. What was needed also was the expansion of
+English commerce into the new channels opened for it by the victories of
+Chatham. Mr. Chief Justice Holt had given it the legal categories it
+would require; and Hume and Adam Smith were to explain that commerce
+might grow with small danger to agricultural prosperity. Beneath the
+apparent calm of Walpole's rule new forces were fast stirring. That can
+be seen on every side. The sturdy morality of Johnson, the new literary
+forms of Richardson and Fielding, the theatre which Garrick founded upon
+the ruins produced by Collier's indignation, the revival of which Law
+and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the stagnation was sleep
+rather than death. The needed events of shock were close at hand. The
+people of England would never have discovered the real meaning of 1688
+if George III had not denied its principles. When he enforced the
+resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and
+English radicalism were born; for the _Present Discontents_ and the
+_Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights_ are the dawn of a
+splendid recovery. And they made possible the speculative ferment which
+showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and
+Rousseau. Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor
+despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the complacency of
+the eighteenth century. But the peace of the Tudors was the death-bed of
+the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism of the early eighteenth
+century which made possible the birth of democratic England.
+
+The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is deep-rooted in the conditions of
+the past. Locke could not have written had not Hobbes and Filmer
+defended in set terms the ideal of despotic government. He announced the
+advent of the modern system of parliamentary government; and from his
+time the debate has been rather of the conditions under which it is to
+work, than of the foundations upon which it is based. Burke, for
+example, wrote what constitutes the supreme analysis of the statesman's
+art. Adam Smith discussed in what fashion the prosperity of peoples
+could be best advanced. From Locke, that is to say, the subject of
+discussion is rather _politik_ than _staatslehre_. The great debate
+inaugurated by the Reformation ceased when Locke had outlined an
+intelligible basis for parliamentary government. Hume, Bolingbroke,
+Burke, are all of them concerned with the detail of political
+arrangement in a fashion which presupposes the acceptance of a basis
+previously known. Burke, indeed, toward the latter part of his life,
+awoke to the realization that men were dissatisfied with the traditional
+substance of the State. But he met the new desires with hate instead of
+understanding, and the Napoleonic wars drove the current of democratic
+opinion underground. Hall and Owen and Hodgskin inherited the thoughts
+of Ogilvie and Spence and Paine; and if they did not give them
+substance, at least they gave them form for a later time.
+
+Nor is the reason for this preoccupation far to seek. The advance of
+English politics in the preceding two centuries was mainly an advance of
+structure; yet relative at least to continental fact, it appeared
+liberal enough to hide the disharmonies of its inner content. The King
+was still a mighty influence. The power of the aristocracy was hardly
+broken until the Reform Bill of 1867. The Church continued to dominate
+the political aspect of English religious life until, after 1832, new
+elements alien from her ideals were introduced into the House of
+Commons. The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial
+Revolution, when a new class of men attained control of the nation's
+economic power. Only then was a realignment of political forces
+essential. Only then, that is to say, had the time arrived for a new
+theory of the State.
+
+The political ideas of the eighteenth century are thus in some sort a
+comment upon the system established by the Revolution; and that is, in
+its turn, the product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in
+the preceding age. But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or
+its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly
+aristocratic. From no accusation were its statesmen more anxious to be
+free than from that of a belief in democratic government. Whether Whigs
+or Tories were in power, it was always the great families who ruled. For
+them the Church, at least in its higher branches, existed; and the
+difference between nobleman and commoner at Oxford is as striking as it
+is hideous to this generation. For them also literature and the theatre
+made their display; and if Dr. Johnson could heap an immortal contumely
+upon the name of patron, we all know of the reverence he felt in the
+presence of the king. Divine Right and non-resistance were dead, but
+they had not died without a struggle. Freedom of the press and legal
+equality may have been obtained; but it was not until the passage of
+Fox's Libel Act that the first became secure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond
+have recently illumined for us the inward meaning of the second. The
+populace might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt
+upon an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the
+unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons. Such
+outbursts are yet the exception to the prevailing temper. The
+deliberations of Parliament were still, at least technically, a secret;
+and membership therein, save for one or two anomalies like Westminster
+and Bristol, was still the private possession of a privileged class. The
+Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract and general freedom, than a
+special release from the arbitrary will of a stupid monarch who aroused
+against himself every deep-seated prejudice of his generation. The
+England which sent James II upon his travels may be, as Hume pointed
+out, reduced to a pathetic fragment even of its electorate. The masses
+were unknown and undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to
+protest against some wise reform like Walpole's Excise Scheme, or to
+become, as in Goldsmith and Cowper and Crabbe, the object of
+half-pitying poetic sentiment. How deep-rooted was the notion of
+aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial
+fact Rousseau's demand for freedom. The protest of Burke against its
+supposed anarchy swept England like a flame; and only a courageous
+handful could be found to protest against Pitt's prostitution of her
+freedom.
+
+Such an age could make but little pretence to discovery; and, indeed, it
+is most largely absent from its speculation. In its political ideas this
+is necessarily and especially the case. For the State is at no time an
+unchanging organization; it reflects with singular exactness the
+dominating ideas of its environment. That division into government and
+subjects which is its main characteristic is here noteworthy for the
+narrowness of the class from which the government is derived, and the
+consistent inertia of those over whom it rules. There is curiously
+little controversy over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most
+men acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament. What balance of
+forces is necessary to its most perfect equilibrium may arouse
+dissension when George III forgets the result of half a century's
+evolution. Junius may have to explain in invective what Burke
+magistrally demonstrated in terms of political philosophy. But the
+deeper problems of the state lay hidden until Bentham and the
+revolutionists came to insist upon their presence. That did not mean
+that the eighteenth century was a soulless failure. Rather did it mean
+that a period of transition had been successfully bridged. The stage was
+set for a new effort simply because the theories of the older philosophy
+no longer represented the facts at issue.
+
+It was thus Locke only in this period who confronted the general
+problems of the modern State. Other thinkers assumed his structure and
+dealt with the details he left undetermined. The main problems, the
+Church apart, arose when a foreigner occupied the English throne and
+left the methods of government to those who were acquainted with them.
+That most happy of all the happy accidents in English history made
+Walpole the fundamental statesman of the time. He used his opportunity
+to the full. Inheriting the possibilities of the cabinet system he gave
+it its modern expression by creating the office of Prime Minister. The
+party-system was already inevitable; and with his advent to full power
+in 1727 we have the characteristic outlines of English representative
+government. Thenceforward, there are, on the whole, but three large
+questions with which the age concerned itself. Toleration had already
+been won by the persistent necessities of two generations, and the noble
+determination of William III; but the place of the Church in the
+Revolution State and the nature of that State were still undetermined.
+Hoadly had one solution, Law another; and the genial rationalism of the
+time, coupled with the political affiliations of the High Church party,
+combined to give Hoadly the victory; but his opponents, and Law
+especially, remained to be the parents of a movement for ecclesiastical
+freedom of which it has been the good fortune of Oxford to supply in
+each succeeding century the leaders. America presented again the problem
+of consent in the special perspective of the imperial relation; and the
+decision which grew out of the blundering obscurantism of the King
+enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the principles of
+1688. Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster empire; and the
+industrial system which his effort quickened could not live under an
+economic régime which still bore traces of the narrow nationalism of the
+Tudors. No man was so emphatically representative of his epoch as Adam
+Smith; and no thinker has ever stated in such generous terms the answer
+of his time to the most vital of its questions. The answer, indeed, like
+all good answers, revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the
+prospect of its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age
+that was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real
+appreciation of it. The American War and the two great revolutions
+brought a new race of thinkers into being. The French seed at last
+produced its harvest. Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even
+while he rejected his methods. For a time, indeed, the heat and dust of
+war obscured the issue that Bentham raised. But the certainties of the
+future lay on his side.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the attempt of
+James II to establish a despotism in alliance with France and Rome. It
+was almost entirely a movement of the aristocracy, and, for the most
+part, it was aristocratic opposition that it encountered. What it did
+was to make for ever impossible the thought of reunion with Rome and the
+theory that the throne could be established on any other basis than the
+consent of Parliament. For no one could pretend that William of Orange
+ruled by Divine Right. The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the
+deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not
+calculated to deceive even the warmest of William's adherents. An
+unconstitutional Parliament thereupon declared the throne vacant; and
+after much negotiation William and Mary were invited to occupy it. To
+William the invitation was irresistible. It gave him the assistance of
+the first maritime power in Europe against the imperialism of Louis XIV.
+It ensured the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an
+enemy who never slumbered. Nor did England find the new régime
+unwelcome. Every widespread conviction of her people had been wantonly
+outraged by the blundering stupidity of James. If a large fraction of
+the English Church held aloof from the new order on technical grounds,
+the commercial classes gave it their warm support; and many who doubted
+in theory submitted in practice. All at least were conscious that a new
+era had dawned.
+
+For William had come over with a definite purpose in view. James had
+wrought havoc with what the Civil Wars had made the essence of the
+English constitution; and it had become important to define in set terms
+the conditions upon which the life of kings must in the future be
+regulated. The reign of William is nothing so much as the period of that
+definition; and the fortunate discovery was made of the mechanisms
+whereby its translation into practice might be secured. The Bill of
+Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701) are the foundation-stones
+of the modern constitutional system.
+
+What, broadly, was established was the dependence of the crown upon
+Parliament. Finance and the army were brought under Parliamentary
+control by the simple expedient of making its annual summons essential.
+The right of petition was re-affirmed; and the independence of the
+judges and ministerial responsibility were secured by the same act which
+forever excluded the legitimate heirs from their royal inheritance. It
+is difficult not to be amazed at the almost casual fashion in which so
+striking a revolution was effected. Not, indeed, that the solution
+worked easily at the outset. William remained to the end a foreigner,
+who could not understand the inwardness of English politics. It was the
+necessities of foreign policy which drove him to admit the immense
+possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his own best
+safeguard in the foundation of the Bank of England. The Cabinet,
+towards the close of his reign, had already become the fundamental
+administrative instrument. Originally a committee of the Privy Council,
+it had no party basis until the ingenious Sunderland atoned for a score
+of dishonesties by insisting that the root of its efficiency would be
+found in its selection from a single party. William acquiesced but
+doubtfully; for, until the end of his life, he never understood why his
+ministers should not be a group of able counsellors chosen without
+reference to their political affiliations. Sunderland knew better for
+the simple reason that he belonged to that period when the Whigs and
+Tories had gambled against each other for their heads. He knew that no
+council-board could with comfort contain both himself and Halifax; just
+as William himself was to learn quite early that neither honor nor
+confidence could win unswerving support from John Churchill. There is a
+certain feverishness in the atmosphere of the reign which shows how many
+kept an anxious eye on St. Germain even while they attended the morning
+levee at Whitehall.
+
+What secured the permanence of the settlement was less the policy of
+William than the blunder of the French monarch. Patience, foresight and
+generosity had not availed to win for William more than a grudging
+recognition of his kingship. He had received only a half-hearted support
+for his foreign policy. The army, despite his protests, had been
+reduced; and the enforced return of his own Dutch Guards to Holland was
+deliberately conceived to cause him pain. But at the very moment when
+his strength seemed weakest James II died; and Louis XIV, despite
+written obligation, sought to comfort the last moments of his tragic
+exile by the falsely chivalrous recognition of the Old Pretender as the
+rightful English king. It was a terrible mistake. It did for William
+what no action of his own could ever have achieved. It suggested that
+England must receive its ruler at the hands of a foreign sovereign. The
+national pride of the people rallied to the cause for which William
+stood. He was king--so, at least in contrast to Louis' decision, it
+appeared--by their deliberate choice and the settlement of which he was
+the symbol would be maintained. Parliament granted to William all that
+his foreign policy could have demanded. His own death was only the
+prelude to the victories of Marlborough. Those victories seemed to seal
+the solution of 1688. A moment came when sentiment and intrigue combined
+to throw in jeopardy the Act of Settlement. But Death held the stakes
+against the gambler's throw of Bolingbroke; and the accession of George
+I assured the permanence of Revolution principles.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort
+to justify the innovations of 1688. He sought, as he said, "to establish
+the throne of our great Restorer, our present King William, and make
+good his title in the consent of the people." In the debate which
+followed his argument remained unanswered, for the sufficient reason
+that it had the common sense of the generation on his side. Yet Locke
+has suffered not a little at the hands of succeeding thinkers. Though
+his influence upon his own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed to
+him the acutest of his insights; though the principles of the American
+Revolution are in large part an acknowledged adoption of his own; he has
+become one of the political classics who are taken for granted rather
+than read. It is a profound and regrettable error. Locke may not possess
+the clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing
+into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the first
+of English political thinkers. He yet stated more clearly than either
+the general problem of the modern State. Hobbes, after all, worked with
+an impossible psychology and sought no more than the prescription
+against disorder. Burke wrote rather a text-book for the cautious
+administrator than a guide for the liberal statesman. But Locke saw that
+the main problem of the State is the conquest of freedom and it was for
+its definition in terms of individual good that he above all strove.
+
+Much, doubtless, of his neglect is due to the medium in which he worked.
+He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only possible
+retort to the theory of Divine Right. He so emphasized the principle of
+consent that when contractualism came in its turn to be discarded, it
+was discovered that Locke suffered far more than Hobbes by the change so
+made. For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as strong
+government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men,
+while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to
+their opportunity for moral expression. Nor did he, like Rousseau, seize
+upon the organic nature of the State. To him the State was always a mere
+aggregate, and the convenient simplicity of majority-rule solved, for
+him, the vital political problems. But Rousseau was translated into the
+complex dialectic of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he
+would have doubtless been the first to disown. Nor was Locke aided by
+his philosophic outlook. Few great thinkers have so little perceived the
+psychological foundations of politics. What he did was rather to fasten
+upon the great institutional necessity of his time--the provision of
+channels of assent--and emphasize its importance to the exclusion of all
+other factors. The problem is in fact more complex; and the solution he
+indicated became so natural a part of the political fabric that the
+value of his emphasis upon its import was largely forgotten when men
+again took up the study of foundations.
+
+John Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset on the 29th of August, 1632.
+His father was clerk to the county justices and acted as a captain in a
+cavalry regiment during the Civil War. Though he suffered heavy losses,
+he was able to give his son as good an education as the time afforded.
+Westminster under Dr. Busby may not have been the gentlest of academies,
+but at least it provided Locke with an admirable training in the
+classics. He himself, indeed, in the _Thoughts on Education_ doubted the
+value of such exercises; nor does he seem to have conceived any
+affection for Oxford whither he proceeded in 1652 as a junior student of
+Christ Church. The university was then under the Puritan control of Dr.
+John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its
+reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and
+ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that
+he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to
+metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis
+the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659
+he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college, which he retained until
+he was deemed politically undesirable in 1684. After toying with his
+father's desire that he should enter the Church, he began the study of
+medicine. Scientific interest won for him the friendship of Boyle; and
+while he was administering physic to the patients of Dr. Thomas, he was
+making the observations recorded in Boyle's _History of the Air_ which
+Locke himself edited after the death of his friend.
+
+Meanwhile accident had turned his life into far different paths. An
+appointment as secretary to a special ambassador opened up to him a
+diplomatic career; but his sturdy commonsense showed him his unfitness
+for such labors. After his visit to Prussia he returned to Oxford, and
+there, in 1667, in the course of his medical work, he met Anthony
+Ashley, the later Lord Shaftesbury and the Ahitophel of Dryden's great
+satire. The two men were warmly attracted to each other, and Locke
+accepted an appointment as physician to Lord Ashley's household. But he
+was also much more than this. The tutor of Ashley's philosophic
+grandson, he became also his patron's confidential counsellor. In 1663
+he became part author of a constitutional scheme for Carolina which is
+noteworthy for its emphasis, thus early, upon the importance of
+religious toleration. In 1672, when Ashley became Lord Chancellor, he
+became Secretary of Presentations and, until 1675, Secretary to the
+Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations. Meanwhile he carried on his
+medical work and must have obtained some reputation in it; for he is
+honorably mentioned by Sydenham, in his _Method of Curing Fevers_
+(1676), and had been elected to the Royal Society in 1668. But his real
+genius lay in other directions.
+
+Locke himself has told us how a few friends began to meet at his chamber
+for the discussions of questions which soon passed into metaphysical
+enquiry; and a page from a commonplace book of 1671 is the first
+beginning of his systematic work. Relieved of his administrative duties
+in 1675, he spent the next four years in France, mainly occupied with
+medical observation. He returned to England in 1679 to assist Lord
+Shaftesbury in the passionate debates upon the Exclusion Bill. Locke
+followed his patron into exile, remaining abroad from 1683 until the
+Revolution. Deprived of his fellowship in 1684 through the malice of
+Charles II, he would have been without means of support had not
+Shaftesbury bequeathed him a pension. As it was, he had no easy time.
+His extradition was demanded by James II after the Monmouth rebellion;
+and though he was later pardoned he refused to return to England until
+William of Orange had procured his freedom. A year after his return he
+made his appearance as a writer. The _Essay Concerning Human
+Understanding_ and the _Two Treatises of Government_ were both published
+in 1690. Five years earlier the _Letter Concerning Toleration_ was
+published in its Latin dress; and four years afterwards an English
+translation appeared. This last, however, perhaps on grounds of
+expediency, Locke never acknowledged until his will was published; for
+the time was not yet suited to such generous speculations. Locke was
+thus in his fifty-eighth year when his first admitted work appeared. But
+the rough attempts at the essay date from 1671, and hints towards the
+_Letter on Toleration_ can be found in fragments of various dates
+between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years of his life. Of the
+_Two Treatises_ the first seems to have been written between 1680 and
+1685, the second in the last year of his Dutch exile.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: On the evidence for these dates see the convincing argument
+of Mr. Fox-Bourne in his _Life of Locke_, Vol. II, pp. 165-7.]
+
+The remaining fourteen years of Locke's life were passed in
+semi-retirement in East Anglia. Though he held public office, first as
+Commissioner of Appeals, and later of Trade, for twelve years, he could
+not stand the pressure of London writers, and his public work was only
+intermittent. His counsel, nevertheless, was highly valued; and he seems
+to have won no small confidence from William in diplomatic matters.
+Somers and Charles Montagu held him in high respect, and he had the
+warm friendship of Sir Isaac Newton. He published some short discussions
+on economic matters, and in 1695 gave valuable assistance in the
+destruction of the censorship of the press. Two years earlier he had
+published his _Thoughts on Education_, in which the observant reader may
+find the germ of most of Emile's ideas. He did not fail to revise the
+_Essay_ from time to time; and his _Reasonableness of Christianity_,
+which, through Toland, provoked a reply from Stillingfleet and showed
+Locke in retort a master of the controversial art, was in some sort the
+foundation of the deistic debate in the next epoch. But his chief work
+had already been done, and he spent his energies in rewarding the
+affection of his friends. Locke died on October 28, 1704, amid
+circumstances of singular majesty. He had lived a full life, and few
+have so completely realized the medieval ideal of specializing in
+omniscience. He left warm friends behind him; and Lady Masham has said
+of him that beyond which no man may dare to aspire.[2]
+
+[Footnote 2: Fox-Bourne, _op. cit_. Letter from Lady Masham to Jean le
+Clerc.]
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Locke's _Two Treatises of Government_ are different both in object and
+in value. The first is a detailed and tiresome response to the historic
+imagination of Sir Robert Filmer. In his _Patriarcha_, which first saw
+the light in 1680, though it had been written long before, the latter
+had sought to reach the ultimate conclusion of Hobbes without the
+element of contract upon which the great thinker depended. "I consent
+with him," said Filmer of Hobbes, "about the Rights of _exercising_
+Government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it." That power
+must be absolute, Filmer, like Hobbes, has no manner of doubt; but his
+method of proof is to derive the title of Charles I from Adam. Little
+difficulties like the origin of primogeniture, or whence, as Locke
+points out, the universal monarchy of Shem can be derived, the good Sir
+Robert does not satisfactorily determine. Locke takes him up point by
+point, and there is little enough left, save a sense that history is the
+root of institutions, when he has done. What troubles us is rather why
+Locke should have wasted the resources of his intelligence upon so
+feeble an opponent. The book of Hobbes lay ready to his hand; yet he
+almost ostentatiously refused to grapple with it. The answer doubtless
+lies in Hobbes' unsavory fame. The man who made the Church a mere
+department of the State and justified not less the title of Cromwell
+than of the Stuarts was not the opponent for one who had a very
+practical problem in hand. And Locke could answer that he was answering
+Hobbes implicitly in the second _Treatise_. And though Filmer might
+never have been known had not Locke thus honored him by retort, he
+doubtless symbolized what many a nobleman's chaplain preached to his
+master's dependents at family prayers.
+
+The _Second Treatise_ goes to the root of the matter. Why does political
+power, "a Right of making Laws and Penalties of Death and consequently
+all less Penalties," exist? It can only be for the public benefit, and
+our enquiry is thus a study of the grounds of political obedience. Locke
+thus traverses the ground Hobbes had covered in his _Leviathan_ though
+he rejects every premise of the earlier thinker. To Hobbes the state of
+nature which precedes political organization had been a state of war.
+Neither peace nor reason could prevail where every man was his
+neighbor's enemy; and the establishment of absolute power, with the
+consequent surrender by men of all their natural liberties, was the only
+means of escape from so brutal a régime. That the state of nature was so
+distinguished Locke at the outset denies. The state of nature is
+governed by the law of nature. The law of nature is not, as Hobbes had
+made it, the antithesis of real law, but rather its condition
+antecedent. It is a body of rules which governs, at all times and all
+places, the conduct of men. Its arbiter is reason and, in the natural
+state, reason shows us that men are equal. From this equality are born
+men's natural rights which Locke, like the Independents in the Puritan
+Revolution, identifies with life, liberty and property. Obviously
+enough, as Hobbes had also granted, the instinct to self-preservation is
+the deepest of human impulses. By liberty Locke means the right of the
+individual to follow his own bent granted only his observance of the
+law of nature. Law, in such an aspect, is clearly a means to the
+realization of freedom in the same way that the rule of the road will,
+by its common acceptance, save its observers from accident. It promotes
+the initiative of men by defining in terms which by their very statement
+obtain acknowledgment the conditions upon which individual caprice may
+have its play. Property Locke derives from a primitive communism which
+becomes transmuted into individual ownership whenever a man has mingled
+his labor with some object. This labor theory of ownership lived, it may
+be remarked, to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the
+parent of modern socialism.
+
+The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes,
+pre-eminently social in character. There may be war or violence; but
+that is only when men have abandoned the rule of reason which is
+integral to their character. But the state of nature is not a civil
+State. There is no common superior to enforce the law of nature. Each
+man, as best he may, works out his own interpretation of it. But
+because the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient
+variety in the conceptions of justice. The result is uncertainty and
+chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which the
+weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable. It is here that the
+social contract emerges. But just as Locke's natural state implies a
+natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture, so does
+Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of reason than of
+hard necessity. It is a contract of each with all, a surrender by the
+individual of his personal right to fulfil the commands of the law of
+nature in return for the guarantee that his rights as nature ordains
+them--life and liberty and property--will be preserved. The contract is
+thus not general as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character.
+Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of
+some single man or group. On the contrary, it is a contract with the
+community as a whole which thus becomes that common political
+superior--the State--which is to enforce the law of nature and punish
+infractions of it. Nor is Locke's state a sovereign State: the very
+word "sovereignty" does not occur, significantly enough, throughout the
+treatise. The State has power only for the protection of natural law.
+Its province ends when it passes beyond those boundaries.
+
+Such a contract, in Locke's view, involves the pre-eminent necessity of
+majority-rule. Unless the minority is content to be bound by the will of
+superior numbers the law of nature has no more protection than it had
+before the institution of political society. And it is further to be
+assumed that the individual has surrendered to the community his
+individual right of carrying out the judgment involved in natural law.
+Whether Locke conceived the contract so formulated to be historical, it
+is no easy matter to determine. That no evidence of its early existence
+can be adduced he ascribes to its origin in the infancy of the race; and
+the histories of Rome and Sparta and Venice seem to him proof that the
+theory is somehow demonstrable by facts. More important than origins, he
+seems to deem its implications. He has placed consent in the foreground
+of the argument; and he was anxious to establish the grounds for its
+continuance. Can the makers of the original contract, that is to say,
+bind their successors? If legitimate government is based upon the
+consent of its subjects, may they withdraw their consent? And what of a
+child born into the community? Locke is at least logical in his consent.
+The contract of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously
+insisted, it is not a contract. Yet Locke urged that the primitive
+members of a State are bound to its perpetuation simply because unless
+the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in any
+satisfactory sense, would be impossible. With children the case is
+different. They are born subjects of no government or country; and their
+consent to its laws must either be derived from express acknowledgment,
+or by the tacit implication of the fact that the protection of the State
+has been accepted. But no one is bound until he has shown by the rule of
+his mature conduct that he considers himself a common subject with his
+fellows. Consent implies an act of will and we must have evidence to
+infer its presence before the rule of subjection can be applied.
+
+We have thus the State, though the method of its organization is not
+yet outlined. For Locke there is a difference, though he did not
+explicitly describe its nature, between State and Government. Indeed he
+sometimes approximates, without ever formally adopting, the attitude of
+Pufendorf, his great German contemporary, where government is derived
+from a secondary contract dependent upon the original institution of
+civil society. The distinction is made in the light of what is to
+follow. For Locke was above all anxious to leave supreme power in a
+community whose single will, as manifested by majority-verdict, could
+not be challenged by any lesser organ than itself. Government there must
+be if political society is to endure; but its form and substance are
+dependent upon popular institution.
+
+Locke follows in the great Aristotelian tradition of dividing the types
+of government into three. Where the power of making laws is in a single
+hand we have a monarchy; where it is exercised by a few or all we have
+alternatively oligarchy and democracy. The disposition of the
+legislative power is the fundamental test of type; for executive and
+judiciary are clearly dependent on it. Nor, as Hobbes argued, is the
+form of government permanent in character; the supreme community is as
+capable of making temporary as of registering irrevocable decisions. And
+though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness to the family, is
+the most primitive type of government, he denies Hobbes' assertion that
+it is the best. It seems, in his view, always to degenerate into the
+hands of lesser men who betray the contract they were appointed to
+observe. Nor is oligarchy much better off since it emphasizes the
+interest of a group against the superior interest of the community as a
+whole. Democracy alone proffers adequate safeguards of an enduring good
+rule; a democracy, that is to say, which is in the hands of delegates
+controlled by popular election. Not that Locke is anxious for the
+abolition of kingship. His letters show that he disliked the Cromwellian
+system and the republicanism which Harrington and Milton had based upon
+it. He was content to have a kingship divested of legislative power so
+long as hereditary succession was acknowledged to be dependent upon
+popular consent. The main thing was to be rid of the Divine Right of
+kings.
+
+We have thus an organ for the interpretation of natural law free from
+the shifting variety of individual judgment. We have a means for
+securing impartial justice between members of civil society, and to that
+means the force of men has been surrendered. The formulation of the
+rules by which life, liberty and property are to be secured is
+legislation and this, from the terms of the original contract, is the
+supreme function of the State. But, in Locke's view, two other functions
+still remain. Law has not only to be declared. It must be enforced; and
+the business of the executive is to secure obedience to the command of
+law. But Locke here makes a third distinction. The State must live with
+other States, both as regards its individual members, and as a
+collective body; and the power which deals with this aspect of its
+relationships, Locke termed "federative." This last distinction, indeed,
+has no special value; and its author's own defence of it is far from
+clear. More important, especially, for future history, was his emphasis
+of the distinction between legislature and executive. The making of laws
+is for Locke a relatively simple and rapid task; the legislature may do
+its work and be gone. But those who attend to their execution must be
+ceaseless in their vigilance. It is better, therefore, to separate the
+two both as to powers and persons. Otherwise legislators "may exempt
+themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both
+in its making and its execution, to their own private wish, and thereby
+come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community,
+contrary to the end of society and government." The legislator must
+therefore be bound by his own laws; and he must be chosen in such
+fashion that the representative assembly may fairly represent its
+constituencies. It was the patent anomalies of the existent scheme of
+distribution which made Locke here proffer his famous suggestion that
+the rotten boroughs should be abolished by executive act. One hundred
+and forty years were still to pass before this wise suggestion was
+translated into statute.
+
+Though Locke thus insisted upon the separation of powers, he realized
+that emergencies are the parent of special need; and he recognized that
+not only may the executive, as in England, share in the task of
+legislation, but also may issue ordinances when the legislature is not
+in session, or act contrary to law in case of grave danger. Nor can the
+executive be forced to summon the legislature. Here, clearly enough,
+Locke is generalizing from the English constitution; and its sense of
+compromise is implicit in his remarks. Nor is his surrender here of
+consent sufficient to be inconsistent with his general outlook. For at
+the back of each governmental act, there is, in his own mind, an active
+citizen body occupied in judging it with single-minded reference to the
+law of nature and their own natural rights. There is thus a standard of
+right and wrong superior to all powers within the State. "A government,"
+as he says, "is not free to do as it pleases ... the law of nature
+stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others."
+The social contract is secreted in the interstices of public statutes.
+
+Its corollary is the right of revolution. It is interesting that he
+should have adopted this position; for in 1676 he had uttered the
+thought that not even the demands of conscience[3] can justify
+rebellion. That was, however, before the tyranny of Charles had driven
+him into exile with his patron, and before James had attempted the
+subversion of all constitutional government. To deny the right of
+revolution was to justify the worst demands of James, and it is in its
+favor that he exerts his ablest controversial power. "The true remedy,"
+he says, "of force without authority is to oppose force to it." Let the
+sovereign but step outside the powers derived from the social contract
+and resistance becomes a natural right. But how define such invasion of
+powers? The instances Locke chose show how closely, here at least, he
+was following the events of 1688. The substitution of arbitrary will for
+law, the corruption of Parliament by packing it with the prince's
+instruments, betrayal to a foreign prince, prevention of the due
+assemblage of Parliament--all these are a perversion of the trust
+imposed and operate to effect the dissolution of the contract. The
+state of nature again supervenes, and a new contract may be made with
+one more fitted to observe it. Here, also, Locke takes occasion to deny
+the central position of Hobbes' thesis. Power, the latter had argued,
+must be absolute and there cannot, therefore, be usurpation. But Locke
+retorts that an absolute government is no government at all since it
+proceeds by caprice instead of reason; and it is comparable only to a
+state of war since it implies the absence of judgment upon the character
+of power. It lacks the essential element of consent without which the
+binding force of law is absent. All government is a moral trust, and the
+idea of limitation is therein implied. But a limitation without the
+means of enforcement would be worthless, and revolution remains as the
+reserve power in society. The only hindrance to its exertion that Locke
+suggests is that of number. Revolution should not, he urges, be the act
+of a minority; for the contract is the action of the major portion of
+the people and its consent should likewise obtain to the dissolution of
+the covenant.
+
+[Footnote 3: King, _Life of Locke_, pp. 62, 63.]
+
+The problem of Church and State demanded a separate discussion; and it
+is difficult not to feel that the great _Letter on Toleration_ is the
+noblest of all his utterances. It came as the climax to a long evolution
+of opinion; and, in the light of William's own conviction, it may be
+said to have marked a decisive epoch of thought. Already in the
+sixteenth century Robert Brown and William the Silent had denounced the
+persecution of sincere belief. Early Baptists like Busher and Richardson
+had finely denied its validity. Roger Williams in America, Milton in
+England had attacked its moral rightness and political adequacy; while
+churchmen like Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth had shown
+the incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate. Nor
+had example been wanting. The religious freedom of Holland was narrow,
+as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom. Rhode Island,
+Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Massachusetts had all embarked upon
+admirable experiment; and Penn himself had aptly said that a man may go
+to chapel instead of church, even while he remains a good constable.
+And in 1687, in the preface to his translation of Lactantius, Burnet had
+not merely attacked the moral viciousness of persecution, but had drawn
+a distinction between the spheres of Church and State which is a
+remarkable anticipation of Locke's own theory.
+
+Locke himself covers the whole ground; and since his opinions on the
+problem were at least twenty years old, it is clear that he was
+consistent in a worthy outlook. He proceeds by a denial that any element
+of theocratic government can claim political validity. The magistrate is
+concerned only with the preservation of social peace and does not deal
+with the problem of men's souls. Where, indeed, opinions destructive of
+the State are entertained or a party subversive of peace makes its
+appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the
+latter case force is the worst and last of remedies. In the English
+situation, it follows that all men are to be tolerated save Catholics,
+Mahomedans and atheists. The first are themselves deniers of the rights
+they would seek, and they find the centre of their political allegiance
+in a foreign power. Mahomedan morals are incompatible with European
+civil systems; and the central factor in atheism is the absence of the
+only ultimately satisfactory sanction of good conduct. Though Church and
+State are thus distinct, they act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is
+thus important to see why Locke insists on the invalidity of
+persecution. For such an end as the cure of souls, he argues, the
+magistrate has no divine legation. He cannot, on other grounds, use
+force for the simple reason that it does not produce internal
+conviction. But even if that were possible, force would still be
+mistaken; for the majority of the world is not Christian, yet it would
+have the right to persecute in the belief that it was possessed of
+truth. Nor can the implication that the magistrate has the keys of
+heaven be accepted. "No religion," says Locke finely, "which I believe
+not to be true can be either true or profitable to me." He thus makes of
+the Church an institution radically different from the ruling
+conceptions of his time. It becomes merely a voluntary society, which
+can exert no power save over its members. It may use its own ceremonies,
+but it cannot impose them on the unwilling; and since persecution is
+alien from the spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the
+limit of ecclesiastical disciplinary power. Nor must we forget the
+advantages of toleration. Its eldest child is charity, and without it
+there can be no honesty of opinion. Later controversy did not make him
+modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay's hands, to be a
+vital weapon in the political method of the nineteenth century.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Any survey of earlier political theory would show how little of novelty
+there is in the specific elements of Locke's general doctrine. He is at
+all points the offspring of a great and unbroken tradition; and that not
+the least when he seems unconscious of it. Definite teachers, indeed, he
+can hardly be said to have had; no one can read his book without
+perceiving how much of it is rooted in the problems of his own day. He
+himself has expressed his sense of Hooker's greatness, and he elsewhere
+had recommended the works of Grotius and Pufendorf as an essential
+element in education. But his was a nature which learned more from men
+than books; and he more than once insisted that his philosophy was woven
+of his own "coarse thoughts." What, doubtless, he therein meant was to
+emphasize the freshness of his contact with contemporary fact in
+contrast with the technical jargon of the earlier thinkers. At least his
+work is free from the mountains of allusion which Prynne rolled into the
+bottom of his pages; and if the first Whig was the devil, he is
+singularly free from the irritating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet
+even with these novelties, no estimate of his work would be complete
+which failed to take account of the foundations upon which he builded.
+
+Herein, perhaps, the danger is lest we exaggerate Locke's dependence
+upon the earlier current of thought. The social contract is at least as
+old as when Glaucon debated with Socrates in the market-place at Athens.
+The theory of a state of nature, with the rights therein implied, is the
+contribution, through Stoicism, of the Roman lawyers, and the great
+medieval contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism. To the latter, also,
+may be traced the separation of powers; and it was then but little more
+than a hundred years since Bodin had been taken to make the doctrine an
+integral part of scientific politics. Nor is the theory of a right to
+revolution in any sense his specific creation. So soon as the
+Reformation had given a new perspective to the problem of Church and
+State every element of Locke's doctrine had become a commonplace of
+debate. Goodman and Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among
+Catholics, the author of the _Vindiciæ_ and Francis Hotman among the
+Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the concept of public power as a
+trust; with, of course, the necessary corollary that its abuse entails
+resistance. Algernon Sydney was at least his acquaintance; and he must
+have been acquainted with the tradition, even if tragedy spared him the
+details, of the _Discourses on Government_. Even his theory of
+toleration had in every detail been anticipated by one or other of a
+hundred controversialists; and his argument can hardly claim either the
+lofty eloquence of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent simplicity of William
+Penn.
+
+What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the manner of his
+writing on the one hand, and the fact of the Revolution on the other.
+Every previous thinker save Sydney--the latter's work was not published
+until 1689--was writing with the Church hardly less in mind than the
+purely political problems of the State; even the secular Hobbes had
+devoted much thought and space to that "kingdom of darkness" which is
+Rome. And, Sydney apart, the resistance they had justified was always
+resistance to a religious tyrant; and Cartwright was as careful to
+exclude political oppression from the grounds of revolution as Locke was
+to insist upon it as the fundamental excuse. Locke is, in fact, the
+first of English thinkers the basis of whose argument is mainly secular.
+Not, indeed, that he can wholly escape the trammels of ecclesiasticism;
+not until the sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible.
+But it is clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground
+from that which arrested the attention of his predecessors. He is
+attempting, that is to say, a separation between Church and State not
+merely in that Scoto-Jesuit sense which aimed at ecclesiastical
+independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as
+such. The central problem is with him political, and all other questions
+are subsidiary to it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any
+previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of
+medieval ideals. Church and State have become transposed in their
+significance. The way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.
+
+The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since made an
+end of the social contract as an explanation of state-origins; and with
+it, of necessity, has gone the conception of natural rights as anterior
+to organized society. The problem, as we now know, is far more complex
+than the older thinkers imagined. Yet Locke's insistence on consent and
+natural rights has received new meaning from each critical period of
+history since he wrote. The theory of consent is vital because without
+the provision of channels for its administrative expression, men tend to
+become the creatures of a power ignorant at once and careless of their
+will. Active consent on the part of the mass of men emphasizes the
+contingent nature of all power and is essential to the full realization
+of freedom; and the purpose of the State, in any sense save the mere
+satisfaction of material appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled. The
+concept of natural right is most closely related to this position. For
+so long as we regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there
+is at no point adequate safeguard against their usurpation. A merely
+legal theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of
+political philosophy.
+
+No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if his effort
+to make rights something more than interests under juridical protection
+can not be accepted in the form he made it, the underlying purpose
+remains. A State, that is to say, which aims at giving to men the full
+capacity their trained initiative would permit is compelled to regard
+certain things as beyond the action of an ordinary legislature. What
+Stammler calls a "natural law with changing content"[4]--a content
+which changes with our increasing power to satisfy demand--is essential
+if the state is to live the life of law. For here was the head and
+centre of Locke's enquiry. "What he was really concerned about," said
+T.H. Green, "was to dispute 'the right divine of kings to govern
+wrong.'" The method, as he conceived, by which this could be
+accomplished was the limitation of power. This he effected by two
+distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in character.
+
+[Footnote 4: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, p. 64., and
+the references there cited.]
+
+The external method has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the first
+place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state. To
+Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of
+gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at
+such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like
+Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the
+interest of individual exertion. But for Locke the real guarantee of
+right lies in another direction. What his whole work amounts to in
+substance--it is a significant anticipation of Rousseau--is a denial
+that sovereignty can exist anywhere save in the community as a whole. A
+common political superior there doubtless must be; but government is an
+organ to which omnipotence is wanting. So far as there is a sovereign at
+all in Locke's book, it is the will of that majority which Rousseau
+tried to disguise under the name of the general will; but obviously the
+conception lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the
+means of operation. The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen,
+under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there is
+lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof that an
+unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember that the
+shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the direction of
+Locke's attitude. That omnicompetence of Parliament which Bentham and
+Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke admits, in later hands, of
+exactly the amelioration he had in mind; and its ethical inadequacy
+becomes the more obvious the more closely it is studied.[5]
+
+[Footnote 5: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chap. I.]
+
+The internal limitation Locke suggested is of more doubtful value.
+Government, he says, in substance, is a trustee and trustees abuse their
+power; let us therefore divide it as to parts and persons that the
+temptation to usurp may be diminished. There is a long history to this
+doctrine in its more obvious form, and it is a lamentable history. It
+tied men down to a tyrannous classification which had no root in the
+material it was supposed to distinguish. Montesquieu took it for the
+root of liberty; Blackstone, who should have known better, repeated the
+pious phrases of the Frenchman; and they went in company to America to
+persuade Madison and the Supreme Court of the United States that only
+the separation of powers can prevent the approach of tyranny. The facts
+do not bear out such assumption. The division of powers means in the
+event not less than their confusion. None can differentiate between the
+judge's declaration of law and his making of it.[6] Every government
+department is compelled to legislate, and, often enough, to undertake
+judicial functions. The American history of the separation of powers
+has most largely been an attempt to bridge them; and all that has been
+gained is to drive the best talent, save on rare occasion, from its
+public life. In France the separation of powers meant, until recent
+times, the excessive subordination of the judiciary to the cabinet. Nor
+must we forget, as Locke should have remembered, the plain lesson of the
+Cromwellian constitutional experiments. That the dispersion of power is
+one of the great needs of the modern State at no point justifies the
+rigid categories into which Locke sought its division.[7]
+
+[Footnote 6: Cf. Mr. Justice Holmes' remarks in _Jensen_ v.
+_Southern Pacific_, 244 U.S. 221.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, pp. 70 f.]
+
+Nor must we belittle the criticism, in its clearest form the work of
+Fitz James Stephen,[8] that has been levelled at Locke's theory of
+toleration. For the larger part of the modern world, his argument is
+acceptable enough; and its ingenious compromises have made it especially
+representative of the English temper. Yet much of it hardly meets the
+argument that some of his opponents, as Proast for example, had made.
+His conception of the visible church as no part of the essence of
+religion could win no assent from even a moderate Anglican; and, once
+the visible church is admitted, Locke's facile distinction between
+Church and State falls to the ground. Nor can it be doubted that he
+underestimated the power of coercion to produce assent; the policy of
+Louis XIV to the Huguenots may have been brutal, but its efficacy must
+be unquestionable. And it is at least doubtful whether his theory has
+any validity for a man who held, as Roman Catholics of his generation
+were bound to hold, that the communication of his particular brand of
+truth outweighed in value all other questions. "Every Church," he wrote,
+"is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical"; but to any
+earnest believer this would approximate to blasphemy. Nor could any
+serious Christian accept the view that "under the gospel '...there is no
+such thing as a Christian commonwealth'"; to Catholics and Presbyterians
+this must have appeared the merest travesty of their faith.
+
+[Footnote 8: Cf. also Coleridge's apt remark. _Table Talk_, Jan. 3,
+1834.]
+
+Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the true progenitor of Benthamism,
+and his work can hardly be understood save in this context. Just as in
+his ethical enquiries it was always the happiness of the individual that
+he sought, so in his politics it was the happiness of the subject he had
+in view. In each case it was to immediate experience that he made his
+appeal; and this perhaps explains the clear sense of a contempt for past
+tradition which pervades all his work. "That which is for the public
+welfare," he said, "is God's will"; and therein we have the root of that
+utilitarianism which, as Maine pointed out, is the real parent of all
+nineteenth century change. And with Locke, as with the Benthamites, his
+clear sense of what utilitarianism demanded led to an over-emphasis of
+human rationalism. No one can read the _Second Treatise_ without
+perceiving that Locke looked upon the State as a machine which can be
+built and taken to pieces in very simple fashion. Herein, undoubtedly,
+he over-simplified the problem; and that made him miss some of the
+cardinal points a true psychology of the State must seize. His very
+contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection for the rational. It
+resulted in his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives
+imbedded in the political act. The significance of herd instinct and the
+vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him. All
+this is of defect; and yet excusably. For it needed the demonstration by
+Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to see the real substance
+of Aristotle's vision that man is embedded in political society.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Once Locke's work had become known, its reputation was secure. Not,
+indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation. Men were not
+wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and felt that
+anything but reason must be the test of truth. Those who stood by the
+ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism and the roots of
+atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the theories of Filmer could
+find defenders against him in the Indian summer of prerogative under
+Queen Anne. John Hutton informed a friend that he was not less dangerous
+than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the nonjuring sect.
+But these, after all, were but the eddies of a stream fast burying
+itself in the sands. For most, the Revolution was a final settlement,
+and Locke was welcome as a writer who had discovered the true source of
+political comfort. So it was that William Molyneux could embody the
+ideas of the "incomparable treatise" in his demand for Irish freedom; a
+book which, even in those days, occasioned some controversy. Nor is it
+uninteresting to discover that the translation of Hotman's
+_Franco-Gallia_ should have been embellished with a preface from one
+who, as Molyneux wrote to Locke,[9] never met the Irish writer without
+conversing of their common master. How rapidly the doctrine spread we
+learn from a letter of Bayle's in which, as early as 1693, Locke has
+already became "the gospel of the Protestants." Nor was his immediate
+influence confined to England. French Huguenots and the Dutch drew
+naturally upon so happy a defender; and Barbeyrac, in the translation of
+Pufendorf which he published in 1706, cites no writer so often as
+Locke. The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell were
+almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the accused
+counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his speech for the
+defence.
+
+[Footnote 9: Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX. 435.]
+
+More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the _Spectator_, on six
+separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose possession is a
+national glory. Defoe in his _Original Power of the People of England_
+made Locke the common possession of the average man, and offered his
+acknowledgments to his master. Even the malignant genius of Swift
+softened his hate to find the epithet "judicious" for one in whose
+doctrines he can have found no comfort. Pope summarized his teaching in
+the form that Bolingbroke chose to give it. Hoadly, in his _Original and
+Institution of Civil Government_, not only dismisses Filmer in a first
+part each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second
+section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to conceal
+the care with which the _Second Treatise_ had also been pillaged. Even
+Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of belittling all rivals in the
+field he considered his own to call him, in that _Divine Legation_ which
+he considered his masterpiece, "the honor of this age and the instructor
+of the future"; but since Warburton's attack on the High Church theory
+is at every point Locke's argument, he may have considered this
+self-eulogy instead of tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis, on the eve of English
+Radicalism, published a noble edition of his book. And there is perhaps
+a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke's economic
+tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the
+_Craftsman_, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole. That is
+irrefutable evidence of the position he had attained.
+
+Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons. There still
+remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke's
+separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch. The
+most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline
+of a social contract more daring even than his own. The authors of the
+_Declaration of Independence_ had still, in words taken from Locke, to
+reassert the state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of North
+Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the Philadelphia
+Convention. Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned against him and
+what was permanent in his work was being cast into the new form required
+by the time. A few sentences of Hume were sufficient to make the social
+contract as worthless as the Divine Right of kings, and when Blackstone
+came to sum up the result of the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual
+terms it was with a full admission that he was making use of fiction so
+far as he went behind the settlement of 1688. Nor is the work of Dean
+Tucker without significance. The failure of England in the American war
+was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked to
+Locke as the author of their principles. "The Americans," he wrote,
+"have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present war"; and in
+his _Treatise Concerning Civil Government_ and his _Four Letters_ he
+declares himself unable to understand on what Locke's reputation was
+based. Meanwhile the English disciples of Rousseau in the persons of
+Price and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol of the
+levellers of England," was the parent also of French destructiveness.
+Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he had dealt with the
+contract theory it ceased to influence political speculation in England.
+Its place was taken by the utilitarian doctrine which Hume had outlined;
+and once Bentham's _Fragment_ had begun to make its way, a new epoch
+opened in the history of political ideas.
+
+Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this renaissance; but,
+once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to other gods men turned.
+For Bentham made an end of natural rights; and his contempt for the past
+was even more unsparing than Locke's own. It is more instructive to
+compare his work with Hobbes and Rousseau than with later thinkers; for
+after Hume English speculation works in a medium Locke would not have
+understood. Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which
+made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English
+philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the
+grimness of facts about him. Yet he need not fear the comparison with
+the earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of
+the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy
+ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each one of
+which is in some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's
+view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil
+character is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept
+Hobbes' Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a
+kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges; but
+Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the other,
+pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the Hobbesian
+view. And anyone who surveys the history of Church and State in America
+will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred years the
+separateness for which Locke contended is not without its justification.
+Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes
+makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids
+them to judge. Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where
+Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder. At every
+point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the
+future has been on Locke's side. He may have defended his cause less
+splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that
+he had a more splendid cause to defend.
+
+With Rousseau there is no contrast, for the simple reason that his
+teaching is only a broadening of the channel dug by Locke. No element
+integral to the _Two Treatises_ is absent from the _Social Contract_.
+Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw deeper than his predecessor. The
+form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance
+Locke can perhaps hardly claim. He understood the organic character of
+the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow
+individualism. It is yet difficult to see that the contribution upon
+which Rousseau's fame has mainly rested is at any point a real advance
+upon Locke. The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms,
+really means the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we
+enquire how that general will is to be known, we come, after much
+shuffling, upon the will of that majority in which Locke also put his
+trust. Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an
+assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also Locke
+was anxious. But he did not think an infallible criterion existed for
+its detection; and he was satisfied with the convenience of a simple
+numerical test. Nor would it be difficult to show that Locke's state has
+more real room for individuality than Rousseau's. The latter made much
+show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in
+the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the
+confines of a city-state. Once, that is to say, we deal with modern
+problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke--what limits
+shall we place upon the power of government? Rousseau has only
+emphasized the urgency of the debate.
+
+Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching
+and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility
+that a final answer can be found to political questions. Each age has
+new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would
+condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the
+attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites
+disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless, even for our
+own day, the kind of work Locke did. In the largest sense, his questions
+are still our own. In the largest sense, also, we are near enough to his
+time to profit at each step of our own efforts by the hints he proffers.
+The point at which he stood in English history bears not a little
+resemblance to our own. The emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem
+of freedom. The problem, now as then, was its translation into
+institutional terms. It is the glory of Locke that he brought a generous
+patience and a searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his
+generation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CHURCH AND STATE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The Revolution of 1688 drew its main source of strength from the
+traditional dislike of Rome, and the eager desire to place the Church of
+England beyond the reach of James' aggression. Yet it was not until a
+generation had passed that the lines of ecclesiastical settlement were,
+in any full sense clear. The difficulties involved were mostly
+governmental, and it can hardly even yet be said that they have been
+solved. The nature of the relation between Church and State, the
+affiliation between the Church and Nonconformist bodies, the character
+of its internal government--all these had still to be defined. Nor was
+this all. The problem of definition was made more complex by schism and
+disloyalty. An important fraction of the Church could not accept at all
+the fact of William's kingship; and if the larger part submitted, it
+cannot be said to have been enthusiastic.
+
+Nor did the Church make easy the situation of the Nonconformists.
+Toleration of some kind was rapidly becoming inevitable; and with a
+Calvinist upon the throne persecution of, at any rate, the Presbyterians
+became finally impossible. Yet the definition of what limits were to be
+set to toleration was far from easy. The Church seemed like a fortress
+beleaguered when Nonjurors, Deists, Nonconformists, all alike assaulted
+her foundations. To loosen her hold upon political privilege seemed to
+be akin to self-destruction. And, after all, if Church and State were to
+stand in some connection, the former must have some benefit from the
+alliance. Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege for
+all who could not accept the special brand of religious doctrine? Locke,
+at least, denied the assumption, and argued that since Churches are
+voluntary societies, they cannot and ought not to have reciprocal
+relation with the State. But Locke's theory was meat too strong for the
+digestion of his time; and no statesman would then have argued that a
+government could forego the advantage of religious support. And William,
+after all, had come to free the church from her oppressor. Freedom
+implied protection, and protection in that age involved establishment.
+It was thus taken for granted by most members of the Church of England
+that her adoption by the State meant her superiority to every other form
+of religious organization. Superiority is, by its nature exclusive, the
+more especially when it is united to a certainty of truth and a kinship
+with the dominant political interest of the time. Long years were thus
+to pass before the real meaning of the Toleration Act secured
+translation into more generous statutes.
+
+The problem of the Church's government was hardly less complex. The very
+acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are in an age of
+settlement. Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless due to the dislike
+of all High Churchmen for William; with their consequent unwillingness
+to admit the full meaning of his ecclesiastical supremacy. Much also is
+due to the fact that the bench of bishops, despite great figures like
+Tillotson and Wake, was necessarily chosen for political aptitude rather
+than for religious value. Nor did men like Burnet and Hoadly, for all
+their learning, make easy the path for brethren of more tender
+consciences. The Church, moreover, must have felt its powers the more
+valuable from the very strength of the assault to which she was
+subjected. And the direct interference with her governance implied by
+the Oaths of Allegiance and of Abjuration raised questions we have not
+yet solved. It suggested the subordination of Church to State; and men
+like Hickes and Leslie were quick to point out the Erastianism of the
+age. It is a fact inevitable in the situation of the English Church that
+the charge of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick
+resentment. She cannot be a church unless she is a _societas perfecta_;
+she cannot have within herself the elements of perfect fellowship if
+what seem the plain commands of Christ are to be at the mercy of the
+king in Parliament. That is the difficulty which lies at the bottom of
+the debate with Wake in one age and with Hoadly in the next. In some
+sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and it is
+in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked with the
+Oxford Movement. But Newman and his followers are the unconscious
+sponsors of a debate which grows in volume; and to discuss the thoughts
+of Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a vital aspect, the study of
+contemporary ideas.
+
+We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William's advisers
+who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy. It raised in acute
+form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more than a century, been
+the main foundation of the alliance between throne and altar in England.
+The demand precipitated a schism which lingered on, though fitfully,
+until the threshold of the nineteenth century. The men who could not
+take the oath were, many of them, among the most distinguished churchmen
+of the time. Great ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of
+Canterbury and one of the seven who had gained immortality by his
+resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of Bath and Wells,
+scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men like Charles Leslie,
+born with a genius for recrimination; much, it is clear, of what was
+best in the Church of England was to be found amongst them. There is not
+a little of beauty, and much of pathos in their history. Most, after
+their deprivation, were condemned to poverty; few of them recanted. The
+lives of men like Sancroft and Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are
+part of the great Anglican tradition of earnest simplicity which later
+John Keble was to illustrate for the nineteenth century. The Nonjurors,
+as they were called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of
+their effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph
+Taylor, to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that
+the history even of their decline is without its interest; and the
+study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the
+Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for students of
+ecclesiastical history.
+
+Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than
+religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past. At the
+bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they
+represent. That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular
+state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the
+allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had
+declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main opponents,
+moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men like Andrewes must
+have felt that when they answered Bellarmine they were in substance also
+defenders of their Church. After the great controversy of James I's
+reign resistance as a duty had come to be regarded as a main element in
+Jesuit and Nonconformist teaching; with the result that its antithesis
+became, as a consequence of the political situation, no less integral a
+part of Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that
+the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to
+the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the
+main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope that it
+would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is
+this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like Barrow
+and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper. When they urge
+the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty
+of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with
+contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect. The Church of
+England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.
+
+How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the
+seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and Sanderson
+sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates its widespread
+acceptance as the result of the Revolution. Four hundred clergy
+abandoned their preferment because James ruled by Divine Right; and they
+could not in conscience resist even his iniquities. An able tract of
+1689[10] had collected much material to show how integral the doctrine
+was to the beliefs of the Church. Had William's government, indeed,
+refrained from the imposition of the oath, it is possible that there
+might have been no schism at all; for the early Nonjurors at
+least--perhaps Hickes and Turner are exceptions--would probably have
+welcomed anything which enabled the avoidance of schism. Once, however,
+the oath was imposed three vital questions were raised. Deprivation
+obviously involved the problem of the power of the State over the
+Church. If the act of a convention whose own legality was at best
+doubtful could deprive the consecrated of their position, was the Church
+a Church at all, or was it the mere creature of the secular power? And
+what, moreover, of conscience? It could not be an inherent part of the
+Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the sake of
+peace. Later thinkers added the purely secular argument that resistance
+in one case made for resistance in all. Admit, it was argued by Leslie,
+the right to disobey, and the fabric of society is at a stroke
+dissolved. The attitude is characteristic of that able controversialist;
+and it shows how hardly the earlier notions of Divine Right were to
+die.
+
+[Footnote 10: _The History of Passive Obedience_. Its author was
+Jeremy Collier.]
+
+These theories merit a further examination. Williams, later the Bishop
+of Chichester, had argued that separation on the basis of the oath was
+unreasonable. "All that the civil power here pretends to," he wrote "is
+to secure itself against the practices of dissatisfied persons." The
+Nonjurors, in this view, were making an ecclesiastical matter of a
+purely secular issue. He was answered, among others, by Samuel Grascom,
+in an argument which found high favor among the stricter of his sect.
+"The matter and substance of these Oaths," he said, "is put into the
+prayers of the Church, and so far it becomes a matter of communion. What
+people are enjoined in the solemn worship to pray for, is made a matter
+of communion; and if it be simple, will not only justify, but require a
+separation." Here is the pith of the matter. For if the form and
+substance of Church affairs is thus to be left to governmental will,
+then those who obey have left the Church and it is the faithful remnant
+only who constitute the true fellowship. The schism, in this view, was
+the fault of those who remained subject to William's dominion. The
+Nonjurors had not changed; and they were preserving the Church in its
+integrity from men who strove to betray it to the civil power.
+
+This matter of integrity is important. The glamour of Macaulay has
+somewhat softened the situation of those who took the oaths; and in his
+pages the Nonjurors appear as stupid men unworthily defending a dead
+cause. It is worth while to note that this is the merest travesty.
+Tillotson, who succeeded Sancroft on the latter's deprivation, and
+Burnet himself had urged passive resistance upon Lord William Russell as
+essential to salvation; Tenison had done likewise at the execution of
+Monmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick, White Kennett, had all written in its
+favor; and to William Sherlock belongs the privilege of having defended
+and attacked it in two pamphlets each of which challenges the pithy
+brilliance of the other. Clearly, so far as consistency is in question,
+the Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their
+side. And even if it is said that the policy of James introduced a new
+situation the answer surely is that Divine Right and non-resistance can,
+by their very nature, make no allowance for novelty.
+
+The root, then, of this ecclesiastical contention is the argument later
+advanced by Leslie in his "Case of the Regale and the Pontificate" in
+which he summarized the Convocation dispute. The State, he argues, has
+no power over bishops whose relationship to their flock is purely
+spiritual and derived from Christ. The Church is independent of all
+civil institution, and must have therefore within herself the powers
+necessary to her life as a society. Leslie repudiates Erastianism in the
+strongest terms. Not only is it, for him, an encroachment upon the
+rights of Christ, but it leads to deism in the gentry and to dissent
+among the common people. The Church of England comes to be regarded as
+no more than the creature of Parliamentary enactment; and thus to leave
+it as the creature of human votes, is to destroy its divinity.
+
+It is easy enough to see that men who felt in this fashion could hardly
+have decided otherwise than as they did. The matter of conscience,
+indeed, was fundamental to their position. "I think," said the Bishop of
+Worcester on his death-bed, "I could suffer at a stake rather than take
+this oath." That, indeed, represents the general temper. Many of them
+did not doubt that James had done grievous wrong; but they had taken the
+oath of allegiance to him, and they saw in their conscience no means of
+escape from their vow. "Their Majesties," writes the author of the
+account of Bishop Lake's death, "are the two persons in the world whose
+reign over them, their interest and inclination oblige them most to
+desire, and nothing but conscience could restrain them from being as
+forward as any in all expressions of loyalty." In such an aspect, even
+those who believe their attitude to have been wrong, can hardly doubt
+that they acted rightly in their expression of it. For, after all,
+experience has shown that the State is built upon the consciences of
+men. And the protest they made stands out in the next generation in
+vivid contrast to a worldly-minded and politically-corrupt Church which
+only internal revolution could awaken from its slumbers.
+
+No one represents so admirably as Charles Leslie the political argument
+of the case. At bottom it is an argument against anarchy that he
+constructs, and much of what he said is medieval enough in tone to
+suggest de Maistre's great defence of papalism as the secret of
+world-order. He stands four square upon divine right and passive
+obedience. "What man is he who can by his own natural authority bend the
+conscience of another? That would be far more than the power of life,
+liberty or prosperity. Therefore they saw the necessity of a divine
+original." Such a foundation, he argued elsewhere, is necessary to
+order, for "if the last resort be in the people, there is no end of
+controversy at all, but endless and unremediable confusion." Nor had he
+sympathy for the Whig attack on monarchy. "The reasons against Kings,"
+he wrote, "are as strong against all powers, for men of any titles are
+subject to err, and numbers more than fewer." And nothing can unloose
+the chain. "Obedience," he said in the _Best of All_, "is due to
+commonwealths by their subjects even for conscience' sake, where the
+princes from whom they have revolted have given up their claim."
+
+The argument has a wider history than its controversial statement might
+seem to warrant. At bottom, clearly enough, it is an attack upon the new
+tradition which Locke had brought into being. What seems to impress it
+most is the impossibility of founding society upon other than a divine
+origin. Anything less will not command the assent of men sufficiently to
+be immune from their evil passions. Let their minds but once turn to
+resistance, and the bonds of social order will be broken. Complete
+submission is the only safeguard against anarchy. So, a century later,
+de Maistre could argue that unless the whole world became the subject of
+Rome, the complete dissolution of Christian society must follow. So,
+too, fifty years before, Hobbes had argued for an absolute dominion lest
+the ambitions and desires of men break through the fragile boundaries of
+the social estate.
+
+The answer is clear enough; and, indeed, the case against the Nonjurors
+is nowhere so strong as on its political side. Men cannot be confined
+within the limits of so narrow a logic. They will not, with Bishop Ken,
+rejoice in suffering as a doctrine of the Cross. Rather will oppression
+in its turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience
+which provokes to action. Here was the root of Locke's doctrine of
+consent; for unless the government, as Hume was later to point out, has
+on its side the opinion of men, it cannot hope to endure. The fall of
+James was caused, not as the Nonjurors were tempted to think, by popular
+disregard of Divine personality, but by his own misunderstanding of the
+limits to which misgovernment may go. Here their opponents had a
+strong case to present; for, as Stillingfleet remarked, if William had
+not come over there might have been no Church of England for the
+Nonjurors to preserve. And other ingenious compromises were suggested.
+Non-resistance, it was argued by Sherlock, applied to government in
+general; and the oath, as a passage in the _Convocation Book_ of Overall
+seemed to suggest, might be taken not less to a _de facto_ monarch than
+to one _de jure_. Few, indeed would have taken the ground of Bishop
+Burnet, and allotted the throne to William and Mary as conquerors of
+the Kingdom; at least the pamphlet in which this uncomfortable doctrine
+was put forward the House of Commons had burned by the common hangman.
+
+What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense. Much the
+ablest attack upon their position was Stillingfleet's defence of the
+policy employed in filling up the sees vacated by deprivation; and it is
+remarkable that the theory he employs is to insist that unless the
+lawfulness of what had been done is admitted, the Nonjuror's position is
+inevitable. "If it be unlawful to succeed a deprived bishop," he
+wrote,[11] "then he is the bishop of the diocese still: and then the law
+that deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament
+that made that law no king and Parliament: and how can this be
+reconciled with the Oath of Allegiance, unless the Doctor can swear
+allegiance to him who is no King and hath no authority to govern." All
+this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the mere fact that it could
+be used as argument against them is proof that they were out of touch
+with the national temper. What they wanted was a legal revolution which
+is in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was
+deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly
+pressed. But the leaders of a revolution "tread a path of fire"; and the
+fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in the fact that
+this was an age when men acted on their principles. William and his
+advisers, with the condition of Ireland and Scotland a cause for
+agitation, with France hostile, with treason and plot not absent from
+the episcopate itself, had no easy task; what, in the temper of the
+time, gives most cause for consideration, is the moderate spirit in
+which they accomplished it.
+
+[Footnote 11: _A Vindication of their Majesties' Authority to fill
+the Sees of the Deprived Bishops_ (1691).]
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which the
+Church of England had to confront in these troubled years. The
+definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the moment
+it aroused less bitterness, was in the long run more intricate in its
+nature. That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of
+prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied. But greater things were
+in the air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of
+Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would have
+been admitted to the Church. It is this which explains the acrimonious
+debates of the next two years. The hatred of the Church for dissent can
+only be understood by those who study with care the insults heaped upon
+her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars. That men who had striven for
+her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen
+as tragic as ironical. Nor must we miss the political aspect of the
+matter. William had received an eager, if natural, support from
+Nonconformists; and since the vast majority of them was Whig in temper,
+the greater the degree of toleration, the greater likelihood there was
+of an attack upon the Church. Exclusion thus became a fundamental
+article of the Tory creed; and it was the more valued because it
+enabled them to strike at their opponents through an institution which
+at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710, still showed an overwhelming hold
+upon the mass of the people.
+
+The attitude of mind herein implied is in large part the reaction from
+the Erastian temper of the government. Under William, that temper is
+intelligible enough; for unless he held the Church in strict control, he
+must have felt that he was giving a large handle to his enemies. Under
+Anne, the essence of the situation remained unchanged, even though her
+eager sympathy with the Church was beyond all question. William had
+relieved Nonconformists from the burden of penal statute; the Occasional
+Conformity Act of 1713 broadly continued the exclusion of all save the
+more yielding of them from political office. When the Hanoverians
+succeeded they were willing to repeal its more rigid intolerance; but
+the Test Act remained as evidence that the Dissenters were not yet
+regarded as in a full sense part of the national life.
+
+The reasons for the hatred of dissent go back in part to the Civil War
+and in part also to the feeling of common ground between the dissenting
+interest and Rome which was born of the struggle under Elizabeth and
+James. The pamphlets are innumerable; and most of them deserve the
+complete obliquity into which they have fallen. We are told, in the
+eighteenth as in the seventeenth century, that the Presbyterian theory
+of government is inconsistent with the existence of the civil power.
+"They claim," said Leslie, "power to abrogate the laws of the land
+touching ecclesiastical matters, if they judge them hurtful or
+unprofitable... They require the civil magistrate to be subject to their
+power." Of Knox or Cartwright this is no unfair account; but of the
+later Presbyterians it is the merest travesty. It supposes that they
+would be willing to push to the utmost limit the implications of the
+theory of the two kingdoms--a supposition which their passive submission
+to the Act of 1712 restoring lay patronage decisively refutes. Bramhall
+had no doubt that their discipline was "the very quintessence of refined
+popery," and the argument is repeated by a hundred less learned
+pamphleteers. Neither the grim irony of Defoe nor the proven facts of
+the case could wean either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of
+the people from the belief that the Revolution endangered the very
+existence of the Church and that concession would be fatal. So stoutly
+did the Church resist it that the accession of George I alone, in
+Lecky's view, prevented the repeal of the Toleration Act and the
+destruction of the political benefits of the Revolution.
+
+But nowhere was the temper of the time more clearly displayed than in
+the disputes over Convocation. To William's advisers, perhaps, more than
+to the Church itself their precipitation is due; for had they not, at
+the outset of the reign, suggested large changes in the liturgy
+suspicions then aroused might well have slumbered. As it was, the
+question of the royal supremacy immediately came into view and the
+clergy spared no effort to meet the issue so raised. And this they felt
+the more bitterly because the upper house of Convocation, two-thirds of
+which were William's nominees, naturally inclined to his side. Both
+under William and Anne the dispute continued, and the lower clergy
+shrank from no opportunity of conflict. They fought the king, the
+archbishop, the upper house. They attacked the writings of Toland and
+Burnet, the latter's book since recognized as one of the great treasures
+of Anglican literature. In the main, of course, the struggle was part of
+the perennial conflict between High Church doctrine and
+latitudinarianism. But that was only a fragment of the issue. What
+really was in question was the nature of the State's power over the
+Church. That could be left unanswered so long, as with James I and
+Charles, the two powers had but a single thought. The situation changed
+only when State and Church had different policies to fulfil and
+different means for their attainment.
+
+The controversy had begun on the threshold of William's accession; but
+its real commencement dates from 1697. In that year was published the
+_Letter to a Convocation Man_, probably written by Sir Bartholomew
+Shower, an able if unscrupulous Jacobite lawyer, which maliciously,
+though with abounding skill, raised every question that peaceful
+churchmen must have been anxious to avoid. The _Letter_ pointed out the
+growth of infidelity and the increasing suspicion that the Church was
+becoming tainted with Socinian doctrine. Only the assembly of
+Convocation could arrest these evils. The author did not deny that the
+king's assent was necessary to its summons. But he argued that once the
+Convocation had met, it could, like Parliament, debate all questions
+relevant to its purpose. "The one of these courts," said Shower, "is of
+the same power and use with regard to the Church as the other is in
+respect to the State," and he insisted that the writ of summons could
+not at any point confine debate. And since the Convocation was an
+ecclesiastical Parliament, it followed that it could legislate and thus
+make any canons "provided they do not impugn common law, statutes,
+customs or prerogative." "To confer, debate and resolve," said Shower,
+"without the king's license, is at common law the undoubted right of
+convocation."
+
+Here was a clear challenge which was at once answered, in _The Authority
+of Christian Princes_, by William Wake, who was by far the most learned
+of the latitudinarian clergy, and the successor of Tenison in the see of
+Canterbury. His argument was purely historical. He endeavored to show
+that the right to summon ecclesiastical synods was always the
+prerogative of the early Christian princes until the aggression of the
+popes had won church independence. The Reformation resumed the primitive
+practice; and the Act of Submission of 1532 had made it legally
+impossible for the clergy to discuss ecclesiastical matters without
+royal permission. Historically, the argument of Wake was irrefutable;
+but what mostly impressed the Church was the uncompromising Erastianism
+of his tone. Princes, he said, "may make what laws or constitutions they
+think fit for the Church.... a canon is but as matter prepared for the
+royal stamp." In this view, obviously, the Church is more than a
+department of the State. But Wake went even farther, "I cannot see why
+the Supreme Magistrate," he wrote, "who confessedly has a power to
+confirm or reject their (Convocation's) decrees, may not also make such
+other use of them as he pleases, and correct, improve, or otherwise
+alter their resolutions, according to his own liking, before he gives
+his authority to them."
+
+So defined no Church could claim in any true sense the headship of
+Christ; for it was clearly left at the mercy of the governmental view of
+expedient conduct. Wake's answer aroused a sensation almost as acute as
+the original _Letter_ of Shower. But by far the ablest criticism it
+provoked was that of Francis Atterbury, then a young student of Christ
+Church and on the threshold of his turbulent career. His _Rights, Powers
+and Privileges of an English Convocation Stated and Vindicated_ not only
+showed a masterly historic sense in its effort to traverse the
+unanswerable induction of Wake, but challenged his position more
+securely on the ground of right. The historical argument, indeed, was
+not a safe position for the Church, and Wake's rejoinder in his _State
+of the Church_ (1703) is generally conceded to have proved his point, so
+far as the claim of prescription is concerned. But when Atterbury moves
+to the deeper problem of what is involved in the nature of a church, he
+has a powerful plea to make. It is unnecessary now to deal with his
+contention that Wake's defence of the Royal Supremacy undermines the
+rights of Parliament; for Wake could clearly reply that the seat of that
+power had changed with the advent of the Revolution. Where the avoidance
+of sympathy is difficult is in his insistence that no Church can live
+without an assembly to debate its problems, and that no assembly can be
+real which is subject to external control. "Their body," as he remarks,
+"will be useless to the State and by consequence contemptible"; for its
+opinions will not be born of that free deliberation which can alone
+ensure respect. Like all High Churchmen, Atterbury has a clear sense
+that Church and State can no longer be equated, and he is anxious to
+preserve the personality of the Church from the invasions of an alien
+body. To be real, it must be independent, and to be independent, it must
+have organs of self-expression. But neither William nor Anne could
+afford to forego the political capital involved in ecclesiastical
+control and Erastian principles proceeded to their triumph.
+
+Here, as elsewhere, it was Charles Leslie who best summed up the
+feeling of High Churchmen. His _Case of the Regale_ (1701) is by far the
+ablest of his many able performances. He saw at the outset that the real
+issue was defined by the Church's claim to be a divine society, with
+rights thus consecrated by the conditions of its origin. If it was
+divine, invasion did not touch its _de jure_ rights. "How," he asked,
+"can rights that are divine be given up? If they are divine, no human
+authority can either supersede or limit them.... How can rights that are
+inherent be given up? If they are inherent, they are inseparable. The
+right to meet, to consult, to make rules or canons for the regulation of
+the society, is essential to every society as such ... can she then part
+with what is essential to her?" Nor could it be denied that "where the
+choice of the governors of one society is in the hands of another
+society, that society must be dependent and subject to the other." The
+Church, in the Latitudinarian view was thus either the creature of the
+state or an _imperium in imperio_; but Leslie would not admit that
+fruitful stumbling block to the debate. "The sacred and civil powers
+were like two parallel lines which could never meet or interfere ... the
+confusion arises ... when the civil power will take upon them to control
+or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her spiritual authority."
+He did not doubt that the Church should give securities for its loyalty
+to the king, and renounce any effort at the coercion of the civil
+magistrate. But the Church was entitled to a similar privilege, and
+kings should not "have their beneficence and protection to the Church of
+Christ understood as a bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their
+hands the powers committed into her charge by Christ." Nor did he fail
+to point out the suicidal nature of Erastianism. For the church's hold
+upon men is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her
+principles. "When they see bishops," he wrote wisely, "made by the
+Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court
+language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a judge
+at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand from the
+Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest security of her
+government."
+
+The argument is powerful enough; though it should be noted that some of
+its implications remain undetermined. Leslie does not say how the
+spheres of Church and State are to be differentiated. He does not
+explain the methods whereby an establishment is to be made compatible
+with freedom. For it is obvious that the partnership of Church and State
+must be upon conditions; and once the State had permitted the existence
+of creeds other than that of its official adoption, it could not
+maintain the exclusive power for which the Church contended. And when
+the Church not only complained of State-betrayal, but attempted the use
+of political means to enforce remedial measures it was inevitable that
+statesmen would use the weapons ready to their hand to coerce it to
+their will. The real remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness
+but disestablishment.
+
+That this is the meaning of the struggle did not appear until the reign
+of George I. What is known as the Bangorian controversy was due to the
+posthumous publication, in 1716, of the papers of George Hickes, the
+most celebrated of the Nonjurors in his generation. The papers are of
+no special import; but taken in connection with the Jacobite rising of
+1715 they seemed to imply a new attack upon the Revolution settlement.
+So, at least, they were interpreted by Benjamin Hoadly, then Bishop of
+Bangor, and a stout upholder of the Latitudinarian school. The conflict
+today has turned to dust and ashes; and few who read the multitude of
+pamphlets it evoked, or stand amazed at their personal bitterness, can
+understand why more than a hundred writers should have thought it
+necessary to inform the world of their opinions, or why the London Stock
+Exchange should have felt so passionate an interest in the debate as to
+cease for a day the hubbub of its transactions. Nor can any one make
+heroes from the personalities of its protagonists. Hoadly himself was a
+typical bishop of the political school, who rose from humble
+circumstances to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester through a
+remarkable series of translations. Before the debate of 1716, he was
+chiefly known by two political tracts in which he had rewritten, in less
+cogent form, and without adequate acknowledgment, the two treatises of
+Locke. He clearly realized how worthless the dogma of Divine Right had
+become, without being certain of the principles by which it was to be
+replaced. Probably, as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is
+the result of a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy. If
+God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we
+must seek a human explanation of political facts. And he became
+convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to
+ecclesiastical than to secular politics. Of his opponents, by far the
+ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be said to
+have respected, and the parent, through his mystical writings, of the
+Wesleyan movement. Snape, then Provost of Eton, was always incisive; and
+his pamphlet went through seventeen editions in a single year and
+provoked seven replies within three months. Thomas Sherlock would not be
+either himself or his father's son, were he not caustic, logical and
+direct. But Hoadly and Law between them exhaust the controversy, so far
+as it has meaning for our own day. The less essential questions like
+Hoadly's choice of friends, his attitude to prayer, the accuracy of the
+details in his account of the Test Act, the cause of his refusal to
+answer Law directly, are hardly now germane to the substance of the
+debate. Hoadly's position is most fully stated in his _Preservative
+against the Principles and Practice of Nonjurors_ which he published in
+1716 as a counterblast to the papers of Hickes; and they are briefly
+summarized in the sermon preached before the King on March 31, 1717, on
+the text "My Kingdom is not of this world," and published by royal
+command. Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and qualifications, some
+simple points emerge. What he was doing was to deprive the priesthood of
+claims to supernatural authority that he might vindicate for civil
+government the right to preserve itself not less against persons in
+ecclesiastical office than against civil assailants. To do so he is
+forced to deny that the miraculous powers of Christ and the Apostles
+descended to their successors. For if that assumption is made we grant
+to fallible men privileges which confessedly belong to persons outside
+the category of fallibility. And, exactly in the fashion of Leslie in
+the _Regale_ he goes on to show that if a Church is a supernatural
+institution, it cannot surrender one jot or tittle of its prerogative.
+It is, in fact, an _imperium in imperio_ and its conflict with the state
+is inevitable. But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what
+is its nature? Hoadly here attacks the doctrine which lies at the basis
+of all ecclesiastical debate. The Church, he claims, is not a visible
+society, presided over by men who have authority directly transmitted by
+Christ. There are not within it "viceregents who can be said properly to
+supply his place; no interpreters upon whom his subjects are absolutely
+to depend; no judges over the conscience or religion of his people. For
+if this were so that any such absolute viceregent authority, either for
+the making of new laws, or interpreting old ones, or judging his
+subjects, in religious matters, were lodged in any men upon earth, the
+consequence would be that what still retains the name of the Church of
+Christ would not be the kingdom of Christ, but the kingdom of those men
+invested with such authority. For whoever hath such an authority of
+making laws is so far a king, and whoever can add new laws to those of
+Christ, equally obligatory, is as truly a king as Christ himself. Nay,
+whosoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken
+laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes,
+and not the person who first wrote and spoke them."
+
+The meaning is clear enough. What Hoadly is attacking is the theory of a
+visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense superstructure of
+miracle and infallibility erected thereon. The true Church of Christ is
+in heaven; and the members of the earthly society can but try in a
+human, blundering way, to act with decency and justice. Apostolic
+succession, the power of excommunication, the dealing out of forgiveness
+for men's sins, the determination of true doctrine, insofar as the
+Church claims these powers, it is usurping an authority that is not its
+own. The relation of man to God is his private affair, and God will ask
+from him sincerity and honesty, rather than judge him for his
+possession of some special set of dogmas. Clearly, therefore, if the
+Church is no more than this, it has no supernatural pretensions to
+oppose to the human claims of the State. And since the State must have
+within itself all the means of sufficient life, it has the right to
+resist the ecclesiastical onslaught as based upon the usurpation of
+power assumed without right. And in later treatises Hoadly did for
+ceremonial exactly what he had done for church government. The eucharist
+became a piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an
+announcement--"a mere external thing"--that the rules of the fellowship
+have been broken. It at no point is related to the sinner's opportunity
+of salvation.
+
+In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has no
+monopoly of truth. It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but reason
+alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes. Nor does its
+judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the truth of
+things. The real root of faith is not the possession of an infallible
+dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which you happen to
+believe. For the magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the
+table of your springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based
+upon that table; from which it follows that things like the Test and
+Corporation Acts have no real political validity. They have been imposed
+upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping power; and
+the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem as valid as that
+of a member of the Church of England.
+
+All this sounds sensible enough; though it is curious doctrine in the
+mouth of a bishop of that church. And this, in fact, is the
+starting-point of Law's analysis of Hoadly. No one who reads the
+unsparing vigor of his criticism can doubt that Law must have been
+thoroughly happy in the composition of his defence; and, indeed, his is
+the only contribution to the debate which may claim a permanent place in
+political literature. In one sense, indeed, the whole of Law's answer is
+an _ignoratio elenchi_, for he assumes the truth of that which Hoadly
+sets out to examine, with the inevitable result that each writer is, for
+the most part, arguing from different premises. But on the assumption
+that Hoadly is a Christian, Law's argument is an attack of great power.
+He shows conclusively that if the Church of England is no more than
+Hoadly imagines it to be, it cannot, in any proper historic sense, be
+called the Church of England at all. For every one of the institutions
+which Hoadly calls an usurpation, is believed by Churchmen to be
+integral to its nature. And if sincerity alone is to count as the test,
+then there cannot, for the existing world, be any such thing as
+objective religious truth. It subverted not merely absolute
+authority--which the Church of England did not claim--but any authority
+in the Church. It impugned the authority of the Crown to enforce
+religious belief by civil penalties. Hoadly's rejection of authority,
+moreover, is in Law's view fatal to government of any kind. For all
+lawful authority must affect eternal salvation insofar as to disobey it
+is to sin. The authority the Church possesses is inherent in the very
+nature of the Church; for the obligation to a belief in Christianity is
+the same thing as to a belief in that Church which can be shown to
+represent Christ's teaching.
+
+From Law's own point of view, the logic of his position is undeniable;
+and in his third letter to Hoadly, the real heart of his attack, he
+touches the centre of the latter's argument. For if it is sincerity
+which is alone important it would follow that things false and wrong are
+as acceptable to God as things true and right, which is patently absurd.
+Nor has Hoadly given us means for the detection of sincerity. He seemed
+to think that anyone was sincere who so thought himself; but, says Law,
+"it is also possible and as likely for a man to be mistaken in those
+things which constitute true sincerity as in those things which
+constitute true religion." Clearly, sincerity cannot be the pith of the
+matter; for it may be mistaken and directed to wrong ends. The State, in
+fact, may respect conscience, but Hoadly is no more entitled to assume
+the infallibility of private belief than he is to deny the infallibility
+of the Church's teaching. That way lies anarchy.
+
+Here, indeed, the antagonists were on common ground. Both had denied the
+absolute character of any authority; but while Hoadly virtually
+postulates a Church which logically is no more than those who accept
+the moral law as Christ described it, Law restricts the Church to that
+society which bears the traditional marks of the historic institution.
+On Hoadly's principles, there was no reason why anyone not hostile to
+the civil power should not enjoy political privilege; on Law's there was
+every reason simply because those who denied the doctrines of the High
+Church refused a truth open for their acceptance. Law, indeed, goes so
+far as to argue that in the light of his principles Hoadly should be a
+Deist; and there is ground for what, in that age, was a valuable point
+to make. The sum total of it all is that for the bishop the outward
+actions of men alone concern the State; while Law insists that the root
+of action and the test of fitness is whether men have seen a certain
+aspect of the truth and grasped it.
+
+The result, to say the least, was calamitous. In May of 1717,
+convocation met and the Lower House immediately adopted an unanimous
+report condemning the "Preservative" and the sermon. But Hoadly had the
+government behind him and the convocation was prorogued before further
+action could be taken. Snape, Hare, Mosse and Sherlock, all of whom were
+chaplains royal, and had been drawn into the conflict, were dismissed
+from their office; and for more than one hundred and thirty-five years
+convocation was not again summoned. It was a striking triumph for
+Erastianism, though the more liberal principles of Hoadly were less
+successful. Robert Walpole was on the threshold of his power, and, as a
+manager of Sacheverell's impeachment, he had seen the hold of the Church
+upon the common people, may even, indeed, have remembered that Hoadly's
+own dwelling had been threatened with destruction in the popular
+excitement. _Quieta non movere_ was his motto; and he was not interested
+in the niceties of ecclesiastic metaphysic. So the Test Act remained
+immovable until 1828; while the annual Act of Indemnity for its
+infractions represented that English genius for illogical mitigation
+which solves the deeper problems of principle while avoiding the
+consideration of their substance.
+
+In the hundred and twenty years which passed between the Bangorian
+Controversy and the Oxford Movement, there is only one volume upon the
+problem of Church and State which deserves more than passing notice.
+Bishop Warburton was the Lord Brougham of his age; and as its
+self-constituted universal provider of intellectual fare, he deemed it
+his duty to settle this, amongst others of the eternal questions. The
+effort excited only the contempt of Leslie Stephen--"the peculiar
+Warburton mixture," he says "of sham logic and bluster." Yet that is
+hardly fair to the total result of Warburton's remarks. He tried to
+steer a middle path between the logical result of such Erastianism as
+that of the _Independent Whig_, on the one hand, and the excessive claim
+of High Churchmanship on the other. Naturally enough, or the writer
+would not be Warburton, the book is full of tawdry rhetoric and stupid
+quibbles. But the _Alliance between Church and State_ (1736) set the
+temper of speculation until the advent of Newman, and is therefore
+material for something more than contempt. It acutely points out that
+societies generate a personality distinct from that of their members in
+words reminiscent of an historic legal pronouncement.[12] "When any
+number of men," he says, "form themselves into a society, whether civil
+or religious, this society becomes a body different from that aggregate
+which the number of individuals composed before the society was
+formed.... But a body must have its proper personality and will, which
+without these is no more than a shadow or a name."
+
+[Footnote 12: Dicey, _Law and Opinion in England_ (2nd edition),
+p. 165.]
+
+And that is the root of Warburton's pronouncement. The Church is a
+society distinct from the State, but lending to that body its assistance
+because without the sanction of religion the full achievement of the
+social purpose is impossible. There is thus an alliance between them,
+each lending its support to the other for their common benefit. The two
+remain distinct; the union between them is of a federal kind. But they
+interchange their powers, and this it is which explains at once the
+royal supremacy and the right of Churchmen to a share in the
+legislature. This also it is which explains the existence of a Test
+Act, whereby those who might injure that which the State has undertaken
+to protect are deprived of their power to evil. And, in return, the
+Church engages to "apply its utmost endeavors in the service of the
+State." It becomes attached to its benefactor from the privilege it
+receives; and the dangers which might arise from its natural
+independence are thus obviated. For a federal union precludes the grave
+problem of an _imperium in imperio_, and the "mischiefs which so
+terrified Hobbes" are met by the terms upon which it is founded.
+
+It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The contract
+does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton "in the same
+archive with the famous original compact between monarch and people"
+which has been the object of vast but fruitless searches. Nor does the
+Act of Submission bear upon its face the marks of that tender care of
+the protection of an independent society which Warburton declared a
+vital tenet of the Union. Yet such criticisms miss the real significance
+of the theory. It is really the introduction into English politics of
+that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and
+Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit
+was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a
+secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the
+superior. Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it
+pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had
+seemed mutually exclusive.
+
+Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the English Church
+because its temper, under the ægis of Laudian views, had been in
+substance theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly expressed the compromise
+the dominant party of the Church had then in mind. They did, indeed,
+mistake the power of the Church, or, rather, they submitted to the State
+so fully that what they had intended for a partnership became an
+absorption. So that the Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep
+enough to make the Church no more than a moral police department of the
+State. Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by
+fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct
+to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The
+Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and
+its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the
+obstrusive Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence
+slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until Newman's advent was
+the provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility. It
+is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church which
+was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The opponents of
+Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a
+plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making. They saw that a
+Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control
+of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth
+their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment
+and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to
+be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal
+and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the
+Church to possess an ethos of her own. It was thus against the
+sovereignty of the State that they protested. Somewhere, a line must be
+drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be
+safeguarded. For its supporters could not be true to their divine
+mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to
+impose its will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious
+body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they
+repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived from the
+State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an
+authority not rightly its own.
+
+The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment. For here
+the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived
+upon terms of her own definition. That was possible before the
+Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of
+rationalism the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become
+unacceptable. If the Church was to become so intimately involved with
+the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to complain, if
+statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to sacrifice it to
+the attainment of that ideal. For the real secret of independence is,
+after all, no more than independence. The Church sought it without being
+willing to pay the price. And this it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge
+triumphant from an ordeal where logically he should have failed. The
+State, by definition is an absorptive animal; and the Church had no
+right to complain if the price of its privileges was royal supremacy. A
+century so self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the
+difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High Church
+theory.
+
+Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next century.
+The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the seventeenth
+century, to the ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.[13] In
+fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law. Like them, it was
+searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it
+discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the
+sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation. "The
+State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words might have been
+written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement, indeed, like its
+predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and when Lord Brougham told
+the House of Lords that the idea of the Church possessing "absolute and
+unalienable rights" was a "gross and monstrous anomaly" because it would
+make impossible the supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the
+result of a doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first
+completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this
+controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury has
+told the House of Lords,[14] "... see the absolute need, if a Church is
+to be strong and vigorous, for the Church, _qua_ church, to be able to
+say what it can do as a church." "The rule of the sovereign, the rule of
+Parliament," replied Lord Haldane,[15] "extend as far as the rule of the
+Church. They are not to be distinguished or differentiated, and that was
+the condition under which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the
+Church of England." Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic
+theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the problem
+of its sovereignty. "A free church in a free state," now, as then, may
+be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to build it.
+
+[Footnote 13: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chapter III.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34,
+p. 992 (June 3, 1919).]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p 1002.
+The quotation does not fully represent Lord Haldane's views.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ERA OF STAGNATION
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of unexampled calm
+in English politics, which lasted until the expulsion of Walpole from
+power in 1742. No vital questions were debated, nor did problems of
+principle force themselves into view; and if the Jacobites remained in
+the background as an element invincibly hostile to absorption, the
+failure of their effort in 1715 showed how feeble was their hold on
+English opinion. Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had
+nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably
+recorded in Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and
+meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the reign
+of George III, they were amenable to management. In the result, an
+opposition in the classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question
+to be considered was the personalities who were to share in power. The
+dominating temper of Walpole decided that issue; and he gave thereby to
+the political struggle the outlines in which it was encased for a
+generation.
+
+It is a dull period, but complacent; for it was not an unprosperous
+time. Agriculture and commerce both were abundant; and the increasing
+development of towns shows us that the Industrial Revolution loomed in
+the near distance. The eager continuance of the deistic controversy
+suggests that there was something of novelty beneath the calm; for
+Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck at the root of religious belief,
+and Shaftesbury's exaltation of Hellenism not only contributed to the
+_Aufklarung_ in Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not
+to go unchallenged. But the literature of the time is summarized in
+Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of
+the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the
+latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop
+Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his
+_Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721) shows rather
+the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea
+Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought.
+Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with
+seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the
+estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite
+the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole
+governed. It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the
+keynote of the time. An able speaker, without being a great orator, a
+superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men
+low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the
+man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions
+to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over
+the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from
+office. One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney,
+Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility. He maintained himself in
+office by a corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically
+conceived. An opposition developed less on principle than on the belief
+that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for concentration.
+The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save personal animosity
+upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions could only seize upon a
+doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain as the pretext of the war it
+was Walpole's ambition no less than policy to avoid. From 1726 until
+1735 the guiding spirit of the party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter
+year he quarrelled with Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in
+high dudgeon to France. But in the years of his leadership he had
+evolved a theory of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the
+intellectual bankruptcy of the time.
+
+To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to remember
+the peculiar character of his career. He had attained to the highest
+office under Anne at an exceptionally early age; and his period of
+power had been distinguished by the vehemence with which he pursued the
+ideal of a strict division of parties and the expulsion of all alien
+elements from the government. But he had staked all his fortunes upon a
+scheme he had neither the resolution to plan nor the courage to execute;
+and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had been followed
+by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to his reputation and
+place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the
+King's mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to
+political place. His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from
+power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance between the
+Tories and malcontent Whigs for Walpole's overthrow. The alliance
+succeeded, though too late for Bolingbroke to enjoy the fruits of
+success; but in effecting the purgation of the Tory party from its taint
+of Jacobitism he rendered no inconsiderable service. His foundation,
+moreover, of the _Craftsman_--the first official journal of a political
+party in England--showed his appreciation of the technique of political
+controversy. Most of it is dead now, and, indeed, no small part of its
+contemporary success is due to the making of comment in terms of the
+immediate situation, as also by its consistent use of a personal
+reference which has, save in the mass, no meaning for today. Though,
+doubtless, the idea of its inception was derived from journals like
+Defoe's _Review_ and Leslie's _Rehearsal_, which had won success, its
+intimate connection with the party leadership was a novel element; and
+it may therein claim a special relation to the official periodicals of a
+later generation.
+
+The reputation of Bolingbroke as a political philosopher is something
+that our age can hardly understand. "A solemn trifler," Lord Morley has
+called him; and it is difficult to know why his easy declamation was so
+long mistaken for profound thought. Much, doubtless, is due to that
+personal fascination which made him the inspiration of men so different
+as Pope and Voltaire; and the man who could supply ideas to Chatham and
+Disraeli cannot be wholly devoid of merit. Certainly he wrote well, in
+that easy elegance of style which was the delight of the eighteenth
+century; and he is consistently happy in his choice of adjectives. But
+his work is at every point embellished with that affectation of
+classical learning which was the curse of his age. He sought no general
+truths, and he is free from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any
+enthusiasm save that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his
+political writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize
+his animosity. The _Dissertation on Parties_ (1734) and the _Idea of a
+Patriot King_ (1738) might have betrayed us, taken alone, into regarding
+their author as a disinterested observer watching with regret the
+development of a fatal system; but taken in conjunction with the _Letter
+to Sir W. Windham_ (1717), which was not published until after his
+death, and is written with an acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to
+honesty, they reveal the opinions as no more than a mask for ambition
+born of hate.
+
+The whole, of course, must have some sort of background; and the
+_Letters on the Study of History_ (1735) was doubtless intended to
+supply it. Experience is to be the test of truth, since history is
+philosophy teaching by example. But Bolingbroke's own argument supplies
+its refutation. His history is an arbitrary selection of instances
+intended to illustrate the particular ideas which happened to be
+uppermost in his mind. The Roman consuls were chosen by annual election;
+whence it is clear that England should have, if not an annual, at least
+a triennial parliament. He acknowledges that the past in some degree
+unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks upon the
+evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger
+aspect than their immediate environment. But his history is intended
+less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy
+of citation. Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content
+with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration. He is willing,
+indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the
+reign of James I; though he shows his lack of true perception when he
+ascribes the true inwardness of the Reformation to the greed of the
+monarch for the spoils of the clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses
+him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events.
+Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the
+real root of great changes. And when he expresses a "thorough contempt"
+for the kind of work scholars such as Scaliger and Petavius had
+achieved, he shows his entire ignorance of the method whereby alone a
+knowledge of general principle can be attained.
+
+A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high
+notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings is too
+stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king
+important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the Church; for
+Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with such matters as
+the apostolic succession. He makes great show of his love of liberty,
+which is the true end of government; and we are informed with a vast
+solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in which it always stands. So that
+the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told
+what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained. The social compact
+seems to win his approbation and we learn that the secret of the
+British constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual
+independency. But what the powers are, and how their independence is
+preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of
+Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria
+against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the
+secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of
+standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told
+that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and
+vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for
+corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his
+sincerity. The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no
+difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how
+completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted. He
+wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He would have
+disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen from Parliament.
+The press was to be free; and there is at least a degree of generous
+insight in his plea for a wider commercial freedom in colonial matters.
+Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man with
+the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the committee for the
+settlement of disputed elections? And what else can we see in his desire
+for liberty of the press save a desire to fight Walpole in the open,
+without fear of the penalties his former treason had incurred?
+
+His value can be tested in another way. His _Idea of a Patriot King_ is
+the remedy for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty years old when it
+appeared, and he had then been in active politics for thirty-five years,
+so that we are entitled to regard it as the fruit of his mature
+experience. He was too convinced that the constitution was "in the
+strictest sense a bargain, a conditional contract between the prince and
+the people" to attempt again the erection of a system of prerogative.
+Yet it is about the person of the monarch that the theory hinges. He is
+to have no powers inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for
+such restraints will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil
+propensities of a bad king. What is needed is a patriot king who will
+destroy corruption and awaken the spirit of liberty. His effective
+government will synchronize with the commencement of his reign; and he
+will at once dismiss the old and cunning ministers, to replace them by
+servants who are wise. He will not stand upon party, but upon the State.
+He will unite the forces of good counsel into a single scheme.
+Complaints will be answered, the evildoers punished. Commerce will flow
+on with uninterrupted prosperity, and the navy of England receive its
+due meed of attention. His conduct must be dignified, and he must
+acquire his influence not apart from, but on account of, the affection
+of his people. "Concord," says Bolingbroke in rhapsodical prospection,
+"will appear breeding peace and prosperity on every hand"; though he
+prudently hopes also that men will look back with affection upon one
+"who desired life for nothing so much as to see a King of Great Britain
+the most powerful man in the country, and a patriot King at the head of
+a united people."
+
+Bolingbroke himself has admitted that such a monarch would be a "sort of
+standing miracle," and perhaps no other comment upon his system is
+required. A smile in Plato at the sight of his philosopher-King in such
+strange company might well be pardoned. It is only necessary to point
+out that the person whom Bolingbroke designates for this high function
+was Frederick, Prince of Wales, to us the most meagre of a meagre
+generation, but to Bolingbroke, by whose grace he was captivated, "the
+greatest and most glorious of human beings." This exaltation of the
+monarch came at a time when a variety of circumstances had combined to
+show the decrease of monarchical sentiment. It bears upon its every page
+the marks of a personal antagonism. It is too obviously the programme of
+a party to be capable of serious interpretation as a system. The
+minister who is to be impeached, the wise servants who are to gain
+office, the attack on corruption, the spirited foreign policy--all these
+have the earmarks of a platform rather than of a philosophy. Attacks on
+corruption hardly read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the
+one solid evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger of
+finance in politics. For none of the Tories save Barnard, who owed his
+party influence thereto, understood the financial schemes of Walpole;
+and since they were his schemes obviously they represented the triumph
+of devilish ingenuity. The return of landed men to power would mean the
+return of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country
+squires, the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that
+Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a régime which already
+faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power. The pamphlet was the
+cornerstone in the education of Frederick's son; and when George III
+came to the throne he proceeded to give such heed to his master as the
+circumstances permitted. It is perhaps, as Mr. A.L. Smith has argued,
+unfair to visit Bolingbroke with George's version of his ideal; yet they
+are sufficiently connected for the one to give the meaning to the other.
+Chatham, indeed, was later intrigued by this ideal of a national party;
+and before Disraeli discovered that England does not love coalitions he
+expended much rhetoric upon the beauties of a patriotic king. But
+Chatham was a wayward genius who had nothing of that instinct for common
+counsel which is of the essence of party government; while it is
+necessary to draw a firm line between Disraeli's genial declamation and
+his practice when in office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort
+founded upon the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that
+his own last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of
+the event which he looked to as the inauguration of the golden age.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political thought;
+the system continued, though the men were different. What alone can be
+detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which found its
+sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the strength of
+which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king. An able
+pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival of this unlooked-for portent.
+_Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts_ (1742) was, though it is
+anonymous,[16] obviously written by one in touch with the inner current
+of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of Walpole, though he sees
+the chaos in its result. "A republican spirit," he says, "has strangely
+arisen"; and he goes on to tell how the electors of London and
+Westminster were now regarding their members as delegates to whom
+instructions might be issued. "A new party of malcontents" had arisen,
+"assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People."
+They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ... and
+endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands
+that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the
+people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so
+obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society,
+to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves."
+The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike, that temper which
+produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible for Cartwright and
+Horne Tooke and Sir Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English
+radicalism.
+
+[Footnote 16: It was probably written by Lord Egmont.]
+
+Yet the influence of that temper still lay a generation ahead; and the
+next piece of import comes from a mind which, though perhaps the most
+powerful of all which have applied themselves to political philosophy in
+England, was, from its very scepticism, incapable of constructive
+effort. David Hume was thirty-one years of age when he published (1742)
+the first series of his essays; and his _Treatise of Human Nature_ which
+had fallen "dead-born from the press" was in some sort compensated by
+the success of the new work. The second part, entitled _Political
+Discourses_, was published in 1752, almost simultaneously with the
+"_Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals_." As in the case of
+Hume's metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful
+dissolvent the century was to see. Yet nowhere was so clearly to be
+demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had fallen.
+
+Hume, of course, is always critical and suggestive, and even if he had
+no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new turn to speculation.
+There is something almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes
+divine right and the social contract. The one is an inevitable deduction
+from theism, but it protects an usurper not less than an hereditary
+king, and gives a "divine commission" as well to a constable as to the
+most majestic prince. The proponents of the social contract are in no
+better case. "Were you to preach," he remarks, "in most parts of the
+world that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary
+consent, or on a mutual promise, the magistrate would soon imprison you
+as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience; if your friends did
+not before shut you up as delirious for advancing such absurdities." The
+original contract could not be produced, and, even if it were, it would
+suppose the "consent of the fathers to bind the children even to the
+most remote generations." The real truth, as he remarks, is that "almost
+all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains
+any record in story, have been founded originally on usurpation, or on
+conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary
+subjection of the people." If we then ask why obedience is possible, the
+sufficient answer is that "it becomes so familiar that most men never
+make any inquiry about its origin or cause, any more than about the
+principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of nature."
+
+Government, in short, is dependent upon the inescapable facts of
+psychology. It might be unnecessary if all desires could be individually
+fulfilled by making them, or if man showed to his fellow-men the same
+tender regard he has for himself. So happy a condition does not exist;
+and government is the most useful way of remedying the defects of our
+situation. A theologian might say that Hume derives government from
+original sin; to which he would have replied by denying the fall. His
+whole attitude is simply an insistence that utility is the touchstone of
+institutions, and he may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its
+application to the whole field of political science. He knows that
+opinion is the sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie
+at the base of the thoughts which get accepted. He does not, indeed,
+deny that fear and consent enter into the attitude of men; he simply
+asserts that these also are founded upon a judgment of utility in the
+thing judged. We obey because otherwise "society could not subsist," and
+society subsists for its utility. "Men," he says "could not live at all
+in society, at least in a civilized society, without laws and
+magistrates and judges, to prevent the encroachments of the strong upon
+the weak, of the violent upon the just and equitable."
+
+Utilitarianism is, of course, above all a method; and it is not unfair
+to say of Hume that he did not get very far beyond insistence on that
+point. He sees that the subjection of the many to the few is rooted in
+human impulse; but he has no penetrating inquiry, such as that of Locke
+or Hobbes, into the purpose of such subjection. So, too, it is the sense
+of public interest which determines men's thoughts on government, on who
+should rule, and what should be the system of property; but the ethical
+substance of these questions he leaves undetermined. Politics, he
+thinks, may one day be a science; though he considers the world still
+too young for general truths therein. The maxims he suggests as of
+permanent value, "that a hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals,
+and a people voting by their representatives form the best monarchy,
+autocracy and democracy"; that "free governments ... are the most
+ruinous and oppressive to their provinces"; that republics are more
+favorable to science, monarchies to art; that the death of a political
+body is inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most
+thinkers at the present time. And when he constructs an ideal
+constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be regarded as
+practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is obvious that the
+historical method had not yet come fully into being.
+
+Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an avoidance
+of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic insight that he had.
+He has a keen eye for the absurdity of Pope's maxim that administration
+is all in all; nothing can ever make the forms of government immaterial.
+He accepts Harrington's dictum that the substance of government
+corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as later
+thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces. He sees that
+the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or withstand the new balance
+of property in the State; a prophecy of which the accuracy was
+demonstrated by the failure of George III. "In all governments," as he
+says, "there is a perpetual intestinal struggle, open or secret,"
+between Authority and Liberty; though his judgment that neither "can
+ever absolutely prevail," shows us rather that we are on the threshold
+of _laissez-faire_ than that Hume really understood the problem of
+freedom. He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of
+the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular
+government. He saw the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency
+to persist in terms of men instead of principles. He was convinced of
+the necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and
+no one, save Adam Smith, has more acutely insisted upon the evil effect
+on commerce of an absolute government. He emphasized the value of
+freedom of the press, in which he saw the secret whereby the mixed
+government of England was maintained. "It has also been found," he said
+in a happy phrase, "... that the people are no such dangerous monsters
+as they have been represented, and that it is in every respect better to
+guide them like rational creatures than to lead or drive them like brute
+beasts." There is, in fact, hardly a page of his work in which some such
+acuteness may not be found.
+
+Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is absent. Hume was a typical
+child of one aspect of the eighteenth century in his hatred of
+enthusiasm, and the form in which he most abominates it is religious.
+Why people's religious opinions should lead to antagonism he could no
+more understand than why people should refuse to pass one another on a
+road. Wars of religion thus seemed to him based upon a merely frivolous
+principle; and in his ideal commonwealth he made the Church a department
+of the State lest it should get out of hand. He was, moreover, a static
+philosopher, disturbed by signs of political restlessness; and this led
+to the purgation of Whig doctrines from his writings, and their
+consistent replacement by a cynical conservatism. He was always afraid
+that popular government would mean mob-rule; and absolute government is
+accordingly recommended as the euthanasia of the British constitution.
+Not even the example of Sweden convinced him that a standing army might
+exist without civil liberty being endangered; and he has all the noxious
+fallacies of his time upon the balance of power. Above all, it is
+striking to see his helplessness before the problem of national
+character. Mainly he ascribes it to the form of government, and that in
+turn to chance. Even the friend of Montesquieu can see no significance
+in race or climate. The idea, in fact, of evolution is entirely absent
+from his political speculation. Political life, like human life, ends in
+death; and the problem is to make our egress as comfortable as we can,
+for the prime evil is disturbance. It is difficult not to feel that
+there is almost a physical basis in his own disease for this love of
+quiet. The man who put indolence among the primary motives of human
+happiness was not likely to view novel theories with unruffled temper.
+
+Hume has an eminent place among economists, and for one to whom the
+study of such phenomena was but a casual inquiry, it is marvelous how
+much he saw. He is free from the crude errors of mercantilism; and
+twenty years before Adam Smith hopes, "as a British subject," for the
+prosperity of other countries. "Free communication and exchange" seems
+to him an ordinance of nature; and he heaps contempt upon those
+"numberless bars, obstructions and imposts which all nations of Europe,
+and none more than England, have put upon trade." Specie he places in
+its true light as merely a medium of exchange. The supposed antagonism
+between commerce and agriculture he disposes of in a half-dozen
+effective sentences. He sees the place of time and distance in the
+discussion of economic want. He sees the value of a general level of
+economic equality, even while he is sceptical of its attainment. He
+insists upon the economic value of high wages, though he somewhat
+belittles the importance of wealth in the achievement of happiness.
+Before Bentham, who on this point converted Adam Smith, he knew that the
+rate of interest depends upon the supply of and demand for loans. He
+insists that commerce demands a free government for its progress,
+pointing out, doubtless from his abundant French experience, that an
+absolute government gives to the commercial class an insufficient status
+of honor. He pointed out, doubtless with France again in his mind, the
+evils of an arbitrary system of taxation. "They are commonly converted,"
+he says with unwonted severity, "into punishments on industry; and also,
+by their unavoidable inequality, are more grievous, than by the real
+burden which they impose." And he emphasizes his belief that the best
+taxes are those which, like taxes upon luxury, press least upon the
+poor.
+
+Such insight is extraordinary enough in the pre-Adamite epoch; but even
+more remarkable are his psychological foundations. The wealth of the
+State, he says, is the labor of its subjects, and they work because the
+wants of man are not a stated sum, but "multiply every moment upon
+him." The desire for wealth comes from the idea of pleasure; and in the
+_Treatise on Human Nature_ he discusses with superb clarity the way in
+which the idea of pleasure is related at once to individual satisfaction
+and to that sympathy for others which is one of the roots of social
+existence. He points out the need for happiness in work. "The mind," he
+writes, "acquires new vigor, enlarges its powers and faculties, and by
+an assiduity in honest industry both satisfies its own appetites and
+prevents growth of unnatural ones"; though, like his predecessor,
+Francis Hutcheson, he overemphasizes the delights opened by civilization
+to the humbler class of men. He gives large space in his discussion to
+the power of will; and, indeed, one of the main advantages he ascribed
+to government was the compulsion it puts upon us to allow the categories
+of time and space a part in our calculations. He does not, being in his
+own life entirely free from avarice, regard the appetite for riches as
+man's main motive to existence; though no one was more urgent in his
+insistence that "the avidity of acquiring goods and possessions for
+ourselves and our nearest friends is ... destructive of society" unless
+balanced by considerations of justice. And what he therein intended may
+be gathered from the liberal notions of equality he manifested. "Every
+person," he wrote in a famous passage, "if possible ought to enjoy the
+fruits of his labor in a full possession of all the necessaries, and
+many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt but such an equality
+is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less the happiness
+of the rich than it adds to that of the poor." It is clear that we have
+moved far from the narrow confines of the old political arithmetic. The
+theory of utility enables Hume to see the scope of economics--the word
+itself he did not know--in a more generous perspective than at any
+previous time. It would be too much to say that his grasp of its
+psychological foundation enabled him entirely to move from the
+limitations of the older concept of a national prosperity expressed only
+in terms of bullion to the view of economics as a social science. But at
+least he saw that economics is rooted in the nature of men and therein
+he had the secret of its true understanding. _The Wealth of Nations_
+would less easily have made its way had not the insight of Hume prepared
+the road for its reception.
+
+What, then, and in general, is his place in the history of political
+thought? Clearly enough, he is not the founder of a system; his work is
+rather a series of pregnant hints than a consecutive account of
+political facts. Nor must we belittle the debt he owes to his
+predecessors. Much, certainly, he owed to Locke, and the full radiance
+of the Scottish enlightenment emerges into the day with his teaching.
+Francis Hutcheson gave him no small inspiration; and Hutcheson means
+that he was indebted to Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy
+commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in
+that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is
+characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth
+century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is
+entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism. He first
+showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between
+ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He brings to an end
+what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical school." After him we
+are done with the abuse of history to bolster up Divine Right and social
+contract; for there is clearly present in his use of facts a true sense
+of historical method. He put an end also to the confusion which resulted
+from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong
+independent of all positive law. He took the facts as phenomena to be
+explained rather than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be
+maintained in part defiance of them. Conventional Whiggism has no
+foothold after he has done with its analysis. His utilitarianism was the
+first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract
+school; and even if he was not the first to see through its
+pretensions--that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury--he was the first
+to show the grounds of their uselessness. He saw that history and
+psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy.
+So that even if he could not himself construct it the hints at least
+were there.
+
+[Footnote 17: There are few books which show so clearly as Lorimer's
+_Institutes of Nations_ (1872) how fully the Scottish school was in the
+midstream of European thought.]
+
+His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion. The
+metaphysics of Burke, so far as one may use a term he would himself have
+repudiated, are largely those of Hume. The place of habit and of social
+instinct alongside of consent, the perception that reason alone will not
+explain political facts, the emphasis upon resistance as of last resort,
+the denial that allegiance is a mere contract to be presently explained,
+the deep respect for order--all these are, after all, the fabric from
+which the thought of Burke was woven. Nor is there in Bentham's defence
+of Utilitarianism argument in which he would have recognized novelty.
+Herein, at least, his proof that morality is no more than general
+opinion of utility constructs, in briefer form, the later arguments of
+Bentham, Paley and the Mills, nor can their mode of statement claim
+superiority to Hume's. So that on either side of his work he foreshadows
+the advent of the two great schools of modern political thought. His
+utilitarianism is the real path by which radical opinion at last found
+means of acceptance. His use of history is, through Burke, the ancestor
+of that specialized conservatism begotten of the historical method. If
+there is thus so much, it is, of course, tempting to ask why there is
+not more. If Hume has the materials why did he fail to build up a system
+from them? The answer seems twofold. In part it is the man himself. His
+genius, as his metaphysics show, lay essentially in his power of
+destruction; and the man who gave solipsism to philosophy was not likely
+to effect a new creation in politics. In part, also, the condition of
+the time gave little stimulus to novelty. Herein Hume was born a
+generation too early. Had he written when George III attempted the
+destruction of the system of the Revolution, and when America and France
+combined to raise again the basic questions of politics, he might have
+done therein what Adam Smith effected in his own field. But the time had
+not yet come; and it was left to Burke and Bentham to reap where he had
+sown.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SIGNS OF CHANGE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+From Hume until the publication of Burke's _Present Discontents_ (1770)
+there is no work on English politics of the first importance. Walpole
+had fallen in 1742; but for the next fifteen years his methods dominated
+the parliamentary scene. It was only with the advent of the elder Pitt
+to power that a new temper may be observed, a temper quickened by what
+followed on the accession of George III. Henceforward, it is not untrue
+to say that the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it
+was no longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French
+Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim
+satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the
+standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight, though
+collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for men to
+grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater
+prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to
+victory. Something of the exhilaration of these years we can still catch
+in the letters which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to
+turn off with easy laughter his deep sense of pride. In the House of
+Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show that a
+new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the
+first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in
+the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent.
+
+So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single
+source, the French influence is the effective cause of change. Voltaire
+and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole's
+administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw.
+Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the
+good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution,
+and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience. Yet
+when he came, in 1762, to publish the _Contrat Social_ it was obvious
+that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real meaning of their
+work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English
+institutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the
+simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and
+one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a
+general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of
+English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing--less
+admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a _Habeas
+Corpus_ and a _lettre de cachet_, the regular succession of Parliaments,
+all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a
+magnificent achievement. The English constitution revealed to France an
+immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration. Even to
+Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was
+a generalization from its significance at a special crisis. Hume had
+partial glimpses of its inner substance. But for most it had become a
+discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs. Its analysis as a
+connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil
+Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was
+more significant was the realization of Montesquieu's import
+simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence.
+Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers.
+Rousseau's time was not yet; though within a score of years it was
+possible to see him as the rival to Burke's conservatism.
+
+It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which underlies
+the _Esprit des Lois_ (1748). It is a commonplace now that Montesquieu
+is to be regarded as the founder of the historical method. The present
+is to be explained by its ancestry. Laws, governments, customs are not
+truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin
+and the country from which they derive. It would be inaccurate, with
+Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the
+systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in
+the most complete unreality, are to be found in Godwin's _Political
+Justice_; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time
+such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his
+faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly
+saw--the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the
+high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past
+wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened
+this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But
+Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main
+mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that
+decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the
+true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the
+importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid
+Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in his inaugural lecture as
+Vinerian professor. He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to
+which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent
+utterance both in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention, and in
+the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What, perhaps, is most
+immediately significant is his famous praise of the British
+Constitution--the secret of which he entirely misapprehended--and his
+discovery of its essence in the separation of powers. The short sixth
+chapter of his eleventh book is the real keynote of Blackstone and De
+Lolme. It led them to investigate, on principles of at least doubtful
+validity, an edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the
+last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth
+antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated
+structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That it
+was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been
+made. The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines have been
+more noxious in their consequence than this theory of checks and
+balances. But Blackstone's _Commentaries_ (1765-9) produced Bentham's
+_Fragment on Government_ (1776), and with that book we enter upon the
+realistic study of the British Constitution.
+
+Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from
+English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an
+influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those
+that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to
+avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference
+between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power
+of government which Locke had proposed. It is a removal at every point
+conditioned by the interest of the people. For Rousseau declared that
+the existing distribution of power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and
+he made the people sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their
+achievement in the shape of sinister interest. The powers of the people
+thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for
+innovation. It is easy enough then to understand why such a philosophy
+should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager sympathy for humble
+men, his optimistic faith in the immediate prospect of popular power
+were to Burke the symptoms of insane delusion and their author "the
+great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England."
+But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's influence was the
+success of the American Revolution; and no one had done more than Burke
+himself to promote its cause and justify its principles. That revolution
+established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its
+statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America
+guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the
+soberness with which it checked the supposed weakness of the sovereign
+people. America made herself independent while what was best in Europe
+combined in enthusiastic applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of
+Rousseau had been taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of
+power could remove what deliberation was impotent to secure. Here
+Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage
+denied. Nor, at the moment, was it influential except in the general
+impetus it gave to thought. But from the moment of its appearance it is
+an undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its metaphysical
+form it failed to command acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its
+results were victorious. Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the
+conclusions he recommends so much as in the language in which he clothes
+them. Either make a final end of the optimism of men like Hume and
+Blackstone, or the veneration for the past which is at the root of
+Burke's own teaching.
+
+It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the
+stimulus it did. Montesquieu came to praise the British constitution at
+a time when good men were aghast at its perversion. There was no room in
+many years for revolution, but at least there was place for hearty
+discontent and a seeking after new methods. Of that temper two men so
+different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are the political symbols. The
+former's rise to power upon the floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant
+nothing so much as a protest against the cynical corruption of the
+previous generation. Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly
+awaking to a sense of its own power. The French creed was too purely
+logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its
+entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden
+shoes played not a little part in its rejection. The rights of man made
+only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was
+involved in that rejection; and then it was too late. But no one could
+feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and
+Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for
+thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is
+nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes.
+The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is
+attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the
+French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would
+have been a supreme achievement.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757. John Brown's
+_Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_ is largely
+forgotten now; though it went through seven editions in a year and was
+at once translated into French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in
+the vast Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of
+comment upon the _Characteristics_ of Shaftesbury. His book is too
+evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with reverence, to
+make us doubt its derivation. There is the same reliance upon Livy and
+Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking generalization; though the
+argument upon which Brown's conclusions are based is seldom given,
+perhaps because his geometric clarity of statement impressed him as
+self-demonstrative. Brown's volumes are an essay upon the depravity of
+the times. He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering
+sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing
+so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the
+universities out of hand, in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would
+not have rejected. He deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men
+trifle with Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would,
+appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become
+nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the
+theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The
+neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown
+in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to
+the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling
+penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the
+army devote themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize
+money. Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour
+brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman. The poor, indeed,
+the middle class, and the legal and medical professions, Brown
+specifically exempts from this indictment. But he emphasizes his belief
+that this is unimportant. "The manners and principles of those who
+lead," he says, "... not of those who are governed ... will ever
+determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the continuance or
+dissolution of a state."
+
+This profligacy Brown compares to the languid vice which preceded the
+fall of Carthage and of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great
+Britain at the hands of France, unless it can be cured. So far as he has
+an explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the
+decay of religious sentiment. His remedy is only Bolingbroke's Patriot
+King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen to the height
+of power. What mainly stirred Englishmen was the prophecy of defeat on
+the morrow of the disastrous convention of Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe
+and Clive repaired that royal humiliation Brown seems to have died a
+natural death. What is more interesting than his prophecies was the
+evidence of a close reading of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is
+the product of the climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and
+sullen temper. Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of
+England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the
+simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation.
+Brown has no passion, and his book reads rather like Mr. Galsworthy's
+_Island Pharisees_ sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a
+well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of attention
+to the evils of his time. It describes undoubted facts, and it shows
+that the era of content has gone. But its careful periods and strangely
+far-off air lack the eagerness for truth which Rousseau put into his
+questions. Brown can neither explain nor can he proffer remedy. He sees
+that Pitt is somehow significant; but when he rules out the popular
+voice as devoid of all importance, he deprives himself of the means
+whereby to grasp the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted. Nothing
+could prove more strongly the exactitude of Burke's _Present
+Discontents_. Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of
+Junius.
+
+Hume was the friend of Montesquieu, though twenty years his junior; and
+the _Esprit des Lois_ travelled rapidly to Scotland. There it caught the
+eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a treatise on refinement, and by the
+influence of Hume and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
+University of Edinburgh. Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular
+in his time, and certainly he has a skill for polished phrase, and a
+genial paraphrase of other men's ideas. His _Essay on the History of
+Civil Society_ (1767), which in a quarter of a century went through six
+editions, was thought by Helvétius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume
+himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its
+suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some
+fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the investigation of
+savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government. He
+sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature. He
+insists, probably after conversation with Adam Smith, upon the social
+value of the division of functions. He does not doubt the original
+equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his age has reached the limit
+of its useful growth. Property he traces back to a parental desire to
+make a better provision for children "than is found under the
+promiscuous management of many copartners." Climate has the new
+importance upon which Montesquieu has insisted; or, at least, as it
+"ripens the pineapple and the tamarina," so it "inspires a degree of
+mildness that can even assuage the rigours of despotical government."
+The priesthood--this is Hume--becomes a separate influence under the
+sway of superstition. Liberty, he says, "is maintained by the continued
+differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in
+behalf of equitable government." The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is
+certainly not here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in
+the obscurity into which he has fallen. The _Esprit des Lois_ took
+twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of men
+like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped. Facile
+popularisers of this sort may have mollified the drawing-room; but they
+did not add to political ideas.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the students of
+constitutional law. Blackstone's _Commentaries on the Laws of England_
+(1765-9) has had ever since its first publication an authority such as
+Coke only before possessed. "He it is," said Bentham, "who, first of
+all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the
+language of the Scholar and the Gentleman." Certainly, as Professor
+Dicey has remarked, "the book contains much real learning about our
+system of government." We are less concerned here with Blackstone as an
+antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy. Here his
+purpose seems obvious enough. The English constitution raised him from
+humble means through a Professorship at Oxford to a judgeship in the
+Court of Common Pleas. He had been a member of Parliament and refused
+the office of Solicitor-General. He had thus no reason to be
+dissatisfied with the conditions of his time; and the first book of the
+_Commentaries_ is nothing so much as an attempt to explain why English
+constitutional law is a miracle of wisdom.
+
+Constitutional law, as such, indeed, found no place in Blackstone's
+book. It creeps in under the rights of persons, where he deals with the
+power of king and Parliament. His treatment implies a whole philosophy.
+Laws are of three kinds--of nature, of God, and of the civil state.
+Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is "a rule of civil conduct
+prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and
+prohibiting what is wrong." It is, he tells us, "called a rule to
+distinguish it from a compact or agreement." It derives from the
+sovereign power, of which the chief character is the making of laws.
+Society is based upon the "wants and fears" of men; and it is coeval
+with their origin. The idea of a state of nature "is too wild to be
+seriously admitted," besides being contrary to historical knowledge.
+Society implies government, and whatever its origins or its forms there
+"must be in all of them a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled
+authority, in which the _jura summa imperii_, or rights of sovereignty
+reside." The forms of government are classified in the usual way; and
+the British constitution is noted as a happy mixture of them all. "The
+legislature of the Kingdom," Blackstone writes, "is entrusted to three
+powers entirely independent of each other; first the King, secondly the
+lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical assembly of
+persons, chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour
+or their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by
+the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy;
+and as this aggregate body, actuated by different springs and attentive
+to different interests, composes the British Parliament and has the
+supreme disposal of everything; there can be no inconvenience attempted
+by either of the three branches, but will be withstood by one of the
+other two; each branch being armed with a negative power, sufficient to
+repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous." It
+is in the king in Parliament that British sovereignty resides. Eschewing
+the notion of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the
+implications of it are secured. "The constitutional government of this
+island," he says, "is so admirably tempered and compounded, that nothing
+can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the equilibrium of power between
+one branch of the legislature and the rest."
+
+All this is not enough; though, as Bentham was to show in his _Fragment
+on Government_, it is already far too much. "A body of nobility," such
+is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, "is also more
+peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded constitution, in order
+to support the rights of both the Crown and people, by forming a barrier
+to withstand the encroachments of both ... if they were confounded with
+the mass of the people, and like them had only a vote in electing
+representatives, their privileges would soon be borne down and
+overwhelmed by the popular torrent, which would effectually level all
+distinctions." "The Commons," he says further, "consist of all such men
+of property in the kingdom as have not seats in the House of Lords." The
+legal irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. "He is not only
+incapable of doing wrong," says Blackstone, "but even of thinking wrong;
+he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or
+weakness," though he points out that the constitution "has allowed a
+latitude of supposing the contrary." The powers of the King are
+described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of William the
+Norman than to the backstairs corruption of George III. The right of
+revolution is noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals
+rather than of law.
+
+"Its true defect," says Professor Dicey of the _Commentaries_, "is the
+hopeless confusion both of language and of thought introduced into the
+whole subject of constitutional law by Blackstone's habit--common to all
+the lawyers of his time--of applying old and inapplicable terms to new
+institutions." This is severe enough; yet Blackstone's sins are deeper
+than the criticism would suggest. He introduced into English political
+philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of substance upon
+which the whole vicious theory of checks and balances was erected. He
+made no distinction between the unlimited sovereignty of law and the
+very obviously limited sovereignty of reality. He must have known that
+to talk of the independence of the branches of the legislature was
+simple nonsense at a time when King and peers competed for the control
+of elections to the House of Commons. His idealization of a peerage
+whose typical spiritual member was Archbishop Cornwallis and whose
+temporal embodiment was the Duke of Bedford would not have deceived a
+schoolboy had it not provided a bulwark against improvement. It was
+ridiculous to describe the Commons as representative of property so long
+as places like Manchester and Sheffield were virtually disfranchised.
+His picture of the royal prerogative was a portrait against every detail
+of which what was best in England had struggled in the preceding century
+and a half. He has nothing to say of the cabinet, nothing of ministerial
+responsibility, nothing of the party system. What he did was to produce
+the defence of a non-existent system which acted as a barrier to all
+legal, and much political, progress in the next half-century. He gave
+men material without cause for satisfaction.
+
+As a description of the existing government there is thus hardly an
+element of Blackstone's work which could stand the test of critical
+inquiry. But even worse was its philosophy. As Bentham pointed out, he
+was unaware of the distinction between society and government. The state
+of nature exists, or fails to exist, with startling inconsistency.
+Blackstone, in fact, was a Lockian who knows that Hume and Montesquieu
+have cut the ground from under his master's feet, and yet cannot
+understand how, without him, a foundation is to be supplied. Locke,
+indeed, seems to him, as a natural conservative, to go too far, and he
+rejects the original contract as without basis in history; yet
+contractual notions are present at every fundamental stage of his
+argument. The sovereign power, so we are told, is irresistible; and then
+because Blackstone is uncertain what right is to mean, we hear of moral
+limitations upon its exercise. He speaks continually of representation
+without any effort to examine into the notions it conveys. The members
+of society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify
+existent inequalities. "The natural foundations of sovereignty," he
+writes, "are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and
+power." Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have been
+taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the actual
+exertion of authority. Nor has he clear notions of the way in which
+property is to be founded. Communism, he writes in seventeenth century
+fashion, is the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the
+earth to men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the
+soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions. This is
+pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are utterly
+remote from the logical result of his own premises.
+
+The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these questions, only
+the most confused sort of notions. He had to preface his work with some
+sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded
+it. The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some
+uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to
+the great sceptic's speculations. So that he was driven back upon
+notions he felt to be false, without a proper realization of their
+falsity. His use of Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a
+great idea can be in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than
+the fertility it contained. The merit of Blackstone is his learning,
+which was substantial, his realization that the powers of law demand
+some classification, his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is
+right alike in searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying
+the historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was
+little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions
+of his time to question its assumptions.
+
+De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with Blackstone,
+what he failed to see was even more remarkable than what he did
+perceive, his book has real ability and merit. De Lolme was a citizen of
+Geneva, who published his _Constitution of England_ in 1775, after a
+twelve months' visit to shores sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to
+die in obscurity and want. His book, as he tells us in his preface, was
+no mean success, though he derived no profit from it. Like Blackstone,
+he was impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional
+equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty. The attitude was
+not unnatural in one who, with his head full of Montesquieu, was a
+witness of the struggle between Junius and the King. He has, of course,
+the limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of
+government in purely mechanical terms. "It is upon the passions of
+mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the
+action of the various parts of a state depends. The machine may vary as
+to its dimensions; but its movement and acting springs still remain
+intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks of government as "a great
+ballet or dance in which ... everything depends upon the disposition of
+the figures." He does not deal, that is to say, with men as men, but
+only as inert adjuncts of a machine by which they are controlled. Such
+an attitude is bound to suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction.
+It regards historic forces as distinct from the men related to them.
+Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to
+unstability. The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal
+power against the popular. The King's interest is safeguarded by the
+division of Parliament into two Houses, each of which rejects the
+encroachment of the other upon the executive. His power is limited by
+parliamentary privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and
+so forth. The theory was not true; though it represented with some
+accuracy the ideals of the time.
+
+Nor must we belittle what insight De Lolme possessed. He saw that the
+early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented the
+continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with the
+result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the English
+people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior power. He
+understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was the
+independence of the judges. He realized that the party-system--he never
+used the actual term--while it provides room for men's ambitions at the
+same time prevents the equation of ambition with indispensability. "Woe
+to him," says De Lolme, "... who should endeavor to make the people
+believe that their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single
+citizen." He sees the paramount value of freedom of the press. This, as
+he says, with the necessity that members should be re-elected, "has
+delivered into the hands of the people at large the exercise of the
+censorial power." He has no doubt but that resistance is the remedy
+whereby governmental encroachment can be prevented; "resistance," he
+says, "is the ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of
+power." He points out how real is the guarantee of liberty where the
+onus of proof in criminal cases is thrown upon the government. He
+regards with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military
+arm, and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it
+has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding to
+the royal power. Nor can he fail to admire the insight which organizes
+"the agitation of the popular mind," not as "the forerunner of violent
+commotions" but to "animate all parts of the state." Therein De Lolme
+had grasped the real essence of party government.
+
+It was, of course, no more than symptomatic of his time that cabinet and
+prime minister should have escaped his notice. A more serious defect was
+his inability, with the Wilkes contest prominently in his notice, to
+see that the people had assumed a new importance. For the masses,
+indeed, De Lolme had no enthusiasm. "A passive share," he thought, "was
+the only one that could, with safety to the state, be trusted" to the
+humble man. "The greater part," he wrote, "of those who compose this
+multitude, taken up with the care of providing for their subsistence,
+have neither sufficient leisure, nor even, in consequence of their
+imperfect education, the degree of information, requisite for functions
+of this kind." Such an attitude blinded him to the significance of the
+American conflict, which he saw unattended by its moral implications. He
+trusted too emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that
+institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George III
+could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a sense of its
+own power. The real social forces of the time found there no channels of
+activity; and the difference between De Lolme and Bagehot is the
+latter's power to go behind the screen of statute to the inner sources
+of power.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The basis of revolutionary doctrine was already present in England when,
+in 1762, Rousseau published his _Contrat Social_. With its fundamental
+doctrines Locke had already made his countrymen familiar; and what was
+needed for the appreciation of its teaching was less a renaissance than
+discontent. So soon as men are dissatisfied with the traditional
+foundations of the State, a gospel of natural rights is certain to make
+its appearance. And, once the design of George III had been made
+familiar by his treatment of Chatham and Wilkes, the discontent did not
+fail to show itself. Indeed, in the year before the publication of
+Rousseau's book, Robert Wallace, a Scottish chaplain royal, had written
+in his _Various Prospects_ (1761) a series of essays which are at once
+an anticipation of the main thesis of Malthus and a plea for the
+integration of social forces by which alone the mass of men could be
+raised from misery. In the light of later experience it is difficult not
+to be impressed by the modernist flavour of Wallace's attack. He
+insists upon the capacity of men and the disproportion between their
+potential achievement and that which is secured by actual society. Men
+are in the mass condemned to ignorance and toil; and the lust of power
+sets man against his neighbor to the profit of the rich. Wallace traces
+these evils to private property and the individualistic organization of
+work, and he sees no remedy save community of possessions and a
+renovated educational system. Yet he does not conceal from himself that
+it is to the interest of the governing class to prevent a revolution
+which, beneficent to the masses, would be fatal to themselves; nor does
+he conceive it possible until the fertility of men has been reduced to
+the capacity of the soil. He speculates upon the chances of a new spirit
+among men, of an all-wise legislator, and of the beneficent example of
+colonies upon the later Owenite model. But his book is contemporaneous
+with our own ideas rather than with the thoughts of his generation. Nor
+does it seem to have excited any general attention.
+
+It is five years after Rousseau that we see the first clear signs of his
+influence. Naturally enough the men amongst whom the new spirit spread
+abroad were the Nonconformists. For more than seventy years they had
+been allowed existence without recognition. None had more faithfully
+supported the new dynasty than they; none had been paid less for their
+allegiance. Their utmost effort could secure only a sparing mitigation
+of the Test Act. All of them were Whigs, and the doctrines of Locke
+suited exactly their temper and their wants. There were amongst them
+able men in every walk of life, and they were apt to publication. Joseph
+Priestley, in particular, gave up with willingness to mankind what was
+obviously meant for chemical science. A few years previously Brown of
+the _Estimate_ had submitted a scheme for national education, in which
+the essential principle was Church control. Priestley had answered him,
+and was encouraged by friends to expand his argument into a general
+treatise. His _Essay on the First Principles of Government_ appeared in
+1768; and, if for nothing else, it would be noteworthy because it was
+therein that the significance of the "greatest happiness principle"
+first flashed across Bentham's mind. But the book shows more than this.
+"I had placed," says Priestley with due modesty, "the foundation of some
+of the most valuable interests of mankind on a broader and firmer basis
+than Mr. Locke"; and the breadth and firmness are Rousseau's
+contribution.
+
+Certainly we herein meet new elements. On the very threshold of the book
+we meet the dogma of the perfectibility of man. "Whatever," Priestley
+rhapsodizes, "was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious
+and paradisaical, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive." "The
+instrument of this progress ... towards this glorious state" is
+government; though a little later we are to find that the main business
+of government is noninterference. Men are all equal, and their natural
+rights are indefeasible. Government must be restrained in the interests
+of liberty. No man can be governed without his consent; for government
+is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in
+exchange for a power to share in public decisions. It thus follows that
+the people must be sovereign, and interference with their natural
+rights will justify resistance. Every government, he says, is "in its
+original principles, and antecedent to its present form an equal
+republic"; wherefore, of course, it follows that we must restore to men
+the equality they have lost. And, equally, of course, this would bestow
+upon the Nonconformists their full citizenship; for Warburton's
+_Alliance_, to attack which Priestley exhausts all the resources of his
+ingenuity, has been one of the main instruments in their degradation.
+"Unbounded liberty in matters of religion," which means the abolition of
+the Establishment, promises to be "very favorable to the best interests
+of mankind."
+
+So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for English
+Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import. It can never be
+forgotten in the history of political ideas that the alliance of Church
+and State made Nonconformists suspicious of government interference.
+Their original desire to be left unimpeded was soon exalted into a
+definite theory; and since political conditions had confined them so
+largely to trade none felt as they did the hampering influence of
+State-restrictions. The result has been a great difficulty in making
+liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the organic
+nature of the State. It remains for them almost entirely a police
+institution which, once it aims at the realization of right, usurps a
+function far better performed by individuals. There is no sense of the
+community; all that exists is a sum of private sentiments. "Civil
+liberty," says Priestley, "has been greatly impaired by an abuse of the
+maxim that the joint understanding of all the members of a State,
+properly collected, must be preferable to that of individuals; and
+consequently that the more the cases are in which mankind are governed
+by this united reason of the whole community, so much the better;
+whereas, in truth, the greater part of human actions are of such a
+nature, that more inconvenience would follow from their being fixed by
+laws than from their being left to every man's arbitrary will." If my
+neighbor assaults me, he suggests, I may usefully call in the police;
+but where the object is the discovery of truth, the means of education,
+the method of religious belief, individual initiative is superior to
+State action. The latter produces an uniform result "incompatible with
+the spirit of discovery." Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just
+to posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future. Men are
+too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all action.
+
+Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past tradition; and
+the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered broadcast over his
+pages. Nevertheless the basis upon which he defended his ideas was a
+utilitarianism hardly less complete than that which Bentham made the
+instrument of revolution. "Regard to the general good," he says, "is the
+main method by which natural rights are to be defended." "The good and
+happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any
+State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state
+must finally be determined." In substance, that is to say, if not
+completely in theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to
+those of expediency. His chief attack upon religious legislation is
+similarly based upon considerations of policy. His view of the
+individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates
+all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual
+energy. Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar
+fashion to Adam Smith and his followers. Priestley, of course, was
+inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief
+instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that
+government has the future in its hands than that government action may
+well be decisive for good or evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism
+is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all
+doors. That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made
+discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school
+which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of
+unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of
+that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it
+encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the
+energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the
+previous age.
+
+It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley exerted;
+certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small. Dr. Richard
+Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he might have had has
+been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents. His sinking-fund scheme
+was taken up by the younger Pitt, and proved, though the latter believed
+in it to the last, to be founded upon an arithmetical fallacy which did
+not sit well upon a fellow of the Royal Society. His sermon on the
+French Revolution provoked the _Reflections_ of Burke; and, though much
+of the right was on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he
+survived Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day,
+and he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English
+revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb optimism;
+for the rigid _a priori_ morality of which he was the somewhat muddled
+defender was less favorable to a confidence in reason. He had a good
+deal of John Brown's fear that luxury was the seed of English
+degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the
+population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential
+to the general thesis he had to make.
+
+Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to print by
+the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely popular, his
+_Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty_ (1776) attained its eighth
+edition within a decade. This, with its supplement _Additional
+Observations_ (1777), presents a perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their
+ancestry concealed. They represent the tradition of Locke, modified by
+the importations of Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume,
+and he takes sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has
+little or nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument
+is upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government, and
+self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator.
+Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to its last
+consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public services"; laws are
+"particular provisions or regulations established by Common Consent for
+gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are "trustees or deputies
+for carrying these regulations into execution." And almost in the words
+of Rousseau, Price goes on to admit that liberty, "in its most perfect
+degree, can be enjoyed only in small states where every independent
+agent is capable of giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen
+into public offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though
+he thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize the
+sacrifice of liberty involved.
+
+But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized.
+"Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust; and
+all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects the theory
+of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with self-government; if
+the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its life, it would betray its
+constituents and dissolve itself. "If omnipotence," he writes, "can with
+any sense be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all
+legislative authority originates; that is, in the People." Such a
+system is alone compatible with the ends of government, since it cannot
+be supposed that men "combine into communities and institute government"
+for self-enslavement. Nor is any other political system "consistent with
+the natural equality of mankind"; by which Price means that no man "is
+constituted by the author of nature the vassal or subject of another, or
+has any right to give law to him, or, without his consent, to take away
+any part of his property or to abridge him of his liberty." From all of
+which it is concluded that liberty is inalienable; and a people which
+has lost it "must have a right to emancipate themselves as soon as they
+can." The aptness of the argument to the American situation is obvious
+enough; and nowhere is Price more happy or more formidable than when he
+applies his precepts to phrases like "the unity of the empire" and the
+"honor of the kingdom" which were so freely used to cover up the
+inevitable results of George's obstinacy.
+
+The _Essay on the Right of Property in Land_ (1781) of William Ogilvie
+deserves at least a passing notice. The author, who published his book
+anonymously, was a Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen and
+an agriculturist of some success. His own career was distinctly
+honorable. The teacher of Sir James Mackintosh, he had a high reputation
+as a classical scholar and deserves to be remembered for his effort to
+reform a college which had practically ceased to perform its proper
+academic functions. His book is virtually an essay upon the natural
+right of men to the soil. He does not doubt that the distress of the
+times is due to the land monopoly. The earth being given to men in
+common, its invasion by private ownership is a dangerous perversion. Men
+have the right to the full product of their labor; but the privileges of
+the landowner prevent the enjoyment of that right. The primary duty of
+every State is the increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation
+is that which has the greatest number of free and independent
+cultivators. But governments attend rather to the interest of the higher
+classes, even while they hold out the protection of the common people as
+the main pretext of their authority. The result is their maintenance of
+land-monopoly even though it affects the prime material of all essential
+industries, prevents the growth of population, and makes the rich
+wealthier at the expense of the poor. It breeds oppression and
+ignorance, and poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative.
+He points out how a nation is dominated by its landlords, and how they
+have consistently evaded the fiscal burdens they should bear. Only in a
+return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source of an
+increase in happiness.
+
+Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to speak of
+actual changes, he had little more to propose than a system of peasant
+proprietorship. What is striking in the book is its sense of great,
+impending changes, its thorough grasp of the principle of utility, its
+realization of the immense agricultural improvement that is possible if
+the landed system can be so changed as to bring into play the impulses
+of humble men. He sees clearly enough that wealth dominates the State;
+and his interpretation of history is throughout economic. Ogilvie is
+one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who, chiefly through
+Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special current of their own in
+the great tide of protest against the unjust situation of labor. Like
+them, he builds his system upon natural rights; though, unlike them, his
+natural rights are defended by expediency and in a style that is always
+clear and logical. The book itself has rather a curious history. At its
+appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind. Mackintosh
+knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against the amiable
+delusion that its excellence would persuade the British government to
+force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the East India Company.
+Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby, it was intended to
+instruct the Chartists in the secret of their oppression; and therein it
+may well have contributed to the tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus
+O'Connor. In 1891 the problem of the land was again eagerly debated
+under the stimulus of Mr. Henry George; and a patriotic Scotchman
+published the book with biographical notes that constitute one of the
+most amazing curiosities in English political literature.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Against the school of Rousseau's English disciples it is comparatively
+easy to multiply criticisms. They lacked any historic sense. Government,
+for them, was simply an instrument which was made and unmade at the
+volition of men. How complex were its psychological foundations they had
+no conception; with the single factor of consent they could explain the
+most marvellous edifice of any time. They were buried beneath a mountain
+of metaphysical right which they never related to legal facts or to
+political possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions
+of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to
+investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led. They
+overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy themselves
+with political affairs. They made no proper allowance for the protective
+armour each social system must acquire by the mere force of
+prescription. Nor is there sufficient allowance in their attitude for
+those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman must
+of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to say, so
+completely with _staatslehre_ that they do not admit the mollifying
+influence of _politik_. They search for principles of universal right,
+without the perception that a right which is to be universal must
+necessarily be so general in character as to be useless in its
+application.
+
+Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their
+insight. They were protesting against a system strongly upheld on
+grounds which now appear to have been simply indefensible. The business
+of government had been made the private possession of a privileged
+class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from
+the minds of most men engaged in its direction. The loss of America, the
+heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the
+Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and
+North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most
+to the fact that principle is a vital part of policy. The revolutionists
+recalled men to the need of explaining, no less than carrying on, the
+government of the Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by
+elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid
+intrigues of the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government
+as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful
+reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the
+governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political
+controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle
+of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind
+and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had
+in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his
+Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer
+like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated,
+unconvinced. It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part
+of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes of
+Europe and America before they would give serious heed; and even then
+they met antagonism with nothing save oppression and hate. Yet the
+doctrines remained; for thought, after all, is killed by reasoned answer
+alone. And when the first gusts of war and revolution had passed, the
+cause for which they stood was found to have permeated all classes save
+that which had all to lose by learning.
+
+We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and
+Priestley as representing more than an important segment of opinion. The
+opposition to their theories was not less articulate than their own
+defence of them. Some, like Burke, desired a purification of the
+existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had no sort of sympathy with
+new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least, deserves some mention less for
+the inherent value of what he had to say, than for the nature of the
+opinions he expounded. Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a
+reputation alike in political and economic enquiry. He represents the
+sturdy nationalism of Arbuthnot's _John Bull_, the unreasoned prejudice
+against all foreigners, the hatred of all metaphysics as inconsistent
+with common sense, the desire to let things be on the ground that the
+effort after change is worse than the evil of which men complain. His
+_Treatise on Civil Government_ (1781) is in many ways a delightful book,
+bluff, hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that
+is all its own. He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the first
+place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the second, to
+explode the new bubble of Rousseau's followers. The second point takes
+the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as Tucker shrewdly saw,
+the theories of the school may trace their ancestry. He analyses the
+theory of consent in such fashion as to show that if its adherents could
+be persuaded to be logical, they would have to admit themselves
+anarchists. He has no sympathy with the state of nature; the noble
+savage, on investigation, turns out to be a barbaric creature with a
+club and scalping knife. Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or,
+as he prefers, somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that
+does not mean that the actual governors can be dismissed when any
+eccentric happens to take exception to their views. He has no sympathy
+with parliamentary reform. Give the mob an increase of power, he says,
+and nothing is to be expected but outrage and violence. He thinks the
+constitution very well as it is, and those who preach the evils of
+corruption ought to prove their charges instead of blasphemously
+asserting that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
+
+Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own. He does not doubt that
+the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered upon them.
+Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as ever George III
+himself could have desired. But not for one moment would he fight them
+to compel their return to British allegiance. If the American colonies
+want to go, let them by all means cut adrift. They are only a useless
+source of expenditure. The trade they represent does not depend upon
+allegiance but upon wants that England can supply if she keeps shop in
+the proper way, if, that is, she makes it to their interest to buy in
+her market. Indeed, colonies of all kinds seem to him quite useless.
+They ever are, he says, and ever were, "a drain to and an incumbrance on
+the Mother-country, requiring perpetual and expensive nursing in their
+infancy, and becoming headstrong and ungovernable in proportion as they
+grow up." All wise relations depend upon self-interest, and that needs
+no compulsion. If Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up,
+the result would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and
+contracts effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal
+industry encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that
+mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-century
+before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean crustily explaining
+his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had just rejected Edmund
+Burke for advocating free trade with Ireland.
+
+No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr. Johnson.
+Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of gloomy
+prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of the source
+from which they come. He thought life a poor thing at the best and took
+a low view of human nature. "The notion of liberty," he told the
+faithful Boswell, "amuses the people of England and helps to keep off
+the _tedium vitae_." The idea of a society properly organized into ranks
+and societies he always esteemed highly. "I am a friend to
+subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of
+society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the
+offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he seems to
+have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as the worst of
+sins. He did not believe in the honesty of republicans; they levelled
+down, but were never inclined to level up. Men, he felt, had a part to
+act in society, and their business was to fulfil their allotted station.
+Rousseau was a very bad man: "I would sooner sign a sentence for his
+transportation than that of any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey
+these many years." Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth
+while was freedom in private concerns. He blessed the government in the
+case of general warrants and thought the power of the Crown too small.
+Toleration he considered due to an inapt distinction between freedom to
+think and freedom to talk, and any magistrate "while he thinks himself
+right ... ought to enforce what he thinks." The American revolt he
+ascribed to selfish faction; and in his _Taxation no Tyranny_ (1775) he
+defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite ground
+of the necessity of subordination. He was willing, he said, to love all
+mankind except an American.
+
+Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an
+acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and
+fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the
+letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He
+knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe
+under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the _Idler_ as
+one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish
+as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the
+sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt
+for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular.
+There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of
+the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time
+was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as
+elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental
+questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no age
+are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is
+diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require
+something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's attitude
+would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but
+where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to
+contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in
+a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to
+look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BURKE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the
+king stands outside the categories of political conflict. He is the
+dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory,
+is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is
+largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came
+to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has
+passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent
+widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have
+secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first
+twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort
+of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once
+more the balance of power. Nor was the effort defeated without a
+struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.
+
+And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time
+highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost much credit
+during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the
+elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended
+for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power. A
+generation of corrupt practice and the final defeat of Stuart hopes had
+already deprived the Whigs of any special hold on their past ideals.
+They were divided already into factions the purpose of which was no more
+than the avid pursuit of place and pension. Government by connection
+proved itself irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also
+that once corruption was centralized there was no limit to its
+influence, granted only the absence of great questions. When George III
+transferred that organization from the office of the minister to his own
+court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his success. For more
+than forty years the Tories had been excluded from office; and they
+were more than eager to sell their support. The Church had become the
+creature of the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was
+towards benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind
+of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He
+had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and a
+reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's first book
+can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor was it obvious
+that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the
+great Whig families.
+
+What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of the
+king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined somewhat
+to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was excessively ignorant
+and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no one but himself, and he
+totally misunderstood the true nature of his office. There is no
+question which arose in the first forty years of his reign in which he
+was not upon the wrong side and proud of his error. He was wrong about
+Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about France. He
+demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked every measure for
+the purification of the political system. He supported the Slave trade
+and he opposed the repeal of the Test Act. He prevented the grant of
+Catholic emancipation at the one moment when it might have genuinely
+healed the wounds of Ireland. He destroyed by his perverse creations the
+value of the House of Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly
+determined to make his will the criterion of policy; and his design
+might have succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to
+its greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen
+with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in politics.
+The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the court upon a
+broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as the event proved,
+could be as subservient to the king as to his minister.
+
+Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with characteristic
+stupidity, the king did not know the proper instruments for his
+purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the suspicion of
+the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder Pitt. In the Wilkes
+affair he threw the clearest light of the century upon the true nature
+of the House of Commons. His own system of proscription restored to the
+Whig party not a little of the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to
+supply them with a philosophy. Chatham remained the idol of the people
+despite his hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of
+representative government and of personal liberty. He lost America and
+it was not his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he
+received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had made
+him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt was to
+compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George's
+effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature
+of things, survive that analysis.
+
+Not, of course, that George ever lacked defenders. As early as 1761, the
+old rival of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage had condemned to
+obsolescence, published his _Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the
+new Reign_. Pulteney urged the sovereign no longer to be content with
+the "shadow of royalty." He should use his "legal prerogatives" to check
+"the illegal claims of factious oligarchy." Government had become the
+private possession of a few powerful men. The king was but a puppet in
+leading strings. The basis of government should be widened, for every
+honest man was aware that distinctions of party were now merely nominal.
+The Tories should be admitted to place. They were now friendly to the
+accession and they no longer boasted their hostility to dissent. They
+knew that Toleration and the Establishment were of the essence of the
+Constitution. Were once the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would
+cease and Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom. "The
+ministers," he said, "will depend on the Crown not the Crown on
+ministers" if George but showed "his resolution to break all factitious
+connections and confederacies." The tone is Bolingbroke's, and it was
+the lesson George had insistently heard from early youth. How sinister
+was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in political
+exile, with Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants threatening the whole
+basis of past liberties.
+
+The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the meaning of
+the new synthesis was Junius. That his anonymity concealed the malignant
+talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now beyond denial. Junius, indeed,
+can hardly claim a place in the history of political ideas. His genius
+lay not in the discussion of principle but the dissection of
+personality. His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled
+him to inform the general public of facts which were the private
+possession of the inner political circle. His mind was narrow and
+pedantic. He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he
+maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough
+was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He
+was never generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his
+calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness the nature of the
+issue and he was a powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king.
+He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the
+unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover, appearing as
+they did in the daily journals gave the press a significance in politics
+which it has never lost. He made the significance of George's effort
+known to the mass of men at a time when no other means of information
+was at hand. The opposition was divided; the king's friends were in a
+vast majority; the publication of debates was all but impossible.
+English government was a secret conflict in which the entrance of
+spectators was forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate.
+It was the glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. Not even the
+combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord Mansfield's
+doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of his vituperation
+and Wilkes' courage. Bad men have sometimes been the instruments of
+noble destiny; and there are few more curious episodes in English
+history than the result of this alliance between revengeful hate and
+insolent ambition.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was the
+ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict its real
+place in philosophy. There is no immortality save in ideas; and it was
+Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in which he was the
+liberal protagonist. His career is illustrative at once of the merits
+and defects of English politics in the eighteenth century. The son of an
+Irish Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, he served, after learning
+what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to
+politics in the upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied,
+along with Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal;
+though the _Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful_ (1756) shows
+his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special
+possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub Street that he appears
+to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge
+which made him without equal in the House of Commons. His earliest
+production was a _Vindication of Natural Society_ (1756), written in the
+manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative
+satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the
+basis of Godwin's _Political Justice_. After a vain attempt to serve in
+Ireland with "Single-Speech" Hamilton, he became the private secretary
+to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the one section of the Whig party to
+which an honorable record still remained. That connection secured for
+him a seat in Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six;
+and henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading
+members. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very
+outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still, in the
+eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in the short
+months during which he held office, the minor office of
+Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom all
+England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a place at
+the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great
+lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has
+endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which
+statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.
+
+For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain
+acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep
+comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a singularly lovable
+figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said Johnson; and Goldsmith
+has told us how he wound his way into a subject like a serpent. Macaulay
+thought him the greatest man since Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest
+master of civil wisdom in our tongue." "No English writer," says Sir
+Leslie Stephen, "has received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics."
+Even when the last criticism has been made, detraction from these
+estimates is impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent
+was his temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which
+he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with
+Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal
+antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in
+self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone
+delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal
+a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of
+comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe.
+His alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics,
+unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never
+guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public welfare.
+No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to the service of
+the nation with less regard for personal advancement. No English
+statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a mass of details to the
+principle they involve.
+
+He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no influence to
+whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics, indeed, bear upon
+their face the preoccupation with the immediate problems of the House of
+Commons. Yet through them all the principles that emerge form a
+consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the
+passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw it
+with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to
+challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the maxims
+of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London out to India
+and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian ryot's wrongs as for
+the iniquities of English policy to Ireland. With less width of mind
+than Hume and less intensity of gaze than Adam Smith, he yet had a width
+and intensity which, fused with his own imaginative sympathy, gave him
+more insight than either. He had an unerring eye for the eternal
+principles of politics. He knew that ideals must be harnessed to an Act
+of Parliament if they are not to cease their influence. Admitting while
+he did that politics must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find
+good reason why expediency should be identified with what he saw as
+right. It is a stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English
+politics to whom a greater immediate influence may be ascribed, just as
+in political philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of
+Hobbes and Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and
+speculation his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like
+him before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer
+Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his practical
+insight was far less profound. Hamilton had Burke's full grasp of
+political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation. So that he remains
+a figure of uniqueness. He may, as Goldsmith said, have expended upon
+his party talents that should have illuminated the universal aspect of
+the State. Yet there is no question with which he dealt that he did not
+leave the richer for his enquiry.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the
+immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he was at
+every point upon the side of the future. Where constitutional reform was
+in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy;
+though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid
+conservatism. In the last decade of his life he encountered the greatest
+cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the Reformation, and it is not too
+much to say that at every point he missed the essence of its meaning.
+Yet even upon France and the English Constitution he was full of
+practical sagacity. Had his warning been uttered without the fury of
+hate that accompanied it, he might well have guided the forces of the
+Revolution into channels that would have left no space for the military
+dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real evils
+of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently inveighed,
+forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch of wise and
+continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had
+little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he
+was ready to praise. What impressed him was less the evils of the
+constitution than its possibilities, could the defects quite alien from
+its nature but be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a deeper
+vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke's
+conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was too much the
+apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles involved in the
+overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense of a Divine Providence
+taking thought for the welfare of men to interfere with violence in his
+handiwork. The tinge of caution is never absent, even from his most
+liberal moments; and he was willing to endure great evil if it seemed
+dangerous to estimate the cost of change.
+
+His American speeches are the true text-book for colonial
+administration. He put aside the empty plea of right which satisfied
+legal pedants like George Grenville. What moved him was the tragic
+fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not
+maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom. He never
+concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the
+maintenance of English liberties. "Armies," he said many years later,
+"first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English
+constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though
+in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection,
+would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself." He had
+firm hold of that insidious danger which belittles freedom itself in the
+interest of curtailing some special desire. "In order to prove that the
+Americans have no right to their liberties," he said in the famous
+_Speech on Conciliation with America_ (1775), "we are every day
+endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our
+own." The way for the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke
+saw, prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character
+of the American contest. His own receipt was sounder. In the _Speech on
+American Taxation_ (1774) he had riddled the view that the fiscal
+methods of Lord North were likely to succeed. The true method was to
+find a way of peace. "Nobody shall persuade me," he told a hostile House
+of Commons, "when a whole people are concerned that acts of lenity are
+not means of conciliation." "Magnanimity in politics," he said in the
+next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and
+little minds go ill together." He did not know, in the most superb of
+all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment against a whole people. He
+would win the colonies by binding them to England with the ties of
+freedom. "The question with me," he said, "is not whether you have a
+right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your
+interest to make them happy." The problem, in fact, was one not of
+abstract right but of expediency; and nothing could be lost by
+satisfying American desire. Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was
+apparent to every first-class mind in England. But the obstinate king
+prevailed; and Burke's great protest remained no more than material for
+the legislation of the future. Yet it was something that ninety years
+after his speech the British North America Act should have given his
+dreams full substance.
+
+Ireland had always a place apart in Burke's affections, and when he
+first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in his
+thoughts was the desire to assist its freedom. He saw that here, as in
+America, no man will be argued into slavery. A government which defied
+the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster. How could
+it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its
+subjects? Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the
+Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan? The system of Protestant
+control, he said in the _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_ (1792), was
+"well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a
+people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself." The
+Catholics paid their taxes; they served with glory in the army and navy.
+Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth. "Common sense," he
+said, "and common justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a
+people for their slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for
+great, general and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will
+destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that
+the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress
+them. "No man will assert seriously," he said, "that when people are of
+a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them
+with something to complain of." The advantages of subjects were, as he
+urged, their right; and a wise government would regard "all their
+reasonable wishes as so many claims." To neglect them was to have a
+nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.
+
+There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to
+mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research may well have
+shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has
+so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there
+maintained. He was the first English statesman fully to understand the
+moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make
+impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an
+eternal challenge to their malignant complacency. He did not ask the
+abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the
+wisdom of its conquest. All that he insisted upon was this, that in
+imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code. A
+lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white. The European must
+respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by
+law to respect them in his own State. "If we are not able," he said, "to
+contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity
+become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for
+their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that
+country to our constitution." England must be in India for India's
+benefit or not at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as
+the East India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are
+instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was the
+antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a magnificent
+passage, "before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless
+prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites
+continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting." Sympathy
+with the native, regard for his habits and wants, the Company's servants
+failed to display. "The English youth in India drink the intoxicating
+draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear
+it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in
+principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert
+themselves for the excesses of their premature power. The consequences
+of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably
+such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the
+rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries
+of India are given to seas and winds to be blown about in every breaking
+up of the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean." More than a
+century was to pass before the wisest of Burke's interpreters attempted
+the translation of his maxims into statute. But there has never, in any
+language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in
+imperial adventure. "The situation of man," said Burke, "is the
+preceptor of his duty." He saw how a nation might become corrupted by
+the spoils of other lands. He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of
+a later cruelty at home. Men will complain of their wrongdoing in the
+remoter empire; and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in
+unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield. He denied that the
+government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction.
+Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit.
+He abhorred the politics of prestige. He knew the difficulties involved
+in administering distant territories, the ignorance and apathy of the
+public, the consequent erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong
+will fail of discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let
+us do what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can
+do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national
+reputation." That is a general truth not less in Africa and China than
+in India itself. The main thought in Burke's mind was the danger lest
+colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of arbitrary ideas. That
+his own safeguards were inadequate is clear enough at the present time.
+He knew that the need was good government. He did not nor could he
+realize how intimately that ideal was connected with self-government.
+Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final outcome of his teaching.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+A background so consistent as this in the inflexible determination to
+moralize political action resulted in a noble edifice. Yet, through it
+all, the principles of policy are rather implied than admitted. It was
+when he came to deal with domestic problems and the French Revolution
+that Burke most clearly showed the real trend of his thought. That trend
+is unmistakable. Burke was a utilitarian who was convinced that what was
+old was valuable by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity. The State
+appeared to him an organic compound that came but slowly to its full
+splendour. It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible. Political
+philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from
+experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty. While he
+did not belittle the value of reason, he was always impressed by the
+immense part played by prejudice in the determination of policy. He had
+no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb
+prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates. Nor must we
+miss the religious aspect of his philosophy. He never doubted that
+religion was the foundation of the English State. "Englishmen," he said
+in the _Reflections on the French Revolution_ (1790), "know, and what is
+better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society
+and the source of all good and of all comfort." The utterance is
+characteristic, not merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its
+ultimate reliance upon a mystic explanation of social facts. Nothing was
+more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. The
+only safeguard he could find was in empiricism.
+
+This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his earliest
+publication; but it remained with him to the end. He would not discuss
+America in terms of right. "I do not enter into these metaphysical
+distinctions," he said in the _Speech on American Taxation_, "I hate the
+very sound of them." "One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state," he
+wrote in the _Reflections_, "is the propensity of the people to resort
+to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a _Speech on the
+Duration of Parliament_, "when men are driven to search into the
+foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of a social contract he
+declared "at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles," and he
+found no sense in the doctrine of popular sovereignty. "The lines of
+morality," he said in the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_ (1791),
+"are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as
+well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These
+exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic but
+by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of the
+virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the
+standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious
+conclusion. "This," he said, "is the true touchstone of all theories
+which regard man and the affairs of men--does it suit his nature in
+general, does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?"
+
+Of the truth of this general attitude it is difficult to make denial.
+But when Burke came to apply it to the British Constitution the "rules
+of prudence" he was willing to admit are narrow enough to cause
+surprised enquiry. He did not doubt that the true end of a legislature
+was "to give a direction, a form, a technical dress ... to the general
+sense of the community"; he admitted that popular revolt is so much the
+outcome of suffering that in any dispute between government and people,
+the presumption is at least equal in the latter's favor. He urged the
+acceptance of Grenville's bill for improving the method of decision upon
+disputed elections. He made a magnificent defence of the popular cause
+in the Middlesex election. He was in favor of the publication of
+parliamentary debates and of the voting lists in divisions. He supported
+almost with passion the ending of that iniquitous system by which the
+enfranchisement of revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir
+of electoral support. His _Speech on Economical Reform_ (1780) was the
+prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack upon the waste of the
+Civil list.
+
+Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go. He was
+against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that
+the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible. He
+opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason
+that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature. He would
+not, as in the great speech at Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that
+a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather
+than a representative of his own convictions. "Government and
+legislation," he said, "are matters of reason and of judgment"; and once
+the private member had honorably arrived at a decision which he thought
+was for the interest of the whole community, his duty was done. All
+this, in itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke's admirable
+grasp of the practical application of attractive theories to the event.
+But it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic
+constitutional change which is more dubious. He had no sympathy with the
+Radicals. "The bane of the Whigs," he said, "has been the admission
+among them of the corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by
+persuading many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs
+inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers." "If the
+nation at large," he wrote in another letter, "has disposition enough to
+oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of government is, in
+my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the general disposition be
+against a virtuous and manly line of public conduct, there is no form
+into which it can be thrown that will improve its nature or add to its
+energy"; and in the same letter he foreshadows a possible retirement
+from the House of Commons as a protest against the growth of radical
+opinion in his party. He resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage
+qualification. He had no sympathy with the effort either to add to the
+county representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs. The framework
+of the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent. He deplored all
+criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials. "Our
+representation," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the necessary
+imperfections of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to
+be." It was in the same temper that he resisted all effort at the
+political relief of the Protestant dissenters. "The machine itself," he
+had said, "is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the
+materials were sound"; and he never moved from that opinion.
+
+Burke's attitude was obsolete even while he wrote; yet the
+suggestiveness of his very errors makes examination of their ground
+important. Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the name
+of expediency. His opponents argued that, since men are by nature equal,
+it must follow that they have an equal right to self-government. To
+Burke, the admission of this principle would have meant the overthrow of
+the British constitution. Its implication was that every institution not
+of immediate popular origin should be destroyed. To secure their ends,
+he thought, the radicals were compelled to preach the injustice of those
+institutions and thus to injure that affection for government upon which
+peace and security depend. Here was an effort to bring all institutions
+to the test of logic which he thought highly dangerous. "No rational man
+ever did govern himself," he said, "by abstractions and universals." The
+question for him was not the abstract rightness of the system upon some
+set of _a priori_ principles but whether, on the whole, that system
+worked for the happiness of the community. He did not doubt that it did;
+and to overthrow a structure so nobly tested by the pressure of events
+in favor of some theories outside historic experience seemed to him
+ruinous to society. Government, for him, was the general harmony of
+diverse interests; and the continual adjustments and exquisite
+modifications of which it stood in need were admirably discovered in the
+existing system. Principles were thus unimportant compared to the
+problem of their application. "The major," he said of all political
+premises, "makes a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory depends
+upon the little minor of circumstances."
+
+To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription. The
+presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change,
+we act at our peril. "Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid
+of all titles, not only to property, but to what is to secure that
+property, to government." Because he saw the State organically he was
+impressed by the smallness both of the present moment and the
+individual's thought. It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the
+species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost
+always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had the
+opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to
+preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a reason; and
+that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So the prescriptive
+title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the
+soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and
+man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by
+prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not
+less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution. So, too,
+his main attack on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be
+discussed." He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but
+at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a
+past experience which built according to the general need. Nor does he
+doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist
+that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth,"
+he said, "may be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that
+certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the
+truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company
+charity, the highest of the virtues."
+
+Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of
+political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that
+danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was
+balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must
+always govern the immediate decision. "When the reason of old
+establishments is gone," he said in his _Speech on Economical Reform_,
+"it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them." "A
+disposition to preserve and an ability to improve," he wrote in the
+_Reflections on the French Revolution_, "taken together would be my
+standard of a statesman." But that "ability to improve" conceals two
+principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold. "All the reformations
+we have hitherto made," he said, "have proceeded upon the principle of
+reference to antiquity"; and the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_,
+which is the most elaborate exposition of his general attitude, proceeds
+upon the general basis that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future.
+Nor is this all. "If I cannot reform with equity," said Burke, "I will
+not reform at all"; and equity seems here to mean a sacrifice of the
+present and its passionate demands to the selfish errors of past policy.
+
+Burke, indeed, was never a democrat, and that is the real root of his
+philosophy. He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the
+necessity of some degree of popular representation. But he was entirely
+satisfied with current Whig principles, could they but be purged of
+their grosser deformities. He knew too well how little reason is wont to
+enter into the formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice of
+innovation to its power. He saw so much of virtue in the old order, that
+he insisted upon the equation of virtue with quintessence. Men of great
+property and position using their influence as a public trust, delicate
+in their sense of honor, and acting only from motives of right--these
+seemed to him the men who should with justice exercise political power.
+He did not doubt that "there is no qualification for government but
+virtue and wisdom ... wherever they are actually found, they have, in
+whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport to heaven";
+but he is careful to dissociate the possibility that they can be found
+in those who practice the mechanical arts. He did not mean that his
+aristocracy should govern without response to popular demand. He had no
+objection to criticism, nor to the public exercise of government. There
+was no reason even for agreement, so long as each party was guided by an
+honorable sense of the public good. This, so he urged, was the system
+which underlay the temporary evils of the British Constitution. An
+aristocracy delegated to do its work by the mass of men was the best
+form of government his imagination could conceive. It meant that
+property must be dominant in the system of government, that, while
+office should be open to all, it should be out of the reach of most.
+"The characteristic essence of property," he wrote in the _Reflections_,
+"... is to be unequal"; and he thought the perpetuation of that
+inequality by inheritance "that which tends most to the perpetuation of
+society itself." The system was difficult to maintain, and it must be
+put out of the reach of popular temptation. "Our constitution," he said
+in the _Present Discontents_, "stands on a nice equipoise, with sharp
+precipices and deep waters on all sides of it. In removing it from a
+dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a danger towards
+oversething it on the other." In straining, that is to say, after too
+large a purification, we may end with destruction. And Burke, of course,
+was emphatic upon the need that property should be undisturbed. It was
+always, he thought, at a great disadvantage in any struggle with
+ability; and there are many passages in which he urges the consequent
+special representation which the adequate defence of property requires.
+
+The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the
+sanctity of past experience. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, Taine and
+Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and Lecky in England, have all urged
+what is in effect a similar plea. We must not break what Bagehot called
+the cake of custom, for men have been trained to its digestion, and new
+food breeds trouble. Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a
+people, and while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform. The true
+idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of
+the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be
+drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness;
+and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society
+would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance
+of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel
+impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance,
+we should disturb beyond repair the intricate equilibrium of countless
+ages. The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present
+is thus the true guide to our policy. "We ought," he said in a famous
+sentence, "to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend."
+
+It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the
+French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the destiny
+which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth
+century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to
+hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of
+religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious
+edifice. He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant
+abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an
+overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than
+the English Parliament. Privileges were scattered to the winds in a
+single night. Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical
+theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred. The
+doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and
+noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect
+justification. On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by
+the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past
+history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the
+truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious
+spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before
+a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared
+incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of
+social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive
+privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body
+politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became
+convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their
+disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves.
+In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of
+ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less
+barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and
+Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not
+unnatural thing. But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty
+years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too
+great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.
+
+Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point
+consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported the
+Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for
+in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the
+other. And when we make allowances for the grave errors of personal
+taste, the gross exaggeration, the inability to see the Revolution as
+something more than a single point in time, it becomes obvious enough
+that his criticism, de Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we
+possess from the generation which knew the movement as a living thing.
+The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as
+the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to
+the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that
+freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of
+doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form
+which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he
+exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom.
+"The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the _Reflections_, "the
+objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and
+therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable
+either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs." The note
+recurs in substance throughout his criticism. Much of its application,
+indeed, will not stand for one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for
+instance, he correlates the monarchical government of France with the
+English constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688.
+The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles,
+but the roots were absent from their national experience.
+
+A year after the publication of the _Reflections_ he himself perceived
+the narrowness of that judgment. In the _Thoughts on French Affairs_
+(1791) he saw that the essence of the Revolution was its foundation in
+theoretic dogma. It was like nothing else in the history of the world
+except the Reformation; which last event it especially resembles in its
+genius for self-propagation. Herein he has already envisaged the
+importance of that "_patrie intellectuelle_" which Tocqueville
+emphasized as born of the Revolution. That led Burke once again to
+insist upon the peculiar genius of each separate state, the difficulties
+of a change, the danger of grafting novelties upon an ancient fabric. He
+saw the certainty that in adhering to an abstract metaphysical scheme
+the French were in truth omitting human nature from their political
+equation; for general ideas can find embodiment in institutional forms
+only after they have been moulded by a thousand varieties of
+circumstance. The French created an universal man not less destructive
+of their practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists.
+They omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must
+demand; with the result that, despite themselves, they came rather to
+destroy than to fulfil. Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the
+harvest of their failure.
+
+Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of the past
+which played so large a part in the revolutionary consciousness. "We are
+afraid," he wrote in the _Reflections_, "to put men to live and trade
+each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this
+stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to
+avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of
+ages." Of Siéyès' building constitutions overnight, this is no unfair
+picture; but it points a more general truth never long absent from
+Burke's mind. Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much
+a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought
+finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small. For
+Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie
+buried in the remote experience of the state. So that men like
+Robespierre were asking from their subjects an impossible task. That
+which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations
+was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to
+be enduring. Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the
+English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories
+with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical
+landmarks of his own neighborhood. For the motives which underlie all
+human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard.
+That upon which they feed submits to change; but the effort is slow and
+the disappointments many. The Revolution taught the populace the thirst
+for power. But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human
+effort without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it
+exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers
+limitation to right ends.
+
+The later part of Burke's attack upon the Revolution does not belong to
+political philosophy. No man is more responsible than he for the temper
+which drew England into war. He came to write rather with the zeal of a
+fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted
+with new ideas. Yet even the _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ (1796) have
+flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that even in the
+midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. So that it is
+permissible to think he did not lightly pen those sentences on peace
+which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert of extravagant rhetoric. "War
+never leaves where it found a nation," he wrote, "it is never to be
+entered upon without mature deliberation." That was a lesson his
+generation had still to learn; nor did it take to heart the even nobler
+passage that follows. "The blood of man," he said, "should never be shed
+but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our
+friends, for our God, for our country, for mankind. The rest is vanity;
+the rest is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that
+century's history that these words were written to justify an effort of
+which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two angles. It
+is easy to show that his picture of the British Constitution was remote
+from the facts even when he wrote. Every change that he opposed was
+essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed
+none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed. Such criticism
+would be at almost every point just; and yet it would fail to touch the
+heart of Burke's position. What is mainly needed is analysis at once of
+his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke
+came to his maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we
+have it upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so
+clearly apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in
+what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian changes
+of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment even for him who
+burdened himself unduly to restore the Beaconsfield estate. No man was
+more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries
+of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious
+inference that once the means of government were made known those who
+possessed the knowledge would demand their share in its application. He
+did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself
+the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which
+Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the
+adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has
+been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a sense to
+have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining the foundations
+of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant
+dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the
+expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the
+facts at issue. No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained
+why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever
+to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy
+and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized
+that Wilkes was but the symptom.
+
+Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of
+political privilege was drawing to its close. That is the real meaning
+of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream of tendency
+not less active in England than abroad. In France, indeed, the lines
+were more sharply drawn than elsewhere. The rights men craved were not,
+as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the
+result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries. A
+power that knew no responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only
+from the accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation
+to offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay,
+these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his generation
+to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past. It is not
+difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the tennis-court at
+Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to be condemned. Burke's
+caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils
+rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good. In a less degree,
+the same is true of England. The constitution that Burke called upon
+men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford
+powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old
+Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the statute-book a
+penal code which hardly yielded to the noble attack of Romilly. These,
+which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble
+ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform
+they were willing to destroy.
+
+The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past
+as the very institutions it came to condemn. The innovations were the
+inevitable outcome of past oppression. Burke refused to see that aspect
+of the picture. He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to
+the half-wilful errors of the past. The man who grounded his faith in
+historic experience refused to admit as history the elements alien from
+his special outlook. He took that liberty not to venerate where he was
+unable to comprehend which he denied to his opponents. Nor did he admit
+the uses to which his doctrine of prescription was bound to be put in
+the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men. No one will object to
+privilege for a Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a
+different thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of
+whom Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham
+will one day emerge. He justifies the privileges of the English Church
+in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to see what men
+like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do with religion. The
+doctrine of prescription might be admirable if all statesmen were so
+wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men it becomes no more than
+the protective armour of vested interests into the ethics of which it
+refuses us leave to examine.
+
+That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke's philosophy, and it
+deserves more examination than it has received. In part it is a
+rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning animal. It
+puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human action; and it
+thus is distrustful of thought as leading into channels to which the
+nature of man is not adapted. Novelty, which is assumed to be the
+outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon which
+civilization depends. Thought is destructive of peace; and it is argued
+that we know too little of political phenomena to make us venture into
+the untried places to which thought invites us. Yet the first of many
+answers is surely the most obvious fact that if man is so much the
+creature of his custom no reason would prevail save where they proved
+inadequate. If thought is simply a reserve power in society, its
+strength must obviously depend upon common acceptance; and that can only
+come when some routine has failed to satisfy the impulses of men. But we
+may urge a difficulty that is even more decisive. No system of habits
+can ever hope to endure long in a world where the cumulative power of
+memory enables change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure
+at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a
+general desire. It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and,
+indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it
+is conscious of itself. The uncritical routine of which Burke is the
+sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of virtue. Yet in modern
+civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that
+consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy. Our
+real need is less the automatic response to ancient stimulus than power
+to know what stimulus has social value. We need, that is to say, the
+gift of criticism rather than the gift of inert acceptance. Not, of
+course, that the habits which Burke so earnestly admired are at all part
+of our nervous endowment in any integral sense. The short space of the
+French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an
+essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian
+school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take
+that as proof of the ease with which essential habit may be acquired.
+Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized
+life. It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered;
+but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous
+response to the chords struck by another hand.
+
+Burke's answer would, of course, have been that he was not a democrat.
+He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity as low. He
+thought of the people--it was obviously a generalization from his
+time--as consistently prone to disorder and checked only by the force of
+ancient habit. Yet he has himself supplied the answer to that attitude.
+"My observation," he said in his _Speech on the East India Bill_, "has
+furnished me with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or
+education which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of
+government." We can go further than that sober caution. We know that
+there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that
+is the training of the mass of men to interest in it. We know that no
+State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without
+representation. Indeed, if proof were here wanting, an examination of
+the eighteenth century would supply it. Few would deny that statesmen
+are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life
+they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the
+dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion of a
+part of the State from sharing in its guidance. Nor did Burke remember
+his own wise saying that "in all disputes between the people and their
+rulers the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people";
+and he quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully's which traces
+popular violence to popular suffering. No one can watch the economic
+struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the
+pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they
+represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too
+intolerable to be borne. Burke himself, as his own speeches show, knew
+little or nothing of the pain involved in the agrarian changes of his
+age. The one way to avoid violent outbreak is not exclusion of the
+people from power but their participation in it. The popular sense of
+right may often, as Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of
+statesmen. It is not necessary to equate the worth of untrained
+commonsense with experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run,
+neglect of common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.
+
+This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground. For the case against Burke's
+aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal. He did not
+inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors
+of a whole people. Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham
+was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent. Once it is
+admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect
+institutional room must be found for its expression. The State is
+morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped. There is something
+curious here in Burke's inability to suspect deformity in a system which
+gave his talents but partial place. He must have known that no one in
+the House of Commons was his equal. He must have known how few of those
+he called upon to recognize the splendor of their function were capable
+of playing the part he pictured for them. The answer to a morally
+bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in
+its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact
+that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for
+power. Burke gave no hint of how the level of his governing class could
+be maintained. He said nothing of what education might accomplish for
+the people. He did not examine the obvious consequences of their
+economic status. Had his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of
+that States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in
+their inexperience, might have given him pause. The "obscure provincial
+advocates ... stewards of petty local jurisdictions ... the fomenters
+and conductors of the petty war of village vexation" legislated, out of
+their inexperience, for the world. Their resolution, their constancy,
+their high sense of the national need, were precisely the qualities
+Burke demanded in his governing class; and the States-General did not
+move from the straight path he laid down until they met with intrigue
+from those of whom Burke became the licensed champion.
+
+Nor is it in the least clear that his emphasis upon expediency is, in
+any real way, a release from metaphysical inquiry. Rather may it be
+urged that what was needed in Burke's philosophy was the clear avowal
+of the metaphysic it implied. Nothing is more greatly wanted in
+political inquiry than discovery of that "intuition more subtle than any
+articulate major premise" which, as Mr. Justice Holmes has said, is the
+true foundation of so many of our political judgments. The theory of
+natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong rather in
+its form than in its substance. It clearly suffered from its mistaken
+effort to trace to an imaginary state of nature what was due to a
+complex experience. It suffered also from its desire to lay down
+universal formulæ. It needed to state the rights demanded in terms of
+the social interests they involved rather than in the abstract ethic
+they implied. But the demands which underlay the thought of men like
+Price and Priestley was as much the offspring of experience as Burke's
+own doctrine. They made, indeed, the tactical mistake of seeking to give
+an unripe philosophic form to a political strategy wherein, clearly
+enough, Burke was their master. But no one can read the answers of Paine
+and Mackintosh, who both were careful to avoid the panoply of
+metaphysics, to the _Reflections_, without feeling that Burke failed
+to move them from their main position. Expediency may be admirable in
+telling the statesmen what to do; but it does not explain the sources of
+his ultimate act, nor justify the thing finally done. The unconscious
+deeps which lie beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent
+than the motives that are avowed. Action is less their elimination than
+their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we have
+the full materials for judgment.
+
+Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is surely
+unanswerable. The things that men desire correspond, in some rough
+fashion, to the things they need. Natural rights are nothing more than
+the armour evolved to protect their vital interests. Upon the narrow
+basis of legal history it is, of course, impossible to protect them.
+History is rather the record of the thwarting of human desire than of
+its achievement. But upon the value of certain things there is a
+sufficient and constant opinion to give us assurance that repression
+will ultimately involve disorder. Nor is there any difference between
+the classes of men in this regard. Forms, indeed, will vary; and the
+power we have of answering demand will always wait upon the discoveries
+of science. Our natural rights, that is to say, will have a changing
+content simply because this is not a static world. But that does not
+mean, as Burke insisted, that they are empty of experience. They come,
+of course, mainly from men who have been excluded from intimate contact
+with the fruits of power. Nonconformists in religion, workers without
+land or capital save the power of their own hands, it is from the
+disinherited that they draw, as demands, their strength. Yet it is
+difficult to see, as Burke would undoubtedly have insisted, that they
+are the worse from the source whence they derive. Rather do they point
+to grave inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of
+which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience. The
+unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack
+of moral insight into the problem he confronted.
+
+That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation; and its
+cause seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic outlook. He was profoundly
+religious; and he did not doubt that the order of the universe was the
+command of God. It was, as a consequence, beneficent; and to deny its
+validity was, for him, to doubt the wisdom of God. "Having disposed," he
+wrote, "and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will,
+but to His, He had, in and by that disposition, vitally subjected us to
+act the part which belongs to the place assigned us." The State, in
+fact, it is to be built upon the sacrifice of men; and this they must
+accept as of the will of God. We are to do our duty in our allotted
+station without repining, in anticipation, doubtless, of a later reward.
+What we are is thus the expression of his goodness; and there is a real
+sense in which Burke may be said to have maintained the inherent
+rightness of the existing order. Certainly he throws a cloak of
+religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property;
+and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely
+part of the same attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect this
+background with his antagonism to the French Revolution. What there was
+most distressing to him was the overthrowal of the Church, and he did
+not hesitate, in very striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion
+with infidelity. Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced
+that a social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his _Letters on a
+Regicide Peace_ have a good deal of that relentless illogic which made
+de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from ultramontanism with
+the road to a denial of all faith. Nothing is more difficult than to
+deal with a thinker who has had a revelation; and this sense that the
+universe was a divine mystery not to be too nearly scrutinized by man
+grew greatly upon Burke in his later years. It was not an attitude which
+reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the
+presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.
+
+There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like
+later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with
+something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him was the
+idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it,
+was not of the essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that
+the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the
+purpose itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the
+deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of
+the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it
+should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper. It
+never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic
+purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur.
+We do not come to grips with the facts. What we are bidden to remember
+is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be. The existing order
+is beatified as a necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to
+separate out the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts
+in time and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do
+not at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.
+
+Yet it is surely evident that in the heat and stress of social life, we
+cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our judgment. We may
+well enough regard the corruption of the monarchy under the later
+Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under Victoria;
+but that does not make it any the less corrupt. We may even see how a
+monistic view of society is possible to one who, like Burke, is uniquely
+occupied with the public good. But the men who, like Muir and Hardy in
+the treason trials of the Revolution, think rather in terms of the
+existing disharmonies than the beauty of the purpose upon which they
+rest, are only human if they think those disharmonies more real than the
+purpose they do not meet. They were surely to be pardoned if, reading
+the _Reflections_ of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more
+vital than their harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with
+which privileges they did not share were defended. It is even possible
+to understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as Burke
+had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it was against
+that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that they were in
+revolt. For them the fact of discontinuity was vital. They could not but
+ask for happiness in their own individual lives no less than in the
+State of which they were part. They came to see that without
+self-government in the sense of their own active participation in power,
+such happiness must go unfulfilled. The State, in fact, may have the
+noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also
+mortal men. The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic. The
+test of allegiance to established institutions became immediately the
+achievement for which they were responsible. The achievement, as they
+urged, was hardly written with adequacy in terms of the lives of humble
+men. That was why they judged no attitude of worth which sought the
+equation of the real and the ideal. The first lesson of their own
+experience of power was the need for its limitation by the instructed
+judgment of free minds.[18]
+
+[Footnote 18: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, pp. 65-9.]
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the romantic
+movement, to the _Contrat Social_ of Rousseau and the _Political
+Justice_ of Godwin, than was Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the
+romantics that Burke's fundamental influence remains. His attitude to
+reason, his exaltation of passion and imagination over the conscious
+logic of men, were of the inmost stuff of which they were made. In that
+sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative revolution
+of the generation which followed him. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, de
+Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the later Wordsworth in
+England, are in a true sense his disciples. That does not mean that any
+of them were directly conscious of his work but that the movement he
+directed had its necessary outcome in their defence of his ideals. The
+path of history is strewn with undistributed middles; and it is possible
+that in the clash between his attitude and that of Bentham there were
+the materials for a fuller synthesis in a later time. Certainly there is
+no more admirable corrective in historical politics that the contrast
+they afford.
+
+It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the greatness of his
+effort. Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless to live rather as
+the author of some maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than
+as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished implications,
+is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or Bentham. His very defects
+are lessons in themselves. His unhesitating inability to see how
+dangerous is the concentration of property is standing proof that men
+are over-prone to judge the rightness of a State by their own wishes.
+His own contempt for the results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless
+lesson in the virtue of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His
+disregard of popular desire suggests the fatal ease with which we
+neglect the opinion of those who stand outside the active centre of
+political conflict. Above all, his hostility to the Revolution should at
+least make later generations beware lest novelty of outlook be unduly
+confounded with erroneous doctrine.
+
+Yet even when such deduction has been made, there is hardly a greater
+figure in the history of political thought in England. Without the
+relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the moral insight of
+T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties of each. He brought to
+the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a
+lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as
+no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of insight are things
+that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political
+complexity. Unquestionably, his speculation is rather that of the orator
+in the tribune than of the thinker in his study. He never forgot his
+party, and he wrote always in that House of Commons atmosphere which
+makes a man unjust to the argument and motives of his opponent. Yet,
+when the last word of criticism has been made, the balance of
+illumination is immense. He illustrates at its best the value of that
+party-system the worth of which made so deep an impression on all he
+wrote. He showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate
+great principles. He showed also that allegiance to party is never
+inconsistent with the deeper allegiance to the demand of conscience.
+When he came to the House of Commons, the prospects of representative
+government were very dark; and it is mainly to his emphasis upon its
+virtues that its victory must be attributed. Institutional change is
+likely to be more rapid than in his generation; for we seem to have
+reached that moment when, as he foresaw, "they who persist in opposing
+that mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of
+Providence itself than the mere designs of men." The principles upon
+which we proceed are doubtless different from those that he commended;
+yet his very challenge to their wisdom only gives to his warning a
+deeper inspiration for our effort.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The Industrial Revolution is hardly less a fundamental change in the
+habits of English thought than in the technique of commercial
+production. Alongside the discoveries of Hargreaves and Crompton, the
+ideas of Hume and Adam Smith shifted the whole perspective of men's
+minds. The Revolution, indeed, like all great movements, did not
+originate at any given moment. There was no sudden invention which made
+the hampering system of government-control seem incompatible with
+industrial advance. The mercantilism against which the work of Adam
+Smith was so magistral a protest was already rather a matter of external
+than internal commerce when he wrote. He triumphed less because he
+suddenly opened men's eyes to a truth hitherto concealed than because he
+represented the culmination of certain principles which, under various
+aspects, were common to his time. The movement for religious toleration
+is not only paralleled in the next century by the movement for economic
+freedom, but is itself in a real sense the parent of the latter. For it
+is not without significance that the pre-Adamite economists were almost
+without exception the urgent defenders of religious toleration. The
+landowners were churchmen, the men of commerce largely Nonconformist;
+and religious proscription interfered with the balance of trade. When
+the roots of religious freedom had been secured, it was easy for them to
+transfer their argument to the secular sphere.
+
+Nothing, indeed, is more important in the history of English political
+philosophy than to realize that from Stuart times the Nonconformists
+were deeply bitten with distrust of government. Its courts of special
+instance hampered industrial life at every turn in the interest of
+religious conformity. Their heavy fines and irritating restrictions upon
+foreign workmen were nothing so much as a tax upon industrial progress.
+What the Nonconformists wanted was to be left alone; and Davenant
+explained the root of their desire when he tells of the gaols crowded
+with substantial tradesmen whose imprisonment spelt unemployment for
+thousands of workmen. Sir William Temple, in his description of Holland,
+represents economic prosperity as the child of toleration. The movement
+for ecclesiastical freedom in England, moreover, became causally linked
+with that protest against the system of monopolies with which it was the
+habit of the court to reward its favorites. Freedom in economic matters,
+like freedom in religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity
+shall exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition.
+The latter easily became imbued with religious significance. English
+puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work was the will
+of God and its performance the test of grace. The greater the energy of
+its performance, the greater the likelihood of prosperity; and thence it
+is but a step to argue that the free development of a man's industrial
+worth is the law of God. Success in business, indeed, became for many a
+test of religious grace, and poverty the proof of God's disfavor. Books
+like Steele's _Religious Tradesman_ (1684) show clearly how close is the
+connection. The hostility of the English landowners to the commercial
+classes in the eighteenth century is at bottom the inheritance of
+religious antagonism. The typical qualities of dissent became a certain
+pushful exertion by which the external criteria of salvation could be
+secured.
+
+Much of the contemporary philosophy, moreover, fits in with this
+attitude. From the time of Bacon, the main object of speculation was to
+disrupt the scholastic teleology. In the result the State becomes
+dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the self-interest of
+each is the starting-point of all inquiry. Hobbes built his state upon
+the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the individual enter political
+life for the benefits that accrue therefrom. The cynicism of Mandeville,
+the utilitarianism of Hume, are only bypaths of the same tradition. The
+organic society of the middle ages gives place to an individual who
+builds the State out of his own desires. Liberty becomes their
+realization; and the object of the State is to enable men in the
+fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their private wants. How far
+is that conception from the Anglican outlook of the seventeenth century,
+a sermon of Laud's makes clear. "If any man," he said,[19] "be so
+addicted to his private interest that he neglects the common State, he
+is void of the sense of piety, and wishes peace and happiness for
+himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the
+commonwealth and in the body of the Church." So Platonic an outlook was
+utterly alien from the temper of puritanism. They had no thought of
+sacrificing themselves to an institution which they had much ground for
+thinking existed only for their torment. The development of the
+religious instinct to the level of salvation found its philosophic
+analogue in the development of the economic sense of fitness. The State
+became the servant of the individual from being his master; and service
+became equated with an internal policy of _laissez-faire_.
+
+[Footnote 19: Sermon of June 19, 1621. Works (ed. of 1847), p. 28.]
+
+Such summary, indeed, abridges the long process of release from which
+the eighteenth century had still to suffer; nor does it sufficiently
+insist upon the degree to which the old idea of state control still held
+sway in external policies of trade. Mercantilism was still in the
+ascendant when Adam Smith came to write. Few statesmen of importance
+before the younger Pitt had learned the secret of its fallacies; and,
+indeed, the chief ground for difference between Chatham and Burke was
+the former's suspicion that Burke had embraced the noxious doctrine of
+free trade. Mercantilism, by the time of Locke, is not the simple error
+that wealth consists in bullion but the insistence that the balance of
+trade must be preserved. Partly it was doubtless derived from the
+methods of the old political arithmetic of men like Petty and Davenant;
+the individual seeks a balance at the end of his year's accounting and
+so, too, the State must have a balance. "A Kingdom," said Locke, "grows
+rich or poor just as a farmer does, and no other way"; and while there
+is a sense in which this is wholly true, the meaning attached to it by
+the mercantilists was that foreign competition meant national weakness.
+They could not conceive a commercial bargain which was profitable to
+both sides. Nations grow prosperous at each other's expense; wherefore a
+woolen trade in Ireland necessarily spells English unemployment. Even
+Davenant, who was in many respects on the high road to free trade, was
+in this problem adamant. Protection was essential in the colonial
+market; for unless the trade of the colonies was directed through
+England they might be dangerous rivals. So Ireland and America were
+sacrificed to the fear of British merchants, with the inevitable result
+that repression brought from both the obvious search for remedy.
+
+Herein it might appear that Adam Smith had novelty to contribute; yet
+nothing is more certain than that his full sense of the world as the
+only true unit of marketing was fully grasped before him. In 1691 Sir
+Dudley North published his _Discourses upon Trade_. Therein he clearly
+sees that commercial barriers between Great Britain and France are
+basically as senseless as would be commercial barriers between Yorkshire
+and Middlesex. Indeed, in one sense, North goes even further than Adam
+Smith, for he argues against the usury laws in terms Bentham would
+hardly have disowned. Ten years later an anonymous writer in a tract
+entitled _Considerations on the East India Trade_ (1701) has no
+illusions about the evil of monopoly. He sees with striking clarity that
+the real problem is not at any cost to maintain the industries a nation
+actually possesses, but to have the national capital applied in the most
+efficient channels. So, too, Hume dismissed the Mercantile theory with
+the contemptuous remark that it was trying to keep water beyond its
+proper level. Tucker, as has been pointed out, was a free trader, and
+his opinion of the American war was that it was as mad as those who
+fought "under the peaceful Cross to recover the Holy Land"; and he
+urged, indeed, prophesied, the union with Ireland in the interest of
+commercial amity. Nor must the emphasis of the Physiocrats upon free
+trade be forgotten. There is no evidence now that Adam Smith owed this
+perception to his acquaintance with Quesnay and Turgot; but they may
+well have confirmed him in it, and they show that the older philosophy
+was attacked on every side.
+
+Nor must we miss the general atmosphere of the time. On the whole his
+age was a conservative one, convinced, without due reason, that
+happiness was independent of birth or wealth and that natural law
+somehow could be made to justify existing institutions. The poets, like
+Pope, were singing of the small part of life which kings and laws may
+hope to cure; and that attitude is written in the general absence of
+economic legislation during the period. Religiously, the Church exalted
+the _status quo_; and where, as with Wesley, there was revolt, its
+impetus directed the mind to the source of salvation in the individual
+act. It may, indeed, be generally argued that the religious teachers
+acted as a social soporific. Where riches accumulated, they could be
+regarded as the blessing of God; where they were absent their
+unimportance for eternal happiness could be emphasized. Burke's early
+attack on a system which condemned "two hundred thousand innocent
+persons ... to so intolerable slavery" was, in truth, a justification of
+the existing order. The social question which, in the previous century,
+men like Bellers and Winstanley had brought into view, dropped out of
+notice until the last quarter of the century. There was, that is to say,
+no organized resistance possible to the power of individualism; and
+resistance was unlikely to make itself heard once the resources of the
+Industrial Revolution were brought into play. Men discovered with
+something akin to ecstasy the possibilities of the new inventions; and
+when the protest came against the misery they effected, it was answered
+that they represented the working of that natural law by which the
+energies of men may raise them to success. And discontent could easily,
+as with the saintly Wilberforce, be countered by the assertion that it
+was revolt against the will of God.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Few lives represent more splendidly than that of Adam Smith the
+speculative ideal of a dispassionate study of philosophy. He was
+fortunate in his teachers and his friends. At Glasgow he was the pupil
+of Francis Hutcheson; and even if he was taught nothing at Oxford, at
+least six years of leisure gave him ample opportunity to learn. His
+professorship at Glasgow not only brought him into contact with men like
+Hume, but also admitted him to intercourse with a group of business men
+whose liberal sentiments on commerce undoubtedly strengthened, if they
+did not originate, his own liberal views. At Glasgow, too, in 1759, he
+published his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, written with sufficient
+power of style to obscure its inner poverty of thought. The book brought
+him immediately a distinguished reputation from a public which exalted
+elegance of diction beyond all literary virtues. The volatile Charles
+Townshend made him tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch, through whom Smith
+not only secured comparative affluence for the rest of his days, but
+also a French tour in which he met at its best the most brilliant
+society in Europe. The germ of his _Wealth of Nations_ already lay
+hidden in those Glasgow lectures which Mr. Cannan has so happily
+recovered for us; and it was in a moment of leisure in France that he
+set to work to put them together in systematic fashion. Not, indeed,
+that the Frenchmen whom he met, Turgot, Quesnay and Dupont de Nemours,
+can be said to have done more than confirm the truths he had already
+been teaching. When he returned to Scotland and a competence ten years
+of constant labor were necessary before the _Wealth of Nations_ was
+complete. After its publication, in 1776, Adam Smith did little save
+attend to the administrative duties of a minor, but lucrative office in
+the Customs. Until the end, indeed, he never quite gave up the hope,
+foreshadowed first in the _Moral Sentiments_ of completing a gigantic
+survey of civilized institutions. But he was a slow worker, and his
+health was never robust. It was enough that he should have written his
+book and cherished friendships such as it is given to few men to
+possess. Hume and Burke, Millar the jurist, James Watt, Foulis the
+printer, Black the chemist and Hutton of geological fame--it is an
+enviable circle. He had known Turgot on intimate terms and visited
+Voltaire on Lake Geneva. Hume had told him that his book had "depth and
+solidity and acuteness"; the younger Pitt had consulted him on public
+affairs. Few men have moved amid such happy peace within the very centre
+of what was most illustrious in their age.
+
+We are less concerned here with the specific economic details of the
+_Wealth of Nations_ than with its general attitude to the State. But
+here a limitation upon criticism must be noted. The man of whom Smith
+writes is man in search of wealth; by definition the economic motive
+dominates his actions. Such abuse, therefore, as Ruskin poured upon him
+is really beside the point when his objective is borne in mind. What
+virtually he does is to assume the existence of a natural economic order
+which tends, when unrestrained by counter-tendencies, to secure the
+happiness of men. "That order of things which necessity imposes in
+general," he writes, "... is, in every particular country promoted by
+the natural inclinations of man"; and he goes on to explain what would
+have resulted "if human institutions had never thwarted those natural
+inclinations." "All systems either of preference or of restraint,
+therefore, being thus completely taken away," he writes again, "the
+obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its
+own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of
+justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own
+way.... The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty in the
+attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable
+delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or
+knowledge would ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the
+industry of private people and of directing it towards the employments
+most suitable to the interests of the society."
+
+The State, in this conception has but three functions--defence, justice
+and "the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and
+certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of
+any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain."
+The State, in fact, is simply to provide the atmosphere in which
+production is possible. Nor does Smith conceal his thought that the main
+function of justice is the protection of property. "The affluence of
+the rich," he wrote, "excites the indignation of the poor, who are often
+both driven by want and prompted by envy to invade their possessions. It
+is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that
+valuable property, acquired by the labor of many years, or perhaps many
+successive generations, can sleep a single night in security." The
+attitude, indeed, is intensified by his constant sense that the capital
+which makes possible new productivity is the outcome of men's sacrifice;
+to protect it is thus to safeguard the sources of wealth itself. And
+even if the State is entrusted with education and the prevention of
+disease, this is rather for the general benefit they confer and the
+doubt that private enterprise would find them profitable than as the
+expression of a general rule. Collective effort of every kind awakened
+in him a deep distrust. Trade regulations such as the limitation of
+apprenticeship he condemned as "manifest encroachment upon the just
+liberty of the workman and of those who may be disposed to employ him."
+Even educational establishments are suspect on the ground--not
+unnatural after his own experience of Oxford--that their possibilities
+of comfort may enervate the natural energies of men.
+
+The key to this attitude is clear enough. The improvement of society is
+due, he thinks not to the calculations of government but to the natural
+instincts of economic man. We cannot avoid the impulse to better our
+condition; and the less its effort is restrained the more certain it is
+that happiness will result. We gain, in fact, some sense of its inherent
+power when we bear in mind the magnitude of its accomplishment despite
+the folly and extravagance of princes. Therein we have some index of
+what it would achieve if left unhindered to work out its own destinies.
+Human institutions continually thwart its power; for those who build
+those institutions are moved rather "by the momentary fluctuations of
+affairs" than their true nature. "That insidious and crafty animal,
+vulgarly called a politician or statesman" meets little mercy for his
+effort compared to the magic power of the natural order. "In all
+countries where there is a tolerable security," he writes, "every man
+of common understanding will endeavor to employ whatever stock he can
+command in procuring either present enjoyment or future profit."
+Individual spontaneity is thus the root of economic good; and the real
+justification of the state is the protection it affords to this impulse.
+Man, in fact, is by nature a trader and he is bound by nature to
+discover the means most apt to progress.
+
+Nor was he greatly troubled by differences of fortune. Like most of the
+Scottish school, especially Hutcheson and Hume, he thought that men are
+much alike in happiness, whatever their station or endowments. For there
+is a "never-failing certainty" that "all men sooner or later accommodate
+themselves to whatever becomes their permanent situation"; though he
+admits that there is a certain level below which poverty and misery go
+hand in hand. But, for the most part, happiness is simply a state of
+mind; and he seems to have had but little suspicion that differences of
+wealth might issue in dangerous social consequence. Men, moreover, he
+regarded as largely equal in their original powers; and differences of
+character he ascribes to the various occupations implied in the
+division of labor. Each man, therefore, as he follows his self-interest
+promotes the general happiness of society. That principle is inherent in
+the social order. "Every man," he wrote in the _Moral Sentiments_, "is
+by nature first and principally recommended to his own care" and therein
+he is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of
+his intention." The State, that is to say, is the sum of individual
+goods; whereby to better ourselves is clearly to its benefit. And that
+desire "which comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go
+to the grave" is the more efficacious the less it is restrained by
+governmental artifice. For we know so well what makes us happy that none
+can hope to help us so much as we help ourselves.
+
+Enlightened selfishness is thus the root of prosperity; but we must not
+fall into the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf to the plaint of the
+poor. He urged the employer to have regard to the health and welfare of
+the worker, a regard which was the voice of reason and humanity. Where
+there was conflict between love of the _status quo_ and a social good
+which Revolution alone could achieve, he did not, at least in the _Moral
+Sentiments_, hesitate to choose the latter. Order was, for the most
+part, indispensable; but "the greatest and noblest of all characters" he
+made the reformer of the State. Yet he is too impressed by the working
+of natural economic laws to belittle their influence. Employers, in his
+picture, are little capable of benevolence or charity. Their rule is the
+law of supply and demand and not the Sermon on the Mount. They combine
+without hesitation to depress wages to the lowest point of subsistence.
+They seize every occasion of commercial misfortune to make better terms
+for themselves; and the greater the poverty the more submissive do
+servants become so that scarcity is naturally regarded as more favorable
+to industry.
+
+Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is Smith's
+conception of nature. Nor can there be much doubt of what he thought its
+inner substance. Facile distinctions such as the effort of Buckle to
+show that while in the _Moral Sentiments_ Adam Smith was dealing with
+the unselfish side of man's nature, in the _Wealth of Nations_ he was
+dealing with a group of facts which required the abstraction of such
+altruistic elements, are really beside the point. Nature for Smith is
+simply the spontaneous action of human character unchecked by hindrances
+of State. It is, as Bonar has aptly said, "a vindication of the
+unconscious law present in the separate actions of men when these
+actions are directed by a certain strong personal motive." Adam Smith's
+argument is an assumption that the facts can be made to show the
+relative powerlessness of institutions in the face of economic laws
+grounded in human psychology. The psychology itself is relatively
+simple, and, at least in the _Wealth of Nations_ not greatly different
+from the avowed assumptions of utilitarianism. He emphasizes the
+strength of reason in the economic field, and his sense that it enables
+men to judge much better of their best interests than an external
+authority can hope to do. And therefore the practices accomplished by
+this reason are those in which the impulses of men are to be found. The
+order they represent is the natural order; and whatever hinders its full
+operation is an unwise check upon the things for which men strive.
+
+Obviously enough, this attitude runs the grave risk of seeming to
+abstract a single motive--the desire for wealth--from the confused
+welter of human impulses and to make it dominant at the expense of human
+nature itself. A hasty reading of Adam Smith would, indeed, confirm that
+impression; and that is perhaps why he seemed to Ruskin to blaspheme
+human nature. But a more careful survey, particularly when the _Moral
+Sentiments_ is borne in mind suggests a different conclusion. His
+attitude is implicit in the general medium in which he worked. What he
+was trying to do was less to emphasize that men care above all things
+for the pursuit of wealth than that no institutional modifications are
+able to destroy the power of that motive to labor. There is too much
+history in the _Wealth of Nations_ to make tenable the hypothesis of
+complete abstraction. And there is even clear a sense of a nature behind
+his custom when he speaks of a "sacred regard" for life, and urges that
+every man has property in his own labor. The truth here surely is that
+Smith was living in a time of commercial expansion. What was evident to
+him was the potential wealth to be made available if the obsolete system
+of restraint could be destroyed. Liberty to him meant absence of
+restraint not because its more positive aspect was concealed from him
+but rather because the kind of freedom wanted in the environment in
+which he moved was exactly that for which he made his plea. There is a
+hint that freedom as a positive thing was known to him from the fact
+that he relied upon education to relieve the evils of the division of
+labor. But the general context of his book required less emphasis upon
+the virtues of state-interference than upon its defects. His cue was to
+show that all the benefits of regulation had been achieved despite its
+interference; from which, of course, it followed that restraint was a
+matter of supererogation.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It would be tedious to praise the _Wealth of Nations_. It may be
+doubtful whether Buckle's ecstatic judgment that it has had more
+influence than any other book in the world was justified even when he
+wrote; but certainly it is one of the seminal books of the modern time.
+What is more important is to note the perspective in which its main
+teaching was set. He wrote in the midst of the first significant
+beginnings of the Industrial Revolution; and his emphatic approval of
+Watt's experiments suggests that he was not unalive to its importance.
+Yet it cannot in any full sense be said that the Industrial Revolution
+has a large part in his book. The picture of industrial organization and
+its possibilities is too simple to suggest that he had caught any far
+reaching glimpse into the future. Industry, for him, is still in the
+last stage of handicraft; it is a matter of skillful workmanship and not
+of mechanical appliance. Capital is still the laborious result of
+parsimony. Credit is spoken of rather in the tones of one who sees it
+less as a new instrument of finance than a dangerous attempt by the
+aspiring needy to scale the heights of wealth. Profits are always a
+justified return for productive labor; interest the payment for the use
+of the owner's past parsimony. Business is still the middleman
+distributing to the consumer on a small scale. He did not, or could not,
+conceive of an industry either so vast or so depersonalized as at
+present. He was rather writing of a system which, like the politics of
+the eighteenth century, had reached an equilibrium of passable comfort.
+His natural order was, at bottom, the beatification of that to which
+this equilibrium tended. Its benefits might be improved by free trade
+and free workmanship; but, upon the whole, he saw no reason to call in
+question its fundamental dogmas.
+
+Therein, of course, may be found the main secret of his omissions. The
+problem of labor finds no place in his book. The things that the poor
+have absent from their lives, that concept of a national minimum below
+which no State can hope to fulfil even the meanest of its aims, of these
+he has no conception. Rather the note of the book is a quiet optimism,
+impressed by the possibilities of constant improvement which lie
+imbedded in the human impulse to better itself. What he did not see is
+the way in which the logical outcome of the system he describes may
+well be the attainment of great wealth at a price in human cost that is
+beyond its worth. Therein, it is clear, all individualistic theories of
+the state miss the true essence of the social bond. Those who came after
+Adam Smith saw only half his problem. He wrote a consumer's theory of
+value. But whereas he had in mind a happy and contented people, the
+economics of Ricardo and Malthus seized upon a single element in human
+nature as that which alone the State must serve. Freedom from restraint
+came ultimately to mean a judgment upon national well-being in terms of
+the volume of trade. "It is not with happiness," said Nassau Senior,
+"but with wealth that I am concerned as a political economist; and I am
+not only justified in omitting, but am perhaps bound to omit, all
+considerations which have no influence upon wealth."
+
+In such an aspect, it was natural for the balance of investigation to
+swing towards the study of the technique of production; and with the
+growing importance of capital, as machinery was introduced, the worker,
+without difficulty, became an adjunct, easily replaced, to the machine.
+What was remembered then was the side of Adam Smith which looked upon
+enlightened selfishness as the key to social good. Regulation became
+anathema even when the evils it attempted to restrain were those which
+made the mass of the people incapable of citizenship. Even national
+education was regarded as likely to destroy initiative; or, as a
+pauper's dole which men of self-respect would regard with due
+abhorrence. The State, in short, ceased to concern itself with justice
+save insofar as the administration of a judicial code spelled the
+protection of the new industrial system. Nothing is more striking in the
+half-century after Adam Smith than the optimism of the economist and the
+business man in contrast to the hopeless despair of labor. That men can
+organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that until
+Francis Place even the workers themselves were half-convinced. The
+manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of
+economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation. The
+literature of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray,
+exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and Robert Owen
+was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet of a new hope.
+The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out to the letter the
+unstated assumptions of Puritan economics. The poor were consigned to a
+God whose dictates were by definition beneficent; and if they failed to
+understand the curious incidence of his rewards that was because his
+ways were inscrutable. No one who reads the tracts of writers like
+Harriet Martineau can fail to see how pitiless was the operation of this
+attitude. Life is made a struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its
+ultimate meaning from the misery incident to it. The tragedy is excused
+because the export-trade increases in its volume. The iron law of wages,
+the assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of wealth,
+the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better his
+condition be sapped by giving to him that which his self-respect can
+better win--these became the unconscious assumptions of all economic
+discussion.
+
+In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided it, we
+must not miss the element of truth that it contains. No poison is more
+subtly destructive of the democratic State than paternalism; and the
+release of the creative impulses of men must always be the coping-stone
+of public policy. Adam Smith is the supreme representative of a
+tradition which saw that release effected by individual effort. Where
+each man cautiously pursued the good as he saw it, the realization was
+bound, in his view, to be splendid. A population each element of which
+was active and alert to its economic problems could not escape the
+achievement of greatness. All that is true; but it evades the obvious
+conditions we have inherited. For even when the psychological
+inadequacies of Smith's attitude are put aside, we can judge his theory
+in the light of the experience it summarizes. Once it is admitted that
+the object of the State is the achievement of the good life, the final
+canon of politics is bound to be a moral one. We have to inquire into
+the dominant conception of the good life, the number of those upon whom
+it is intended that good shall be conferred.
+
+In the light of this conception it is obvious enough that Smith's view
+is impossible. No mere conflict of private interests, however pure in
+motive, seems able to achieve a harmony of interest between the members
+of the State. Liberty, in the sense of a positive and equal opportunity
+for self-realization, is impossible save upon the basis of the
+acceptance of certain minimal standards which can get accepted only
+through collective effort. Smith did not see that in the processes of
+politics what gets accepted is not the will that is at every moment a
+part of the state-purpose, but the will of those who in fact operate the
+machinery of government. In the half-century after he wrote the men who
+dominated political life were, with the best intentions, moved by
+motives at most points unrelated to the national well-being. The
+fellow-servant doctrine would never have obtained acceptance in a state
+where, as he thought, employer and workman stood upon an equal footing.
+Opposition to the Factory Acts would never have developed in a community
+where it was realized that below certain standards of subsistence the
+very concept of humanity is impossible. Modern achievement implies a
+training in the tools of life; and that, for most, is denied even in our
+own day to the vast majority of men. In the absence of legislation, it
+is certain that those who employ the services of men will be their
+political masters; and it will follow that their Acts of Parliament will
+be adapted to the needs of property. That shrinkage of the purpose of
+the State will mean for most not merely hardship but degradation of all
+that makes life worthy. Upon those stunted existences, indeed, a wealthy
+civilization may easily be builded. Yet it will be a civilization of
+slaves rather than of men.
+
+The individualism, that is to say, for which Adam Smith was zealous
+demands a different institutional expression from that which he gave it.
+We must not assume an _a priori_ justification for the forces of the
+past. The customs of men may represent the thwarting of the impulses of
+the many at the expense of the few not less easily than they may embody
+a general desire; and it is surely a mistaken usage to dignify as
+natural whatever may happen to have occurred. A man may find
+self-realization not less in working for the common good than in the
+limited satisfaction of his narrow desire for material advancement. And
+that, indeed, is the starting-point of modern effort. Our liberty means
+the consistent expression of our personality in media where we find
+people like-minded with ourselves in their conception of social life.
+The very scale of civilization implies collective plans and common
+effort. The constant revision of our basic notions was inevitable
+immediately science was applied to industry. There was thus no reason to
+believe that the system of individual interests for which Smith stood
+sponsor was more likely to fit requirements of a new time than one which
+implied the national regulation of business enterprise. The danger in
+every period of history is lest we take our own age as the term in
+institutional evolution. Private enterprise has the sanction of
+prescription; but since the Industrial Revolution the chief lesson we
+have had to learn is the unsatisfactory character of that title. History
+is an unenviable record of bad metaphysics used to defend obsolete
+systems. It took almost a century after the publication of the _Wealth
+of Nations_ for men to realize that its axioms represented the
+experience of a definite time. Smith thought of freedom in the terms
+most suitable to his generation and stated them with a largeness of view
+which remains impressive even at a century's distance.
+
+But nothing is more certain in the history of political philosophy than
+that the problem of freedom changes with each age. The nineteenth
+century sought release from political privilege; and it built its
+success upon the system prepared by its predecessor. It can never be too
+greatly emphasized that in each age the substance of liberty will be
+found in what the dominating forces of that age most greatly want. With
+Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is
+always the summary of some special experience universalized. That does
+not mean that the past is worthless. Politics, as Seeley said, are
+vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed
+to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its
+novelties upon foundations of sand. Suspicions of collective effort in
+the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to
+think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so
+finely criticized Hegel. It is as though one were to confound the
+accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis
+of property itself. From such an error it is the task of history above
+all to free us. For it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as
+a perennial challenge to the coming time.
+
+The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double
+tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth. On the one hand he is the
+founder of the classic political economy. With Ricardo, the elder Mill
+and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the production of wealth
+without regard to its moral environment; and the state for them is
+merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in which business men achieve
+their labors. There is nothing in them of that fine despair which made
+Stuart Mill welcome socialism itself rather than allow the continuance
+of the new capitalist system. Herein the State is purged of moral
+purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the greatest happiness by
+insisting that the technique of production must dominate all other
+circumstances. Until the Reform Act of 1867, the orthodox economists
+remained unchallenged. The use of the franchise was only beginning to be
+understood. The "new model" of trade unionism had not yet been tested in
+the political field. But it was discovered impossible to act any longer
+upon the assumptions of the abstract economic man. The infallible sense
+of his own interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for
+the simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously
+required training if they were to be applied to a complex world.
+Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because it
+failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be found
+for the creative energies of humble men.
+
+It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to understand
+the inner significance of the protest against this economic liberalism.
+Adam Smith had declared the source of value to lie in labor; and, at
+the moment of its deepest agony, there were men willing to point the
+moral of his tale. That it represented an incautious analysis was, for
+them, unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path
+whereby economics could be reclaimed for moral science. For if labor was
+the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as
+though degradation was the sole payment for its services. They did not
+ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically profitable,
+but whether it was ethically right. No one can read the history of these
+years and fail to understand their uncompromising denial of its
+rightness. Their negation fell upon unheeding ears; but twenty years
+later, the tradition for which they stood came into Marx's hands and was
+fashioned by him into an interpretation of history. With all its faults
+of statement and of emphasis, the doctrine of the English socialists has
+been, in later hands, the most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics.
+It was a deliberate effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith's ideas, to
+create a commonwealth in the interests of the masses. Wealth, in its
+view, was less the mere production of goods than the accumulated
+happiness of humble men. The impulses it praised and sought through
+state-action to express were, indeed, different from those upon which
+Smith laid emphasis; and he would doubtless have stood aghast at the way
+in which his thought was turned to ends of which he did not dream. Yet
+he can hardly have desired a greater glory. He thus made possible not
+only knowledge of a State untrammelled in its economic life by moral
+considerations; but also the road to those categories wherein the old
+conception of co-operative effort might find a new expression. Those who
+trod in his footsteps may have repudiated the ideal for which he stood,
+but they made possible a larger hope in which he would have been proud
+and glad to share.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+This bibliography makes no pretence to completeness. It attempts only to
+enumerate the more obvious sources that an interested reader would care
+to examine.
+
+
+
+GENERAL
+
+
+LESLIE STEPHEN. _History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_.
+1876. Vol. II, Chapters IX and X.
+
+W.E.H. LECKY. _History of England in the Eighteenth Century._
+
+A.L. SMITH. _Political Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth and
+Eighteenth Centuries_ in the _Cambridge Modern History_. Vol. VI,
+Chapter XXIII.
+
+J. BONAR. _Philosophy and Political Economy_. Chapters V-IX.
+
+F.W. MAITLAND. _An Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality_ in
+_Collected Papers_. Vol. I.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+JOHN LOCKE. _Works_ (Eleventh Edition), 10 volumes. London, 1812.
+
+H.R. FOX-BOURNE. _Life of John Locke_. London, 1876.
+
+T.H. GREEN. _The Principles of Political Obligation_ in _Collected
+Works_. Vol. II. London, 1908.
+
+PETER. LORD KING. _The Life and Letters of John Locke_. London, 1858.
+
+SIR F. POLLOCK. _Locke's Theory of the State_ in _Proc. Brit. Acad._.
+Vol. I. London, 1904.
+
+S.P. LAMPRECHT. _The Moral and Political Philosophy of Locke_. New York,
+1918.
+
+A.A. SEATON. _The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts_.
+Cambridge, 1911.
+
+J.N. FIGGIS. _The Divine Right of Kings_. Cambridge, 1914.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+JEREMY COLLIER. _The History of Passive Obedience_. London, 1689.
+
+WILLIAM SHERLOCK. _The Case of Resistance_. London, 1684.
+
+CHARLES LESLIE. _The Case of the Regale_ (Collected Works). Vol. III,
+                   p. 291.
+                _The Rehearsal_.
+                _The New Association_.
+                _Cassandra_.
+                _The Finishing Stroke_.
+                _Obedience to Civil Government Clearly Stated_.
+                _The Best Answer_.
+                _The Best of All_.
+
+SAMUEL GRASCOM. _A Brief Answer_.
+
+E. SHELLINGFLEET. _A Vindication of their Majesties Authoritie_.
+
+B. SHOWER. _A Letter to a Convocation Man._
+
+W. WAKE. _The Authority of Christian Princes_. _The State of the Church_
+(1703).
+
+FRANCIS ATTERBURY. _Rights, Powers and Privileges of an English
+Convocation_ (1701).
+
+BENJAMIN HOADLY. _Origins of Civil Government_ (1710).
+                 _Preservative Against Nonjurors_ (1716).
+                 _Works_, 3 vols. London (1773).
+
+WILLIAM LAW. _A Defence of Church Principles_ (ed. Gore). Edinburgh,
+1904.
+
+W. WARBURTON. _Alliance between Church and State_ (1736).
+
+J.H. OVERTON. _The Nonjurors._ New York, 1903.
+
+T. LATHEBURY. _History of Convocation._ London, 1842.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+BERKELEY. _Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721).
+
+H. ST. JOHN (Viscount Bolingbroke). _Works._ 5 vols. London, 1754.
+
+LORD EGMONT. _Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts_ (1742).
+
+DAVID HUME. _Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals_ (1752).
+            _Essays_. (1742-1752) ed. Green & Grose. London, 1876.
+
+W. SICHEL. _Life of Bolingbroke_. 2 vols. 1900-4.
+
+J. CHURTON COLLINS. _Bolingbroke and Voltaire in England_.
+
+J. HILL BURTON. _Life of Hume_.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+MONTESQUIEU. _L'Esprit des Lois_ (1748).
+
+J.J. ROUSSEAU. _Du Contrat Social_ (1762). See ed. by Vaughan, 1918.
+
+JOHN BROWN. _Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_
+(1757).
+
+ADAM FERGUSON. _Essay on the History of Civil Society_ (1767).
+
+WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. _Commentaries_ (1765-9).
+
+JEREMY BENTHAM. _A Fragment on Government_ (1776). Ed. F.C. Montague,
+1891.
+
+J. DE LOLME. _The Constitution of England_ (1775).
+
+ROBERT WALLACE. _Various Prospects_ (1761).
+
+JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. _Essay on the First Principles of Government_ (1768).
+
+RICHARD PRICE. _Observations on Civil Liberty_ (1776). _Additional
+Observations_ (1777).
+
+WILLIAM OGILVIE. _The Right of Property in Land_ (1781). Ed. Macdonald,
+1891.
+
+JOSIAH TUCKER. _Treatise on Civil Government_ (1781).
+
+SAMUEL JOHNSON. _Taxation No Tyranny_ (1775).
+
+M. BEER. _History of British Socialism_ (1919).
+
+JAMES BOSWELL. _Life of Samuel Johnson_ (1791).
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+EDMUND BURKE. _Collected Works_. London, 1808.
+
+JOHN MORLEY. _Edmund Burke_ (1867). _Life of Burke_ (1887).
+
+J. MACCUNN. _The Political Philosophy of Burke_ (1908).
+
+JUNIUS. _Letters_ (1769-72). London, 1812.
+
+THOMAS PAINE. _The Rights of Man_ (1791-2).
+
+JAMES MACKINTOSH. _Vendiciæ Gallicæ_ (1791).
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+CHARLES DAVENANT. _Works_. London, 1771.
+
+SIR DUDLEY NORTH. _A Discourse upon Trade_ (1691).
+
+ADAM SMITH. _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ (1759).
+            _Wealth of Nations_ (1776).
+            _Lectures on Justice and Police_. (Ed. Cannan, 1896).
+
+W.R. SCOTT. _Life of Francis Hutcheson_ (1900).
+
+JOHN RAE. _Life of Adam Smith_ (1895).
+
+W. BAGEHOT. _Adam Smith as a Person_ in _Coll. Works_. Vol. VII.
+
+F.W. HIRST. _Adam Smith_ (1904).
+
+W. HASBACH. _Untersuchungen über Adam Smith_ (1891).
+
+J. BONAR. _A Catalogue of Adam Smith's Library_ (1894).
+
+T. CLIFFE LESLIE. _Adam Smith_ in _Essays in Moral and Political
+Philosophy_ (1879).
+
+E. TROELTSCH. _Die Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirchen_ (1912).
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Addison, 69
+Andrewes, 83
+Ashley, 33-4
+Atterbury, 102
+Austin, 62
+
+Bagehot, 9, 249
+Barbeyrac, 68
+Barrow, 84
+Bellarmine, 83, 121
+Bentham, 23, 62, 72, 151, 157, 175, 194
+Berkeley, 10, 129
+Blackstone, 163-4, 174f
+Bolingbroke, 69, 131f
+Bonald, 277
+Bonar, 300
+Bonwicke, 82
+Boswell, 209
+Bray, 307, 315
+Brown (J.), 168
+Brown (R.), 52
+Burke, 7, 8, 16, 30, 157, 159, 166, 221f, 286
+Burnet, 80, 87, 93
+Busher, 52
+
+Cartwright, 97
+Chatham, 132, 167, 188, 262
+Chillingworth, 52
+Chubb, 128
+Coleridge, 277
+Collier, 84n
+Cowper, 20
+Crabbe, 20
+
+Dalrymple, 8
+Darwin, 67
+Davenant, 283, 287
+Defoe, 8, 128, 132
+Dicey, 175, 179
+Disraeli, 132
+Divine Right, 7, 30
+Dodwell, 82
+Dupont de Nemours, 292
+
+Egmont, 142
+Eldon, 159
+
+Ferguson, 172-4
+Fielding, 160
+Filmer, 7, 38
+
+Galsworthy, 171-2
+George III, 13, 15, 158, 188, 213f
+Godwin, 10, 163, 222, 276
+Goldsmith, 19, 223
+Goodman, 57
+Grascom, 86
+Gray, 160
+Green (T.H.), 61, 279
+
+Haldane, 126
+Hales, 52
+Halifax, 8, 27
+Hall, 17, 307
+Hamilton (J.L. & B.), 19
+Harrington, 147
+Hegel, 249, 277, 212-3
+Hickes, 83
+Hoadly, 9, 22, 69, 107f
+Hobbes, 8, 16, 30, 40f, 72, 91, 278, 284
+Hodgskin, 17, 307
+Holmes (O.W.), 63n, 269
+Holt, 14,
+Hooker, 44
+Hotman, 57, 68
+Hume, 8, 11, 71, 92, 143f, 278, 284, 297
+Hutcheson, 11, 153, 155, 291, 297
+
+Independents, 40
+
+Jackson, 84
+James II, 24f, 35
+Johnson (Dr.), 18, 210f, 223, 230
+Junius, 21, 219
+
+Keble, 82
+Kerr, 82
+Knox, 57, 83, 97
+
+Lassalle, 313
+Laud, 285
+Law, 22, 108f
+Leslie, 80, 85, 88, 90, 97, 104, 132
+Locke, 7, 11, 21, 29-76, 79, 197, 207, 273, 287
+de Lolme, 10, 183f
+
+Mackintosh, 269
+Madison, 63
+Maine, 66, 249
+Maistre, 91, 252, 273
+Malthus, 305
+Mandeville, 129, 284
+Mariana, 57
+Martin, 69
+Marx, 312, 315
+Melville, 121
+Mill, 157
+Milton, 52
+Molyneux, 68
+Montesquieu, 12, 63, 160f, 173, 183
+Morley, 132, 223
+
+Newton, 37
+Newman, 81, 122, 125
+North, 287
+
+Ogilvie, 199f
+Owen, 17, 307
+Oxford Movement, 81
+
+Paine, 202, 269
+Paley, 157
+Pattison, 10
+Penn, 58
+Place, 306
+Pope, 69, 128, 132
+Price, 196f
+Priestley, 72, 190f
+Proast, 64
+Prynne, 8, 55
+Pufendorf, 68
+Pulteney, 217
+
+Quesnay, 288, 292
+
+Renan, 249
+Ricardo, 305
+Richardson, 160
+Richardson (S.), 52
+Rousseau, 8, 74, 162f, 188, 197, 276
+Royer-Collard, 226
+Ruskin, 293, 301
+
+Sanderson, 84
+Savigny, 249, 277
+Seeley, 312
+Selden, 9
+Senior, 304
+Separation of Powers, 63f
+Shaftesbury, 11, 128, 155
+Sherlock (T.), 108
+Sherlock (W.), 87
+Shower, 99
+Sidney, 7, 57
+Smith (Adam), 9, 16, 152, 195, 258, 281f
+Smith (A.L.), 140
+Snape, 108
+Social Contract, 57
+Spelman, 9
+Spence, 202
+Stammler, 60
+Steele, 284
+Stephen (F.), 65
+Stephen (L.), 108, 223
+Stillingfleet, 37, 87, 93
+Suarez, 57
+
+Taylor, 52, 57
+Temple, 283
+Thompson, 307, 215
+Tindal, 123
+Tocqueville, 254
+Toleration, 52, 64
+Tucker, 71, 206f, 288
+Turgot, 288, 292
+
+Voltaire, 12, 132, 160
+
+Wake, 80, 100f
+Wallace, 188
+Walpole, 13, 21, 128-30
+Warburton, 69, 118f, 192
+Wilberforce, 290
+Wilkes, 167, 188, 220
+William III, 25f
+Williams (Roger), 52
+Woolston, 128
+Wordsworth, 277
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Political Thought in England from
+Locke to Bentham, by Harold J. Laski
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Political Thought in England from Locke to
+Bentham, by Harold J. Laski
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham
+
+Author: Harold J. Laski
+
+Release Date: January 19, 2005 [EBook #14735]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David King and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<div id="titlepages"><br />
+<h2>HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY<br />
+OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE</h2>
+<h3>No. 103</h3>
+<p class="center"><i>Editors:</i></p>
+<div class="editors">
+<p class="small">HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.<br />
+PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D. LL.D., F.B.A.<br />
+PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.<br />
+PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="long" />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="page1" id="page1"></a>
+<h1>POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND<br />
+<br />
+FROM<br />
+LOCKE TO BENTHAM</h1>
+<br />
+<p class="center">BY</p>
+<h2>HAROLD J. LASKI</h2>
+<p class="center"><span class="small">SOMETIME EXHIBITIONER OF NEW
+COLLEGE, OXFORD, OF THE<br />
+DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY,<br />
+AUTHOR OF STUDIES IN THE PROBLEM OF<br />
+SOVEREIGNTY AND AUTHORITY IN<br />
+THE MODERN STATE</span></p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<p class="center"><img src="images/image01.png" width="96" height=
+"126" alt="" /></p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<p class="center">NEW YORK<br />
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY<br />
+<span class="small">LONDON</span><br />
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<br />
+<a name="page2" id="page2"></a>
+<p class="center">1920</p>
+<br />
+<hr class="long" /></div>
+<div id="preface"><a name="page3" id="page3"></a>
+<h2>NOTE</h2>
+<p class="indent">It is impossible for me to publish this book
+without some expression of the debt it owes to Leslie Stephen's
+<i>History of the English Thought in the Eighteenth Century</i>. It
+is almost insolent to praise such work; but I may be permitted to
+say that no one can fully appreciate either its wisdom or its
+knowledge who has not had to dig among the original texts.</p>
+<p class="indent">Were so small a volume worthy to bear a
+dedication, I should associate it with the name of my friend Walter
+Lippmann. He and I have so often discussed the substance of its
+problems that I am certain a good deal of what I feel to be my own
+is, where it has merit, really his. This volume is thus in great
+part a tribute to him; though there is little that can repay such
+friendship as he gives.</p>
+<p class="right">H.J.L.</p>
+<p class="small">HARVARD UNIVERSITY<br />
+<span class="in2">Sept. 15, 1919</span></p>
+<hr class="long" /></div>
+<div id="toc"><a name="page5" id="page5"></a>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<br />
+<div class="center">
+<table width="100%" summary="Table of Contents">
+<tr>
+<td class="right"><span class="tiny">CHAPTER</span></td>
+<td class="center8">&nbsp;</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="right"><span class="tiny">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">I.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>INTRODUCTION</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page7">7</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">II.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page24">24</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">III.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>CHURCH AND STATE</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page77">77</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">IV.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>THE ERA OF STAGNATION</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page127">127</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">V.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>SIGNS OF CHANGE</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page159">159</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">VI.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>BURKE</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page213">213</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">VII.</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page281">281</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="3">BIBLIOGRAPHY</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page317">317</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="3">INDEX</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#page321">321</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+<br /></div>
+<hr class="long" />
+<div id="content"><a name="page7" id="page7"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3>INTRODUCTION</h3>
+<p>The eighteenth century may be said to begin with the Revolution
+of 1688; for, with its completion, the dogma of Divine Right
+disappeared for ever from English politics. Its place was but
+partially filled until Hume and Burke supplied the outlines of a
+new philosophy. For the observer of this age can hardly fail, as he
+notes its relative barrenness of abstract ideas, to be impressed by
+the large part Divine Right must have played in the politics of the
+succeeding century. Its very absoluteness made for keen
+partisanship on the one side and the other. It could produce at
+once the longwinded rhapsodies of Filmer and, by repulsion, the
+wearisome reiterations of Algernon Sidney. Once the foundations of
+Divine Right had been destroyed by Locke, the basis of passionate
+controversy was <a name="page8" id="page8"></a>absent. The theory
+of a social contract never produced in England the enthusiasm it
+evoked in France, for the simple reason that the main objective of
+Rousseau and his disciples had already been secured there by other
+weapons. And this has perhaps given to the eighteenth century an
+urbaneness from which its predecessor was largely free. Sermons are
+perhaps the best test of such a change; and it is a relief to move
+from the addresses bristling with Suarez and Bellarmine to the
+noble exhortations of Bishop Butler. Not until the French
+Revolution were ultimate dogmas again called into question; and it
+is about them only that political speculation provokes deep
+feeling. The urbanity, indeed, is not entirely new. The Restoration
+had heralded its coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common
+with Bolingbroke and Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the
+eighteenth century an historical profundity to compare with that of
+the zealous pamphleteers in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like
+Prynne find very different substitutes in brilliant journalists
+like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and Blackstone are <a name="page9" id=
+"page9"></a>respectable, they bear no comparison with masters like
+Selden and Sir Henry Spelman.</p>
+<p>Yet urbanity must not deceive us. The eighteenth century has an
+importance in English politics which the comparative absence of
+systematic speculation can not conceal. If its large constitutional
+outlines had been traced by a preceding age, its administrative
+detail had still to be secured. The process was very gradual; and
+the attempt of George III to arrest it produced the splendid effort
+of Edmund Burke. Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and
+stumbling; but it gave to the principle of consent a permanent
+place in English politics. It is the age which saw the
+crystallization of the party-system, and therein it may perhaps lay
+claim to have recognized what Bagehot called the vital principle of
+representative government. Few discussions of the sphere of
+government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith gave
+a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite
+its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of
+Church and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed
+its name. <a name="page10" id="page10"></a>De Lolme is the real
+parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in Bagehot's
+hands, become not the least fruitful type of political method.
+Blackstone, in a real sense, may be called the ancestor of
+Professor Dicey. The very calmness of the atmosphere only the more
+surely paved the way for the surprising novelties of Godwin and the
+revolutionists.</p>
+<p>Nor must we neglect the relation between its ethics and its
+politics. The eighteenth century school of British moralists has
+suffered somewhat beside the greater glories of Berkeley and Hume.
+Yet it was a great work to which they bent their effort, and they
+knew its greatness. The deistic controversy involved a fresh
+investigation of the basis of morals; and it is to the credit of
+the investigators that they attempted to provide it in social
+terms. It is, indeed, one of the primary characteristics of the
+British mind to be interested in problems of conduct rather than of
+thought. The seventeenth century had, for the most part, been
+interested in theology and government; and its preoccupation, in
+both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its <a name=
+"page11" id="page11"></a>conclusions unfitted for a period
+dominated by rationalism. Locke regarded his <i>Human
+Understanding</i> as the preliminary to an ethical enquiry; and
+Hume seems to have considered his <i>Principles of Morals</i> the
+most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of
+Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have
+been represented as the proper study of man, and his only business,
+have been periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no
+one will be inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the
+spiritual idealism of the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson
+and the Wesleyan revival will make us generalize with caution. But
+the truth was that theological ethics had become empty and
+inadequate, and the problem was therefore urgent. That is why
+Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith&mdash;to take only men
+of the first eminence&mdash;were thinking not less for politics
+than for ethics when they sought to justify the ways of man to man.
+For all of them saw that a theory of society is impossible without
+the provision of psychological foundations; and those <a name=
+"page12" id="page12"></a>must, above all, result in a theory of
+conduct if the social bond is to be maintained. That sure insight
+is, of course, one current only in a greater English stream which
+reaches back to Hobbes at its source and forward to T.H. Green at
+perhaps its fullest. Its value is its denial of politics as a
+science distinct from other human relations; and that is why Adam
+Smith can write of moral sentiments no less than of the wealth of
+nations. The eighteenth century saw clearly that each aspect of
+social life must find its place in the political equation.</p>
+<p>Yet it is undoubtedly an age of methods rather than of
+principles; and, as such its peaceful prosperity was well suited to
+its questions. Problems of technique, such as the cabinet and the
+Bank of England required the absence of passionate debate if they
+were in any fruitful fashion to be solved. Nor must the achievement
+of the age in politics be minimized. It was, of course, a
+complacent time; but we ought to note that foreigners of
+distinction did not wonder at its complacency. Voltaire and
+Montesquieu look back to England in the eighteenth century for the
+substance <a name="page13" id="page13"></a>of political truths. The
+American colonies took alike their methods and their arguments from
+English ancestors; and Burke provided them with the main elements
+of justification. The very quietness, indeed, of the time was the
+natural outcome of a century of storm; and England surely had some
+right to be contented when her political system was compared with
+the governments of France and Germany. Not, indeed, that the full
+fruit of the Revolution was gathered. The principle of consent
+came, in practice and till 1760, to mean the government of the Whig
+Oligarchy; and the <i>Extraordinary Black Book</i> remains to tell
+us what happened when George III gave the Tory party a new lease of
+power. There is throughout the time an over-emphasis upon the value
+of order, and a not unnatural tendency to confound the private good
+of the governing class with the general welfare of the state. It
+became the fixed policy of Walpole to make prosperity the mask for
+political stagnation. He turned political debate from principles to
+personalities, and a sterile generation was the outcome of his
+cunning.</p>
+<a name="page14" id="page14"></a>
+<p>Not that this barrenness is without its compensations. The
+theories of the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within
+a generation. The constitutional ideas of the seventeenth century
+had no substance for an England where Anglicanism and agriculture
+were beginning to lose the rigid outlines of overwhelming
+predominance. What was needed was the assurance of safety for the
+Church that her virtue might be tested in the light of
+nonconformist practice on the one hand, and the new rationalism on
+the other. What was needed also was the expansion of English
+commerce into the new channels opened for it by the victories of
+Chatham. Mr. Chief Justice Holt had given it the legal categories
+it would require; and Hume and Adam Smith were to explain that
+commerce might grow with small danger to agricultural prosperity.
+Beneath the apparent calm of Walpole's rule new forces were fast
+stirring. That can be seen on every side. The sturdy morality of
+Johnson, the new literary forms of Richardson and Fielding, the
+theatre which Garrick founded upon the ruins produced by Collier's
+indignation, <a name="page15" id="page15"></a>the revival of which
+Law and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the stagnation was
+sleep rather than death. The needed events of shock were close at
+hand. The people of England would never have discovered the real
+meaning of 1688 if George III had not denied its principles. When
+he enforced the resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once
+of Edmund Burke and English radicalism were born; for the
+<i>Present Discontents</i> and the <i>Society for the Support of
+the Bill of Rights</i> are the dawn of a splendid recovery. And
+they made possible the speculative ferment which showed that
+England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and
+Rousseau. Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the
+Tudor despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the
+complacency of the eighteenth century. But the peace of the Tudors
+was the death-bed of the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism
+of the early eighteenth century which made possible the birth of
+democratic England.</p>
+<p>The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is deep-rooted in the
+conditions of the past. Locke could not have written had not
+<a name="page16" id="page16"></a>Hobbes and Filmer defended in set
+terms the ideal of despotic government. He announced the advent of
+the modern system of parliamentary government; and from his time
+the debate has been rather of the conditions under which it is to
+work, than of the foundations upon which it is based. Burke, for
+example, wrote what constitutes the supreme analysis of the
+statesman's art. Adam Smith discussed in what fashion the
+prosperity of peoples could be best advanced. From Locke, that is
+to say, the subject of discussion is rather <i>politik</i> than
+<i>staatslehre</i>. The great debate inaugurated by the Reformation
+ceased when Locke had outlined an intelligible basis for
+parliamentary government. Hume, Bolingbroke, Burke, are all of them
+concerned with the detail of political arrangement in a fashion
+which presupposes the acceptance of a basis previously known.
+Burke, indeed, toward the latter part of his life, awoke to the
+realization that men were dissatisfied with the traditional
+substance of the State. But he met the new desires with hate
+instead of understanding, and the Napoleonic wars drove the current
+of democratic opinion <a name="page17" id="page17"></a>underground.
+Hall and Owen and Hodgskin inherited the thoughts of Ogilvie and
+Spence and Paine; and if they did not give them substance, at least
+they gave them form for a later time.</p>
+<p>Nor is the reason for this preoccupation far to seek. The
+advance of English politics in the preceding two centuries was
+mainly an advance of structure; yet relative at least to
+continental fact, it appeared liberal enough to hide the
+disharmonies of its inner content. The King was still a mighty
+influence. The power of the aristocracy was hardly broken until the
+Reform Bill of 1867. The Church continued to dominate the political
+aspect of English religious life until, after 1832, new elements
+alien from her ideals were introduced into the House of Commons.
+The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial Revolution,
+when a new class of men attained control of the nation's economic
+power. Only then was a realignment of political forces essential.
+Only then, that is to say, had the time arrived for a new theory of
+the State.</p>
+<p>The political ideas of the eighteenth <a name="page18" id=
+"page18"></a>century are thus in some sort a comment upon the
+system established by the Revolution; and that is, in its turn, the
+product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in the
+preceding age. But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or
+its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still
+dominantly aristocratic. From no accusation were its statesmen more
+anxious to be free than from that of a belief in democratic
+government. Whether Whigs or Tories were in power, it was always
+the great families who ruled. For them the Church, at least in its
+higher branches, existed; and the difference between nobleman and
+commoner at Oxford is as striking as it is hideous to this
+generation. For them also literature and the theatre made their
+display; and if Dr. Johnson could heap an immortal contumely upon
+the name of patron, we all know of the reverence he felt in the
+presence of the king. Divine Right and non-resistance were dead,
+but they had not died without a struggle. Freedom of the press and
+legal equality may have been obtained; but it was not until the
+passage of Fox's Libel Act that the first became <a name="page19"
+id="page19"></a>secure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have recently
+illumined for us the inward meaning of the second. The populace
+might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt upon
+an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the
+unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons.
+Such outbursts are yet the exception to the prevailing temper. The
+deliberations of Parliament were still, at least technically, a
+secret; and membership therein, save for one or two anomalies like
+Westminster and Bristol, was still the private possession of a
+privileged class. The Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract
+and general freedom, than a special release from the arbitrary will
+of a stupid monarch who aroused against himself every deep-seated
+prejudice of his generation. The England which sent James II upon
+his travels may be, as Hume pointed out, reduced to a pathetic
+fragment even of its electorate. The masses were unknown and
+undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to protest
+against some wise reform like Walpole's Excise Scheme, or to
+become, as in Goldsmith <a name="page20" id="page20"></a>and Cowper
+and Crabbe, the object of half-pitying poetic sentiment. How
+deep-rooted was the notion of aristocratic control was to be shown
+when France turned into substantial fact Rousseau's demand for
+freedom. The protest of Burke against its supposed anarchy swept
+England like a flame; and only a courageous handful could be found
+to protest against Pitt's prostitution of her freedom.</p>
+<p>Such an age could make but little pretence to discovery; and,
+indeed, it is most largely absent from its speculation. In its
+political ideas this is necessarily and especially the case. For
+the State is at no time an unchanging organization; it reflects
+with singular exactness the dominating ideas of its environment.
+That division into government and subjects which is its main
+characteristic is here noteworthy for the narrowness of the class
+from which the government is derived, and the consistent inertia of
+those over whom it rules. There is curiously little controversy
+over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most men
+acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament. What balance of
+forces is necessary to its most <a name="page21" id=
+"page21"></a>perfect equilibrium may arouse dissension when George
+III forgets the result of half a century's evolution. Junius may
+have to explain in invective what Burke magistrally demonstrated in
+terms of political philosophy. But the deeper problems of the state
+lay hidden until Bentham and the revolutionists came to insist upon
+their presence. That did not mean that the eighteenth century was a
+soulless failure. Rather did it mean that a period of transition
+had been successfully bridged. The stage was set for a new effort
+simply because the theories of the older philosophy no longer
+represented the facts at issue.</p>
+<p>It was thus Locke only in this period who confronted the general
+problems of the modern State. Other thinkers assumed his structure
+and dealt with the details he left undetermined. The main problems,
+the Church apart, arose when a foreigner occupied the English
+throne and left the methods of government to those who were
+acquainted with them. That most happy of all the happy accidents in
+English history made Walpole the fundamental statesman of the time.
+He used his opportunity to the full. Inheriting the <a name=
+"page22" id="page22"></a>possibilities of the cabinet system he
+gave it its modern expression by creating the office of Prime
+Minister. The party-system was already inevitable; and with his
+advent to full power in 1727 we have the characteristic outlines of
+English representative government. Thenceforward, there are, on the
+whole, but three large questions with which the age concerned
+itself. Toleration had already been won by the persistent
+necessities of two generations, and the noble determination of
+William III; but the place of the Church in the Revolution State
+and the nature of that State were still undetermined. Hoadly had
+one solution, Law another; and the genial rationalism of the time,
+coupled with the political affiliations of the High Church party,
+combined to give Hoadly the victory; but his opponents, and Law
+especially, remained to be the parents of a movement for
+ecclesiastical freedom of which it has been the good fortune of
+Oxford to supply in each succeeding century the leaders. America
+presented again the problem of consent in the special perspective
+of the imperial relation; and the decision which grew out of
+<a name="page23" id="page23"></a>the blundering obscurantism of the
+King enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the
+principles of 1688. Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster
+empire; and the industrial system which his effort quickened could
+not live under an economic r&eacute;gime which still bore traces of
+the narrow nationalism of the Tudors. No man was so emphatically
+representative of his epoch as Adam Smith; and no thinker has ever
+stated in such generous terms the answer of his time to the most
+vital of its questions. The answer, indeed, like all good answers,
+revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the prospect of
+its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age that
+was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real
+appreciation of it. The American War and the two great revolutions
+brought a new race of thinkers into being. The French seed at last
+produced its harvest. Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even
+while he rejected his methods. For a time, indeed, the heat and
+dust of war obscured the issue that Bentham raised. But the
+certainties of the future lay on his side.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page24" id="page24"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the
+attempt of James II to establish a despotism in alliance with
+France and Rome. It was almost entirely a movement of the
+aristocracy, and, for the most part, it was aristocratic opposition
+that it encountered. What it did was to make for ever impossible
+the thought of reunion with Rome and the theory that the throne
+could be established on any other basis than the consent of
+Parliament. For no one could pretend that William of Orange ruled
+by Divine Right. The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the
+deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not
+calculated to deceive even the warmest of William's adherents. An
+unconstitutional Parliament thereupon declared the throne <a name=
+"page25" id="page25"></a>vacant; and after much negotiation William
+and Mary were invited to occupy it. To William the invitation was
+irresistible. It gave him the assistance of the first maritime
+power in Europe against the imperialism of Louis XIV. It ensured
+the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an enemy
+who never slumbered. Nor did England find the new r&eacute;gime
+unwelcome. Every widespread conviction of her people had been
+wantonly outraged by the blundering stupidity of James. If a large
+fraction of the English Church held aloof from the new order on
+technical grounds, the commercial classes gave it their warm
+support; and many who doubted in theory submitted in practice. All
+at least were conscious that a new era had dawned.</p>
+<p>For William had come over with a definite purpose in view. James
+had wrought havoc with what the Civil Wars had made the essence of
+the English constitution; and it had become important to define in
+set terms the conditions upon which the life of kings must in the
+future be regulated. The reign of William is nothing so much as the
+period of that definition; <a name="page26" id="page26"></a>and the
+fortunate discovery was made of the mechanisms whereby its
+translation into practice might be secured. The Bill of Rights
+(1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701) are the foundation-stones
+of the modern constitutional system.</p>
+<p>What, broadly, was established was the dependence of the crown
+upon Parliament. Finance and the army were brought under
+Parliamentary control by the simple expedient of making its annual
+summons essential. The right of petition was re-affirmed; and the
+independence of the judges and ministerial responsibility were
+secured by the same act which forever excluded the legitimate heirs
+from their royal inheritance. It is difficult not to be amazed at
+the almost casual fashion in which so striking a revolution was
+effected. Not, indeed, that the solution worked easily at the
+outset. William remained to the end a foreigner, who could not
+understand the inwardness of English politics. It was the
+necessities of foreign policy which drove him to admit the immense
+possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his own best
+safeguard in the foundation of the Bank of England. <a name=
+"page27" id="page27"></a>The Cabinet, towards the close of his
+reign, had already become the fundamental administrative
+instrument. Originally a committee of the Privy Council, it had no
+party basis until the ingenious Sunderland atoned for a score of
+dishonesties by insisting that the root of its efficiency would be
+found in its selection from a single party. William acquiesced but
+doubtfully; for, until the end of his life, he never understood why
+his ministers should not be a group of able counsellors chosen
+without reference to their political affiliations. Sunderland knew
+better for the simple reason that he belonged to that period when
+the Whigs and Tories had gambled against each other for their
+heads. He knew that no council-board could with comfort contain
+both himself and Halifax; just as William himself was to learn
+quite early that neither honor nor confidence could win unswerving
+support from John Churchill. There is a certain feverishness in the
+atmosphere of the reign which shows how many kept an anxious eye on
+St. Germain even while they attended the morning levee at
+Whitehall.</p>
+<p>What secured the permanence of the <a name="page28" id=
+"page28"></a>settlement was less the policy of William than the
+blunder of the French monarch. Patience, foresight and generosity
+had not availed to win for William more than a grudging recognition
+of his kingship. He had received only a half-hearted support for
+his foreign policy. The army, despite his protests, had been
+reduced; and the enforced return of his own Dutch Guards to Holland
+was deliberately conceived to cause him pain. But at the very
+moment when his strength seemed weakest James II died; and Louis
+XIV, despite written obligation, sought to comfort the last moments
+of his tragic exile by the falsely chivalrous recognition of the
+Old Pretender as the rightful English king. It was a terrible
+mistake. It did for William what no action of his own could ever
+have achieved. It suggested that England must receive its ruler at
+the hands of a foreign sovereign. The national pride of the people
+rallied to the cause for which William stood. He was king&mdash;so,
+at least in contrast to Louis' decision, it appeared&mdash;by their
+deliberate choice and the settlement of which he was the symbol
+would be maintained. Parliament granted <a name="page29" id=
+"page29"></a>to William all that his foreign policy could have
+demanded. His own death was only the prelude to the victories of
+Marlborough. Those victories seemed to seal the solution of 1688. A
+moment came when sentiment and intrigue combined to throw in
+jeopardy the Act of Settlement. But Death held the stakes against
+the gambler's throw of Bolingbroke; and the accession of George I
+assured the permanence of Revolution principles.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his
+conscious effort to justify the innovations of 1688. He sought, as
+he said, "to establish the throne of our great Restorer, our
+present King William, and make good his title in the consent of the
+people." In the debate which followed his argument remained
+unanswered, for the sufficient reason that it had the common sense
+of the generation on his side. Yet Locke has suffered not a little
+at the hands of succeeding thinkers. Though his influence upon his
+own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed <a name="page30" id=
+"page30"></a>to him the acutest of his insights; though the
+principles of the American Revolution are in large part an
+acknowledged adoption of his own; he has become one of the
+political classics who are taken for granted rather than read. It
+is a profound and regrettable error. Locke may not possess the
+clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing
+into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the
+first of English political thinkers. He yet stated more clearly
+than either the general problem of the modern State. Hobbes, after
+all, worked with an impossible psychology and sought no more than
+the prescription against disorder. Burke wrote rather a text-book
+for the cautious administrator than a guide for the liberal
+statesman. But Locke saw that the main problem of the State is the
+conquest of freedom and it was for its definition in terms of
+individual good that he above all strove.</p>
+<p>Much, doubtless, of his neglect is due to the medium in which he
+worked. He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only
+possible retort to the theory of Divine Right. He so <a name=
+"page31" id="page31"></a>emphasized the principle of consent that
+when contractualism came in its turn to be discarded, it was
+discovered that Locke suffered far more than Hobbes by the change
+so made. For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as
+strong government could be shown to be implicit in the natural
+badness of men, while Locke assumed their goodness and made his
+contract essential to their opportunity for moral expression. Nor
+did he, like Rousseau, seize upon the organic nature of the State.
+To him the State was always a mere aggregate, and the convenient
+simplicity of majority-rule solved, for him, the vital political
+problems. But Rousseau was translated into the complex dialectic of
+Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he would have
+doubtless been the first to disown. Nor was Locke aided by his
+philosophic outlook. Few great thinkers have so little perceived
+the psychological foundations of politics. What he did was rather
+to fasten upon the great institutional necessity of his
+time&mdash;the provision of channels of assent&mdash;and emphasize
+its importance to the exclusion of all other factors. The problem
+is in fact <a name="page32" id="page32"></a>more complex; and the
+solution he indicated became so natural a part of the political
+fabric that the value of his emphasis upon its import was largely
+forgotten when men again took up the study of foundations.</p>
+<p>John Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset on the 29th of
+August, 1632. His father was clerk to the county justices and acted
+as a captain in a cavalry regiment during the Civil War. Though he
+suffered heavy losses, he was able to give his son as good an
+education as the time afforded. Westminster under Dr. Busby may not
+have been the gentlest of academies, but at least it provided Locke
+with an admirable training in the classics. He himself, indeed, in
+the <i>Thoughts on Education</i> doubted the value of such
+exercises; nor does he seem to have conceived any affection for
+Oxford whither he proceeded in 1652 as a junior student of Christ
+Church. The university was then under the Puritan control of Dr.
+John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from
+its reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the
+"wrangling and ostentation" of the <a name="page33" id=
+"page33"></a>peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that he
+encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to
+metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and
+Wallis the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his
+respect. In 1659 he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college,
+which he retained until he was deemed politically undesirable in
+1684. After toying with his father's desire that he should enter
+the Church, he began the study of medicine. Scientific interest won
+for him the friendship of Boyle; and while he was administering
+physic to the patients of Dr. Thomas, he was making the
+observations recorded in Boyle's <i>History of the Air</i> which
+Locke himself edited after the death of his friend.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile accident had turned his life into far different paths.
+An appointment as secretary to a special ambassador opened up to
+him a diplomatic career; but his sturdy commonsense showed him his
+unfitness for such labors. After his visit to Prussia he returned
+to Oxford, and there, in 1667, in the course of his medical work,
+he met Anthony Ashley, the later <a name="page34" id=
+"page34"></a>Lord Shaftesbury and the Ahitophel of Dryden's great
+satire. The two men were warmly attracted to each other, and Locke
+accepted an appointment as physician to Lord Ashley's household.
+But he was also much more than this. The tutor of Ashley's
+philosophic grandson, he became also his patron's confidential
+counsellor. In 1663 he became part author of a constitutional
+scheme for Carolina which is noteworthy for its emphasis, thus
+early, upon the importance of religious toleration. In 1672, when
+Ashley became Lord Chancellor, he became Secretary of Presentations
+and, until 1675, Secretary to the Council of Trade and Foreign
+Plantations. Meanwhile he carried on his medical work and must have
+obtained some reputation in it; for he is honorably mentioned by
+Sydenham, in his <i>Method of Curing Fevers</i> (1676), and had
+been elected to the Royal Society in 1668. But his real genius lay
+in other directions.</p>
+<p>Locke himself has told us how a few friends began to meet at his
+chamber for the discussions of questions which soon passed into
+metaphysical enquiry; and a page from a commonplace book of 1671
+<a name="page35" id="page35"></a>is the first beginning of his
+systematic work. Relieved of his administrative duties in 1675, he
+spent the next four years in France, mainly occupied with medical
+observation. He returned to England in 1679 to assist Lord
+Shaftesbury in the passionate debates upon the Exclusion Bill.
+Locke followed his patron into exile, remaining abroad from 1683
+until the Revolution. Deprived of his fellowship in 1684 through
+the malice of Charles II, he would have been without means of
+support had not Shaftesbury bequeathed him a pension. As it was, he
+had no easy time. His extradition was demanded by James II after
+the Monmouth rebellion; and though he was later pardoned he refused
+to return to England until William of Orange had procured his
+freedom. A year after his return he made his appearance as a
+writer. The <i>Essay Concerning Human Understanding</i> and the
+<i>Two Treatises of Government</i> were both published in 1690.
+Five years earlier the <i>Letter Concerning Toleration</i> was
+published in its Latin dress; and four years afterwards an English
+translation appeared. This last, however, perhaps on <a name=
+"page36" id="page36"></a>grounds of expediency, Locke never
+acknowledged until his will was published; for the time was not yet
+suited to such generous speculations. Locke was thus in his
+fifty-eighth year when his first admitted work appeared. But the
+rough attempts at the essay date from 1671, and hints towards the
+<i>Letter on Toleration</i> can be found in fragments of various
+dates between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years of his life.
+Of the <i>Two Treatises</i> the first seems to have been written
+between 1680 and 1685, the second in the last year of his Dutch
+exile.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref1" id="fnref1" href=
+"#fn1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn1" id="fn1" href=
+"#fnref1">[1]</a></span> On the evidence for these dates see the
+convincing argument of Mr. Fox-Bourne in his <i>Life of Locke</i>,
+Vol. II, pp. 165-7.</div>
+<p>The remaining fourteen years of Locke's life were passed in
+semi-retirement in East Anglia. Though he held public office, first
+as Commissioner of Appeals, and later of Trade, for twelve years,
+he could not stand the pressure of London writers, and his public
+work was only intermittent. His counsel, nevertheless, was highly
+valued; and he seems to have won no small confidence from William
+in diplomatic matters. Somers and Charles Montagu held him in high
+respect, and he <a name="page37" id="page37"></a>had the warm
+friendship of Sir Isaac Newton. He published some short discussions
+on economic matters, and in 1695 gave valuable assistance in the
+destruction of the censorship of the press. Two years earlier he
+had published his <i>Thoughts on Education</i>, in which the
+observant reader may find the germ of most of Emile's ideas. He did
+not fail to revise the <i>Essay</i> from time to time; and his
+<i>Reasonableness of Christianity</i>, which, through Toland,
+provoked a reply from Stillingfleet and showed Locke in retort a
+master of the controversial art, was in some sort the foundation of
+the deistic debate in the next epoch. But his chief work had
+already been done, and he spent his energies in rewarding the
+affection of his friends. Locke died on October 28, 1704, amid
+circumstances of singular majesty. He had lived a full life, and
+few have so completely realized the medieval ideal of specializing
+in omniscience. He left warm friends behind him; and Lady Masham
+has said of him that beyond which no man may dare to
+aspire.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref2" id="fnref2" href=
+"#fn2">[2]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn2" id="fn2" href=
+"#fnref2">[2]</a></span> Fox-Bourne, <i>op. cit</i>. Letter from
+Lady Masham to Jean le Clerc.</div>
+<a name="page38" id="page38"></a>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>Locke's <i>Two Treatises of Government</i> are different both in
+object and in value. The first is a detailed and tiresome response
+to the historic imagination of Sir Robert Filmer. In his
+<i>Patriarcha</i>, which first saw the light in 1680, though it had
+been written long before, the latter had sought to reach the
+ultimate conclusion of Hobbes without the element of contract upon
+which the great thinker depended. "I consent with him," said Filmer
+of Hobbes, "about the Rights of <i>exercising</i> Government, but I
+cannot agree to his means of acquiring it." That power must be
+absolute, Filmer, like Hobbes, has no manner of doubt; but his
+method of proof is to derive the title of Charles I from Adam.
+Little difficulties like the origin of primogeniture, or whence, as
+Locke points out, the universal monarchy of Shem can be derived,
+the good Sir Robert does not satisfactorily determine. Locke takes
+him up point by point, and there is little enough left, save a
+sense that history is the root of institutions, when he has done.
+What troubles us is rather why <a name="page39" id=
+"page39"></a>Locke should have wasted the resources of his
+intelligence upon so feeble an opponent. The book of Hobbes lay
+ready to his hand; yet he almost ostentatiously refused to grapple
+with it. The answer doubtless lies in Hobbes' unsavory fame. The
+man who made the Church a mere department of the State and
+justified not less the title of Cromwell than of the Stuarts was
+not the opponent for one who had a very practical problem in hand.
+And Locke could answer that he was answering Hobbes implicitly in
+the second <i>Treatise</i>. And though Filmer might never have been
+known had not Locke thus honored him by retort, he doubtless
+symbolized what many a nobleman's chaplain preached to his master's
+dependents at family prayers.</p>
+<p>The <i>Second Treatise</i> goes to the root of the matter. Why
+does political power, "a Right of making Laws and Penalties of
+Death and consequently all less Penalties," exist? It can only be
+for the public benefit, and our enquiry is thus a study of the
+grounds of political obedience. Locke thus traverses the ground
+Hobbes had covered in his <i>Leviathan</i> though he rejects
+<a name="page40" id="page40"></a>every premise of the earlier
+thinker. To Hobbes the state of nature which precedes political
+organization had been a state of war. Neither peace nor reason
+could prevail where every man was his neighbor's enemy; and the
+establishment of absolute power, with the consequent surrender by
+men of all their natural liberties, was the only means of escape
+from so brutal a r&eacute;gime. That the state of nature was so
+distinguished Locke at the outset denies. The state of nature is
+governed by the law of nature. The law of nature is not, as Hobbes
+had made it, the antithesis of real law, but rather its condition
+antecedent. It is a body of rules which governs, at all times and
+all places, the conduct of men. Its arbiter is reason and, in the
+natural state, reason shows us that men are equal. From this
+equality are born men's natural rights which Locke, like the
+Independents in the Puritan Revolution, identifies with life,
+liberty and property. Obviously enough, as Hobbes had also granted,
+the instinct to self-preservation is the deepest of human impulses.
+By liberty Locke means the right of the individual to follow his
+own <a name="page41" id="page41"></a>bent granted only his
+observance of the law of nature. Law, in such an aspect, is clearly
+a means to the realization of freedom in the same way that the rule
+of the road will, by its common acceptance, save its observers from
+accident. It promotes the initiative of men by defining in terms
+which by their very statement obtain acknowledgment the conditions
+upon which individual caprice may have its play. Property Locke
+derives from a primitive communism which becomes transmuted into
+individual ownership whenever a man has mingled his labor with some
+object. This labor theory of ownership lived, it may be remarked,
+to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the parent of
+modern socialism.</p>
+<p>The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of
+Hobbes, pre-eminently social in character. There may be war or
+violence; but that is only when men have abandoned the rule of
+reason which is integral to their character. But the state of
+nature is not a civil State. There is no common superior to enforce
+the law of nature. Each man, as best he may, works out his own
+interpretation of it. But <a name="page42" id="page42"></a>because
+the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient
+variety in the conceptions of justice. The result is uncertainty
+and chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which
+the weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable. It is here
+that the social contract emerges. But just as Locke's natural state
+implies a natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture,
+so does Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of
+reason than of hard necessity. It is a contract of each with all, a
+surrender by the individual of his personal right to fulfil the
+commands of the law of nature in return for the guarantee that his
+rights as nature ordains them&mdash;life and liberty and
+property&mdash;will be preserved. The contract is thus not general
+as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character. Nor is it, as
+Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of some
+single man or group. On the contrary, it is a contract with the
+community as a whole which thus becomes that common political
+superior&mdash;the State&mdash;which is to enforce the law of
+nature and punish infractions of it. Nor <a name="page43" id=
+"page43"></a>is Locke's state a sovereign State: the very word
+"sovereignty" does not occur, significantly enough, throughout the
+treatise. The State has power only for the protection of natural
+law. Its province ends when it passes beyond those boundaries.</p>
+<p>Such a contract, in Locke's view, involves the pre-eminent
+necessity of majority-rule. Unless the minority is content to be
+bound by the will of superior numbers the law of nature has no more
+protection than it had before the institution of political society.
+And it is further to be assumed that the individual has surrendered
+to the community his individual right of carrying out the judgment
+involved in natural law. Whether Locke conceived the contract so
+formulated to be historical, it is no easy matter to determine.
+That no evidence of its early existence can be adduced he ascribes
+to its origin in the infancy of the race; and the histories of Rome
+and Sparta and Venice seem to him proof that the theory is somehow
+demonstrable by facts. More important than origins, he seems to
+deem its implications. He has placed consent in the foreground of
+the argument; and he <a name="page44" id="page44"></a>was anxious
+to establish the grounds for its continuance. Can the makers of the
+original contract, that is to say, bind their successors? If
+legitimate government is based upon the consent of its subjects,
+may they withdraw their consent? And what of a child born into the
+community? Locke is at least logical in his consent. The contract
+of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously
+insisted, it is not a contract. Yet Locke urged that the primitive
+members of a State are bound to its perpetuation simply because
+unless the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in
+any satisfactory sense, would be impossible. With children the case
+is different. They are born subjects of no government or country;
+and their consent to its laws must either be derived from express
+acknowledgment, or by the tacit implication of the fact that the
+protection of the State has been accepted. But no one is bound
+until he has shown by the rule of his mature conduct that he
+considers himself a common subject with his fellows. Consent
+implies an act of will and we must have evidence to infer its
+presence before the rule of subjection can be applied.</p>
+<a name="page45" id="page45"></a>
+<p>We have thus the State, though the method of its organization is
+not yet outlined. For Locke there is a difference, though he did
+not explicitly describe its nature, between State and Government.
+Indeed he sometimes approximates, without ever formally adopting,
+the attitude of Pufendorf, his great German contemporary, where
+government is derived from a secondary contract dependent upon the
+original institution of civil society. The distinction is made in
+the light of what is to follow. For Locke was above all anxious to
+leave supreme power in a community whose single will, as manifested
+by majority-verdict, could not be challenged by any lesser organ
+than itself. Government there must be if political society is to
+endure; but its form and substance are dependent upon popular
+institution.</p>
+<p>Locke follows in the great Aristotelian tradition of dividing
+the types of government into three. Where the power of making laws
+is in a single hand we have a monarchy; where it is exercised by a
+few or all we have alternatively oligarchy and democracy. The
+disposition of the legislative power is the fundamental test of
+<a name="page46" id="page46"></a>type; for executive and judiciary
+are clearly dependent on it. Nor, as Hobbes argued, is the form of
+government permanent in character; the supreme community is as
+capable of making temporary as of registering irrevocable
+decisions. And though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness
+to the family, is the most primitive type of government, he denies
+Hobbes' assertion that it is the best. It seems, in his view,
+always to degenerate into the hands of lesser men who betray the
+contract they were appointed to observe. Nor is oligarchy much
+better off since it emphasizes the interest of a group against the
+superior interest of the community as a whole. Democracy alone
+proffers adequate safeguards of an enduring good rule; a democracy,
+that is to say, which is in the hands of delegates controlled by
+popular election. Not that Locke is anxious for the abolition of
+kingship. His letters show that he disliked the Cromwellian system
+and the republicanism which Harrington and Milton had based upon
+it. He was content to have a kingship divested of legislative power
+so long as hereditary succession was <a name="page47" id=
+"page47"></a>acknowledged to be dependent upon popular consent. The
+main thing was to be rid of the Divine Right of kings.</p>
+<p>We have thus an organ for the interpretation of natural law free
+from the shifting variety of individual judgment. We have a means
+for securing impartial justice between members of civil society,
+and to that means the force of men has been surrendered. The
+formulation of the rules by which life, liberty and property are to
+be secured is legislation and this, from the terms of the original
+contract, is the supreme function of the State. But, in Locke's
+view, two other functions still remain. Law has not only to be
+declared. It must be enforced; and the business of the executive is
+to secure obedience to the command of law. But Locke here makes a
+third distinction. The State must live with other States, both as
+regards its individual members, and as a collective body; and the
+power which deals with this aspect of its relationships, Locke
+termed "federative." This last distinction, indeed, has no special
+value; and its author's own defence of it is far from clear. More
+important, especially, for future history, <a name="page48" id=
+"page48"></a>was his emphasis of the distinction between
+legislature and executive. The making of laws is for Locke a
+relatively simple and rapid task; the legislature may do its work
+and be gone. But those who attend to their execution must be
+ceaseless in their vigilance. It is better, therefore, to separate
+the two both as to powers and persons. Otherwise legislators "may
+exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit
+the law, both in its making and its execution, to their own private
+wish, and thereby come to have a distinct interest from the rest of
+the community, contrary to the end of society and government." The
+legislator must therefore be bound by his own laws; and he must be
+chosen in such fashion that the representative assembly may fairly
+represent its constituencies. It was the patent anomalies of the
+existent scheme of distribution which made Locke here proffer his
+famous suggestion that the rotten boroughs should be abolished by
+executive act. One hundred and forty years were still to pass
+before this wise suggestion was translated into statute.</p>
+<p>Though Locke thus insisted upon the <a name="page49" id=
+"page49"></a>separation of powers, he realized that emergencies are
+the parent of special need; and he recognized that not only may the
+executive, as in England, share in the task of legislation, but
+also may issue ordinances when the legislature is not in session,
+or act contrary to law in case of grave danger. Nor can the
+executive be forced to summon the legislature. Here, clearly
+enough, Locke is generalizing from the English constitution; and
+its sense of compromise is implicit in his remarks. Nor is his
+surrender here of consent sufficient to be inconsistent with his
+general outlook. For at the back of each governmental act, there
+is, in his own mind, an active citizen body occupied in judging it
+with single-minded reference to the law of nature and their own
+natural rights. There is thus a standard of right and wrong
+superior to all powers within the State. "A government," as he
+says, "is not free to do as it pleases ... the law of nature stands
+as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others." The
+social contract is secreted in the interstices of public
+statutes.</p>
+<p>Its corollary is the right of revolution. <a name="page50" id=
+"page50"></a>It is interesting that he should have adopted this
+position; for in 1676 he had uttered the thought that not even the
+demands of conscience<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref3" id=
+"fnref3" href="#fn3">[3]</a></span> can justify rebellion. That
+was, however, before the tyranny of Charles had driven him into
+exile with his patron, and before James had attempted the
+subversion of all constitutional government. To deny the right of
+revolution was to justify the worst demands of James, and it is in
+its favor that he exerts his ablest controversial power. "The true
+remedy," he says, "of force without authority is to oppose force to
+it." Let the sovereign but step outside the powers derived from the
+social contract and resistance becomes a natural right. But how
+define such invasion of powers? The instances Locke chose show how
+closely, here at least, he was following the events of 1688. The
+substitution of arbitrary will for law, the corruption of
+Parliament by packing it with the prince's instruments, betrayal to
+a foreign prince, prevention of the due assemblage of
+Parliament&mdash;all these are a perversion of the trust imposed
+and operate to effect the <a name="page51" id=
+"page51"></a>dissolution of the contract. The state of nature again
+supervenes, and a new contract may be made with one more fitted to
+observe it. Here, also, Locke takes occasion to deny the central
+position of Hobbes' thesis. Power, the latter had argued, must be
+absolute and there cannot, therefore, be usurpation. But Locke
+retorts that an absolute government is no government at all since
+it proceeds by caprice instead of reason; and it is comparable only
+to a state of war since it implies the absence of judgment upon the
+character of power. It lacks the essential element of consent
+without which the binding force of law is absent. All government is
+a moral trust, and the idea of limitation is therein implied. But a
+limitation without the means of enforcement would be worthless, and
+revolution remains as the reserve power in society. The only
+hindrance to its exertion that Locke suggests is that of number.
+Revolution should not, he urges, be the act of a minority; for the
+contract is the action of the major portion of the people and its
+consent should likewise obtain to the dissolution of the
+covenant.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn3" id="fn3" href=
+"#fnref3">[3]</a></span> King, <i>Life of Locke</i>, pp. 62,
+63.</div>
+<a name="page52" id="page52"></a>
+<p>The problem of Church and State demanded a separate discussion;
+and it is difficult not to feel that the great <i>Letter on
+Toleration</i> is the noblest of all his utterances. It came as the
+climax to a long evolution of opinion; and, in the light of
+William's own conviction, it may be said to have marked a decisive
+epoch of thought. Already in the sixteenth century Robert Brown and
+William the Silent had denounced the persecution of sincere belief.
+Early Baptists like Busher and Richardson had finely denied its
+validity. Roger Williams in America, Milton in England had attacked
+its moral rightness and political adequacy; while churchmen like
+Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth had shown the
+incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate.
+Nor had example been wanting. The religious freedom of Holland was
+narrow, as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom. Rhode
+Island, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Massachusetts had all
+embarked upon admirable experiment; and Penn himself had aptly said
+that a man may go to chapel instead of church, even while he
+remains <a name="page53" id="page53"></a>a good constable. And in
+1687, in the preface to his translation of Lactantius, Burnet had
+not merely attacked the moral viciousness of persecution, but had
+drawn a distinction between the spheres of Church and State which
+is a remarkable anticipation of Locke's own theory.</p>
+<p>Locke himself covers the whole ground; and since his opinions on
+the problem were at least twenty years old, it is clear that he was
+consistent in a worthy outlook. He proceeds by a denial that any
+element of theocratic government can claim political validity. The
+magistrate is concerned only with the preservation of social peace
+and does not deal with the problem of men's souls. Where, indeed,
+opinions destructive of the State are entertained or a party
+subversive of peace makes its appearance, the magistrate has the
+right of suppression; though in the latter case force is the worst
+and last of remedies. In the English situation, it follows that all
+men are to be tolerated save Catholics, Mahomedans and atheists.
+The first are themselves deniers of the rights they would seek, and
+they find the centre of their political allegiance in a foreign
+<a name="page54" id="page54"></a>power. Mahomedan morals are
+incompatible with European civil systems; and the central factor in
+atheism is the absence of the only ultimately satisfactory sanction
+of good conduct. Though Church and State are thus distinct, they
+act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is thus important to see why
+Locke insists on the invalidity of persecution. For such an end as
+the cure of souls, he argues, the magistrate has no divine
+legation. He cannot, on other grounds, use force for the simple
+reason that it does not produce internal conviction. But even if
+that were possible, force would still be mistaken; for the majority
+of the world is not Christian, yet it would have the right to
+persecute in the belief that it was possessed of truth. Nor can the
+implication that the magistrate has the keys of heaven be accepted.
+"No religion," says Locke finely, "which I believe not to be true
+can be either true or profitable to me." He thus makes of the
+Church an institution radically different from the ruling
+conceptions of his time. It becomes merely a voluntary society,
+which can exert no power save over its members. It may use its own
+ceremonies, <a name="page55" id="page55"></a>but it cannot impose
+them on the unwilling; and since persecution is alien from the
+spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the limit of
+ecclesiastical disciplinary power. Nor must we forget the
+advantages of toleration. Its eldest child is charity, and without
+it there can be no honesty of opinion. Later controversy did not
+make him modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay's
+hands, to be a vital weapon in the political method of the
+nineteenth century.</p>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p>Any survey of earlier political theory would show how little of
+novelty there is in the specific elements of Locke's general
+doctrine. He is at all points the offspring of a great and unbroken
+tradition; and that not the least when he seems unconscious of it.
+Definite teachers, indeed, he can hardly be said to have had; no
+one can read his book without perceiving how much of it is rooted
+in the problems of his own day. He himself has expressed his sense
+of Hooker's greatness, and he elsewhere had recommended the works
+of <a name="page56" id="page56"></a>Grotius and Pufendorf as an
+essential element in education. But his was a nature which learned
+more from men than books; and he more than once insisted that his
+philosophy was woven of his own "coarse thoughts." What, doubtless,
+he therein meant was to emphasize the freshness of his contact with
+contemporary fact in contrast with the technical jargon of the
+earlier thinkers. At least his work is free from the mountains of
+allusion which Prynne rolled into the bottom of his pages; and if
+the first Whig was the devil, he is singularly free from the
+irritating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet even with these
+novelties, no estimate of his work would be complete which failed
+to take account of the foundations upon which he builded.</p>
+<p>Herein, perhaps, the danger is lest we exaggerate Locke's
+dependence upon the earlier current of thought. The social contract
+is at least as old as when Glaucon debated with Socrates in the
+market-place at Athens. The theory of a state of nature, with the
+rights therein implied, is the contribution, through Stoicism, of
+the Roman lawyers, and the great medieval <a name="page57" id=
+"page57"></a>contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism. To the
+latter, also, may be traced the separation of powers; and it was
+then but little more than a hundred years since Bodin had been
+taken to make the doctrine an integral part of scientific politics.
+Nor is the theory of a right to revolution in any sense his
+specific creation. So soon as the Reformation had given a new
+perspective to the problem of Church and State every element of
+Locke's doctrine had become a commonplace of debate. Goodman and
+Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among Catholics, the
+author of the <i>Vindici&aelig;</i> and Francis Hotman among the
+Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the concept of public power
+as a trust; with, of course, the necessary corollary that its abuse
+entails resistance. Algernon Sydney was at least his acquaintance;
+and he must have been acquainted with the tradition, even if
+tragedy spared him the details, of the <i>Discourses on
+Government</i>. Even his theory of toleration had in every detail
+been anticipated by one or other of a hundred controversialists;
+and his argument can hardly claim either the lofty eloquence
+<a name="page58" id="page58"></a>of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent
+simplicity of William Penn.</p>
+<p>What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the
+manner of his writing on the one hand, and the fact of the
+Revolution on the other. Every previous thinker save
+Sydney&mdash;the latter's work was not published until
+1689&mdash;was writing with the Church hardly less in mind than the
+purely political problems of the State; even the secular Hobbes had
+devoted much thought and space to that "kingdom of darkness" which
+is Rome. And, Sydney apart, the resistance they had justified was
+always resistance to a religious tyrant; and Cartwright was as
+careful to exclude political oppression from the grounds of
+revolution as Locke was to insist upon it as the fundamental
+excuse. Locke is, in fact, the first of English thinkers the basis
+of whose argument is mainly secular. Not, indeed, that he can
+wholly escape the trammels of ecclesiasticism; not until the
+sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible. But it is
+clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground from
+that which arrested the attention of his predecessors. <a name=
+"page59" id="page59"></a>He is attempting, that is to say, a
+separation between Church and State not merely in that Scoto-Jesuit
+sense which aimed at ecclesiastical independence, but in order to
+assert the pre-eminence of the State as such. The central problem
+is with him political, and all other questions are subsidiary to
+it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any previous writer save
+Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of medieval ideals.
+Church and State have become transposed in their significance. The
+way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.</p>
+<p>The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since
+made an end of the social contract as an explanation of
+state-origins; and with it, of necessity, has gone the conception
+of natural rights as anterior to organized society. The problem, as
+we now know, is far more complex than the older thinkers imagined.
+Yet Locke's insistence on consent and natural rights has received
+new meaning from each critical period of history since he wrote.
+The theory of consent is vital because without the provision of
+channels for its administrative expression, men tend to <a name=
+"page60" id="page60"></a>become the creatures of a power ignorant
+at once and careless of their will. Active consent on the part of
+the mass of men emphasizes the contingent nature of all power and
+is essential to the full realization of freedom; and the purpose of
+the State, in any sense save the mere satisfaction of material
+appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled. The concept of natural
+right is most closely related to this position. For so long as we
+regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there is at no
+point adequate safeguard against their usurpation. A merely legal
+theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of
+political philosophy.</p>
+<p>No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if
+his effort to make rights something more than interests under
+juridical protection can not be accepted in the form he made it,
+the underlying purpose remains. A State, that is to say, which aims
+at giving to men the full capacity their trained initiative would
+permit is compelled to regard certain things as beyond the action
+of an ordinary legislature. What Stammler calls a <a name="page61"
+id="page61"></a>"natural law with changing content"<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref4" id="fnref4" href=
+"#fn4">[4]</a></span>&mdash;a content which changes with our
+increasing power to satisfy demand&mdash;is essential if the state
+is to live the life of law. For here was the head and centre of
+Locke's enquiry. "What he was really concerned about," said T.H.
+Green, "was to dispute 'the right divine of kings to govern
+wrong.'" The method, as he conceived, by which this could be
+accomplished was the limitation of power. This he effected by two
+distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in
+character.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn4" id="fn4" href=
+"#fnref4">[4]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Authority in the Modern
+State</i>, p. 64., and the references there cited.</div>
+<p>The external method has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the
+first place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the
+state. To Locke the State is little more than a negative
+institution, a kind of gigantic limited liability company; and if
+we are inclined to cavil at such restraint, we may perhaps remember
+that even to neo-Hegelians like Green and Bosanquet this negative
+sense is rarely absent, in the interest of individual exertion. But
+for Locke the real guarantee of right lies in another direction.
+What his whole work <a name="page62" id="page62"></a>amounts to in
+substance&mdash;it is a significant anticipation of
+Rousseau&mdash;is a denial that sovereignty can exist anywhere save
+in the community as a whole. A common political superior there
+doubtless must be; but government is an organ to which omnipotence
+is wanting. So far as there is a sovereign at all in Locke's book,
+it is the will of that majority which Rousseau tried to disguise
+under the name of the general will; but obviously the conception
+lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the means
+of operation. The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen,
+under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there
+is lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof
+that an unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember
+that the shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the
+direction of Locke's attitude. That omnicompetence of Parliament
+which Bentham and Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke
+admits, in later hands, of exactly the amelioration he had in mind;
+and its ethical inadequacy becomes the more obvious the more
+closely it is studied.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref5" id=
+"fnref5" href="#fn5">[5]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn5" id="fn5" href=
+"#fnref5">[5]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Problem of Sovereignty</i>,
+Chap. I.</div>
+<a name="page63" id="page63"></a>
+<p>The internal limitation Locke suggested is of more doubtful
+value. Government, he says, in substance, is a trustee and trustees
+abuse their power; let us therefore divide it as to parts and
+persons that the temptation to usurp may be diminished. There is a
+long history to this doctrine in its more obvious form, and it is a
+lamentable history. It tied men down to a tyrannous classification
+which had no root in the material it was supposed to distinguish.
+Montesquieu took it for the root of liberty; Blackstone, who should
+have known better, repeated the pious phrases of the Frenchman; and
+they went in company to America to persuade Madison and the Supreme
+Court of the United States that only the separation of powers can
+prevent the approach of tyranny. The facts do not bear out such
+assumption. The division of powers means in the event not less than
+their confusion. None can differentiate between the judge's
+declaration of law and his making of it.<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref6" id="fnref6" href="#fn6">[6]</a></span>
+Every government department is compelled to legislate, and, often
+enough, to undertake <a name="page64" id="page64"></a>judicial
+functions. The American history of the separation of powers has
+most largely been an attempt to bridge them; and all that has been
+gained is to drive the best talent, save on rare occasion, from its
+public life. In France the separation of powers meant, until recent
+times, the excessive subordination of the judiciary to the cabinet.
+Nor must we forget, as Locke should have remembered, the plain
+lesson of the Cromwellian constitutional experiments. That the
+dispersion of power is one of the great needs of the modern State
+at no point justifies the rigid categories into which Locke sought
+its division.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref7" id="fnref7" href=
+"#fn7">[7]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn6" id="fn6" href=
+"#fnref6">[6]</a></span> Cf. Mr. Justice Holmes' remarks in
+<i>Jensen</i> v. <i>Southern Pacific</i>, 244 U.S. 221.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="fnnum"><a name="fn7" id="fn7" href=
+"#fnref7">[7]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Authority in the Modern
+State</i>, pp. 70 f.</div>
+<p>Nor must we belittle the criticism, in its clearest form the
+work of Fitz James Stephen,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref8" id=
+"fnref8" href="#fn8">[8]</a></span> that has been levelled at
+Locke's theory of toleration. For the larger part of the modern
+world, his argument is acceptable enough; and its ingenious
+compromises have made it especially representative of the English
+temper. Yet much of it hardly meets the argument that some of his
+opponents, as Proast for example, <a name="page65" id=
+"page65"></a>had made. His conception of the visible church as no
+part of the essence of religion could win no assent from even a
+moderate Anglican; and, once the visible church is admitted,
+Locke's facile distinction between Church and State falls to the
+ground. Nor can it be doubted that he underestimated the power of
+coercion to produce assent; the policy of Louis XIV to the
+Huguenots may have been brutal, but its efficacy must be
+unquestionable. And it is at least doubtful whether his theory has
+any validity for a man who held, as Roman Catholics of his
+generation were bound to hold, that the communication of his
+particular brand of truth outweighed in value all other questions.
+"Every Church," he wrote, "is orthodox to itself; to others,
+erroneous or heretical"; but to any earnest believer this would
+approximate to blasphemy. Nor could any serious Christian accept
+the view that "under the gospel '...there is no such thing as a
+Christian commonwealth'"; to Catholics and Presbyterians this must
+have appeared the merest travesty of their faith.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn8" id="fn8" href=
+"#fnref8">[8]</a></span> Cf. also Coleridge's apt remark. <i>Table
+Talk</i>, Jan. 3, 1834.</div>
+<p>Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the <a name="page66" id=
+"page66"></a>true progenitor of Benthamism, and his work can hardly
+be understood save in this context. Just as in his ethical
+enquiries it was always the happiness of the individual that he
+sought, so in his politics it was the happiness of the subject he
+had in view. In each case it was to immediate experience that he
+made his appeal; and this perhaps explains the clear sense of a
+contempt for past tradition which pervades all his work. "That
+which is for the public welfare," he said, "is God's will"; and
+therein we have the root of that utilitarianism which, as Maine
+pointed out, is the real parent of all nineteenth century change.
+And with Locke, as with the Benthamites, his clear sense of what
+utilitarianism demanded led to an over-emphasis of human
+rationalism. No one can read the <i>Second Treatise</i> without
+perceiving that Locke looked upon the State as a machine which can
+be built and taken to pieces in very simple fashion. Herein,
+undoubtedly, he over-simplified the problem; and that made him miss
+some of the cardinal points a true psychology of the State must
+seize. His very contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection
+for the <a name="page67" id="page67"></a>rational. It resulted in
+his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives imbedded
+in the political act. The significance of herd instinct and the
+vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him.
+All this is of defect; and yet excusably. For it needed the
+demonstration by Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to
+see the real substance of Aristotle's vision that man is embedded
+in political society.</p>
+<h4>V</h4>
+<p>Once Locke's work had become known, its reputation was secure.
+Not, indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation. Men
+were not wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and
+felt that anything but reason must be the test of truth. Those who
+stood by the ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism
+and the roots of atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the
+theories of Filmer could find defenders against him in the Indian
+summer of prerogative under Queen Anne. John Hutton informed a
+friend that he was not less dangerous <a name="page68" id=
+"page68"></a>than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the
+nonjuring sect. But these, after all, were but the eddies of a
+stream fast burying itself in the sands. For most, the Revolution
+was a final settlement, and Locke was welcome as a writer who had
+discovered the true source of political comfort. So it was that
+William Molyneux could embody the ideas of the "incomparable
+treatise" in his demand for Irish freedom; a book which, even in
+those days, occasioned some controversy. Nor is it uninteresting to
+discover that the translation of Hotman's <i>Franco-Gallia</i>
+should have been embellished with a preface from one who, as
+Molyneux wrote to Locke,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref9" id=
+"fnref9" href="#fn9">[9]</a></span> never met the Irish writer
+without conversing of their common master. How rapidly the doctrine
+spread we learn from a letter of Bayle's in which, as early as
+1693, Locke has already became "the gospel of the Protestants." Nor
+was his immediate influence confined to England. French Huguenots
+and the Dutch drew naturally upon so happy a defender; and
+Barbeyrac, in the translation of Pufendorf which he published in
+1706, cites no <a name="page69" id="page69"></a>writer so often as
+Locke. The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell
+were almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the
+accused counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his
+speech for the defence.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn9" id="fn9" href=
+"#fnref9">[9]</a></span> Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX. 435.</div>
+<p>More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the <i>Spectator</i>,
+on six separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose
+possession is a national glory. Defoe in his <i>Original Power of
+the People of England</i> made Locke the common possession of the
+average man, and offered his acknowledgments to his master. Even
+the malignant genius of Swift softened his hate to find the epithet
+"judicious" for one in whose doctrines he can have found no
+comfort. Pope summarized his teaching in the form that Bolingbroke
+chose to give it. Hoadly, in his <i>Original and Institution of
+Civil Government</i>, not only dismisses Filmer in a first part
+each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second
+section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to
+conceal the care with which the <i>Second Treatise</i> had also
+been pillaged. Even Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of
+belittling <a name="page70" id="page70"></a>all rivals in the field
+he considered his own to call him, in that <i>Divine Legation</i>
+which he considered his masterpiece, "the honor of this age and the
+instructor of the future"; but since Warburton's attack on the High
+Church theory is at every point Locke's argument, he may have
+considered this self-eulogy instead of tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis,
+on the eve of English Radicalism, published a noble edition of his
+book. And there is perhaps a certain humor in the remembrance that
+it was to Locke's economic tracts that Bolingbroke went for the
+arguments with which, in the <i>Craftsman</i>, he attacked the
+excise scheme of Walpole. That is irrefutable evidence of the
+position he had attained.</p>
+<p>Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons.
+There still remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he
+made Locke's separation of powers the keystone of his own more
+splendid arch. The most splendid of all sciolists was still to use
+his book for the outline of a social contract more daring even than
+his own. The authors of the <i>Declaration of Independence</i> had
+still, in words taken from Locke, to reassert the <a name="page71"
+id="page71"></a>state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of
+North Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the
+Philadelphia Convention. Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned
+against him and what was permanent in his work was being cast into
+the new form required by the time. A few sentences of Hume were
+sufficient to make the social contract as worthless as the Divine
+Right of kings, and when Blackstone came to sum up the result of
+the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual terms it was with a full
+admission that he was making use of fiction so far as he went
+behind the settlement of 1688. Nor is the work of Dean Tucker
+without significance. The failure of England in the American war
+was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked
+to Locke as the author of their principles. "The Americans," he
+wrote, "have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present
+war"; and in his <i>Treatise Concerning Civil Government</i> and
+his <i>Four Letters</i> he declares himself unable to understand on
+what Locke's reputation was based. Meanwhile the English disciples
+of Rousseau in the persons of Price <a name="page72" id=
+"page72"></a>and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol
+of the levellers of England," was the parent also of French
+destructiveness. Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he
+had dealt with the contract theory it ceased to influence political
+speculation in England. Its place was taken by the utilitarian
+doctrine which Hume had outlined; and once Bentham's
+<i>Fragment</i> had begun to make its way, a new epoch opened in
+the history of political ideas.</p>
+<p>Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this
+renaissance; but, once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to
+other gods men turned. For Bentham made an end of natural rights;
+and his contempt for the past was even more unsparing than Locke's
+own. It is more instructive to compare his work with Hobbes and
+Rousseau than with later thinkers; for after Hume English
+speculation works in a medium Locke would not have understood.
+Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which made
+Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English
+philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or <a name="page73"
+id="page73"></a>pungent grasp of the grimness of facts about him.
+Yet he need not fear the comparison with the earlier thinker. If
+Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of the commonplaces of
+jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy ourselves with
+erecting about it a system of limitations each one of which is in
+some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's view of
+the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil character
+is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept Hobbes'
+Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a
+kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges;
+but Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the
+other, pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the
+Hobbesian view. And anyone who surveys the history of Church and
+State in America will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred
+years the separateness for which Locke contended is not without its
+justification. Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity
+of men; Hobbes makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a
+power he forbids <a name="page74" id="page74"></a>them to judge.
+Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where Hobbes
+dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder. At every
+point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the
+future has been on Locke's side. He may have defended his cause
+less splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by
+most that he had a more splendid cause to defend.</p>
+<p>With Rousseau there is no contrast, for the simple reason that
+his teaching is only a broadening of the channel dug by Locke. No
+element integral to the <i>Two Treatises</i> is absent from the
+<i>Social Contract</i>. Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw
+deeper than his predecessor. The form into which he threw his
+questions gave them an eternal significance Locke can perhaps
+hardly claim. He understood the organic character of the State,
+where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow
+individualism. It is yet difficult to see that the contribution
+upon which Rousseau's fame has mainly rested is at any point a real
+advance upon Locke. The general will, in practical instead of
+semi-mystic terms, <a name="page75" id="page75"></a>really means
+the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we enquire how
+that general will is to be known, we come, after much shuffling,
+upon the will of that majority in which Locke also put his trust.
+Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an
+assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also
+Locke was anxious. But he did not think an infallible criterion
+existed for its detection; and he was satisfied with the
+convenience of a simple numerical test. Nor would it be difficult
+to show that Locke's state has more real room for individuality
+than Rousseau's. The latter made much show of an impartible and
+inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in the people; but in
+practice its exercise is impossible outside the confines of a
+city-state. Once, that is to say, we deal with modern problems our
+real enquiry is still the question of Locke&mdash;what limits shall
+we place upon the power of government? Rousseau has only emphasized
+the urgency of the debate.</p>
+<p>Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's
+teaching and our own time may be discovered is in our <a name=
+"page76" id="page76"></a>sense of the impossibility that a final
+answer can be found to political questions. Each age has new
+materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would
+condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the
+attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right
+invites disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless,
+even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did. In the largest
+sense, his questions are still our own. In the largest sense, also,
+we are near enough to his time to profit at each step of our own
+efforts by the hints he proffers. The point at which he stood in
+English history bears not a little resemblance to our own. The
+emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem of freedom. The problem,
+now as then, was its translation into institutional terms. It is
+the glory of Locke that he brought a generous patience and a
+searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his
+generation.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page77" id="page77"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3>CHURCH AND STATE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>The Revolution of 1688 drew its main source of strength from the
+traditional dislike of Rome, and the eager desire to place the
+Church of England beyond the reach of James' aggression. Yet it was
+not until a generation had passed that the lines of ecclesiastical
+settlement were, in any full sense clear. The difficulties involved
+were mostly governmental, and it can hardly even yet be said that
+they have been solved. The nature of the relation between Church
+and State, the affiliation between the Church and Nonconformist
+bodies, the character of its internal government&mdash;all these
+had still to be defined. Nor was this all. The problem of
+definition was made more complex by schism and disloyalty. An
+important fraction of <a name="page78" id="page78"></a>the Church
+could not accept at all the fact of William's kingship; and if the
+larger part submitted, it cannot be said to have been
+enthusiastic.</p>
+<p>Nor did the Church make easy the situation of the
+Nonconformists. Toleration of some kind was rapidly becoming
+inevitable; and with a Calvinist upon the throne persecution of, at
+any rate, the Presbyterians became finally impossible. Yet the
+definition of what limits were to be set to toleration was far from
+easy. The Church seemed like a fortress beleaguered when Nonjurors,
+Deists, Nonconformists, all alike assaulted her foundations. To
+loosen her hold upon political privilege seemed to be akin to
+self-destruction. And, after all, if Church and State were to stand
+in some connection, the former must have some benefit from the
+alliance. Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege
+for all who could not accept the special brand of religious
+doctrine? Locke, at least, denied the assumption, and argued that
+since Churches are voluntary societies, they cannot and ought not
+to have reciprocal relation with the State. But Locke's theory was
+meat <a name="page79" id="page79"></a>too strong for the digestion
+of his time; and no statesman would then have argued that a
+government could forego the advantage of religious support. And
+William, after all, had come to free the church from her oppressor.
+Freedom implied protection, and protection in that age involved
+establishment. It was thus taken for granted by most members of the
+Church of England that her adoption by the State meant her
+superiority to every other form of religious organization.
+Superiority is, by its nature exclusive, the more especially when
+it is united to a certainty of truth and a kinship with the
+dominant political interest of the time. Long years were thus to
+pass before the real meaning of the Toleration Act secured
+translation into more generous statutes.</p>
+<p>The problem of the Church's government was hardly less complex.
+The very acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are
+in an age of settlement. Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless
+due to the dislike of all High Churchmen for William; with their
+consequent unwillingness to admit the full meaning of <a name=
+"page80" id="page80"></a>his ecclesiastical supremacy. Much also is
+due to the fact that the bench of bishops, despite great figures
+like Tillotson and Wake, was necessarily chosen for political
+aptitude rather than for religious value. Nor did men like Burnet
+and Hoadly, for all their learning, make easy the path for brethren
+of more tender consciences. The Church, moreover, must have felt
+its powers the more valuable from the very strength of the assault
+to which she was subjected. And the direct interference with her
+governance implied by the Oaths of Allegiance and of Abjuration
+raised questions we have not yet solved. It suggested the
+subordination of Church to State; and men like Hickes and Leslie
+were quick to point out the Erastianism of the age. It is a fact
+inevitable in the situation of the English Church that the charge
+of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick
+resentment. She cannot be a church unless she is a <i>societas
+perfecta</i>; she cannot have within herself the elements of
+perfect fellowship if what seem the plain commands of Christ are to
+be at the mercy of the king in Parliament. That is the difficulty
+which lies at <a name="page81" id="page81"></a>the bottom of the
+debate with Wake in one age and with Hoadly in the next. In some
+sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and
+it is in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked
+with the Oxford Movement. But Newman and his followers are the
+unconscious sponsors of a debate which grows in volume; and to
+discuss the thoughts of Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a vital
+aspect, the study of contemporary ideas.</p>
+<p>We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William's
+advisers who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy. It
+raised in acute form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more
+than a century, been the main foundation of the alliance between
+throne and altar in England. The demand precipitated a schism which
+lingered on, though fitfully, until the threshold of the nineteenth
+century. The men who could not take the oath were, many of them,
+among the most distinguished churchmen of the time. Great
+ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of Canterbury and one
+of the seven who had gained immortality by his <a name="page82" id=
+"page82"></a>resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of
+Bath and Wells, scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men
+like Charles Leslie, born with a genius for recrimination; much, it
+is clear, of what was best in the Church of England was to be found
+amongst them. There is not a little of beauty, and much of pathos
+in their history. Most, after their deprivation, were condemned to
+poverty; few of them recanted. The lives of men like Sancroft and
+Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are part of the great Anglican
+tradition of earnest simplicity which later John Keble was to
+illustrate for the nineteenth century. The Nonjurors, as they were
+called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of their
+effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph Taylor,
+to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that the
+history even of their decline is without its interest; and the
+study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the
+Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for
+students of ecclesiastical history.</p>
+<p>Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring <a name="page83" id=
+"page83"></a>schism was political rather than religious; and its
+roots go out to vital events of the past. At the bottom it is the
+obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they represent. That
+theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular state
+against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the
+allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent,
+had declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main
+opponents, moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men
+like Andrewes must have felt that when they answered Bellarmine
+they were in substance also defenders of their Church. After the
+great controversy of James I's reign resistance as a duty had come
+to be regarded as a main element in Jesuit and Nonconformist
+teaching; with the result that its antithesis became, as a
+consequence of the political situation, no less integral a part of
+Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that the
+Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to
+the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made
+it, the main weapon of the <a name="page84" id=
+"page84"></a>dissenting churches there was little hope that it
+would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is
+this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like
+Barrow and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper.
+When they urge the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in
+truth the sovereignty of the Church; and that means the triumph of
+men who looked with contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of
+every sect. The Church of England taught non-resistance as the
+condition of its own survival.</p>
+<p>How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the
+seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and
+Sanderson sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates
+its widespread acceptance as the result of the Revolution. Four
+hundred clergy abandoned their preferment because James ruled by
+Divine Right; and they could not in conscience resist even his
+iniquities. An able tract of 1689<span class="fnref"><a name=
+"fnref10" id="fnref10" href="#fn10">[10]</a></span> had collected
+much material to show how <a name="page85" id="page85"></a>integral
+the doctrine was to the beliefs of the Church. Had William's
+government, indeed, refrained from the imposition of the oath, it
+is possible that there might have been no schism at all; for the
+early Nonjurors at least&mdash;perhaps Hickes and Turner are
+exceptions&mdash;would probably have welcomed anything which
+enabled the avoidance of schism. Once, however, the oath was
+imposed three vital questions were raised. Deprivation obviously
+involved the problem of the power of the State over the Church. If
+the act of a convention whose own legality was at best doubtful
+could deprive the consecrated of their position, was the Church a
+Church at all, or was it the mere creature of the secular power?
+And what, moreover, of conscience? It could not be an inherent part
+of the Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the
+sake of peace. Later thinkers added the purely secular argument
+that resistance in one case made for resistance in all. Admit, it
+was argued by Leslie, the right to disobey, and the fabric of
+society is at a stroke dissolved. The attitude is characteristic of
+that able controversialist; and <a name="page86" id="page86"></a>it
+shows how hardly the earlier notions of Divine Right were to
+die.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn10" id="fn10" href=
+"#fnref10">[10]</a></span> <i>The History of Passive Obedience</i>.
+Its author was Jeremy Collier.</div>
+<p>These theories merit a further examination. Williams, later the
+Bishop of Chichester, had argued that separation on the basis of
+the oath was unreasonable. "All that the civil power here pretends
+to," he wrote "is to secure itself against the practices of
+dissatisfied persons." The Nonjurors, in this view, were making an
+ecclesiastical matter of a purely secular issue. He was answered,
+among others, by Samuel Grascom, in an argument which found high
+favor among the stricter of his sect. "The matter and substance of
+these Oaths," he said, "is put into the prayers of the Church, and
+so far it becomes a matter of communion. What people are enjoined
+in the solemn worship to pray for, is made a matter of communion;
+and if it be simple, will not only justify, but require a
+separation." Here is the pith of the matter. For if the form and
+substance of Church affairs is thus to be left to governmental
+will, then those who obey have left the Church and it is the
+faithful remnant only who constitute the true fellowship. The
+schism, in this <a name="page87" id="page87"></a>view, was the
+fault of those who remained subject to William's dominion. The
+Nonjurors had not changed; and they were preserving the Church in
+its integrity from men who strove to betray it to the civil
+power.</p>
+<p>This matter of integrity is important. The glamour of Macaulay
+has somewhat softened the situation of those who took the oaths;
+and in his pages the Nonjurors appear as stupid men unworthily
+defending a dead cause. It is worth while to note that this is the
+merest travesty. Tillotson, who succeeded Sancroft on the latter's
+deprivation, and Burnet himself had urged passive resistance upon
+Lord William Russell as essential to salvation; Tenison had done
+likewise at the execution of Monmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick,
+White Kennett, had all written in its favor; and to William
+Sherlock belongs the privilege of having defended and attacked it
+in two pamphlets each of which challenges the pithy brilliance of
+the other. Clearly, so far as consistency is in question, the
+Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their
+side. And even if it is said that the policy of <a name="page88"
+id="page88"></a>James introduced a new situation the answer surely
+is that Divine Right and non-resistance can, by their very nature,
+make no allowance for novelty.</p>
+<p>The root, then, of this ecclesiastical contention is the
+argument later advanced by Leslie in his "Case of the Regale and
+the Pontificate" in which he summarized the Convocation dispute.
+The State, he argues, has no power over bishops whose relationship
+to their flock is purely spiritual and derived from Christ. The
+Church is independent of all civil institution, and must have
+therefore within herself the powers necessary to her life as a
+society. Leslie repudiates Erastianism in the strongest terms. Not
+only is it, for him, an encroachment upon the rights of Christ, but
+it leads to deism in the gentry and to dissent among the common
+people. The Church of England comes to be regarded as no more than
+the creature of Parliamentary enactment; and thus to leave it as
+the creature of human votes, is to destroy its divinity.</p>
+<p>It is easy enough to see that men who felt in this fashion could
+hardly have decided otherwise than as they did. The <a name=
+"page89" id="page89"></a>matter of conscience, indeed, was
+fundamental to their position. "I think," said the Bishop of
+Worcester on his death-bed, "I could suffer at a stake rather than
+take this oath." That, indeed, represents the general temper. Many
+of them did not doubt that James had done grievous wrong; but they
+had taken the oath of allegiance to him, and they saw in their
+conscience no means of escape from their vow. "Their Majesties,"
+writes the author of the account of Bishop Lake's death, "are the
+two persons in the world whose reign over them, their interest and
+inclination oblige them most to desire, and nothing but conscience
+could restrain them from being as forward as any in all expressions
+of loyalty." In such an aspect, even those who believe their
+attitude to have been wrong, can hardly doubt that they acted
+rightly in their expression of it. For, after all, experience has
+shown that the State is built upon the consciences of men. And the
+protest they made stands out in the next generation in vivid
+contrast to a worldly-minded and politically-corrupt Church which
+only internal revolution could awaken from its slumbers.</p>
+<a name="page90" id="page90"></a>
+<p>No one represents so admirably as Charles Leslie the political
+argument of the case. At bottom it is an argument against anarchy
+that he constructs, and much of what he said is medieval enough in
+tone to suggest de Maistre's great defence of papalism as the
+secret of world-order. He stands four square upon divine right and
+passive obedience. "What man is he who can by his own natural
+authority bend the conscience of another? That would be far more
+than the power of life, liberty or prosperity. Therefore they saw
+the necessity of a divine original." Such a foundation, he argued
+elsewhere, is necessary to order, for "if the last resort be in the
+people, there is no end of controversy at all, but endless and
+unremediable confusion." Nor had he sympathy for the Whig attack on
+monarchy. "The reasons against Kings," he wrote, "are as strong
+against all powers, for men of any titles are subject to err, and
+numbers more than fewer." And nothing can unloose the chain.
+"Obedience," he said in the <i>Best of All</i>, "is due to
+commonwealths by their subjects even for conscience' sake, where
+<a name="page91" id="page91"></a>the princes from whom they have
+revolted have given up their claim."</p>
+<p>The argument has a wider history than its controversial
+statement might seem to warrant. At bottom, clearly enough, it is
+an attack upon the new tradition which Locke had brought into
+being. What seems to impress it most is the impossibility of
+founding society upon other than a divine origin. Anything less
+will not command the assent of men sufficiently to be immune from
+their evil passions. Let their minds but once turn to resistance,
+and the bonds of social order will be broken. Complete submission
+is the only safeguard against anarchy. So, a century later, de
+Maistre could argue that unless the whole world became the subject
+of Rome, the complete dissolution of Christian society must follow.
+So, too, fifty years before, Hobbes had argued for an absolute
+dominion lest the ambitions and desires of men break through the
+fragile boundaries of the social estate.</p>
+<p>The answer is clear enough; and, indeed, the case against the
+Nonjurors is nowhere so strong as on its political side. Men cannot
+be confined within the limits <a name="page92" id="page92"></a>of
+so narrow a logic. They will not, with Bishop Ken, rejoice in
+suffering as a doctrine of the Cross. Rather will oppression in its
+turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience
+which provokes to action. Here was the root of Locke's doctrine of
+consent; for unless the government, as Hume was later to point out,
+has on its side the opinion of men, it cannot hope to endure. The
+fall of James was caused, not as the Nonjurors were tempted to
+think, by popular disregard of Divine personality, but by his own
+misunderstanding of the limits to which misgovernment may go. Here
+their opponents had a strong case to present; for, as Stillingfleet
+remarked, if William had not come over there might have been no
+Church of England for the Nonjurors to preserve. And other
+ingenious compromises were suggested. Non-resistance, it was argued
+by Sherlock, applied to government in general; and the oath, as a
+passage in the <i>Convocation Book</i> of Overall seemed to
+suggest, might be taken not less to a <i>de facto</i> monarch than
+to one <i>de jure</i>. Few, indeed would have taken the ground of
+Bishop Burnet, and allotted the <a name="page93" id=
+"page93"></a>throne to William and Mary as conquerors of the
+Kingdom; at least the pamphlet in which this uncomfortable doctrine
+was put forward the House of Commons had burned by the common
+hangman.</p>
+<p>What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense. Much
+the ablest attack upon their position was Stillingfleet's defence
+of the policy employed in filling up the sees vacated by
+deprivation; and it is remarkable that the theory he employs is to
+insist that unless the lawfulness of what had been done is
+admitted, the Nonjuror's position is inevitable. "If it be unlawful
+to succeed a deprived bishop," he wrote,<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref11" id="fnref11" href="#fn11">[11]</a></span>
+"then he is the bishop of the diocese still: and then the law that
+deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament
+that made that law no king and Parliament: and how can this be
+reconciled with the Oath of Allegiance, unless the Doctor can swear
+allegiance to him who is no King and hath no authority to govern."
+All this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the <a name=
+"page94" id="page94"></a>mere fact that it could be used as
+argument against them is proof that they were out of touch with the
+national temper. What they wanted was a legal revolution which is
+in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was
+deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly
+pressed. But the leaders of a revolution "tread a path of fire";
+and the fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in
+the fact that this was an age when men acted on their principles.
+William and his advisers, with the condition of Ireland and
+Scotland a cause for agitation, with France hostile, with treason
+and plot not absent from the episcopate itself, had no easy task;
+what, in the temper of the time, gives most cause for
+consideration, is the moderate spirit in which they accomplished
+it.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn11" id="fn11" href=
+"#fnref11">[11]</a></span> <i>A Vindication of their Majesties'
+Authority to fill the Sees of the Deprived Bishops</i>
+(1691).</div>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which
+the Church of England had to confront in these troubled years. The
+definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the
+moment it <a name="page95" id="page95"></a>aroused less bitterness,
+was in the long run more intricate in its nature. That some sort of
+toleration was inevitable few, save a group of prejudiced
+irreconcilables, would have denied. But greater things were in the
+air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of
+Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would
+have been admitted to the Church. It is this which explains the
+acrimonious debates of the next two years. The hatred of the Church
+for dissent can only be understood by those who study with care the
+insults heaped upon her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars.
+That men who had striven for her dissolution should be admitted to
+her privileges seemed to Churchmen as tragic as ironical. Nor must
+we miss the political aspect of the matter. William had received an
+eager, if natural, support from Nonconformists; and since the vast
+majority of them was Whig in temper, the greater the degree of
+toleration, the greater likelihood there was of an attack upon the
+Church. Exclusion thus became a fundamental article of the Tory
+creed; and it was the more valued <a name="page96" id=
+"page96"></a>because it enabled them to strike at their opponents
+through an institution which at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710,
+still showed an overwhelming hold upon the mass of the people.</p>
+<p>The attitude of mind herein implied is in large part the
+reaction from the Erastian temper of the government. Under William,
+that temper is intelligible enough; for unless he held the Church
+in strict control, he must have felt that he was giving a large
+handle to his enemies. Under Anne, the essence of the situation
+remained unchanged, even though her eager sympathy with the Church
+was beyond all question. William had relieved Nonconformists from
+the burden of penal statute; the Occasional Conformity Act of 1713
+broadly continued the exclusion of all save the more yielding of
+them from political office. When the Hanoverians succeeded they
+were willing to repeal its more rigid intolerance; but the Test Act
+remained as evidence that the Dissenters were not yet regarded as
+in a full sense part of the national life.</p>
+<p>The reasons for the hatred of dissent go back in part <a name=
+"page97" id="page97"></a>to the Civil War and in part also to the
+feeling of common ground between the dissenting interest and Rome
+which was born of the struggle under Elizabeth and James. The
+pamphlets are innumerable; and most of them deserve the complete
+obliquity into which they have fallen. We are told, in the
+eighteenth as in the seventeenth century, that the Presbyterian
+theory of government is inconsistent with the existence of the
+civil power. "They claim," said Leslie, "power to abrogate the laws
+of the land touching ecclesiastical matters, if they judge them
+hurtful or unprofitable... They require the civil magistrate to be
+subject to their power." Of Knox or Cartwright this is no unfair
+account; but of the later Presbyterians it is the merest travesty.
+It supposes that they would be willing to push to the utmost limit
+the implications of the theory of the two kingdoms&mdash;a
+supposition which their passive submission to the Act of 1712
+restoring lay patronage decisively refutes. Bramhall had no doubt
+that their discipline was "the very quintessence of refined
+popery," and the argument is repeated by a hundred less learned
+pamphleteers. Neither the grim irony of <a name="page98" id=
+"page98"></a>Defoe nor the proven facts of the case could wean
+either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of the people from
+the belief that the Revolution endangered the very existence of the
+Church and that concession would be fatal. So stoutly did the
+Church resist it that the accession of George I alone, in Lecky's
+view, prevented the repeal of the Toleration Act and the
+destruction of the political benefits of the Revolution.</p>
+<p>But nowhere was the temper of the time more clearly displayed
+than in the disputes over Convocation. To William's advisers,
+perhaps, more than to the Church itself their precipitation is due;
+for had they not, at the outset of the reign, suggested large
+changes in the liturgy suspicions then aroused might well have
+slumbered. As it was, the question of the royal supremacy
+immediately came into view and the clergy spared no effort to meet
+the issue so raised. And this they felt the more bitterly because
+the upper house of Convocation, two-thirds of which were William's
+nominees, naturally inclined to his side. Both under William and
+Anne the dispute continued, <a name="page99" id="page99"></a>and
+the lower clergy shrank from no opportunity of conflict. They
+fought the king, the archbishop, the upper house. They attacked the
+writings of Toland and Burnet, the latter's book since recognized
+as one of the great treasures of Anglican literature. In the main,
+of course, the struggle was part of the perennial conflict between
+High Church doctrine and latitudinarianism. But that was only a
+fragment of the issue. What really was in question was the nature
+of the State's power over the Church. That could be left unanswered
+so long, as with James I and Charles, the two powers had but a
+single thought. The situation changed only when State and Church
+had different policies to fulfil and different means for their
+attainment.</p>
+<p>The controversy had begun on the threshold of William's
+accession; but its real commencement dates from 1697. In that year
+was published the <i>Letter to a Convocation Man</i>, probably
+written by Sir Bartholomew Shower, an able if unscrupulous Jacobite
+lawyer, which maliciously, though with abounding skill, raised
+every question that peaceful <a name="page100" id=
+"page100"></a>churchmen must have been anxious to avoid. The
+<i>Letter</i> pointed out the growth of infidelity and the
+increasing suspicion that the Church was becoming tainted with
+Socinian doctrine. Only the assembly of Convocation could arrest
+these evils. The author did not deny that the king's assent was
+necessary to its summons. But he argued that once the Convocation
+had met, it could, like Parliament, debate all questions relevant
+to its purpose. "The one of these courts," said Shower, "is of the
+same power and use with regard to the Church as the other is in
+respect to the State," and he insisted that the writ of summons
+could not at any point confine debate. And since the Convocation
+was an ecclesiastical Parliament, it followed that it could
+legislate and thus make any canons "provided they do not impugn
+common law, statutes, customs or prerogative." "To confer, debate
+and resolve," said Shower, "without the king's license, is at
+common law the undoubted right of convocation."</p>
+<p>Here was a clear challenge which was at once answered, in <i>The
+Authority of Christian Princes</i>, by William Wake, who <a name=
+"page101" id="page101"></a>was by far the most learned of the
+latitudinarian clergy, and the successor of Tenison in the see of
+Canterbury. His argument was purely historical. He endeavored to
+show that the right to summon ecclesiastical synods was always the
+prerogative of the early Christian princes until the aggression of
+the popes had won church independence. The Reformation resumed the
+primitive practice; and the Act of Submission of 1532 had made it
+legally impossible for the clergy to discuss ecclesiastical matters
+without royal permission. Historically, the argument of Wake was
+irrefutable; but what mostly impressed the Church was the
+uncompromising Erastianism of his tone. Princes, he said, "may make
+what laws or constitutions they think fit for the Church.... a
+canon is but as matter prepared for the royal stamp." In this view,
+obviously, the Church is more than a department of the State. But
+Wake went even farther, "I cannot see why the Supreme Magistrate,"
+he wrote, "who confessedly has a power to confirm or reject their
+(Convocation's) decrees, may not also make such other use of them
+as he pleases, and <a name="page102" id="page102"></a>correct,
+improve, or otherwise alter their resolutions, according to his own
+liking, before he gives his authority to them."</p>
+<p>So defined no Church could claim in any true sense the headship
+of Christ; for it was clearly left at the mercy of the governmental
+view of expedient conduct. Wake's answer aroused a sensation almost
+as acute as the original <i>Letter</i> of Shower. But by far the
+ablest criticism it provoked was that of Francis Atterbury, then a
+young student of Christ Church and on the threshold of his
+turbulent career. His <i>Rights, Powers and Privileges of an
+English Convocation Stated and Vindicated</i> not only showed a
+masterly historic sense in its effort to traverse the unanswerable
+induction of Wake, but challenged his position more securely on the
+ground of right. The historical argument, indeed, was not a safe
+position for the Church, and Wake's rejoinder in his <i>State of
+the Church</i> (1703) is generally conceded to have proved his
+point, so far as the claim of prescription is concerned. But when
+Atterbury moves to the deeper problem of what is involved in the
+nature of a church, he has a powerful plea to <a name="page103" id=
+"page103"></a>make. It is unnecessary now to deal with his
+contention that Wake's defence of the Royal Supremacy undermines
+the rights of Parliament; for Wake could clearly reply that the
+seat of that power had changed with the advent of the Revolution.
+Where the avoidance of sympathy is difficult is in his insistence
+that no Church can live without an assembly to debate its problems,
+and that no assembly can be real which is subject to external
+control. "Their body," as he remarks, "will be useless to the State
+and by consequence contemptible"; for its opinions will not be born
+of that free deliberation which can alone ensure respect. Like all
+High Churchmen, Atterbury has a clear sense that Church and State
+can no longer be equated, and he is anxious to preserve the
+personality of the Church from the invasions of an alien body. To
+be real, it must be independent, and to be independent, it must
+have organs of self-expression. But neither William nor Anne could
+afford to forego the political capital involved in ecclesiastical
+control and Erastian principles proceeded to their triumph.</p>
+<p>Here, as elsewhere, it was Charles <a name="page104" id=
+"page104"></a>Leslie who best summed up the feeling of High
+Churchmen. His <i>Case of the Regale</i> (1701) is by far the
+ablest of his many able performances. He saw at the outset that the
+real issue was defined by the Church's claim to be a divine
+society, with rights thus consecrated by the conditions of its
+origin. If it was divine, invasion did not touch its <i>de jure</i>
+rights. "How," he asked, "can rights that are divine be given up?
+If they are divine, no human authority can either supersede or
+limit them.... How can rights that are inherent be given up? If
+they are inherent, they are inseparable. The right to meet, to
+consult, to make rules or canons for the regulation of the society,
+is essential to every society as such ... can she then part with
+what is essential to her?" Nor could it be denied that "where the
+choice of the governors of one society is in the hands of another
+society, that society must be dependent and subject to the other."
+The Church, in the Latitudinarian view was thus either the creature
+of the state or an <i>imperium in imperio</i>; but Leslie would not
+admit that fruitful stumbling block to the debate. "The <a name=
+"page105" id="page105"></a>sacred and civil powers were like two
+parallel lines which could never meet or interfere ... the
+confusion arises ... when the civil power will take upon them to
+control or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her
+spiritual authority." He did not doubt that the Church should give
+securities for its loyalty to the king, and renounce any effort at
+the coercion of the civil magistrate. But the Church was entitled
+to a similar privilege, and kings should not "have their
+beneficence and protection to the Church of Christ understood as a
+bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their hands the powers
+committed into her charge by Christ." Nor did he fail to point out
+the suicidal nature of Erastianism. For the church's hold upon men
+is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her
+principles. "When they see bishops," he wrote wisely, "made by the
+Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court
+language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a
+judge at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand
+from the Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest
+security of her government."</p>
+<a name="page106" id="page106"></a>
+<p>The argument is powerful enough; though it should be noted that
+some of its implications remain undetermined. Leslie does not say
+how the spheres of Church and State are to be differentiated. He
+does not explain the methods whereby an establishment is to be made
+compatible with freedom. For it is obvious that the partnership of
+Church and State must be upon conditions; and once the State had
+permitted the existence of creeds other than that of its official
+adoption, it could not maintain the exclusive power for which the
+Church contended. And when the Church not only complained of
+State-betrayal, but attempted the use of political means to enforce
+remedial measures it was inevitable that statesmen would use the
+weapons ready to their hand to coerce it to their will. The real
+remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness but
+disestablishment.</p>
+<p>That this is the meaning of the struggle did not appear until
+the reign of George I. What is known as the Bangorian controversy
+was due to the posthumous publication, in 1716, of the papers of
+George Hickes, the most celebrated of the <a name="page107" id=
+"page107"></a>Nonjurors in his generation. The papers are of no
+special import; but taken in connection with the Jacobite rising of
+1715 they seemed to imply a new attack upon the Revolution
+settlement. So, at least, they were interpreted by Benjamin Hoadly,
+then Bishop of Bangor, and a stout upholder of the Latitudinarian
+school. The conflict today has turned to dust and ashes; and few
+who read the multitude of pamphlets it evoked, or stand amazed at
+their personal bitterness, can understand why more than a hundred
+writers should have thought it necessary to inform the world of
+their opinions, or why the London Stock Exchange should have felt
+so passionate an interest in the debate as to cease for a day the
+hubbub of its transactions. Nor can any one make heroes from the
+personalities of its protagonists. Hoadly himself was a typical
+bishop of the political school, who rose from humble circumstances
+to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester through a remarkable series
+of translations. Before the debate of 1716, he was chiefly known by
+two political tracts in which he had rewritten, in less cogent
+form, and <a name="page108" id="page108"></a>without adequate
+acknowledgment, the two treatises of Locke. He clearly realized how
+worthless the dogma of Divine Right had become, without being
+certain of the principles by which it was to be replaced. Probably,
+as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is the result of
+a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy. If God is
+to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we must
+seek a human explanation of political facts. And he became
+convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to
+ecclesiastical than to secular politics. Of his opponents, by far
+the ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be
+said to have respected, and the parent, through his mystical
+writings, of the Wesleyan movement. Snape, then Provost of Eton,
+was always incisive; and his pamphlet went through seventeen
+editions in a single year and provoked seven replies within three
+months. Thomas Sherlock would not be either himself or his father's
+son, were he not caustic, logical and direct. But Hoadly and Law
+between them exhaust the controversy, so far as it has <a name=
+"page109" id="page109"></a>meaning for our own day. The less
+essential questions like Hoadly's choice of friends, his attitude
+to prayer, the accuracy of the details in his account of the Test
+Act, the cause of his refusal to answer Law directly, are hardly
+now germane to the substance of the debate. Hoadly's position is
+most fully stated in his <i>Preservative against the Principles and
+Practice of Nonjurors</i> which he published in 1716 as a
+counterblast to the papers of Hickes; and they are briefly
+summarized in the sermon preached before the King on March 31,
+1717, on the text "My Kingdom is not of this world," and published
+by royal command. Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and
+qualifications, some simple points emerge. What he was doing was to
+deprive the priesthood of claims to supernatural authority that he
+might vindicate for civil government the right to preserve itself
+not less against persons in ecclesiastical office than against
+civil assailants. To do so he is forced to deny that the miraculous
+powers of Christ and the Apostles descended to their successors.
+For if that assumption is made we grant to fallible <a name=
+"page110" id="page110"></a>men privileges which confessedly belong
+to persons outside the category of fallibility. And, exactly in the
+fashion of Leslie in the <i>Regale</i> he goes on to show that if a
+Church is a supernatural institution, it cannot surrender one jot
+or tittle of its prerogative. It is, in fact, an <i>imperium in
+imperio</i> and its conflict with the state is inevitable. But if
+the Church is not a supernatural institution, what is its nature?
+Hoadly here attacks the doctrine which lies at the basis of all
+ecclesiastical debate. The Church, he claims, is not a visible
+society, presided over by men who have authority directly
+transmitted by Christ. There are not within it "viceregents who can
+be said properly to supply his place; no interpreters upon whom his
+subjects are absolutely to depend; no judges over the conscience or
+religion of his people. For if this were so that any such absolute
+viceregent authority, either for the making of new laws, or
+interpreting old ones, or judging his subjects, in religious
+matters, were lodged in any men upon earth, the consequence would
+be that what still retains the name of the Church of Christ would
+not be the kingdom of <a name="page111" id="page111"></a>Christ,
+but the kingdom of those men invested with such authority. For
+whoever hath such an authority of making laws is so far a king, and
+whoever can add new laws to those of Christ, equally obligatory, is
+as truly a king as Christ himself. Nay, whosoever hath an absolute
+authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, it is he who is
+truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes, and not the person
+who first wrote and spoke them."</p>
+<p>The meaning is clear enough. What Hoadly is attacking is the
+theory of a visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense
+superstructure of miracle and infallibility erected thereon. The
+true Church of Christ is in heaven; and the members of the earthly
+society can but try in a human, blundering way, to act with decency
+and justice. Apostolic succession, the power of excommunication,
+the dealing out of forgiveness for men's sins, the determination of
+true doctrine, insofar as the Church claims these powers, it is
+usurping an authority that is not its own. The relation of man to
+God is his private affair, and God will ask from him sincerity and
+honesty, rather than judge <a name="page112" id="page112"></a>him
+for his possession of some special set of dogmas. Clearly,
+therefore, if the Church is no more than this, it has no
+supernatural pretensions to oppose to the human claims of the
+State. And since the State must have within itself all the means of
+sufficient life, it has the right to resist the ecclesiastical
+onslaught as based upon the usurpation of power assumed without
+right. And in later treatises Hoadly did for ceremonial exactly
+what he had done for church government. The eucharist became a
+piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an
+announcement&mdash;"a mere external thing"&mdash;that the rules of
+the fellowship have been broken. It at no point is related to the
+sinner's opportunity of salvation.</p>
+<p>In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has
+no monopoly of truth. It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but
+reason alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes. Nor
+does its judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the
+truth of things. The real root of faith is not the possession of an
+infallible dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which
+you <a name="page113" id="page113"></a>happen to believe. For the
+magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the table of your
+springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based upon that
+table; from which it follows that things like the Test and
+Corporation Acts have no real political validity. They have been
+imposed upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping
+power; and the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem
+as valid as that of a member of the Church of England.</p>
+<p>All this sounds sensible enough; though it is curious doctrine
+in the mouth of a bishop of that church. And this, in fact, is the
+starting-point of Law's analysis of Hoadly. No one who reads the
+unsparing vigor of his criticism can doubt that Law must have been
+thoroughly happy in the composition of his defence; and, indeed,
+his is the only contribution to the debate which may claim a
+permanent place in political literature. In one sense, indeed, the
+whole of Law's answer is an <i>ignoratio elenchi</i>, for he
+assumes the truth of that which Hoadly sets out to examine, with
+the inevitable result that each writer is, for the most part,
+arguing from different <a name="page114" id="page114"></a>premises.
+But on the assumption that Hoadly is a Christian, Law's argument is
+an attack of great power. He shows conclusively that if the Church
+of England is no more than Hoadly imagines it to be, it cannot, in
+any proper historic sense, be called the Church of England at all.
+For every one of the institutions which Hoadly calls an usurpation,
+is believed by Churchmen to be integral to its nature. And if
+sincerity alone is to count as the test, then there cannot, for the
+existing world, be any such thing as objective religious truth. It
+subverted not merely absolute authority&mdash;which the Church of
+England did not claim&mdash;but any authority in the Church. It
+impugned the authority of the Crown to enforce religious belief by
+civil penalties. Hoadly's rejection of authority, moreover, is in
+Law's view fatal to government of any kind. For all lawful
+authority must affect eternal salvation insofar as to disobey it is
+to sin. The authority the Church possesses is inherent in the very
+nature of the Church; for the obligation to a belief in
+Christianity is the same thing as to a belief in that Church which
+can be shown to represent Christ's teaching.</p>
+<a name="page115" id="page115"></a>
+<p>From Law's own point of view, the logic of his position is
+undeniable; and in his third letter to Hoadly, the real heart of
+his attack, he touches the centre of the latter's argument. For if
+it is sincerity which is alone important it would follow that
+things false and wrong are as acceptable to God as things true and
+right, which is patently absurd. Nor has Hoadly given us means for
+the detection of sincerity. He seemed to think that anyone was
+sincere who so thought himself; but, says Law, "it is also possible
+and as likely for a man to be mistaken in those things which
+constitute true sincerity as in those things which constitute true
+religion." Clearly, sincerity cannot be the pith of the matter; for
+it may be mistaken and directed to wrong ends. The State, in fact,
+may respect conscience, but Hoadly is no more entitled to assume
+the infallibility of private belief than he is to deny the
+infallibility of the Church's teaching. That way lies anarchy.</p>
+<p>Here, indeed, the antagonists were on common ground. Both had
+denied the absolute character of any authority; but while Hoadly
+virtually postulates a <a name="page116" id="page116"></a>Church
+which logically is no more than those who accept the moral law as
+Christ described it, Law restricts the Church to that society which
+bears the traditional marks of the historic institution. On
+Hoadly's principles, there was no reason why anyone not hostile to
+the civil power should not enjoy political privilege; on Law's
+there was every reason simply because those who denied the
+doctrines of the High Church refused a truth open for their
+acceptance. Law, indeed, goes so far as to argue that in the light
+of his principles Hoadly should be a Deist; and there is ground for
+what, in that age, was a valuable point to make. The sum total of
+it all is that for the bishop the outward actions of men alone
+concern the State; while Law insists that the root of action and
+the test of fitness is whether men have seen a certain aspect of
+the truth and grasped it.</p>
+<p>The result, to say the least, was calamitous. In May of 1717,
+convocation met and the Lower House immediately adopted an
+unanimous report condemning the "Preservative" and the sermon. But
+Hoadly had the government behind him <a name="page117" id=
+"page117"></a>and the convocation was prorogued before further
+action could be taken. Snape, Hare, Mosse and Sherlock, all of whom
+were chaplains royal, and had been drawn into the conflict, were
+dismissed from their office; and for more than one hundred and
+thirty-five years convocation was not again summoned. It was a
+striking triumph for Erastianism, though the more liberal
+principles of Hoadly were less successful. Robert Walpole was on
+the threshold of his power, and, as a manager of Sacheverell's
+impeachment, he had seen the hold of the Church upon the common
+people, may even, indeed, have remembered that Hoadly's own
+dwelling had been threatened with destruction in the popular
+excitement. <i>Quieta non movere</i> was his motto; and he was not
+interested in the niceties of ecclesiastic metaphysic. So the Test
+Act remained immovable until 1828; while the annual Act of
+Indemnity for its infractions represented that English genius for
+illogical mitigation which solves the deeper problems of principle
+while avoiding the consideration of their substance.</p>
+<p>In the hundred and twenty years which <a name="page118" id=
+"page118"></a>passed between the Bangorian Controversy and the
+Oxford Movement, there is only one volume upon the problem of
+Church and State which deserves more than passing notice. Bishop
+Warburton was the Lord Brougham of his age; and as its
+self-constituted universal provider of intellectual fare, he deemed
+it his duty to settle this, amongst others of the eternal
+questions. The effort excited only the contempt of Leslie
+Stephen&mdash;"the peculiar Warburton mixture," he says "of sham
+logic and bluster." Yet that is hardly fair to the total result of
+Warburton's remarks. He tried to steer a middle path between the
+logical result of such Erastianism as that of the <i>Independent
+Whig</i>, on the one hand, and the excessive claim of High
+Churchmanship on the other. Naturally enough, or the writer would
+not be Warburton, the book is full of tawdry rhetoric and stupid
+quibbles. But the <i>Alliance between Church and State</i> (1736)
+set the temper of speculation until the advent of Newman, and is
+therefore material for something more than contempt. It acutely
+points out that societies generate a <a name="page119" id=
+"page119"></a>personality distinct from that of their members in
+words reminiscent of an historic legal pronouncement.<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref12" id="fnref12" href="#fn12">[12]</a></span>
+"When any number of men," he says, "form themselves into a society,
+whether civil or religious, this society becomes a body different
+from that aggregate which the number of individuals composed before
+the society was formed.... But a body must have its proper
+personality and will, which without these is no more than a shadow
+or a name."</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn12" id="fn12" href=
+"#fnref12">[12]</a></span> Dicey, <i>Law and Opinion in England</i>
+(2nd edition), p. 165.</div>
+<p>And that is the root of Warburton's pronouncement. The Church is
+a society distinct from the State, but lending to that body its
+assistance because without the sanction of religion the full
+achievement of the social purpose is impossible. There is thus an
+alliance between them, each lending its support to the other for
+their common benefit. The two remain distinct; the union between
+them is of a federal kind. But they interchange their powers, and
+this it is which explains at once the royal supremacy and the right
+of Churchmen to a share in the legislature. <a name="page120" id=
+"page120"></a>This also it is which explains the existence of a
+Test Act, whereby those who might injure that which the State has
+undertaken to protect are deprived of their power to evil. And, in
+return, the Church engages to "apply its utmost endeavors in the
+service of the State." It becomes attached to its benefactor from
+the privilege it receives; and the dangers which might arise from
+its natural independence are thus obviated. For a federal union
+precludes the grave problem of an <i>imperium in imperio</i>, and
+the "mischiefs which so terrified Hobbes" are met by the terms upon
+which it is founded.</p>
+<p>It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The
+contract does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton
+"in the same archive with the famous original compact between
+monarch and people" which has been the object of vast but fruitless
+searches. Nor does the Act of Submission bear upon its face the
+marks of that tender care of the protection of an independent
+society which Warburton declared a vital tenet of the Union. Yet
+such criticisms miss the real significance of the theory. It is
+really the <a name="page121" id="page121"></a>introduction into
+English politics of that notion of the two societies which, a
+century before, Melville and Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With
+neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit was the separation complete, for
+the simple reason that each had a secret conviction that the
+ecclesiastical society was at bottom the superior. Yet the theory
+was the parent of liberty, if only because it pointed the way to a
+balance of power between claims which, before, had seemed mutually
+exclusive.</p>
+<p>Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the
+English Church because its temper, under the &aelig;gis of Laudian
+views, had been in substance theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly
+expressed the compromise the dominant party of the Church had then
+in mind. They did, indeed, mistake the power of the Church, or,
+rather, they submitted to the State so fully that what they had
+intended for a partnership became an absorption. So that the
+Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep enough to make the
+Church no more than a moral police department of the State. Saints
+like Ken and preachers like South are <a name="page122" id=
+"page122"></a>replaced by fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who
+made Lambeth Palace an adjunct to Ranelagh Gardens, and
+self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The Church could not
+even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and its charity
+was the irritating and complacent patronage of the obstrusive
+Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence slumbered; and
+the main function it fulfilled until Newman's advent was the
+provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility.
+It is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church
+which was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.</p>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p>No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The
+opponents of Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate
+Church, and it was a plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were
+making. They saw that a Church whose patronage and discipline and
+debates were under the control of an alien body could not with
+honesty claim that Christ was in truth <a name="page123" id=
+"page123"></a>their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of
+private judgment and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic
+basis would have to be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the
+condemnation of Tindal and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their
+teaching, impossible for the Church to possess an ethos of her own.
+It was thus against the sovereignty of the State that they
+protested. Somewhere, a line must be drawn about its functions that
+the independence of the Church might be safeguarded. For its
+supporters could not be true to their divine mission if the
+accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to impose its
+will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious body to
+which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they
+repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived
+from the State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription
+was to usurp an authority not rightly its own.</p>
+<p>The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment.
+For here the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life
+must be lived upon terms of her own <a name="page124" id=
+"page124"></a>definition. That was possible before the Reformation;
+but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of rationalism
+the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become
+unacceptable. If the Church was to become so intimately involved
+with the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to
+complain, if statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to
+sacrifice it to the attainment of that ideal. For the real secret
+of independence is, after all, no more than independence. The
+Church sought it without being willing to pay the price. And this
+it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge triumphant from an ordeal
+where logically he should have failed. The State, by definition is
+an absorptive animal; and the Church had no right to complain if
+the price of its privileges was royal supremacy. A century so
+self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the
+difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High
+Church theory.</p>
+<p>Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next
+century. The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the
+seventeenth century, to <a name="page125" id="page125"></a>the
+ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref13" id="fnref13" href="#fn13">[13]</a></span>
+In fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law. Like them, it
+was searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like
+them it discovered that connection with the State means, in the
+end, the sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political
+situation. "The State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words
+might have been written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement,
+indeed, like its predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and
+when Lord Brougham told the House of Lords that the idea of the
+Church possessing "absolute and unalienable rights" was a "gross
+and monstrous anomaly" because it would make impossible the
+supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the result of a
+doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first
+completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this
+controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury
+has told the House of Lords,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref14"
+id="fnref14" href="#fn14">[14]</a></span> <a name="page126" id=
+"page126"></a>"... see the absolute need, if a Church is to be
+strong and vigorous, for the Church, <i>qua</i> church, to be able
+to say what it can do as a church." "The rule of the sovereign, the
+rule of Parliament," replied Lord Haldane,<span class=
+"fnref"><a name="fnref15" id="fnref15" href="#fn15">[15]</a></span>
+"extend as far as the rule of the Church. They are not to be
+distinguished or differentiated, and that was the condition under
+which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the Church of
+England." Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic
+theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the
+problem of its sovereignty. "A free church in a free state," now,
+as then, may be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to
+build it.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn13" id="fn13" href=
+"#fnref13">[13]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Problem of Sovereignty</i>,
+Chapter III.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="fnnum"><a name="fn14" id="fn14" href=
+"#fnref14">[14]</a></span> <i>Parliamentary Debates</i>. Fifth
+Series, Vol. 34, p. 992 (June 3, 1919).<br />
+<br />
+<span class="fnnum"><a name="fn15" id="fn15" href=
+"#fnref15">[15]</a></span> <i>Parliamentary Debates</i>. Fifth
+Series, Vol. 34, p 1002. The quotation does not fully represent
+Lord Haldane's views.</div>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page127" id="page127"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h3>THE ERA OF STAGNATION</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of
+unexampled calm in English politics, which lasted until the
+expulsion of Walpole from power in 1742. No vital questions were
+debated, nor did problems of principle force themselves into view;
+and if the Jacobites remained in the background as an element
+invincibly hostile to absorption, the failure of their effort in
+1715 showed how feeble was their hold on English opinion. Not,
+indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had nothing of that
+romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably recorded in
+Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and
+meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the
+reign of George III, they were amenable to management. In the
+result, <a name="page128" id="page128"></a>an opposition in the
+classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question to be
+considered was the personalities who were to share in power. The
+dominating temper of Walpole decided that issue; and he gave
+thereby to the political struggle the outlines in which it was
+encased for a generation.</p>
+<p>It is a dull period, but complacent; for it was not an
+unprosperous time. Agriculture and commerce both were abundant; and
+the increasing development of towns shows us that the Industrial
+Revolution loomed in the near distance. The eager continuance of
+the deistic controversy suggests that there was something of
+novelty beneath the calm; for Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck
+at the root of religious belief, and Shaftesbury's exaltation of
+Hellenism not only contributed to the <i>Aufklarung</i> in
+Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not to go
+unchallenged. But the literature of the time is summarized in Pope;
+and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of
+the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and
+the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to <a name="page129" id=
+"page129"></a>die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley, indeed,
+was convinced of the decadence of England; but his <i>Essay towards
+Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain</i> (1721) shows rather the
+effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea
+Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political
+thought. Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard
+with seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a
+tax upon the estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of
+Mandeville were, despite the indignation they aroused, more suited
+to the age that Walpole governed. It is, in fact, the character of
+the minister which sets the keynote of the time. An able speaker,
+without being a great orator, a superb administrator, eager rather
+for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting
+them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of
+mind or of temperament, to bring great questions to the foreground
+of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over the respect of
+the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from office. One
+by one, the younger men of <a name="page130" id=
+"page130"></a>talent, Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Pitt, were
+driven into hostility. He maintained himself in office by a
+corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically
+conceived. An opposition developed less on principle than on the
+belief that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for
+concentration. The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save
+personal animosity upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions
+could only seize upon a doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain
+as the pretext of the war it was Walpole's ambition no less than
+policy to avoid. From 1726 until 1735 the guiding spirit of the
+party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter year he quarrelled with
+Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in high dudgeon to
+France. But in the years of his leadership he had evolved a theory
+of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the intellectual
+bankruptcy of the time.</p>
+<p>To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to
+remember the peculiar character of his career. He had attained to
+the highest office under Anne at an exceptionally early age; and
+his <a name="page131" id="page131"></a>period of power had been
+distinguished by the vehemence with which he pursued the ideal of a
+strict division of parties and the expulsion of all alien elements
+from the government. But he had staked all his fortunes upon a
+scheme he had neither the resolution to plan nor the courage to
+execute; and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had
+been followed by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to
+his reputation and place; and through an enormous bribe to the
+bottomless pocket of the King's mistress St. John was enabled to
+return from exile, though not to political place. His restless mind
+was dissatisfied with exclusion from power, and he occupied himself
+with creating an alliance between the Tories and malcontent Whigs
+for Walpole's overthrow. The alliance succeeded, though too late
+for Bolingbroke to enjoy the fruits of success; but in effecting
+the purgation of the Tory party from its taint of Jacobitism he
+rendered no inconsiderable service. His foundation, moreover, of
+the <i>Craftsman</i>&mdash;the first official journal of a
+political party in England&mdash;showed his appreciation of the
+technique of political <a name="page132" id=
+"page132"></a>controversy. Most of it is dead now, and, indeed, no
+small part of its contemporary success is due to the making of
+comment in terms of the immediate situation, as also by its
+consistent use of a personal reference which has, save in the mass,
+no meaning for today. Though, doubtless, the idea of its inception
+was derived from journals like Defoe's <i>Review</i> and Leslie's
+<i>Rehearsal</i>, which had won success, its intimate connection
+with the party leadership was a novel element; and it may therein
+claim a special relation to the official periodicals of a later
+generation.</p>
+<p>The reputation of Bolingbroke as a political philosopher is
+something that our age can hardly understand. "A solemn trifler,"
+Lord Morley has called him; and it is difficult to know why his
+easy declamation was so long mistaken for profound thought. Much,
+doubtless, is due to that personal fascination which made him the
+inspiration of men so different as Pope and Voltaire; and the man
+who could supply ideas to Chatham and Disraeli cannot be wholly
+devoid of merit. Certainly he wrote well, in that easy elegance of
+style which was the delight of the <a name="page133" id=
+"page133"></a>eighteenth century; and he is consistently happy in
+his choice of adjectives. But his work is at every point
+embellished with that affectation of classical learning which was
+the curse of his age. He sought no general truths, and he is free
+from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any enthusiasm save
+that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his political
+writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize his
+animosity. The <i>Dissertation on Parties</i> (1734) and the
+<i>Idea of a Patriot King</i> (1738) might have betrayed us, taken
+alone, into regarding their author as a disinterested observer
+watching with regret the development of a fatal system; but taken
+in conjunction with the <i>Letter to Sir W. Windham</i> (1717),
+which was not published until after his death, and is written with
+an acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to honesty, they reveal the
+opinions as no more than a mask for ambition born of hate.</p>
+<p>The whole, of course, must have some sort of background; and the
+<i>Letters on the Study of History</i> (1735) was doubtless
+intended to supply it. Experience is to be the test of truth, since
+history is <a name="page134" id="page134"></a>philosophy teaching
+by example. But Bolingbroke's own argument supplies its refutation.
+His history is an arbitrary selection of instances intended to
+illustrate the particular ideas which happened to be uppermost in
+his mind. The Roman consuls were chosen by annual election; whence
+it is clear that England should have, if not an annual, at least a
+triennial parliament. He acknowledges that the past in some degree
+unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks
+upon the evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from
+a larger aspect than their immediate environment. But his history
+is intended less to illustrate the working of principle than to
+collect cases worthy of citation. Time and space do not exist as
+categories; he is as content with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart
+illustration. He is willing, indeed, to look for the causes of the
+Revolution as far back as the reign of James I; though he shows his
+lack of true perception when he ascribes the true inwardness of the
+Reformation to the greed of the monarch for the spoils of the
+clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses him is the immense <a name=
+"page135" id="page135"></a>influence of personal accident upon
+events. Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of
+gossip, here is the real root of great changes. And when he
+expresses a "thorough contempt" for the kind of work scholars such
+as Scaliger and Petavius had achieved, he shows his entire
+ignorance of the method whereby alone a knowledge of general
+principle can be attained.</p>
+<p>A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by
+high notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings
+is too stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes
+a king important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the
+Church; for Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with
+such matters as the apostolic succession. He makes great show of
+his love of liberty, which is the true end of government; and we
+are informed with a vast solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in
+which it always stands. So that the chief end of patriotism is its
+maintenance; though we are never told what liberty is, nor how it
+is to be maintained. The social compact seems to win his
+approbation and we learn that the <a name="page136" id=
+"page136"></a>secret of the British constitution is the balance of
+powers and their mutual independency. But what the powers are, and
+how their independence is preserved we do not learn, save by an
+insistence that the safety of Europe is to be found in playing off
+the ambitions of France and Austria against each other; an analogy
+the rejection of which has been the secret of English
+constitutional success. We learn of the evil of standing armies and
+the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told that parties are
+mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and vast patronage;
+and a great enough show is made of his hatred for corruption as to
+convince at least some critics of distinction of his sincerity. The
+parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no
+difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us
+how completely the principles of the Revolution had become
+exhausted. He wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He
+would have disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen
+from Parliament. The press was to be free; and there is at least a
+degree of generous insight in his plea for a wider <a name=
+"page137" id="page137"></a>commercial freedom in colonial matters.
+Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man
+with the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the
+committee for the settlement of disputed elections? And what else
+can we see in his desire for liberty of the press save a desire to
+fight Walpole in the open, without fear of the penalties his former
+treason had incurred?</p>
+<p>His value can be tested in another way. His <i>Idea of a Patriot
+King</i> is the remedy for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty
+years old when it appeared, and he had then been in active politics
+for thirty-five years, so that we are entitled to regard it as the
+fruit of his mature experience. He was too convinced that the
+constitution was "in the strictest sense a bargain, a conditional
+contract between the prince and the people" to attempt again the
+erection of a system of prerogative. Yet it is about the person of
+the monarch that the theory hinges. He is to have no powers
+inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for such restraints
+will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil propensities
+of a bad king. What is needed is a <a name="page138" id=
+"page138"></a>patriot king who will destroy corruption and awaken
+the spirit of liberty. His effective government will synchronize
+with the commencement of his reign; and he will at once dismiss the
+old and cunning ministers, to replace them by servants who are
+wise. He will not stand upon party, but upon the State. He will
+unite the forces of good counsel into a single scheme. Complaints
+will be answered, the evildoers punished. Commerce will flow on
+with uninterrupted prosperity, and the navy of England receive its
+due meed of attention. His conduct must be dignified, and he must
+acquire his influence not apart from, but on account of, the
+affection of his people. "Concord," says Bolingbroke in rhapsodical
+prospection, "will appear breeding peace and prosperity on every
+hand"; though he prudently hopes also that men will look back with
+affection upon one "who desired life for nothing so much as to see
+a King of Great Britain the most powerful man in the country, and a
+patriot King at the head of a united people."</p>
+<p>Bolingbroke himself has admitted that such a monarch would be a
+"sort of <a name="page139" id="page139"></a>standing miracle," and
+perhaps no other comment upon his system is required. A smile in
+Plato at the sight of his philosopher-King in such strange company
+might well be pardoned. It is only necessary to point out that the
+person whom Bolingbroke designates for this high function was
+Frederick, Prince of Wales, to us the most meagre of a meagre
+generation, but to Bolingbroke, by whose grace he was captivated,
+"the greatest and most glorious of human beings." This exaltation
+of the monarch came at a time when a variety of circumstances had
+combined to show the decrease of monarchical sentiment. It bears
+upon its every page the marks of a personal antagonism. It is too
+obviously the programme of a party to be capable of serious
+interpretation as a system. The minister who is to be impeached,
+the wise servants who are to gain office, the attack on corruption,
+the spirited foreign policy&mdash;all these have the earmarks of a
+platform rather than of a philosophy. Attacks on corruption hardly
+read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the one solid
+evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger <a name=
+"page140" id="page140"></a>of finance in politics. For none of the
+Tories save Barnard, who owed his party influence thereto,
+understood the financial schemes of Walpole; and since they were
+his schemes obviously they represented the triumph of devilish
+ingenuity. The return of landed men to power would mean the return
+of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country squires,
+the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that
+Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a r&eacute;gime
+which already faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power. The
+pamphlet was the cornerstone in the education of Frederick's son;
+and when George III came to the throne he proceeded to give such
+heed to his master as the circumstances permitted. It is perhaps,
+as Mr. A.L. Smith has argued, unfair to visit Bolingbroke with
+George's version of his ideal; yet they are sufficiently connected
+for the one to give the meaning to the other. Chatham, indeed, was
+later intrigued by this ideal of a national party; and before
+Disraeli discovered that England does not love coalitions he
+expended much rhetoric upon the beauties of a patriotic king.
+<a name="page141" id="page141"></a>But Chatham was a wayward genius
+who had nothing of that instinct for common counsel which is of the
+essence of party government; while it is necessary to draw a firm
+line between Disraeli's genial declamation and his practice when in
+office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort founded upon
+the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that his own
+last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of the
+event which he looked to as the inauguration of the golden age.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political
+thought; the system continued, though the men were different. What
+alone can be detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which
+found its sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the
+strength of which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an
+unwilling king. An able pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival
+of this unlooked-for portent. <i>Faction detected by the Evidence
+of Facts</i> (1742) <a name="page142" id="page142"></a>was, though
+it is anonymous,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref16" id="fnref16"
+href="#fn16">[16]</a></span> obviously written by one in touch with
+the inner current of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of
+Walpole, though he sees the chaos in its result. "A republican
+spirit," he says, "has strangely arisen"; and he goes on to tell
+how the electors of London and Westminster were now regarding their
+members as delegates to whom instructions might be issued. "A new
+party of malcontents" had arisen, "assuming to themselves, though
+very falsely, the title of the People." They affect, he tells us,
+"superiority to the whole legislature ... and endeavor in effect to
+animate the people to resume into their own hands that vague and
+loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the people of no
+country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so obvious
+that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society, to
+divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from
+themselves." The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike,
+that temper which produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible
+for Cartwright and Horne Tooke and Sir <a name="page143" id=
+"page143"></a>Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English
+radicalism.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn16" id="fn16" href=
+"#fnref16">[16]</a></span> It was probably written by Lord
+Egmont.</div>
+<p>Yet the influence of that temper still lay a generation ahead;
+and the next piece of import comes from a mind which, though
+perhaps the most powerful of all which have applied themselves to
+political philosophy in England, was, from its very scepticism,
+incapable of constructive effort. David Hume was thirty-one years
+of age when he published (1742) the first series of his essays; and
+his <i>Treatise of Human Nature</i> which had fallen "dead-born
+from the press" was in some sort compensated by the success of the
+new work. The second part, entitled <i>Political Discourses</i>,
+was published in 1752, almost simultaneously with the "<i>Inquiry
+concerning the Principles of Morals</i>." As in the case of Hume's
+metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful dissolvent
+the century was to see. Yet nowhere was so clearly to be
+demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had
+fallen.</p>
+<p>Hume, of course, is always critical and suggestive, and even if
+he had no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new <a name=
+"page144" id="page144"></a>turn to speculation. There is something
+almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes divine right
+and the social contract. The one is an inevitable deduction from
+theism, but it protects an usurper not less than an hereditary
+king, and gives a "divine commission" as well to a constable as to
+the most majestic prince. The proponents of the social contract are
+in no better case. "Were you to preach," he remarks, "in most parts
+of the world that political connections are founded altogether on
+voluntary consent, or on a mutual promise, the magistrate would
+soon imprison you as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience;
+if your friends did not before shut you up as delirious for
+advancing such absurdities." The original contract could not be
+produced, and, even if it were, it would suppose the "consent of
+the fathers to bind the children even to the most remote
+generations." The real truth, as he remarks, is that "almost all
+the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains
+any record in story, have been founded originally on usurpation, or
+on conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair <a name=
+"page145" id="page145"></a>consent or voluntary subjection of the
+people." If we then ask why obedience is possible, the sufficient
+answer is that "it becomes so familiar that most men never make any
+inquiry about its origin or cause, any more than about the
+principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of
+nature."</p>
+<p>Government, in short, is dependent upon the inescapable facts of
+psychology. It might be unnecessary if all desires could be
+individually fulfilled by making them, or if man showed to his
+fellow-men the same tender regard he has for himself. So happy a
+condition does not exist; and government is the most useful way of
+remedying the defects of our situation. A theologian might say that
+Hume derives government from original sin; to which he would have
+replied by denying the fall. His whole attitude is simply an
+insistence that utility is the touchstone of institutions, and he
+may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its application to
+the whole field of political science. He knows that opinion is the
+sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie at the
+base of the thoughts which get <a name="page146" id=
+"page146"></a>accepted. He does not, indeed, deny that fear and
+consent enter into the attitude of men; he simply asserts that
+these also are founded upon a judgment of utility in the thing
+judged. We obey because otherwise "society could not subsist," and
+society subsists for its utility. "Men," he says "could not live at
+all in society, at least in a civilized society, without laws and
+magistrates and judges, to prevent the encroachments of the strong
+upon the weak, of the violent upon the just and equitable."</p>
+<p>Utilitarianism is, of course, above all a method; and it is not
+unfair to say of Hume that he did not get very far beyond
+insistence on that point. He sees that the subjection of the many
+to the few is rooted in human impulse; but he has no penetrating
+inquiry, such as that of Locke or Hobbes, into the purpose of such
+subjection. So, too, it is the sense of public interest which
+determines men's thoughts on government, on who should rule, and
+what should be the system of property; but the ethical substance of
+these questions he leaves undetermined. Politics, he thinks, may
+one day be a science; though <a name="page147" id="page147"></a>he
+considers the world still too young for general truths therein. The
+maxims he suggests as of permanent value, "that a hereditary
+prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their
+representatives form the best monarchy, autocracy and democracy";
+that "free governments ... are the most ruinous and oppressive to
+their provinces"; that republics are more favorable to science,
+monarchies to art; that the death of a political body is
+inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most
+thinkers at the present time. And when he constructs an ideal
+constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be
+regarded as practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is
+obvious that the historical method had not yet come fully into
+being.</p>
+<p>Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an
+avoidance of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic
+insight that he had. He has a keen eye for the absurdity of Pope's
+maxim that administration is all in all; nothing can ever make the
+forms of government immaterial. He accepts Harrington's <a name=
+"page148" id="page148"></a>dictum that the substance of government
+corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as
+later thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces.
+He sees that the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or
+withstand the new balance of property in the State; a prophecy of
+which the accuracy was demonstrated by the failure of George III.
+"In all governments," as he says, "there is a perpetual intestinal
+struggle, open or secret," between Authority and Liberty; though
+his judgment that neither "can ever absolutely prevail," shows us
+rather that we are on the threshold of <i>laissez-faire</i> than
+that Hume really understood the problem of freedom. He realized
+that the House of Commons had become the pivot of the State; though
+he looked with dread upon the onset of popular government. He saw
+the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency to persist in
+terms of men instead of principles. He was convinced of the
+necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and
+no one, save Adam Smith, has more acutely insisted upon the evil
+effect on commerce of an absolute <a name="page149" id=
+"page149"></a>government. He emphasized the value of freedom of the
+press, in which he saw the secret whereby the mixed government of
+England was maintained. "It has also been found," he said in a
+happy phrase, "... that the people are no such dangerous monsters
+as they have been represented, and that it is in every respect
+better to guide them like rational creatures than to lead or drive
+them like brute beasts." There is, in fact, hardly a page of his
+work in which some such acuteness may not be found.</p>
+<p>Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is absent. Hume was a
+typical child of one aspect of the eighteenth century in his hatred
+of enthusiasm, and the form in which he most abominates it is
+religious. Why people's religious opinions should lead to
+antagonism he could no more understand than why people should
+refuse to pass one another on a road. Wars of religion thus seemed
+to him based upon a merely frivolous principle; and in his ideal
+commonwealth he made the Church a department of the State lest it
+should get out of hand. He was, moreover, a static philosopher,
+disturbed by signs of political <a name="page150" id=
+"page150"></a>restlessness; and this led to the purgation of Whig
+doctrines from his writings, and their consistent replacement by a
+cynical conservatism. He was always afraid that popular government
+would mean mob-rule; and absolute government is accordingly
+recommended as the euthanasia of the British constitution. Not even
+the example of Sweden convinced him that a standing army might
+exist without civil liberty being endangered; and he has all the
+noxious fallacies of his time upon the balance of power. Above all,
+it is striking to see his helplessness before the problem of
+national character. Mainly he ascribes it to the form of
+government, and that in turn to chance. Even the friend of
+Montesquieu can see no significance in race or climate. The idea,
+in fact, of evolution is entirely absent from his political
+speculation. Political life, like human life, ends in death; and
+the problem is to make our egress as comfortable as we can, for the
+prime evil is disturbance. It is difficult not to feel that there
+is almost a physical basis in his own disease for this love of
+quiet. The man who put indolence among the primary motives of human
+<a name="page151" id="page151"></a>happiness was not likely to view
+novel theories with unruffled temper.</p>
+<p>Hume has an eminent place among economists, and for one to whom
+the study of such phenomena was but a casual inquiry, it is
+marvelous how much he saw. He is free from the crude errors of
+mercantilism; and twenty years before Adam Smith hopes, "as a
+British subject," for the prosperity of other countries. "Free
+communication and exchange" seems to him an ordinance of nature;
+and he heaps contempt upon those "numberless bars, obstructions and
+imposts which all nations of Europe, and none more than England,
+have put upon trade." Specie he places in its true light as merely
+a medium of exchange. The supposed antagonism between commerce and
+agriculture he disposes of in a half-dozen effective sentences. He
+sees the place of time and distance in the discussion of economic
+want. He sees the value of a general level of economic equality,
+even while he is sceptical of its attainment. He insists upon the
+economic value of high wages, though he somewhat belittles the
+importance of wealth in the achievement of <a name="page152" id=
+"page152"></a>happiness. Before Bentham, who on this point
+converted Adam Smith, he knew that the rate of interest depends
+upon the supply of and demand for loans. He insists that commerce
+demands a free government for its progress, pointing out, doubtless
+from his abundant French experience, that an absolute government
+gives to the commercial class an insufficient status of honor. He
+pointed out, doubtless with France again in his mind, the evils of
+an arbitrary system of taxation. "They are commonly converted," he
+says with unwonted severity, "into punishments on industry; and
+also, by their unavoidable inequality, are more grievous, than by
+the real burden which they impose." And he emphasizes his belief
+that the best taxes are those which, like taxes upon luxury, press
+least upon the poor.</p>
+<p>Such insight is extraordinary enough in the pre-Adamite epoch;
+but even more remarkable are his psychological foundations. The
+wealth of the State, he says, is the labor of its subjects, and
+they work because the wants of man are not a stated sum, but
+"multiply every moment upon <a name="page153" id=
+"page153"></a>him." The desire for wealth comes from the idea of
+pleasure; and in the <i>Treatise on Human Nature</i> he discusses
+with superb clarity the way in which the idea of pleasure is
+related at once to individual satisfaction and to that sympathy for
+others which is one of the roots of social existence. He points out
+the need for happiness in work. "The mind," he writes, "acquires
+new vigor, enlarges its powers and faculties, and by an assiduity
+in honest industry both satisfies its own appetites and prevents
+growth of unnatural ones"; though, like his predecessor, Francis
+Hutcheson, he overemphasizes the delights opened by civilization to
+the humbler class of men. He gives large space in his discussion to
+the power of will; and, indeed, one of the main advantages he
+ascribed to government was the compulsion it puts upon us to allow
+the categories of time and space a part in our calculations. He
+does not, being in his own life entirely free from avarice, regard
+the appetite for riches as man's main motive to existence; though
+no one was more urgent in his insistence that "the avidity of
+acquiring goods and possessions for <a name="page154" id=
+"page154"></a>ourselves and our nearest friends is ... destructive
+of society" unless balanced by considerations of justice. And what
+he therein intended may be gathered from the liberal notions of
+equality he manifested. "Every person," he wrote in a famous
+passage, "if possible ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor in a
+full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the
+conveniences of life. No one can doubt but such an equality is most
+suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less the happiness of
+the rich than it adds to that of the poor." It is clear that we
+have moved far from the narrow confines of the old political
+arithmetic. The theory of utility enables Hume to see the scope of
+economics&mdash;the word itself he did not know&mdash;in a more
+generous perspective than at any previous time. It would be too
+much to say that his grasp of its psychological foundation enabled
+him entirely to move from the limitations of the older concept of a
+national prosperity expressed only in terms of bullion to the view
+of economics as a social science. But at least he saw that
+economics is rooted in the nature of men and therein he had the
+<a name="page155" id="page155"></a>secret of its true
+understanding. <i>The Wealth of Nations</i> would less easily have
+made its way had not the insight of Hume prepared the road for its
+reception.</p>
+<p>What, then, and in general, is his place in the history of
+political thought? Clearly enough, he is not the founder of a
+system; his work is rather a series of pregnant hints than a
+consecutive account of political facts. Nor must we belittle the
+debt he owes to his predecessors. Much, certainly, he owed to
+Locke, and the full radiance of the Scottish enlightenment emerges
+into the day with his teaching. Francis Hutcheson gave him no small
+inspiration; and Hutcheson means that he was indebted to
+Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy commonsense of the
+Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in that
+interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is
+characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle
+seventeenth century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the
+nineteenth.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref17" id="fnref17" href=
+"#fn17">[17]</a></span> He is entitled to be considered <a name=
+"page156" id="page156"></a>the real founder of utilitarianism. He
+first showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction
+between ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He
+brings to an end what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical
+school." After him we are done with the abuse of history to bolster
+up Divine Right and social contract; for there is clearly present
+in his use of facts a true sense of historical method. He put an
+end also to the confusion which resulted from the effort of
+thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong independent of all
+positive law. He took the facts as phenomena to be explained rather
+than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be maintained in
+part defiance of them. Conventional Whiggism has no foothold after
+he has done with its analysis. His utilitarianism was the first
+efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract
+school; and even if he was not the first to see through its
+pretensions&mdash;that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury&mdash;he
+was the first to show the grounds of their uselessness. He saw that
+history and psychology together provide the materials for <a name=
+"page157" id="page157"></a>a political philosophy. So that even if
+he could not himself construct it the hints at least were
+there.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn17" id="fn17" href=
+"#fnref17">[17]</a></span> There are few books which show so
+clearly as Lorimer's <i>Institutes of Nations</i> (1872) how fully
+the Scottish school was in the midstream of European thought.</div>
+<p>His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion.
+The metaphysics of Burke, so far as one may use a term he would
+himself have repudiated, are largely those of Hume. The place of
+habit and of social instinct alongside of consent, the perception
+that reason alone will not explain political facts, the emphasis
+upon resistance as of last resort, the denial that allegiance is a
+mere contract to be presently explained, the deep respect for
+order&mdash;all these are, after all, the fabric from which the
+thought of Burke was woven. Nor is there in Bentham's defence of
+Utilitarianism argument in which he would have recognized novelty.
+Herein, at least, his proof that morality is no more than general
+opinion of utility constructs, in briefer form, the later arguments
+of Bentham, Paley and the Mills, nor can their mode of statement
+claim superiority to Hume's. So that on either side of his work he
+foreshadows the advent of the two great schools of modern political
+thought. His utilitarianism is the real <a name="page158" id=
+"page158"></a>path by which radical opinion at last found means of
+acceptance. His use of history is, through Burke, the ancestor of
+that specialized conservatism begotten of the historical method. If
+there is thus so much, it is, of course, tempting to ask why there
+is not more. If Hume has the materials why did he fail to build up
+a system from them? The answer seems twofold. In part it is the man
+himself. His genius, as his metaphysics show, lay essentially in
+his power of destruction; and the man who gave solipsism to
+philosophy was not likely to effect a new creation in politics. In
+part, also, the condition of the time gave little stimulus to
+novelty. Herein Hume was born a generation too early. Had he
+written when George III attempted the destruction of the system of
+the Revolution, and when America and France combined to raise again
+the basic questions of politics, he might have done therein what
+Adam Smith effected in his own field. But the time had not yet
+come; and it was left to Burke and Bentham to reap where he had
+sown.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page159" id="page159"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h3>SIGNS OF CHANGE</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>From Hume until the publication of Burke's <i>Present
+Discontents</i> (1770) there is no work on English politics of the
+first importance. Walpole had fallen in 1742; but for the next
+fifteen years his methods dominated the parliamentary scene. It was
+only with the advent of the elder Pitt to power that a new temper
+may be observed, a temper quickened by what followed on the
+accession of George III. Henceforward, it is not untrue to say that
+the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it was no
+longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French
+Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim
+satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the
+standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight,
+though collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for
+men to <a name="page160" id="page160"></a>grumble where, as under
+Walpole, each harvest brought them greater prosperity, or where, as
+under Chatham, they leaped from victory to victory. Something of
+the exhilaration of these years we can still catch in the letters
+which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to turn off
+with easy laughter his deep sense of pride. In the House of
+Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show
+that a new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and
+Fielding, the first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and
+Collins, above all in the awakening of political science, that
+novelty is apparent.</p>
+<p>So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a
+single source, the French influence is the effective cause of
+change. Voltaire and Montesquieu had both visited England in the
+period of Walpole's administration, and both had been greatly
+influenced by what they saw. Rousseau, indeed, came later on that
+amazing voyage which the good-natured Hume insisted would save him
+from his dread of persecution, and there is evidence enough that he
+did not relish his <a name="page161" id="page161"></a>experience.
+Yet when he came, in 1762, to publish the <i>Contrat Social</i> it
+was obvious that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real
+meaning of their work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they
+gave to English institutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast
+difference between the simplicity of a government where sovereignty
+was the monarch's will and one in which a complex distribution of
+powers was found to secure a general freedom. The Frenchmen were
+amazed at the generous equality of English judicial procedure. The
+liberty of unlicensed printing&mdash;less admirable than they
+accounted it&mdash;the difference between a <i>Habeas Corpus</i>
+and a <i>lettre de cachet</i>, the regular succession of
+Parliaments, all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of
+their absence, as a magnificent achievement. The English
+constitution revealed to France an immense and unused reservoir of
+philosophic illustration. Even to Englishmen itself that meaning
+was but partly known. Locke's system was a generalization from its
+significance at a special crisis. Hume had partial glimpses of its
+inner substance. But for most it <a name="page162" id=
+"page162"></a>had become a discreet series of remedies for
+particular wrongs. Its analysis as a connected whole invigorated
+thought as nothing had done since the Civil Wars had elaborated the
+theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was more significant was
+the realization of Montesquieu's import simultaneously with the
+effort of George III to revive crown influence. Montesquieu thus
+became the prophet of a new race of thinkers. Rousseau's time was
+not yet; though within a score of years it was possible to see him
+as the rival to Burke's conservatism.</p>
+<p>It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which
+underlies the <i>Esprit des Lois</i> (1748). It is a commonplace
+now that Montesquieu is to be regarded as the founder of the
+historical method. The present is to be explained by its ancestry.
+Laws, governments, customs are not truths absolute and universal,
+but relative to the time of their origin and the country from which
+they derive. It would be inaccurate, with Rousseau on the
+threshold, to say that his influence demolished the systems of
+political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in the most
+<a name="page163" id="page163"></a>complete unreality, are to be
+found in Godwin's <i>Political Justice</i>; but it is not beyond
+the mark to affirm that after his time such abstract systems were
+on the defensive. Therein, with all his faults, he had given Burke
+the clue to those truths he so profoundly saw&mdash;the sense of
+the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the high regard
+for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past wisdom. He
+was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened this
+age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But
+Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the
+main mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of
+that decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first
+revealed the true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time
+so emphasized the importance of liberty as the true end of
+government; even the placid Blackstone adopted the utterance from
+him in his inaugural lecture as Vinerian professor. He insisted,
+too, on the danger of perversion to which political principle lies
+open; a feeling which found consistent utterance both in <a name=
+"page164" id="page164"></a>the debates of the Philadelphia
+Convention, and in the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What,
+perhaps, is most immediately significant is his famous praise of
+the British Constitution&mdash;the secret of which he entirely
+misapprehended&mdash;and his discovery of its essence in the
+separation of powers. The short sixth chapter of his eleventh book
+is the real keynote of Blackstone and De Lolme. It led them to
+investigate, on principles of at least doubtful validity, an
+edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the last
+criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth
+antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated
+structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That
+it was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have
+been made. The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines
+have been more noxious in their consequence than this theory of
+checks and balances. But Blackstone's <i>Commentaries</i> (1765-9)
+produced Bentham's <i>Fragment on Government</i> (1776), and with
+that book we enter upon the realistic study of the British
+Constitution.</p>
+<a name="page165" id="page165"></a>
+<p>Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from
+English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an
+influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were
+those that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had
+sought to avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real
+difference between them is no more than a removal of the
+limitations upon the power of government which Locke had proposed.
+It is a removal at every point conditioned by the interest of the
+people. For Rousseau declared that the existing distribution of
+power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and he made the people
+sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their achievement in
+the shape of sinister interest. The powers of the people thus
+became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for
+innovation. It is easy enough then to understand why such a
+philosophy should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager
+sympathy for humble men, his optimistic faith in the immediate
+prospect of popular power were to Burke the symptoms of insane
+delusion and their author "the great <a name="page166" id=
+"page166"></a>professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in
+England." But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's
+influence was the success of the American Revolution; and no one
+had done more than Burke himself to promote its cause and justify
+its principles. That revolution established what Europe might well
+consider a democracy; and its statesmen were astonished not less at
+the vigilance with which America guarded against the growth of
+autocratic government, than at the soberness with which it checked
+the supposed weakness of the sovereign people. America made herself
+independent while what was best in Europe combined in enthusiastic
+applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of Rousseau had been
+taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of power could
+remove what deliberation was impotent to secure. Here Rousseau had
+a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage denied. Nor,
+at the moment, was it influential except in the general impetus it
+gave to thought. But from the moment of its appearance it is an
+undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its <a name=
+"page167" id="page167"></a>metaphysical form it failed to command
+acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its results were victorious.
+Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the conclusions he recommends
+so much as in the language in which he clothes them. Either make a
+final end of the optimism of men like Hume and Blackstone, or the
+veneration for the past which is at the root of Burke's own
+teaching.</p>
+<p>It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the
+stimulus it did. Montesquieu came to praise the British
+constitution at a time when good men were aghast at its perversion.
+There was no room in many years for revolution, but at least there
+was place for hearty discontent and a seeking after new methods. Of
+that temper two men so different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are
+the political symbols. The former's rise to power upon the
+floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant nothing so much as a protest
+against the cynical corruption of the previous generation. Wilkes
+was a sign that the populace was slowly awaking to a sense of its
+own power. The French creed was too purely logical, too obviously
+the outcome <a name="page168" id="page168"></a>of alien conditions,
+to fit in its entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted,
+memories of wooden shoes played not a little part in its rejection.
+The rights of man made only a partial appeal until the miseries of
+Pitt's wars showed what was involved in that rejection; and then it
+was too late. But no one could feel without being stirred the
+illumination of Montesquieu; and Rousseau's questions, even if they
+proved unanswerable, were stuff for thought. The work of the forty
+years before the French Revolution is nothing so much as a
+preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes. The theorists
+build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is attuned
+to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the
+French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least,
+would have been a supreme achievement.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757. John
+Brown's <i>Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times</i>
+is largely forgotten now; <a name="page169" id="page169"></a>though
+it went through seven editions in a year and was at once translated
+into French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in the vast
+Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of comment
+upon the <i>Characteristics</i> of Shaftesbury. His book is too
+evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with
+reverence, to make us doubt its derivation. There is the same
+reliance upon Livy and Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking
+generalization; though the argument upon which Brown's conclusions
+are based is seldom given, perhaps because his geometric clarity of
+statement impressed him as self-demonstrative. Brown's volumes are
+an essay upon the depravity of the times. He does not deny it
+humanitarianism, and a still lingering sense of freedom, but it is
+steeped in corruption and displays nothing so much as a luxurious
+and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the universities out of hand,
+in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would not have rejected. He
+deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men trifle with Hume's
+gay impieties, and could not, if they would, <a name="page170" id=
+"page170"></a>appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton.
+Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish
+interests. The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them
+lost their former virtues. The neurotic temper of the times is
+known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of
+Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the
+kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every
+nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote
+themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize money.
+Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour
+brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman. The poor,
+indeed, the middle class, and the legal and medical professions,
+Brown specifically exempts from this indictment. But he emphasizes
+his belief that this is unimportant. "The manners and principles of
+those who lead," he says, "... not of those who are governed ...
+will ever determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the
+continuance or dissolution of a state."</p>
+<p>This profligacy Brown compares to the <a name="page171" id=
+"page171"></a>languid vice which preceded the fall of Carthage and
+of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great Britain at the
+hands of France, unless it can be cured. So far as he has an
+explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the
+decay of religious sentiment. His remedy is only Bolingbroke's
+Patriot King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen
+to the height of power. What mainly stirred Englishmen was the
+prophecy of defeat on the morrow of the disastrous convention of
+Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe and Clive repaired that royal
+humiliation Brown seems to have died a natural death. What is more
+interesting than his prophecies was the evidence of a close reading
+of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is the product of the
+climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and sullen temper.
+Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of England is
+the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the
+simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by
+enervation. Brown has no passion, and his book reads rather like
+Mr. Galsworthy's <i>Island Pharisees</i> sufficiently <a name=
+"page172" id="page172"></a>expurgated to be declaimed by a
+well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of
+attention to the evils of his time. It describes undoubted facts,
+and it shows that the era of content has gone. But its careful
+periods and strangely far-off air lack the eagerness for truth
+which Rousseau put into his questions. Brown can neither explain
+nor can he proffer remedy. He sees that Pitt is somehow
+significant; but when he rules out the popular voice as devoid of
+all importance, he deprives himself of the means whereby to grasp
+the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted. Nothing could prove
+more strongly the exactitude of Burke's <i>Present Discontents</i>.
+Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of Junius.</p>
+<p>Hume was the friend of Montesquieu, though twenty years his
+junior; and the <i>Esprit des Lois</i> travelled rapidly to
+Scotland. There it caught the eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a
+treatise on refinement, and by the influence of Hume and Adam
+Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of
+Edinburgh. Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular in his
+time, and certainly <a name="page173" id="page173"></a>he has a
+skill for polished phrase, and a genial paraphrase of other men's
+ideas. His <i>Essay on the History of Civil Society</i> (1767),
+which in a quarter of a century went through six editions, was
+thought by Helv&eacute;tius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume
+himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its
+suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make
+some fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the
+investigation of savage life will throw some light upon the origins
+of government. He sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the
+state of nature. He insists, probably after conversation with Adam
+Smith, upon the social value of the division of functions. He does
+not doubt the original equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his
+age has reached the limit of its useful growth. Property he traces
+back to a parental desire to make a better provision for children
+"than is found under the promiscuous management of many
+copartners." Climate has the new importance upon which Montesquieu
+has insisted; or, at least, as it "ripens the pineapple and the
+tamarina," <a name="page174" id="page174"></a>so it "inspires a
+degree of mildness that can even assuage the rigours of despotical
+government." The priesthood&mdash;this is Hume&mdash;becomes a
+separate influence under the sway of superstition. Liberty, he
+says, "is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions
+of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in behalf of equitable
+government." The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is certainly not
+here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in the
+obscurity into which he has fallen. The <i>Esprit des Lois</i> took
+twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of
+men like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped.
+Facile popularisers of this sort may have mollified the
+drawing-room; but they did not add to political ideas.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the
+students of constitutional law. Blackstone's <i>Commentaries on the
+Laws of England</i> (1765-9) has had ever since its first
+publication an authority such as Coke only before <a name="page175"
+id="page175"></a>possessed. "He it is," said Bentham, "who, first
+of all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the
+language of the Scholar and the Gentleman." Certainly, as Professor
+Dicey has remarked, "the book contains much real learning about our
+system of government." We are less concerned here with Blackstone
+as an antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy.
+Here his purpose seems obvious enough. The English constitution
+raised him from humble means through a Professorship at Oxford to a
+judgeship in the Court of Common Pleas. He had been a member of
+Parliament and refused the office of Solicitor-General. He had thus
+no reason to be dissatisfied with the conditions of his time; and
+the first book of the <i>Commentaries</i> is nothing so much as an
+attempt to explain why English constitutional law is a miracle of
+wisdom.</p>
+<p>Constitutional law, as such, indeed, found no place in
+Blackstone's book. It creeps in under the rights of persons, where
+he deals with the power of king and Parliament. His treatment
+implies a whole philosophy. Laws are of three <a name="page176" id=
+"page176"></a>kinds&mdash;of nature, of God, and of the civil
+state. Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is "a rule of
+civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state,
+commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong." It is, he
+tells us, "called a rule to distinguish it from a compact or
+agreement." It derives from the sovereign power, of which the chief
+character is the making of laws. Society is based upon the "wants
+and fears" of men; and it is coeval with their origin. The idea of
+a state of nature "is too wild to be seriously admitted," besides
+being contrary to historical knowledge. Society implies government,
+and whatever its origins or its forms there "must be in all of them
+a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which
+the <i>jura summa imperii</i>, or rights of sovereignty reside."
+The forms of government are classified in the usual way; and the
+British constitution is noted as a happy mixture of them all. "The
+legislature of the Kingdom," Blackstone writes, "is entrusted to
+three powers entirely independent of each other; first the King,
+secondly the lords spiritual and temporal, which is an <a name=
+"page177" id="page177"></a>aristocratical assembly of persons,
+chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour or
+their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen
+by the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of
+democracy; and as this aggregate body, actuated by different
+springs and attentive to different interests, composes the British
+Parliament and has the supreme disposal of everything; there can be
+no inconvenience attempted by either of the three branches, but
+will be withstood by one of the other two; each branch being armed
+with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it
+shall think inexpedient or dangerous." It is in the king in
+Parliament that British sovereignty resides. Eschewing the notion
+of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the
+implications of it are secured. "The constitutional government of
+this island," he says, "is so admirably tempered and compounded,
+that nothing can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the
+equilibrium of power between one branch of the legislature and the
+rest."</p>
+<p>All this is not enough; though, as <a name="page178" id=
+"page178"></a>Bentham was to show in his <i>Fragment on
+Government</i>, it is already far too much. "A body of nobility,"
+such is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, "is
+also more peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded
+constitution, in order to support the rights of both the Crown and
+people, by forming a barrier to withstand the encroachments of both
+... if they were confounded with the mass of the people, and like
+them had only a vote in electing representatives, their privileges
+would soon be borne down and overwhelmed by the popular torrent,
+which would effectually level all distinctions." "The Commons," he
+says further, "consist of all such men of property in the kingdom
+as have not seats in the House of Lords." The legal
+irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. "He is not only
+incapable of doing wrong," says Blackstone, "but even of thinking
+wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no
+folly or weakness," though he points out that the constitution "has
+allowed a latitude of supposing the contrary." The powers of the
+King are described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of
+<a name="page179" id="page179"></a>William the Norman than to the
+backstairs corruption of George III. The right of revolution is
+noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals rather
+than of law.</p>
+<p>"Its true defect," says Professor Dicey of the
+<i>Commentaries</i>, "is the hopeless confusion both of language
+and of thought introduced into the whole subject of constitutional
+law by Blackstone's habit&mdash;common to all the lawyers of his
+time&mdash;of applying old and inapplicable terms to new
+institutions." This is severe enough; yet Blackstone's sins are
+deeper than the criticism would suggest. He introduced into English
+political philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of
+substance upon which the whole vicious theory of checks and
+balances was erected. He made no distinction between the unlimited
+sovereignty of law and the very obviously limited sovereignty of
+reality. He must have known that to talk of the independence of the
+branches of the legislature was simple nonsense at a time when King
+and peers competed for the control of elections to the House of
+Commons. His idealization of a peerage whose <a name="page180" id=
+"page180"></a>typical spiritual member was Archbishop Cornwallis
+and whose temporal embodiment was the Duke of Bedford would not
+have deceived a schoolboy had it not provided a bulwark against
+improvement. It was ridiculous to describe the Commons as
+representative of property so long as places like Manchester and
+Sheffield were virtually disfranchised. His picture of the royal
+prerogative was a portrait against every detail of which what was
+best in England had struggled in the preceding century and a half.
+He has nothing to say of the cabinet, nothing of ministerial
+responsibility, nothing of the party system. What he did was to
+produce the defence of a non-existent system which acted as a
+barrier to all legal, and much political, progress in the next
+half-century. He gave men material without cause for
+satisfaction.</p>
+<p>As a description of the existing government there is thus hardly
+an element of Blackstone's work which could stand the test of
+critical inquiry. But even worse was its philosophy. As Bentham
+pointed out, he was unaware of the distinction between society and
+government. The state <a name="page181" id="page181"></a>of nature
+exists, or fails to exist, with startling inconsistency.
+Blackstone, in fact, was a Lockian who knows that Hume and
+Montesquieu have cut the ground from under his master's feet, and
+yet cannot understand how, without him, a foundation is to be
+supplied. Locke, indeed, seems to him, as a natural conservative,
+to go too far, and he rejects the original contract as without
+basis in history; yet contractual notions are present at every
+fundamental stage of his argument. The sovereign power, so we are
+told, is irresistible; and then because Blackstone is uncertain
+what right is to mean, we hear of moral limitations upon its
+exercise. He speaks continually of representation without any
+effort to examine into the notions it conveys. The members of
+society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify
+existent inequalities. "The natural foundations of sovereignty," he
+writes, "are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and
+power." Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have
+been taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the
+actual exertion of authority. Nor has he <a name="page182" id=
+"page182"></a>clear notions of the way in which property is to be
+founded. Communism, he writes in seventeenth century fashion, is
+the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the earth to
+men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the
+soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions. This
+is pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are
+utterly remote from the logical result of his own premises.</p>
+<p>The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these
+questions, only the most confused sort of notions. He had to
+preface his work with some sort of philosophic theory because the
+conditions of the age demanded it. The one source of enlightenment
+when he wrote was Hume; but for some uncertain reason, perhaps his
+piety, Blackstone makes no reference to the great sceptic's
+speculations. So that he was driven back upon notions he felt to be
+false, without a proper realization of their falsity. His use of
+Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a great idea can be
+in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than the
+fertility it contained. The merit of <a name="page183" id=
+"page183"></a>Blackstone is his learning, which was substantial,
+his realization that the powers of law demand some classification,
+his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is right alike in
+searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying the
+historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was
+little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the
+conditions of his time to question its assumptions.</p>
+<p>De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with
+Blackstone, what he failed to see was even more remarkable than
+what he did perceive, his book has real ability and merit. De Lolme
+was a citizen of Geneva, who published his <i>Constitution of
+England</i> in 1775, after a twelve months' visit to shores
+sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to die in obscurity and
+want. His book, as he tells us in his preface, was no mean success,
+though he derived no profit from it. Like Blackstone, he was
+impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional
+equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty. The attitude
+was not unnatural in one who, with his head full of <a name=
+"page184" id="page184"></a>Montesquieu, was a witness of the
+struggle between Junius and the King. He has, of course, the
+limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of
+government in purely mechanical terms. "It is upon the passions of
+mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable,
+that the action of the various parts of a state depends. The
+machine may vary as to its dimensions; but its movement and acting
+springs still remain intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks
+of government as "a great ballet or dance in which ... everything
+depends upon the disposition of the figures." He does not deal,
+that is to say, with men as men, but only as inert adjuncts of a
+machine by which they are controlled. Such an attitude is bound to
+suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction. It regards
+historic forces as distinct from the men related to them. Every
+mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to
+unstability. The English avoid these dangers by playing off the
+royal power against the popular. The King's interest is safeguarded
+by the division of Parliament into two Houses, each of <a name=
+"page185" id="page185"></a>which rejects the encroachment of the
+other upon the executive. His power is limited by parliamentary
+privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and so
+forth. The theory was not true; though it represented with some
+accuracy the ideals of the time.</p>
+<p>Nor must we belittle what insight De Lolme possessed. He saw
+that the early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented
+the continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with
+the result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the
+English people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior
+power. He understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was
+the independence of the judges. He realized that the
+party-system&mdash;he never used the actual term&mdash;while it
+provides room for men's ambitions at the same time prevents the
+equation of ambition with indispensability. "Woe to him," says De
+Lolme, "... who should endeavor to make the people believe that
+their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single citizen."
+He sees the paramount value of freedom of the press. This, as
+<a name="page186" id="page186"></a>he says, with the necessity that
+members should be re-elected, "has delivered into the hands of the
+people at large the exercise of the censorial power." He has no
+doubt but that resistance is the remedy whereby governmental
+encroachment can be prevented; "resistance," he says, "is the
+ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of power." He
+points out how real is the guarantee of liberty where the onus of
+proof in criminal cases is thrown upon the government. He regards
+with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military arm,
+and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it
+has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding
+to the royal power. Nor can he fail to admire the insight which
+organizes "the agitation of the popular mind," not as "the
+forerunner of violent commotions" but to "animate all parts of the
+state." Therein De Lolme had grasped the real essence of party
+government.</p>
+<p>It was, of course, no more than symptomatic of his time that
+cabinet and prime minister should have escaped his notice. A more
+serious defect was his inability, <a name="page187" id=
+"page187"></a>with the Wilkes contest prominently in his notice, to
+see that the people had assumed a new importance. For the masses,
+indeed, De Lolme had no enthusiasm. "A passive share," he thought,
+"was the only one that could, with safety to the state, be trusted"
+to the humble man. "The greater part," he wrote, "of those who
+compose this multitude, taken up with the care of providing for
+their subsistence, have neither sufficient leisure, nor even, in
+consequence of their imperfect education, the degree of
+information, requisite for functions of this kind." Such an
+attitude blinded him to the significance of the American conflict,
+which he saw unattended by its moral implications. He trusted too
+emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that
+institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George
+III could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a
+sense of its own power. The real social forces of the time found
+there no channels of activity; and the difference between De Lolme
+and Bagehot is the latter's power to go behind the screen of
+statute to the inner sources of power.</p>
+<a name="page188" id="page188"></a>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p>The basis of revolutionary doctrine was already present in
+England when, in 1762, Rousseau published his <i>Contrat
+Social</i>. With its fundamental doctrines Locke had already made
+his countrymen familiar; and what was needed for the appreciation
+of its teaching was less a renaissance than discontent. So soon as
+men are dissatisfied with the traditional foundations of the State,
+a gospel of natural rights is certain to make its appearance. And,
+once the design of George III had been made familiar by his
+treatment of Chatham and Wilkes, the discontent did not fail to
+show itself. Indeed, in the year before the publication of
+Rousseau's book, Robert Wallace, a Scottish chaplain royal, had
+written in his <i>Various Prospects</i> (1761) a series of essays
+which are at once an anticipation of the main thesis of Malthus and
+a plea for the integration of social forces by which alone the mass
+of men could be raised from misery. In the light of later
+experience it is difficult not to be impressed by the modernist
+flavour of Wallace's attack. <a name="page189" id="page189"></a>He
+insists upon the capacity of men and the disproportion between
+their potential achievement and that which is secured by actual
+society. Men are in the mass condemned to ignorance and toil; and
+the lust of power sets man against his neighbor to the profit of
+the rich. Wallace traces these evils to private property and the
+individualistic organization of work, and he sees no remedy save
+community of possessions and a renovated educational system. Yet he
+does not conceal from himself that it is to the interest of the
+governing class to prevent a revolution which, beneficent to the
+masses, would be fatal to themselves; nor does he conceive it
+possible until the fertility of men has been reduced to the
+capacity of the soil. He speculates upon the chances of a new
+spirit among men, of an all-wise legislator, and of the beneficent
+example of colonies upon the later Owenite model. But his book is
+contemporaneous with our own ideas rather than with the thoughts of
+his generation. Nor does it seem to have excited any general
+attention.</p>
+<p>It is five years after Rousseau that we see the first clear
+signs of his influence. <a name="page190" id=
+"page190"></a>Naturally enough the men amongst whom the new spirit
+spread abroad were the Nonconformists. For more than seventy years
+they had been allowed existence without recognition. None had more
+faithfully supported the new dynasty than they; none had been paid
+less for their allegiance. Their utmost effort could secure only a
+sparing mitigation of the Test Act. All of them were Whigs, and the
+doctrines of Locke suited exactly their temper and their wants.
+There were amongst them able men in every walk of life, and they
+were apt to publication. Joseph Priestley, in particular, gave up
+with willingness to mankind what was obviously meant for chemical
+science. A few years previously Brown of the <i>Estimate</i> had
+submitted a scheme for national education, in which the essential
+principle was Church control. Priestley had answered him, and was
+encouraged by friends to expand his argument into a general
+treatise. His <i>Essay on the First Principles of Government</i>
+appeared in 1768; and, if for nothing else, it would be noteworthy
+because it was therein that the significance of the "greatest
+happiness principle" first <a name="page191" id=
+"page191"></a>flashed across Bentham's mind. But the book shows
+more than this. "I had placed," says Priestley with due modesty,
+"the foundation of some of the most valuable interests of mankind
+on a broader and firmer basis than Mr. Locke"; and the breadth and
+firmness are Rousseau's contribution.</p>
+<p>Certainly we herein meet new elements. On the very threshold of
+the book we meet the dogma of the perfectibility of man.
+"Whatever," Priestley rhapsodizes, "was the beginning of this
+world, the end will be glorious and paradisaical, beyond what our
+imaginations can now conceive." "The instrument of this progress
+... towards this glorious state" is government; though a little
+later we are to find that the main business of government is
+noninterference. Men are all equal, and their natural rights are
+indefeasible. Government must be restrained in the interests of
+liberty. No man can be governed without his consent; for government
+is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in
+exchange for a power to share in public decisions. It thus follows
+that the people must be <a name="page192" id=
+"page192"></a>sovereign, and interference with their natural rights
+will justify resistance. Every government, he says, is "in its
+original principles, and antecedent to its present form an equal
+republic"; wherefore, of course, it follows that we must restore to
+men the equality they have lost. And, equally, of course, this
+would bestow upon the Nonconformists their full citizenship; for
+Warburton's <i>Alliance</i>, to attack which Priestley exhausts all
+the resources of his ingenuity, has been one of the main
+instruments in their degradation. "Unbounded liberty in matters of
+religion," which means the abolition of the Establishment, promises
+to be "very favorable to the best interests of mankind."</p>
+<p>So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for
+English Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import. It can
+never be forgotten in the history of political ideas that the
+alliance of Church and State made Nonconformists suspicious of
+government interference. Their original desire to be left unimpeded
+was soon exalted into a definite theory; and since political
+conditions had confined them so largely to trade none felt as they
+<a name="page193" id="page193"></a>did the hampering influence of
+State-restrictions. The result has been a great difficulty in
+making liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the
+organic nature of the State. It remains for them almost entirely a
+police institution which, once it aims at the realization of right,
+usurps a function far better performed by individuals. There is no
+sense of the community; all that exists is a sum of private
+sentiments. "Civil liberty," says Priestley, "has been greatly
+impaired by an abuse of the maxim that the joint understanding of
+all the members of a State, properly collected, must be preferable
+to that of individuals; and consequently that the more the cases
+are in which mankind are governed by this united reason of the
+whole community, so much the better; whereas, in truth, the greater
+part of human actions are of such a nature, that more inconvenience
+would follow from their being fixed by laws than from their being
+left to every man's arbitrary will." If my neighbor assaults me, he
+suggests, I may usefully call in the police; but where the object
+is the discovery of truth, the means of education, <a name=
+"page194" id="page194"></a>the method of religious belief,
+individual initiative is superior to State action. The latter
+produces an uniform result "incompatible with the spirit of
+discovery." Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just to
+posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future. Men
+are too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all
+action.</p>
+<p>Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past
+tradition; and the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered
+broadcast over his pages. Nevertheless the basis upon which he
+defended his ideas was a utilitarianism hardly less complete than
+that which Bentham made the instrument of revolution. "Regard to
+the general good," he says, "is the main method by which natural
+rights are to be defended." "The good and happiness of the members,
+that is, the majority of the members of any State, is the great
+standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be
+determined." In substance, that is to say, if not completely in
+theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to those of
+expediency. His chief <a name="page195" id="page195"></a>attack
+upon religious legislation is similarly based upon considerations
+of policy. His view of the individual as a never-ending source of
+fruitful innovation anticipates all the later Benthamite arguments
+about the well-spring of individual energy. Interference and
+stagnation are equated in exactly similar fashion to Adam Smith and
+his followers. Priestley, of course, was inconsistent in urging at
+the outset that government is the chief instrument of progress; but
+what he seems to mean is less that government has the future in its
+hands than that government action may well be decisive for good or
+evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism is his glorification of
+reason as the great key which is to unlock all doors. That is, of
+course, natural in a scientist who had himself made discoveries of
+vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school which
+scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of
+unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices
+of that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every
+problem it encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a
+confidence <a name="page196" id="page196"></a>in the energies of
+men was better than the complacent stagnation of the previous
+age.</p>
+<p>It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley
+exerted; certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small.
+Dr. Richard Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he
+might have had has been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents.
+His sinking-fund scheme was taken up by the younger Pitt, and
+proved, though the latter believed in it to the last, to be founded
+upon an arithmetical fallacy which did not sit well upon a fellow
+of the Royal Society. His sermon on the French Revolution provoked
+the <i>Reflections</i> of Burke; and, though much of the right was
+on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he survived
+Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day, and
+he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English
+revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb
+optimism; for the rigid <i>a priori</i> morality of which he was
+the somewhat muddled defender was less favorable to a confidence in
+reason. He had a good deal of John Brown's fear that <a name=
+"page197" id="page197"></a>luxury was the seed of English
+degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the
+population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were
+unessential to the general thesis he had to make.</p>
+<p>Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to
+print by the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely
+popular, his <i>Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty</i>
+(1776) attained its eighth edition within a decade. This, with its
+supplement <i>Additional Observations</i> (1777), presents a
+perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their ancestry concealed. They
+represent the tradition of Locke, modified by the importations of
+Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume, and he takes
+sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has little or
+nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument is
+upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government,
+and self-government means the right of every man to be his own
+legislator. Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to
+its last consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public
+services"; laws are "particular <a name="page198" id=
+"page198"></a>provisions or regulations established by Common
+Consent for gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are
+"trustees or deputies for carrying these regulations into
+execution." And almost in the words of Rousseau, Price goes on to
+admit that liberty, "in its most perfect degree, can be enjoyed
+only in small states where every independent agent is capable of
+giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen into public
+offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though he
+thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize
+the sacrifice of liberty involved.</p>
+<p>But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized.
+"Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust;
+and all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects
+the theory of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with
+self-government; if the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its
+life, it would betray its constituents and dissolve itself. "If
+omnipotence," he writes, "can with any sense be ascribed to a
+legislature, it must be lodged where all legislative authority
+originates; that is, in <a name="page199" id="page199"></a>the
+People." Such a system is alone compatible with the ends of
+government, since it cannot be supposed that men "combine into
+communities and institute government" for self-enslavement. Nor is
+any other political system "consistent with the natural equality of
+mankind"; by which Price means that no man "is constituted by the
+author of nature the vassal or subject of another, or has any right
+to give law to him, or, without his consent, to take away any part
+of his property or to abridge him of his liberty." From all of
+which it is concluded that liberty is inalienable; and a people
+which has lost it "must have a right to emancipate themselves as
+soon as they can." The aptness of the argument to the American
+situation is obvious enough; and nowhere is Price more happy or
+more formidable than when he applies his precepts to phrases like
+"the unity of the empire" and the "honor of the kingdom" which were
+so freely used to cover up the inevitable results of George's
+obstinacy.</p>
+<p>The <i>Essay on the Right of Property in Land</i> (1781) of
+William Ogilvie deserves at least a passing notice. The author, who
+<a name="page200" id="page200"></a>published his book anonymously,
+was a Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen and an
+agriculturist of some success. His own career was distinctly
+honorable. The teacher of Sir James Mackintosh, he had a high
+reputation as a classical scholar and deserves to be remembered for
+his effort to reform a college which had practically ceased to
+perform its proper academic functions. His book is virtually an
+essay upon the natural right of men to the soil. He does not doubt
+that the distress of the times is due to the land monopoly. The
+earth being given to men in common, its invasion by private
+ownership is a dangerous perversion. Men have the right to the full
+product of their labor; but the privileges of the landowner prevent
+the enjoyment of that right. The primary duty of every State is the
+increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation is that which
+has the greatest number of free and independent cultivators. But
+governments attend rather to the interest of the higher classes,
+even while they hold out the protection of the common people as the
+main pretext of their authority. <a name="page201" id=
+"page201"></a>The result is their maintenance of land-monopoly even
+though it affects the prime material of all essential industries,
+prevents the growth of population, and makes the rich wealthier at
+the expense of the poor. It breeds oppression and ignorance, and
+poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative. He points
+out how a nation is dominated by its landlords, and how they have
+consistently evaded the fiscal burdens they should bear. Only in a
+return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source
+of an increase in happiness.</p>
+<p>Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to
+speak of actual changes, he had little more to propose than a
+system of peasant proprietorship. What is striking in the book is
+its sense of great, impending changes, its thorough grasp of the
+principle of utility, its realization of the immense agricultural
+improvement that is possible if the landed system can be so changed
+as to bring into play the impulses of humble men. He sees clearly
+enough that wealth dominates the State; and his interpretation of
+history is throughout economic. Ogilvie <a name="page202" id=
+"page202"></a>is one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who,
+chiefly through Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special
+current of their own in the great tide of protest against the
+unjust situation of labor. Like them, he builds his system upon
+natural rights; though, unlike them, his natural rights are
+defended by expediency and in a style that is always clear and
+logical. The book itself has rather a curious history. At its
+appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind.
+Mackintosh knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against
+the amiable delusion that its excellence would persuade the British
+government to force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the
+East India Company. Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby,
+it was intended to instruct the Chartists in the secret of their
+oppression; and therein it may well have contributed to the
+tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus O'Connor. In 1891 the problem of
+the land was again eagerly debated under the stimulus of Mr. Henry
+George; and a patriotic Scotchman published the book with
+biographical notes that constitute one of the most <a name=
+"page203" id="page203"></a>amazing curiosities in English political
+literature.</p>
+<h4>V</h4>
+<p>Against the school of Rousseau's English disciples it is
+comparatively easy to multiply criticisms. They lacked any historic
+sense. Government, for them, was simply an instrument which was
+made and unmade at the volition of men. How complex were its
+psychological foundations they had no conception; with the single
+factor of consent they could explain the most marvellous edifice of
+any time. They were buried beneath a mountain of metaphysical right
+which they never related to legal facts or to political
+possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions of
+the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to
+investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led.
+They overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy
+themselves with political affairs. They made no proper allowance
+for the protective armour each social system must acquire by the
+mere force of prescription. Nor is <a name="page204" id=
+"page204"></a>there sufficient allowance in their attitude for
+those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman
+must of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to
+say, so completely with <i>staatslehre</i> that they do not admit
+the mollifying influence of <i>politik</i>. They search for
+principles of universal right, without the perception that a right
+which is to be universal must necessarily be so general in
+character as to be useless in its application.</p>
+<p>Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of
+their insight. They were protesting against a system strongly
+upheld on grounds which now appear to have been simply
+indefensible. The business of government had been made the private
+possession of a privileged class; and eagerness for desirable
+change was, in the mass, absent from the minds of most men engaged
+in its direction. The loss of America, the heartless treatment of
+Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the Wilkes affair, the
+heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and North at the
+direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of <a name=
+"page205" id="page205"></a>most to the fact that principle is a
+vital part of policy. The revolutionists recalled men to the need
+of explaining, no less than carrying on, the government of the
+Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by elements of
+which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid intrigues of
+the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government as in its
+nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful reminder
+that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the
+governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on
+political controversy as though no public opinion existed outside
+the small circle of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its
+idol was, in a blind and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that
+Price and Priestley had in mind. For the moment, they were
+unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his Constitutional Societies, might
+capture the support of an eccentric peer like the Duke of Richmond;
+but the vast majority remained, if irritated, unconvinced. It
+needed the realization that the new doctrines were part of a vaster
+synthesis which swept within its purview <a name="page206" id=
+"page206"></a>the fortunes of Europe and America before they would
+give serious heed; and even then they met antagonism with nothing
+save oppression and hate. Yet the doctrines remained; for thought,
+after all, is killed by reasoned answer alone. And when the first
+gusts of war and revolution had passed, the cause for which they
+stood was found to have permeated all classes save that which had
+all to lose by learning.</p>
+<p>We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and
+Priestley as representing more than an important segment of
+opinion. The opposition to their theories was not less articulate
+than their own defence of them. Some, like Burke, desired a
+purification of the existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had
+no sort of sympathy with new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least,
+deserves some mention less for the inherent value of what he had to
+say, than for the nature of the opinions he expounded. Josiah
+Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a reputation alike in political
+and economic enquiry. He represents the sturdy nationalism of
+Arbuthnot's <i>John Bull</i>, the unreasoned <a name="page207" id=
+"page207"></a>prejudice against all foreigners, the hatred of all
+metaphysics as inconsistent with common sense, the desire to let
+things be on the ground that the effort after change is worse than
+the evil of which men complain. His <i>Treatise on Civil
+Government</i> (1781) is in many ways a delightful book, bluff,
+hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that is
+all its own. He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the
+first place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the
+second, to explode the new bubble of Rousseau's followers. The
+second point takes the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as
+Tucker shrewdly saw, the theories of the school may trace their
+ancestry. He analyses the theory of consent in such fashion as to
+show that if its adherents could be persuaded to be logical, they
+would have to admit themselves anarchists. He has no sympathy with
+the state of nature; the noble savage, on investigation, turns out
+to be a barbaric creature with a club and scalping knife.
+Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or, as he prefers,
+somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that does not
+mean <a name="page208" id="page208"></a>that the actual governors
+can be dismissed when any eccentric happens to take exception to
+their views. He has no sympathy with parliamentary reform. Give the
+mob an increase of power, he says, and nothing is to be expected
+but outrage and violence. He thinks the constitution very well as
+it is, and those who preach the evils of corruption ought to prove
+their charges instead of blasphemously asserting that the voice of
+the people is the voice of God.</p>
+<p>Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own. He does not doubt
+that the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered
+upon them. Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as
+ever George III himself could have desired. But not for one moment
+would he fight them to compel their return to British allegiance.
+If the American colonies want to go, let them by all means cut
+adrift. They are only a useless source of expenditure. The trade
+they represent does not depend upon allegiance but upon wants that
+England can supply if she keeps shop in the proper way, if, that
+is, she makes it to their interest to buy in her market. Indeed,
+colonies of all kinds <a name="page209" id="page209"></a>seem to
+him quite useless. They ever are, he says, and ever were, "a drain
+to and an incumbrance on the Mother-country, requiring perpetual
+and expensive nursing in their infancy, and becoming headstrong and
+ungovernable in proportion as they grow up." All wise relations
+depend upon self-interest, and that needs no compulsion. If
+Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up, the result
+would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and contracts
+effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal industry
+encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that
+mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism
+half-a-century before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean
+crustily explaining his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had
+just rejected Edmund Burke for advocating free trade with
+Ireland.</p>
+<p>No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr.
+Johnson. Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of
+gloomy prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of
+the source from which they come. He <a name="page210" id=
+"page210"></a>thought life a poor thing at the best and took a low
+view of human nature. "The notion of liberty," he told the faithful
+Boswell, "amuses the people of England and helps to keep off the
+<i>tedium vitae</i>." The idea of a society properly organized into
+ranks and societies he always esteemed highly. "I am a friend to
+subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of
+society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the
+offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he
+seems to have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as
+the worst of sins. He did not believe in the honesty of
+republicans; they levelled down, but were never inclined to level
+up. Men, he felt, had a part to act in society, and their business
+was to fulfil their allotted station. Rousseau was a very bad man:
+"I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of
+any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years."
+Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth while was
+freedom in private concerns. He blessed the government in the case
+of general warrants and thought the power <a name="page211" id=
+"page211"></a>of the Crown too small. Toleration he considered due
+to an inapt distinction between freedom to think and freedom to
+talk, and any magistrate "while he thinks himself right ... ought
+to enforce what he thinks." The American revolt he ascribed to
+selfish faction; and in his <i>Taxation no Tyranny</i> (1775) he
+defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite
+ground of the necessity of subordination. He was willing, he said,
+to love all mankind except an American.</p>
+<p>Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure
+in an acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank
+and fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who
+wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of
+abasement. He knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that
+will keep us safe under every form of government." He defined a
+courtier in the <i>Idler</i> as one "whose business it is to watch
+the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself." Much of what he
+felt was in part a revolt against the sentimental aspect of
+contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt for <a name=
+"page212" id="page212"></a>the talk of degeneracy that men such as
+Brown had made popular. There is, indeed, in all his political
+observations a strong sense of the virtue of order, and a
+perception that the radicalism of the time was too abstract to
+provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as elsewhere,
+Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental
+questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no
+age are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is
+diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require
+something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's
+attitude would have been admirable where there were no questions to
+debate; but where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had
+nothing to contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain
+weapon of utility in a different and complex world; and it was
+because the age refused to look it in the face that it invited the
+approach of revolution.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page213" id="page213"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h3>BURKE</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>It is the special merit of the English constitutional system
+that the king stands outside the categories of political conflict.
+He is the dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at
+least in theory, is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The
+merit, indeed, is largely accidental; and we shall miss the real
+fashion in which it came to be established unless we remark the
+vicissitudes through which it has passed. The foreign birth of the
+first two Hanoverians, the insistent widowhood of Queen Victoria,
+these rather than deliberate foresight have secured the elevated
+nullification of the Crown. Yet the first twenty-five years of
+George III's reign represent the deliberate effort of an obstinate
+man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once more the
+balance of <a name="page214" id="page214"></a>power. Nor was the
+effort defeated without a struggle which went to the root of
+constitutional principle.</p>
+<p>And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a
+time highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost
+much credit during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke,
+Carteret and the elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a
+system which depended for its existence upon the exclusion of able
+men from power. A generation of corrupt practice and the final
+defeat of Stuart hopes had already deprived the Whigs of any
+special hold on their past ideals. They were divided already into
+factions the purpose of which was no more than the avid pursuit of
+place and pension. Government by connection proved itself
+irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also that once
+corruption was centralized there was no limit to its influence,
+granted only the absence of great questions. When George III
+transferred that organization from the office of the minister to
+his own court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his
+success. For more than forty years the Tories had <a name="page215"
+id="page215"></a>been excluded from office; and they were more than
+eager to sell their support. The Church had become the creature of
+the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was towards
+benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind of
+George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He
+had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and
+a reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's
+first book can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor
+was it obvious that a genuine kingship would have been worse than
+the oligarchy of the great Whig families.</p>
+<p>What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of
+the king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined
+somewhat to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was
+excessively ignorant and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no
+one but himself, and he totally misunderstood the true nature of
+his office. There is no question which arose in the first forty
+years of his reign in which he was not upon the wrong side and
+proud of his error. He was <a name="page216" id="page216"></a>wrong
+about Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about
+France. He demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked
+every measure for the purification of the political system. He
+supported the Slave trade and he opposed the repeal of the Test
+Act. He prevented the grant of Catholic emancipation at the one
+moment when it might have genuinely healed the wounds of Ireland.
+He destroyed by his perverse creations the value of the House of
+Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly determined to make
+his will the criterion of policy; and his design might have
+succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to its
+greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen
+with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in
+politics. The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the
+court upon a broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as
+the event proved, could be as subservient to the king as to his
+minister.</p>
+<p>Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with
+characteristic stupidity, the <a name="page217" id=
+"page217"></a>king did not know the proper instruments for his
+purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the
+suspicion of the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder
+Pitt. In the Wilkes affair he threw the clearest light of the
+century upon the true nature of the House of Commons. His own
+system of proscription restored to the Whig party not a little of
+the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to supply them with a
+philosophy. Chatham remained the idol of the people despite his
+hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of representative
+government and of personal liberty. He lost America and it was not
+his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he
+received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had
+made him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt
+was to compel attention once again to the foundations of politics;
+and George's effort, in the light of his immense failures, could
+not, in the nature of things, survive that analysis.</p>
+<p>Not, of course, that George ever lacked defenders. As early as
+1761, the old rival of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage <a name=
+"page218" id="page218"></a>had condemned to obsolescence, published
+his <i>Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the new Reign</i>.
+Pulteney urged the sovereign no longer to be content with the
+"shadow of royalty." He should use his "legal prerogatives" to
+check "the illegal claims of factious oligarchy." Government had
+become the private possession of a few powerful men. The king was
+but a puppet in leading strings. The basis of government should be
+widened, for every honest man was aware that distinctions of party
+were now merely nominal. The Tories should be admitted to place.
+They were now friendly to the accession and they no longer boasted
+their hostility to dissent. They knew that Toleration and the
+Establishment were of the essence of the Constitution. Were once
+the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would cease and
+Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom. "The
+ministers," he said, "will depend on the Crown not the Crown on
+ministers" if George but showed "his resolution to break all
+factitious connections and confederacies." The tone is
+Bolingbroke's, and it was the lesson George had <a name="page219"
+id="page219"></a>insistently heard from early youth. How sinister
+was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in
+political exile, with Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants
+threatening the whole basis of past liberties.</p>
+<p>The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the
+meaning of the new synthesis was Junius. That his anonymity
+concealed the malignant talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now
+beyond denial. Junius, indeed, can hardly claim a place in the
+history of political ideas. His genius lay not in the discussion of
+principle but the dissection of personality. His power lay in his
+style and the knowledge that enabled him to inform the general
+public of facts which were the private possession of the inner
+political circle. His mind was narrow and pedantic. He stood with
+Grenville on American taxation; and he maintained without
+perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough was a freehold
+beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He was never
+generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his
+calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness <a name=
+"page220" id="page220"></a>the nature of the issue and he was a
+powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king. He won a new
+audience for political conflict and that audience was the
+unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover,
+appearing as they did in the daily journals gave the press a
+significance in politics which it has never lost. He made the
+significance of George's effort known to the mass of men at a time
+when no other means of information was at hand. The opposition was
+divided; the king's friends were in a vast majority; the
+publication of debates was all but impossible. English government
+was a secret conflict in which the entrance of spectators was
+forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate. It was the
+glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. Not even the
+combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord
+Mansfield's doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of
+his vituperation and Wilkes' courage. Bad men have sometimes been
+the instruments of noble destiny; and there are few more curious
+episodes in English history than the result of this alliance
+between revengeful hate and insolent ambition.</p>
+<a name="page221" id="page221"></a>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was
+the ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict
+its real place in philosophy. There is no immortality save in
+ideas; and it was Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in
+which he was the liberal protagonist. His career is illustrative at
+once of the merits and defects of English politics in the
+eighteenth century. The son of an Irish Protestant lawyer and a
+Catholic mother, he served, after learning what Trinity College,
+Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to politics in the
+upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied, along with
+Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal; though
+the <i>Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful</i> (1756)
+shows his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made
+the special possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub
+Street that he appears to have attained that amazing amount of
+varied yet profound knowledge which made him without equal in the
+House of Commons. <a name="page222" id="page222"></a>His earliest
+production was a <i>Vindication of Natural Society</i> (1756),
+written in the manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in
+its imitative satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but
+also to become the basis of Godwin's <i>Political Justice</i>.
+After a vain attempt to serve in Ireland with "Single-Speech"
+Hamilton, he became the private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the
+leader of the one section of the Whig party to which an honorable
+record still remained. That connection secured for him a seat in
+Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six; and
+henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading
+members. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very
+outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still,
+in the eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in
+the short months during which he held office, the minor office of
+Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom
+all England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a
+place at the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a
+memory of great lovableness <a name="page223" id="page223"></a>and
+Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has endured as the
+permanent manual of political wisdom without which statesmen are as
+sailors on an uncharted sea.</p>
+<p>For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to
+obtain acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but
+to give deep comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a
+singularly lovable figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said
+Johnson; and Goldsmith has told us how he wound his way into a
+subject like a serpent. Macaulay thought him the greatest man since
+Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest master of civil wisdom in our
+tongue." "No English writer," says Sir Leslie Stephen, "has
+received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics." Even when the
+last criticism has been made, detraction from these estimates is
+impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent was his
+temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which he
+allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations
+with Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of <a name=
+"page224" id="page224"></a>his personal antipathies. As an orator,
+his speeches are often turgid, wanting in self-control, and full of
+those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone delighted to obscure
+his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal a magnificent
+loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of comparative
+poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe. His
+alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics,
+unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never
+guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public
+welfare. No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to
+the service of the nation with less regard for personal
+advancement. No English statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a
+mass of details to the principle they involve.</p>
+<p>He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no
+influence to whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics,
+indeed, bear upon their face the preoccupation with the immediate
+problems of the House of Commons. Yet through them all the
+principles that <a name="page225" id="page225"></a>emerge form a
+consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the
+passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw
+it with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to
+challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the
+maxims of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London
+out to India and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian
+ryot's wrongs as for the iniquities of English policy to Ireland.
+With less width of mind than Hume and less intensity of gaze than
+Adam Smith, he yet had a width and intensity which, fused with his
+own imaginative sympathy, gave him more insight than either. He had
+an unerring eye for the eternal principles of politics. He knew
+that ideals must be harnessed to an Act of Parliament if they are
+not to cease their influence. Admitting while he did that politics
+must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find good reason why
+expediency should be identified with what he saw as right. It is a
+stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English politics
+to whom a greater immediate <a name="page226" id=
+"page226"></a>influence may be ascribed, just as in political
+philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of Hobbes and
+Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and speculation
+his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like him
+before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer
+Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his
+practical insight was far less profound. Hamilton had Burke's full
+grasp of political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation. So
+that he remains a figure of uniqueness. He may, as Goldsmith said,
+have expended upon his party talents that should have illuminated
+the universal aspect of the State. Yet there is no question with
+which he dealt that he did not leave the richer for his
+enquiry.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the
+immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he
+was at every point upon the side of the future. Where
+constitutional reform was in debate no man <a name="page227" id=
+"page227"></a>saw more clearly than he the evils that needed
+remedy; though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the
+mark of timid conservatism. In the last decade of his life he
+encountered the greatest cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the
+Reformation, and it is not too much to say that at every point he
+missed the essence of its meaning. Yet even upon France and the
+English Constitution he was full of practical sagacity. Had his
+warning been uttered without the fury of hate that accompanied it,
+he might well have guided the forces of the Revolution into
+channels that would have left no space for the military
+dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real
+evils of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently
+inveighed, forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch
+of wise and continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and,
+at bottom, he had little regard for that popular sense of right
+which, upon occasion, he was ready to praise. What impressed him
+was less the evils of the constitution than its possibilities,
+could the defects quite alien from its nature but <a name="page228"
+id="page228"></a>be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a
+deeper vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to
+Burke's conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was
+too much the apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles
+involved in the overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense
+of a Divine Providence taking thought for the welfare of men to
+interfere with violence in his handiwork. The tinge of caution is
+never absent, even from his most liberal moments; and he was
+willing to endure great evil if it seemed dangerous to estimate the
+cost of change.</p>
+<p>His American speeches are the true text-book for colonial
+administration. He put aside the empty plea of right which
+satisfied legal pedants like George Grenville. What moved him was
+the tragic fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they
+could not maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom.
+He never concealed from himself that the success of America was
+bound up with the maintenance of English liberties. "Armies," he
+said many years later, "first victorious over Englishmen, in a
+conflict <a name="page229" id="page229"></a>for English
+constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated
+(though in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject
+subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of
+England itself." He had firm hold of that insidious danger which
+belittles freedom itself in the interest of curtailing some special
+desire. "In order to prove that the Americans have no right to
+their liberties," he said in the famous <i>Speech on Conciliation
+with America</i> (1775), "we are every day endeavoring to subvert
+the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own." The way for
+the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke saw,
+prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character
+of the American contest. His own receipt was sounder. In the
+<i>Speech on American Taxation</i> (1774) he had riddled the view
+that the fiscal methods of Lord North were likely to succeed. The
+true method was to find a way of peace. "Nobody shall persuade me,"
+he told a hostile House of Commons, "when a whole people are
+concerned that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation."
+<a name="page230" id="page230"></a>"Magnanimity in politics," he
+said in the next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a
+great empire and little minds go ill together." He did not know, in
+the most superb of all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment
+against a whole people. He would win the colonies by binding them
+to England with the ties of freedom. "The question with me," he
+said, "is not whether you have a right to render your people
+miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy."
+The problem, in fact, was one not of abstract right but of
+expediency; and nothing could be lost by satisfying American
+desire. Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was apparent to every
+first-class mind in England. But the obstinate king prevailed; and
+Burke's great protest remained no more than material for the
+legislation of the future. Yet it was something that ninety years
+after his speech the British North America Act should have given
+his dreams full substance.</p>
+<p>Ireland had always a place apart in Burke's affections, and when
+he first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in
+his thoughts was the <a name="page231" id="page231"></a>desire to
+assist its freedom. He saw that here, as in America, no man will be
+argued into slavery. A government which defied the fundamental
+impulses of men was bound to court disaster. How could it seek
+security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its
+subjects? Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the
+Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan? The system of
+Protestant control, he said in the <i>Letter to Sir Hercules
+Langrishe</i> (1792), was "well fitted for the oppression,
+impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in
+them of human nature itself." The Catholics paid their taxes; they
+served with glory in the army and navy. Yet they were denied a
+share in the commonwealth. "Common sense," he said, "and common
+justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a people for their
+slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for great, general
+and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them,
+or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that the body
+of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress them.
+"No man will <a name="page232" id="page232"></a>assert seriously,"
+he said, "that when people are of a turbulent spirit the best way
+to keep them in order is to furnish them with something to complain
+of." The advantages of subjects were, as he urged, their right; and
+a wise government would regard "all their reasonable wishes as so
+many claims." To neglect them was to have a nation full of
+uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.</p>
+<p>There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long
+attempt to mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research
+may well have shown that in some details he pressed the case too
+far; yet nothing has so far come to light to cast doubt upon the
+principles he there maintained. He was the first English statesman
+fully to understand the moral import of the problem of subject
+races; and if he did not make impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the
+future, at least he flung an eternal challenge to their malignant
+complacency. He did not ask the abandonment of British dominion in
+India, though he may have doubted the wisdom of its conquest. All
+that he insisted upon was this, that in imperial adventure the
+<a name="page233" id="page233"></a>conquering race must abide by a
+moral code. A lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white.
+The European must respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he
+would be compelled by law to respect them in his own State. "If we
+are not able," he said, "to contrive some method of governing India
+well which will not of necessity become the means of governing
+Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for their eternal separation,
+but none for sacrificing the people of that country to our
+constitution." England must be in India for India's benefit or not
+at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as the East
+India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are
+instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was
+the antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a
+magnificent passage, "before the eyes of the natives but an
+endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and
+passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is
+continually wasting." Sympathy with the native, regard for his
+habits and wants, the Company's servants failed to display. "The
+English youth in <a name="page234" id="page234"></a>India drink the
+intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads
+are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long
+before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have
+any opportunity to exert themselves for the excesses of their
+premature power. The consequences of their conduct, which in good
+minds (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce
+penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their
+flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are
+given to seas and winds to be blown about in every breaking up of
+the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean." More than a century
+was to pass before the wisest of Burke's interpreters attempted the
+translation of his maxims into statute. But there has never, in any
+language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in
+imperial adventure. "The situation of man," said Burke, "is the
+preceptor of his duty." He saw how a nation might become corrupted
+by the spoils of other lands. He knew that cruelty abroad is the
+parent of a later cruelty at home. Men will complain of <a name=
+"page235" id="page235"></a>their wrongdoing in the remoter empire;
+and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in
+unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield. He denied that
+the government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial
+transaction. Its problem was not to secure dividends but to
+accomplish moral benefit. He abhorred the politics of prestige. He
+knew the difficulties involved in administering distant
+territories, the ignorance and apathy of the public, the consequent
+erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong will fail of
+discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let us do
+what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can
+do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national
+reputation." That is a general truth not less in Africa and China
+than in India itself. The main thought in Burke's mind was the
+danger lest colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of
+arbitrary ideas. That his own safeguards were inadequate is clear
+enough at the present time. He knew that the need was good
+government. He did not nor could he realize how intimately that
+ideal was <a name="page236" id="page236"></a>connected with
+self-government. Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final
+outcome of his teaching.</p>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p>A background so consistent as this in the inflexible
+determination to moralize political action resulted in a noble
+edifice. Yet, through it all, the principles of policy are rather
+implied than admitted. It was when he came to deal with domestic
+problems and the French Revolution that Burke most clearly showed
+the real trend of his thought. That trend is unmistakable. Burke
+was a utilitarian who was convinced that what was old was valuable
+by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity. The State appeared to
+him an organic compound that came but slowly to its full splendour.
+It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible. Political
+philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from
+experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty.
+While he did not belittle the value of reason, he was always
+impressed by the immense part played by prejudice in the <a name=
+"page237" id="page237"></a>determination of policy. He had no doubt
+that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb
+prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates. Nor must
+we miss the religious aspect of his philosophy. He never doubted
+that religion was the foundation of the English State.
+"Englishmen," he said in the <i>Reflections on the French
+Revolution</i> (1790), "know, and what is better, we feel inwardly,
+that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all
+good and of all comfort." The utterance is characteristic, not
+merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its ultimate reliance
+upon a mystic explanation of social facts. Nothing was more alien
+from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. The only
+safeguard he could find was in empiricism.</p>
+<p>This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his
+earliest publication; but it remained with him to the end. He would
+not discuss America in terms of right. "I do not enter into these
+metaphysical distinctions," he said in the <i>Speech on American
+Taxation</i>, "I hate the very sound of them." "One sure symptom of
+an ill-conducted state," he wrote in the <a name="page238" id=
+"page238"></a><i>Reflections</i>, "is the propensity of the people
+to resort to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a
+<i>Speech on the Duration of Parliament</i>, "when men are driven
+to search into the foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of
+a social contract he declared "at best a confusion of judicial with
+civil principles," and he found no sense in the doctrine of popular
+sovereignty. "The lines of morality," he said in the <i>Appeal from
+the New to the Old Whigs</i> (1791), "are not like ideal lines of
+mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of
+exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and
+modifications are made, not by the process of logic but by the
+rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of the
+virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the
+regulator, the standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw
+the obvious conclusion. "This," he said, "is the true touchstone of
+all theories which regard man and the affairs of men&mdash;does it
+suit his nature in general, does it suit his nature as modified by
+his habits?"</p>
+<a name="page239" id="page239"></a>
+<p>Of the truth of this general attitude it is difficult to make
+denial. But when Burke came to apply it to the British Constitution
+the "rules of prudence" he was willing to admit are narrow enough
+to cause surprised enquiry. He did not doubt that the true end of a
+legislature was "to give a direction, a form, a technical dress ...
+to the general sense of the community"; he admitted that popular
+revolt is so much the outcome of suffering that in any dispute
+between government and people, the presumption is at least equal in
+the latter's favor. He urged the acceptance of Grenville's bill for
+improving the method of decision upon disputed elections. He made a
+magnificent defence of the popular cause in the Middlesex election.
+He was in favor of the publication of parliamentary debates and of
+the voting lists in divisions. He supported almost with passion the
+ending of that iniquitous system by which the enfranchisement of
+revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir of electoral
+support. His <i>Speech on Economical Reform</i> (1780) was the
+prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack upon the waste of
+the Civil list.</p>
+<a name="page240" id="page240"></a>
+<p>Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go.
+He was against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent
+ground that the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons
+less responsible. He opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the
+good and sufficient reason that it gave the executive an interest
+against the legislature. He would not, as in the great speech at
+Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that a member of Parliament was
+a mere delegate of his constituents rather than a representative of
+his own convictions. "Government and legislation," he said, "are
+matters of reason and of judgment"; and once the private member had
+honorably arrived at a decision which he thought was for the
+interest of the whole community, his duty was done. All this, in
+itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke's admirable grasp of
+the practical application of attractive theories to the event. But
+it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic
+constitutional change which is more dubious. He had no sympathy
+with the Radicals. "The bane of the Whigs," he said, "has been the
+admission <a name="page241" id="page241"></a>among them of the
+corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by persuading
+many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs
+inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers." "If
+the nation at large," he wrote in another letter, "has disposition
+enough to oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of
+government is, in my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the
+general disposition be against a virtuous and manly line of public
+conduct, there is no form into which it can be thrown that will
+improve its nature or add to its energy"; and in the same letter he
+foreshadows a possible retirement from the House of Commons as a
+protest against the growth of radical opinion in his party. He
+resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage qualification. He had
+no sympathy with the effort either to add to the county
+representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs. The framework of
+the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent. He deplored all
+criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials.
+"Our representation," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the
+<a name="page242" id="page242"></a>necessary imperfections of human
+affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to be." It was in the
+same temper that he resisted all effort at the political relief of
+the Protestant dissenters. "The machine itself," he had said, "is
+well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were
+sound"; and he never moved from that opinion.</p>
+<p>Burke's attitude was obsolete even while he wrote; yet the
+suggestiveness of his very errors makes examination of their ground
+important. Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the
+name of expediency. His opponents argued that, since men are by
+nature equal, it must follow that they have an equal right to
+self-government. To Burke, the admission of this principle would
+have meant the overthrow of the British constitution. Its
+implication was that every institution not of immediate popular
+origin should be destroyed. To secure their ends, he thought, the
+radicals were compelled to preach the injustice of those
+institutions and thus to injure that affection for government upon
+which peace and security depend. Here was an effort <a name=
+"page243" id="page243"></a>to bring all institutions to the test of
+logic which he thought highly dangerous. "No rational man ever did
+govern himself," he said, "by abstractions and universals." The
+question for him was not the abstract rightness of the system upon
+some set of <i>a priori</i> principles but whether, on the whole,
+that system worked for the happiness of the community. He did not
+doubt that it did; and to overthrow a structure so nobly tested by
+the pressure of events in favor of some theories outside historic
+experience seemed to him ruinous to society. Government, for him,
+was the general harmony of diverse interests; and the continual
+adjustments and exquisite modifications of which it stood in need
+were admirably discovered in the existing system. Principles were
+thus unimportant compared to the problem of their application. "The
+major," he said of all political premises, "makes a pompous figure
+in the battle, but the victory depends upon the little minor of
+circumstances."</p>
+<p>To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription. The
+presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and <a name=
+"page244" id="page244"></a>when we change, we act at our peril.
+"Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid of all titles,
+not only to property, but to what is to secure that property, to
+government." Because he saw the State organically he was impressed
+by the smallness both of the present moment and the individual's
+thought. It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the species
+is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost
+always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had
+the opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should
+be to preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a
+reason; and that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So
+the prescriptive title becomes "not the creature, but the master,
+of positive law ... the soundest, the most general and the most
+recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or
+public jurisprudence." It is by prescription that he defends the
+existence of Catholicism in Ireland not less than the supposed
+deformities of the British Constitution. So, too, his main attack
+on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be <a name=
+"page245" id="page245"></a>discussed." He does not say that all
+which is has rightness in it; but at least he urges that to doubt
+it is to doubt the construction of a past experience which built
+according to the general need. Nor does he doubt the chance that
+what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist that at least it
+gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth," he said, "may
+be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that certainty in
+the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were
+evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company
+charity, the highest of the virtues."</p>
+<p>Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a
+defence of political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards
+against that danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past
+experience was balanced by a general admission that particular
+circumstances must always govern the immediate decision. "When the
+reason of old establishments is gone," he said in his <i>Speech on
+Economical Reform</i>, "it is absurd to preserve nothing but the
+burden of them." "A disposition to preserve and an ability <a name=
+"page246" id="page246"></a>to improve," he wrote in the
+<i>Reflections on the French Revolution</i>, "taken together would
+be my standard of a statesman." But that "ability to improve"
+conceals two principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold. "All
+the reformations we have hitherto made," he said, "have proceeded
+upon the principle of reference to antiquity"; and the <i>Appeal
+from the New to the Old Whigs</i>, which is the most elaborate
+exposition of his general attitude, proceeds upon the general basis
+that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future. Nor is this all. "If
+I cannot reform with equity," said Burke, "I will not reform at
+all"; and equity seems here to mean a sacrifice of the present and
+its passionate demands to the selfish errors of past policy.</p>
+<p>Burke, indeed, was never a democrat, and that is the real root
+of his philosophy. He saw the value of the party-system, and he
+admitted the necessity of some degree of popular representation.
+But he was entirely satisfied with current Whig principles, could
+they but be purged of their grosser deformities. He knew too well
+how little reason is wont to enter into the <a name="page247" id=
+"page247"></a>formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice
+of innovation to its power. He saw so much of virtue in the old
+order, that he insisted upon the equation of virtue with
+quintessence. Men of great property and position using their
+influence as a public trust, delicate in their sense of honor, and
+acting only from motives of right&mdash;these seemed to him the men
+who should with justice exercise political power. He did not doubt
+that "there is no qualification for government but virtue and
+wisdom ... wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever
+state, condition, profession or trade, the passport to heaven"; but
+he is careful to dissociate the possibility that they can be found
+in those who practice the mechanical arts. He did not mean that his
+aristocracy should govern without response to popular demand. He
+had no objection to criticism, nor to the public exercise of
+government. There was no reason even for agreement, so long as each
+party was guided by an honorable sense of the public good. This, so
+he urged, was the system which underlay the temporary evils of the
+British Constitution. An <a name="page248" id=
+"page248"></a>aristocracy delegated to do its work by the mass of
+men was the best form of government his imagination could conceive.
+It meant that property must be dominant in the system of
+government, that, while office should be open to all, it should be
+out of the reach of most. "The characteristic essence of property,"
+he wrote in the <i>Reflections</i>, "... is to be unequal"; and he
+thought the perpetuation of that inequality by inheritance "that
+which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself." The system
+was difficult to maintain, and it must be put out of the reach of
+popular temptation. "Our constitution," he said in the <i>Present
+Discontents</i>, "stands on a nice equipoise, with sharp precipices
+and deep waters on all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous
+leaning towards one side, there may be a danger towards oversething
+it on the other." In straining, that is to say, after too large a
+purification, we may end with destruction. And Burke, of course,
+was emphatic upon the need that property should be undisturbed. It
+was always, he thought, at a great disadvantage in any struggle
+with ability; and there are many <a name="page249" id=
+"page249"></a>passages in which he urges the consequent special
+representation which the adequate defence of property requires.</p>
+<p>The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers
+over-impressed by the sanctity of past experience. Hegel and
+Savigny in Germany, Taine and Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and
+Lecky in England, have all urged what is in effect a similar plea.
+We must not break what Bagehot called the cake of custom, for men
+have been trained to its digestion, and new food breeds trouble.
+Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a people, and
+while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform. The true idea of
+national development is always latent in the past experience of the
+race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be
+drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless
+unconsciousness; and without this loyalty to inherited institutions
+the fabric of society would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact,
+depends upon the performance of actions defined in preconceived
+channels; and if we obeyed those novel impulses of right which
+seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance, we <a name="page250"
+id="page250"></a>should disturb beyond repair the intricate
+equilibrium of countless ages. The experience of the past rather
+than the desires of the present is thus the true guide to our
+policy. "We ought," he said in a famous sentence, "to venerate
+where we are unable presently to comprehend."</p>
+<p>It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at
+the French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the
+destiny which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the
+eighteenth century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand
+but also to hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change
+in tests of religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard
+the whole religious edifice. He would not support the abolition
+even of the most flagrant abuses in the system of representation;
+and he was to see in France an overthrow of a monarchy even more
+august in its prescriptive rights than the English Parliament.
+Privileges were scattered to the winds in a single night. Peace was
+sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical theories of equality and
+justice which he most deeply abhorred. The <a name="page251" id=
+"page251"></a>doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in
+that last and noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps
+its most perfect justification. On all hands there was the sense of
+a new world built by the immediate thought of man upon the
+wholehearted rejection of past history. Politics was emphatically
+declared to be a system of which the truths could be stated in
+terms of mathematical certainty. The religious spirit which Burke
+was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before a general
+scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared
+incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the
+centre of social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of
+those prescriptive privileges which Burke regarded as the
+protective armour of the body politic. Above all, the men who
+seized the reins of power became convinced that theirs was a
+specific of universal application. Their disciples in England
+seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves. In a moment of
+time, the England which had been the example to Europe of ordered
+popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only <a name=
+"page252" id="page252"></a>less barbaric than the despotic princes
+of the continent. That Price and Priestley should suffer the
+infection was, even for Burke, a not unnatural thing. But when
+Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty years for its
+antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too great to pay
+for the overthrow of the Revolution.</p>
+<p>Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point
+consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported
+the Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without
+meaning; for in the one there is no word that can honorably be
+twisted to support the other. And when we make allowances for the
+grave errors of personal taste, the gross exaggeration, the
+inability to see the Revolution as something more than a single
+point in time, it becomes obvious enough that his criticism, de
+Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we possess from the
+generation which knew the movement as a living thing. The attempt
+to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as the
+essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private
+<a name="page253" id="page253"></a>to the king, the inevitable
+precursor of dictatorship. He realized that freedom is born of a
+certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of doctrinaire
+thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form which
+underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he
+exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political
+wisdom. "The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the
+<i>Reflections</i>, "the objects of society are of the greatest
+possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or
+direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the
+quality of his affairs." The note recurs in substance throughout
+his criticism. Much of its application, indeed, will not stand for
+one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for instance, he
+correlates the monarchical government of France with the English
+constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688. The
+French made every effort to find the secret of English principles,
+but the roots were absent from their national experience.</p>
+<p>A year after the publication of the <i>Reflections</i> he
+himself perceived the <a name="page254" id="page254"></a>narrowness
+of that judgment. In the <i>Thoughts on French Affairs</i> (1791)
+he saw that the essence of the Revolution was its foundation in
+theoretic dogma. It was like nothing else in the history of the
+world except the Reformation; which last event it especially
+resembles in its genius for self-propagation. Herein he has already
+envisaged the importance of that "<i>patrie intellectuelle</i>"
+which Tocqueville emphasized as born of the Revolution. That led
+Burke once again to insist upon the peculiar genius of each
+separate state, the difficulties of a change, the danger of
+grafting novelties upon an ancient fabric. He saw the certainty
+that in adhering to an abstract metaphysical scheme the French were
+in truth omitting human nature from their political equation; for
+general ideas can find embodiment in institutional forms only after
+they have been moulded by a thousand varieties of circumstance. The
+French created an universal man not less destructive of their
+practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists. They
+omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must
+demand; with the result <a name="page255" id="page255"></a>that,
+despite themselves, they came rather to destroy than to fulfil.
+Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the harvest of their
+failure.</p>
+<p>Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of
+the past which played so large a part in the revolutionary
+consciousness. "We are afraid," he wrote in the <i>Reflections</i>,
+"to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of
+reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,
+and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the
+general bank and capital of nations and of ages." Of
+Si&eacute;y&egrave;s' building constitutions overnight, this is no
+unfair picture; but it points a more general truth never long
+absent from Burke's mind. Man is for him so much the creature of
+prejudice, so much a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance
+of novel thought finding a peaceful place among his institutions is
+always small. For Burke, thought is always at the service of the
+instincts, and these lie buried in the remote experience of the
+state. So that men like Robespierre were asking from their subjects
+an impossible task. <a name="page256" id="page256"></a>That which
+they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations
+was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and
+desired to be enduring. Burke looks with sober admiration at the
+way in which the English revolution related itself at every point
+to ideas and theories with which the average man was as familiar as
+with the physical landmarks of his own neighborhood. For the
+motives which underlie all human effort are, he thought,
+sufficiently constant to compel regard. That upon which they feed
+submits to change; but the effort is slow and the disappointments
+many. The Revolution taught the populace the thirst for power. But
+it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human effort
+without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it
+exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it
+suffers limitation to right ends.</p>
+<p>The later part of Burke's attack upon the Revolution does not
+belong to political philosophy. No man is more responsible than he
+for the temper which drew England into war. He came to write rather
+with the zeal of a fanatic waging a holy <a name="page257" id=
+"page257"></a>war than in the temper of a statesman confronted with
+new ideas. Yet even the <i>Letters on a Regicide Peace</i> (1796)
+have flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that
+even in the midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. So
+that it is permissible to think he did not lightly pen those
+sentences on peace which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert of
+extravagant rhetoric. "War never leaves where it found a nation,"
+he wrote, "it is never to be entered upon without mature
+deliberation." That was a lesson his generation had still to learn;
+nor did it take to heart the even nobler passage that follows. "The
+blood of man," he said, "should never be shed but to redeem the
+blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for
+our God, for our country, for mankind. The rest is vanity; the rest
+is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that century's
+history that these words were written to justify an effort of which
+they supply an irrefutable condemnation.</p>
+<a name="page258" id="page258"></a>
+<h4>V</h4>
+<p>Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two
+angles. It is easy to show that his picture of the British
+Constitution was remote from the facts even when he wrote. Every
+change that he opposed was essential to the security of the next
+generation; and there followed none of the disastrous consequences
+he had foreshadowed. Such criticism would be at almost every point
+just; and yet it would fail to touch the heart of Burke's position.
+What is mainly needed is analysis at once of his omissions and of
+the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke came to his
+maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we have it
+upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so clearly
+apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in
+what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian
+changes of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment
+even for him who burdened himself unduly to restore the
+Beaconsfield estate. No man was more eager than he that the public
+should be admitted to the <a name="page259" id=
+"page259"></a>mysteries of political debate; yet he steadfastly
+refused to draw the obvious inference that once the means of
+government were made known those who possessed the knowledge would
+demand their share in its application. He did not see that the
+metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself the offspring of
+that contemptible worship of expediency which Blackstone
+generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the
+adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights
+has been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a
+sense to have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining
+the foundations of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that
+the constant dissatisfaction with those foundations his age
+expressed is the expression of serious ill in the body politic is
+wilfully blind to the facts at issue. No one had more faithfully
+than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete;
+yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative
+to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was
+the cause of that disquiet of which he realized that Wilkes was but
+the symptom.</p>
+<a name="page260" id="page260"></a>
+<p>Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign
+of political privilege was drawing to its close. That is the real
+meaning of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream
+of tendency not less active in England than abroad. In France,
+indeed, the lines were more sharply drawn than elsewhere. The
+rights men craved were not, as Burke insisted, the immediate
+offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the result of a determination to
+end the malignant wrong of centuries. A power that knew no
+responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only from the
+accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation to
+offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay,
+these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his
+generation to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past.
+It is not difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the
+tennis-court at Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to
+be condemned. Burke's caution was for them the timidity of one who
+embraces existent evils rather than fly to the refuge of an
+accessible good. In a less degree, <a name="page261" id=
+"page261"></a>the same is true of England. The constitution that
+Burke called upon men to worship was the constitution which made
+the Duke of Bedford powerful, that gave no representation to
+Manchester and a member to Old Sarum, which enacted the game laws
+and left upon the statute-book a penal code which hardly yielded to
+the noble attack of Romilly. These, which were for Burke merely the
+accidental excrescences of a noble ideal, were for them its inner
+essence; and where they could not reform they were willing to
+destroy.</p>
+<p>The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of
+the past as the very institutions it came to condemn. The
+innovations were the inevitable outcome of past oppression. Burke
+refused to see that aspect of the picture. He ascribed to the crime
+of the present what was due to the half-wilful errors of the past.
+The man who grounded his faith in historic experience refused to
+admit as history the elements alien from his special outlook. He
+took that liberty not to venerate where he was unable to comprehend
+which he denied to his opponents. Nor did he admit the uses to
+which his doctrine of <a name="page262" id=
+"page262"></a>prescription was bound to be put in the hands of
+selfish and unscrupulous men. No one will object to privilege for a
+Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a different
+thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of whom
+Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham
+will one day emerge. He justifies the privileges of the English
+Church in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to
+see what men like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do
+with religion. The doctrine of prescription might be admirable if
+all statesmen were so wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men
+it becomes no more than the protective armour of vested interests
+into the ethics of which it refuses us leave to examine.</p>
+<p>That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke's philosophy, and
+it deserves more examination than it has received. In part it is a
+rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning
+animal. It puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human
+action; and it thus is distrustful of thought as leading into
+channels to which the nature of man is not adapted. <a name=
+"page263" id="page263"></a>Novelty, which is assumed to be the
+outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon
+which civilization depends. Thought is destructive of peace; and it
+is argued that we know too little of political phenomena to make us
+venture into the untried places to which thought invites us. Yet
+the first of many answers is surely the most obvious fact that if
+man is so much the creature of his custom no reason would prevail
+save where they proved inadequate. If thought is simply a reserve
+power in society, its strength must obviously depend upon common
+acceptance; and that can only come when some routine has failed to
+satisfy the impulses of men.</p>
+<p>But we may urge a difficulty that is even more decisive. No
+system of habits can ever hope to endure long in a world where the
+cumulative power of memory enables change to be so swift; and no
+system of habits can endure at all unless its underlying idea
+represents the satisfaction of a general desire. It must, that is
+to say, make rational appeal; and, indeed, as Aristotle said, it
+can have virtue only to the point where it is conscious of itself.
+The uncritical routine of which Burke is <a name="page264" id=
+"page264"></a>the sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of
+virtue. Yet in modern civilization the whole strength of any custom
+depends upon exactly that consciousness of right which Burke
+restricted to his aristocracy. Our real need is less the automatic
+response to ancient stimulus than power to know what stimulus has
+social value. We need, that is to say, the gift of criticism rather
+than the gift of inert acceptance. Not, of course, that the habits
+which Burke so earnestly admired are at all part of our nervous
+endowment in any integral sense. The short space of the French
+Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an
+essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the
+Burkian school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in
+history, we take that as proof of the ease with which essential
+habit may be acquired. Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys
+the finer side of civilized life. It may leave a stratum to whom
+its riches have been discovered; but it leaves the mass of men
+soulless automata without spontaneous response to the chords struck
+by another hand.</p>
+<a name="page265" id="page265"></a>
+<p>Burke's answer would, of course, have been that he was not a
+democrat. He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity
+as low. He thought of the people&mdash;it was obviously a
+generalization from his time&mdash;as consistently prone to
+disorder and checked only by the force of ancient habit. Yet he has
+himself supplied the answer to that attitude. "My observation," he
+said in his <i>Speech on the East India Bill</i>, "has furnished me
+with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or education
+which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of
+government." We can go further than that sober caution. We know
+that there is one technique only capable of securing good
+government and that is the training of the mass of men to interest
+in it. We know that no State can hope for peace in which large
+types of experience are without representation. Indeed, if proof
+were here wanting, an examination of the eighteenth century would
+supply it. Few would deny that statesmen are capable of
+disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life they are
+ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the
+dominant class is <a name="page266" id="page266"></a>too intimate
+to permit with safety the exclusion of a part of the State from
+sharing in its guidance. Nor did Burke remember his own wise saying
+that "in all disputes between the people and their rulers the
+presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people"; and he
+quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully's which traces
+popular violence to popular suffering. No one can watch the
+economic struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or
+calculate the pain they have involved to humble men, without
+admitting that they represent the final protest of an outraged mind
+against oppression too intolerable to be borne. Burke himself, as
+his own speeches show, knew little or nothing of the pain involved
+in the agrarian changes of his age. The one way to avoid violent
+outbreak is not exclusion of the people from power but their
+participation in it. The popular sense of right may often, as
+Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of statesmen. It is not
+necessary to equate the worth of untrained commonsense with
+experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run, neglect of
+common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.</p>
+<a name="page267" id="page267"></a>
+<p>This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground. For the case against
+Burke's aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal.
+He did not inquire by what right a handful of men were to be
+hereditary governors of a whole people. Expediency is no answer to
+the question, for Bentham was presently to show how shallow was
+that basis of consent. Once it is admitted that the personality of
+men is entitled to respect institutional room must be found for its
+expression. The State is morally stunted where their powers go
+undeveloped. There is something curious here in Burke's inability
+to suspect deformity in a system which gave his talents but partial
+place. He must have known that no one in the House of Commons was
+his equal. He must have known how few of those he called upon to
+recognize the splendor of their function were capable of playing
+the part he pictured for them. The answer to a morally bankrupt
+aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in its
+purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact
+that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness
+<a name="page268" id="page268"></a>for power. Burke gave no hint of
+how the level of his governing class could be maintained. He said
+nothing of what education might accomplish for the people. He did
+not examine the obvious consequences of their economic status. Had
+his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of that
+States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in
+their inexperience, might have given him pause. The "obscure
+provincial advocates ... stewards of petty local jurisdictions ...
+the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation"
+legislated, out of their inexperience, for the world. Their
+resolution, their constancy, their high sense of the national need,
+were precisely the qualities Burke demanded in his governing class;
+and the States-General did not move from the straight path he laid
+down until they met with intrigue from those of whom Burke became
+the licensed champion.</p>
+<p>Nor is it in the least clear that his emphasis upon expediency
+is, in any real way, a release from metaphysical inquiry. Rather
+may it be urged that what was needed in Burke's philosophy was the
+<a name="page269" id="page269"></a>clear avowal of the metaphysic
+it implied. Nothing is more greatly wanted in political inquiry
+than discovery of that "intuition more subtle than any articulate
+major premise" which, as Mr. Justice Holmes has said, is the true
+foundation of so many of our political judgments. The theory of
+natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong
+rather in its form than in its substance. It clearly suffered from
+its mistaken effort to trace to an imaginary state of nature what
+was due to a complex experience. It suffered also from its desire
+to lay down universal formul&aelig;. It needed to state the rights
+demanded in terms of the social interests they involved rather than
+in the abstract ethic they implied. But the demands which underlay
+the thought of men like Price and Priestley was as much the
+offspring of experience as Burke's own doctrine. They made, indeed,
+the tactical mistake of seeking to give an unripe philosophic form
+to a political strategy wherein, clearly enough, Burke was their
+master. But no one can read the answers of Paine and Mackintosh,
+who both were careful to avoid the panoply of <a name="page270" id=
+"page270"></a>metaphysics, to the <i>Reflections</i>, without
+feeling that Burke failed to move them from their main position.
+Expediency may be admirable in telling the statesmen what to do;
+but it does not explain the sources of his ultimate act, nor
+justify the thing finally done. The unconscious deeps which lie
+beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent than the
+motives that are avowed. Action is less their elimination than
+their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we
+have the full materials for judgment.</p>
+<p>Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is
+surely unanswerable. The things that men desire correspond, in some
+rough fashion, to the things they need. Natural rights are nothing
+more than the armour evolved to protect their vital interests. Upon
+the narrow basis of legal history it is, of course, impossible to
+protect them. History is rather the record of the thwarting of
+human desire than of its achievement. But upon the value of certain
+things there is a sufficient and constant opinion to give us
+assurance that repression will ultimately involve disorder. Nor is
+there any difference between the <a name="page271" id=
+"page271"></a>classes of men in this regard. Forms, indeed, will
+vary; and the power we have of answering demand will always wait
+upon the discoveries of science. Our natural rights, that is to
+say, will have a changing content simply because this is not a
+static world. But that does not mean, as Burke insisted, that they
+are empty of experience. They come, of course, mainly from men who
+have been excluded from intimate contact with the fruits of power.
+Nonconformists in religion, workers without land or capital save
+the power of their own hands, it is from the disinherited that they
+draw, as demands, their strength. Yet it is difficult to see, as
+Burke would undoubtedly have insisted, that they are the worse from
+the source whence they derive. Rather do they point to grave
+inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of
+which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience. The
+unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his
+lack of moral insight into the problem he confronted.</p>
+<p>That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation;
+and its cause seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic <a name="page272"
+id="page272"></a>outlook. He was profoundly religious; and he did
+not doubt that the order of the universe was the command of God. It
+was, as a consequence, beneficent; and to deny its validity was,
+for him, to doubt the wisdom of God. "Having disposed," he wrote,
+"and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will,
+but to His, He had, in and by that disposition, vitally subjected
+us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us." The
+State, in fact, it is to be built upon the sacrifice of men; and
+this they must accept as of the will of God. We are to do our duty
+in our allotted station without repining, in anticipation,
+doubtless, of a later reward. What we are is thus the expression of
+his goodness; and there is a real sense in which Burke may be said
+to have maintained the inherent rightness of the existing order.
+Certainly he throws a cloak of religious veneration about the
+purely metaphysical concept of property; and his insistence upon
+the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely part of the same
+attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect this background with his
+antagonism to the French Revolution. What there was <a name=
+"page273" id="page273"></a>most distressing to him was the
+overthrowal of the Church, and he did not hesitate, in very
+striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion with infidelity.
+Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced that a
+social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his <i>Letters on a
+Regicide Peace</i> have a good deal of that relentless illogic
+which made de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from
+ultramontanism with the road to a denial of all faith. Nothing is
+more difficult than to deal with a thinker who has had a
+revelation; and this sense that the universe was a divine mystery
+not to be too nearly scrutinized by man grew greatly upon Burke in
+his later years. It was not an attitude which reason could
+overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the presence of
+facts to which reason is a stranger.</p>
+<p>There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him,
+like later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties
+with something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him
+was the idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought,
+deformed it, <a name="page274" id="page274"></a>was not of the
+essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that the degree
+to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the purpose
+itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the
+deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the
+beauty of the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic
+philosophy that it should come to the examination of facts in so
+optimistic a temper. It never sufficiently realizes that in the
+transition from theoretic purpose to practical realization a
+significant transformation may occur. We do not come to grips with
+the facts. What we are bidden to remember is the splendor of what
+the facts are trying to be. The existing order is beatified as a
+necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to separate out
+the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts in time
+and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do not
+at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.</p>
+<p>Yet it is surely evident that in the heat and stress of social
+life, we cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our
+judgment. We may well enough regard the <a name="page275" id=
+"page275"></a>corruption of the monarchy under the later
+Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under
+Victoria; but that does not make it any the less corrupt. We may
+even see how a monistic view of society is possible to one who,
+like Burke, is uniquely occupied with the public good. But the men
+who, like Muir and Hardy in the treason trials of the Revolution,
+think rather in terms of the existing disharmonies than the beauty
+of the purpose upon which they rest, are only human if they think
+those disharmonies more real than the purpose they do not meet.
+They were surely to be pardoned if, reading the <i>Reflections</i>
+of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more vital than their
+harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with which
+privileges they did not share were defended. It is even possible to
+understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as
+Burke had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it
+was against that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that
+they were in revolt. For them the fact of discontinuity was vital.
+They could not but ask for happiness in their own individual lives
+<a name="page276" id="page276"></a>no less than in the State of
+which they were part. They came to see that without self-government
+in the sense of their own active participation in power, such
+happiness must go unfulfilled. The State, in fact, may have the
+noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also
+mortal men. The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic.
+The test of allegiance to established institutions became
+immediately the achievement for which they were responsible. The
+achievement, as they urged, was hardly written with adequacy in
+terms of the lives of humble men. That was why they judged no
+attitude of worth which sought the equation of the real and the
+ideal. The first lesson of their own experience of power was the
+need for its limitation by the instructed judgment of free
+minds.<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref18" id="fnref18" href=
+"#fn18">[18]</a></span></p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn18" id="fn18" href=
+"#fnref18">[18]</a></span> Cf. my <i>Authority in the Modern
+State</i>, pp. 65-9.</div>
+<h4>VI</h4>
+<p>No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the
+romantic movement, to the <i>Contrat Social</i> of Rousseau and the
+<i>Political Justice</i> of Godwin, than was <a name="page277" id=
+"page277"></a>Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the romantics
+that Burke's fundamental influence remains. His attitude to reason,
+his exaltation of passion and imagination over the conscious logic
+of men, were of the inmost stuff of which they were made. In that
+sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative
+revolution of the generation which followed him. Hegel and Savigny
+in Germany, de Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the
+later Wordsworth in England, are in a true sense his disciples.
+That does not mean that any of them were directly conscious of his
+work but that the movement he directed had its necessary outcome in
+their defence of his ideals. The path of history is strewn with
+undistributed middles; and it is possible that in the clash between
+his attitude and that of Bentham there were the materials for a
+fuller synthesis in a later time. Certainly there is no more
+admirable corrective in historical politics that the contrast they
+afford.</p>
+<p>It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the
+greatness of his effort. Perspective apart, he is destined
+doubtless to live rather as the author of some <a name="page278"
+id="page278"></a>maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than
+as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished
+implications, is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or
+Bentham. His very defects are lessons in themselves. His
+unhesitating inability to see how dangerous is the concentration of
+property is standing proof that men are over-prone to judge the
+rightness of a State by their own wishes. His own contempt for the
+results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless lesson in the virtue
+of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His disregard of popular
+desire suggests the fatal ease with which we neglect the opinion of
+those who stand outside the active centre of political conflict.
+Above all, his hostility to the Revolution should at least make
+later generations beware lest novelty of outlook be unduly
+confounded with erroneous doctrine.</p>
+<p>Yet even when such deduction has been made, there is hardly a
+greater figure in the history of political thought in England.
+Without the relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the
+moral insight of T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties
+of each. He <a name="page279" id="page279"></a>brought to the
+political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a
+lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity,
+such as no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of
+insight are things that go, as few men have ever gone, into the
+hidden deeps of political complexity. Unquestionably, his
+speculation is rather that of the orator in the tribune than of the
+thinker in his study. He never forgot his party, and he wrote
+always in that House of Commons atmosphere which makes a man unjust
+to the argument and motives of his opponent. Yet, when the last
+word of criticism has been made, the balance of illumination is
+immense. He illustrates at its best the value of that party-system
+the worth of which made so deep an impression on all he wrote. He
+showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate
+great principles. He showed also that allegiance to party is never
+inconsistent with the deeper allegiance to the demand of
+conscience. When he came to the House of Commons, the prospects of
+representative government were very dark; and it is mainly to his
+emphasis <a name="page280" id="page280"></a>upon its virtues that
+its victory must be attributed. Institutional change is likely to
+be more rapid than in his generation; for we seem to have reached
+that moment when, as he foresaw, "they who persist in opposing that
+mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of
+Providence itself than the mere designs of men." The principles
+upon which we proceed are doubtless different from those that he
+commended; yet his very challenge to their wisdom only gives to his
+warning a deeper inspiration for our effort.</p>
+<hr class="long" />
+<a name="page281" id="page281"></a>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h3>THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p>The Industrial Revolution is hardly less a fundamental change in
+the habits of English thought than in the technique of commercial
+production. Alongside the discoveries of Hargreaves and Crompton,
+the ideas of Hume and Adam Smith shifted the whole perspective of
+men's minds. The Revolution, indeed, like all great movements, did
+not originate at any given moment. There was no sudden invention
+which made the hampering system of government-control seem
+incompatible with industrial advance. The mercantilism against
+which the work of Adam Smith was so magistral a protest was already
+rather a matter of external than internal commerce when he wrote.
+He triumphed less because he suddenly opened men's eyes to a truth
+hitherto concealed than because he represented the <a name=
+"page282" id="page282"></a>culmination of certain principles which,
+under various aspects, were common to his time. The movement for
+religious toleration is not only paralleled in the next century by
+the movement for economic freedom, but is itself in a real sense
+the parent of the latter. For it is not without significance that
+the pre-Adamite economists were almost without exception the urgent
+defenders of religious toleration. The landowners were churchmen,
+the men of commerce largely Nonconformist; and religious
+proscription interfered with the balance of trade. When the roots
+of religious freedom had been secured, it was easy for them to
+transfer their argument to the secular sphere.</p>
+<p>Nothing, indeed, is more important in the history of English
+political philosophy than to realize that from Stuart times the
+Nonconformists were deeply bitten with distrust of government. Its
+courts of special instance hampered industrial life at every turn
+in the interest of religious conformity. Their heavy fines and
+irritating restrictions upon foreign workmen were nothing so much
+as a tax upon industrial progress. What the Nonconformists <a name=
+"page283" id="page283"></a>wanted was to be left alone; and
+Davenant explained the root of their desire when he tells of the
+gaols crowded with substantial tradesmen whose imprisonment spelt
+unemployment for thousands of workmen. Sir William Temple, in his
+description of Holland, represents economic prosperity as the child
+of toleration. The movement for ecclesiastical freedom in England,
+moreover, became causally linked with that protest against the
+system of monopolies with which it was the habit of the court to
+reward its favorites. Freedom in economic matters, like freedom in
+religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity shall
+exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition.
+The latter easily became imbued with religious significance.
+English puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work
+was the will of God and its performance the test of grace. The
+greater the energy of its performance, the greater the likelihood
+of prosperity; and thence it is but a step to argue that the free
+development of a man's industrial worth is the law of God. Success
+in business, indeed, became for many a test of <a name="page284"
+id="page284"></a>religious grace, and poverty the proof of God's
+disfavor. Books like Steele's <i>Religious Tradesman</i> (1684)
+show clearly how close is the connection. The hostility of the
+English landowners to the commercial classes in the eighteenth
+century is at bottom the inheritance of religious antagonism. The
+typical qualities of dissent became a certain pushful exertion by
+which the external criteria of salvation could be secured.</p>
+<p>Much of the contemporary philosophy, moreover, fits in with this
+attitude. From the time of Bacon, the main object of speculation
+was to disrupt the scholastic teleology. In the result the State
+becomes dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the
+self-interest of each is the starting-point of all inquiry. Hobbes
+built his state upon the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the
+individual enter political life for the benefits that accrue
+therefrom. The cynicism of Mandeville, the utilitarianism of Hume,
+are only bypaths of the same tradition. The organic society of the
+middle ages gives place to an individual who builds the State out
+of his own desires. Liberty becomes their <a name="page285" id=
+"page285"></a>realization; and the object of the State is to enable
+men in the fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their
+private wants. How far is that conception from the Anglican outlook
+of the seventeenth century, a sermon of Laud's makes clear. "If any
+man," he said,<span class="fnref"><a name="fnref19" id="fnref19"
+href="#fn19">[19]</a></span> "be so addicted to his private
+interest that he neglects the common State, he is void of the sense
+of piety, and wishes peace and happiness for himself in vain. For,
+whoever he be, he must live in the body of the commonwealth and in
+the body of the Church." So Platonic an outlook was utterly alien
+from the temper of puritanism. They had no thought of sacrificing
+themselves to an institution which they had much ground for
+thinking existed only for their torment. The development of the
+religious instinct to the level of salvation found its philosophic
+analogue in the development of the economic sense of fitness. The
+State became the servant of the individual from being his master;
+and service became equated with an internal policy of
+<i>laissez-faire</i>.</p>
+<div class="fn"><span class="fnnum"><a name="fn19" id="fn19" href=
+"#fnref19">[19]</a></span> Sermon of June 19, 1621. Works (ed. of
+1847), p. 28.</div>
+<p>Such summary, indeed, abridges the <a name="page286" id=
+"page286"></a>long process of release from which the eighteenth
+century had still to suffer; nor does it sufficiently insist upon
+the degree to which the old idea of state control still held sway
+in external policies of trade. Mercantilism was still in the
+ascendant when Adam Smith came to write. Few statesmen of
+importance before the younger Pitt had learned the secret of its
+fallacies; and, indeed, the chief ground for difference between
+Chatham and Burke was the former's suspicion that Burke had
+embraced the noxious doctrine of free trade. Mercantilism, by the
+time of Locke, is not the simple error that wealth consists in
+bullion but the insistence that the balance of trade must be
+preserved. Partly it was doubtless derived from the methods of the
+old political arithmetic of men like Petty and Davenant; the
+individual seeks a balance at the end of his year's accounting and
+so, too, the State must have a balance. "A Kingdom," said Locke,
+"grows rich or poor just as a farmer does, and no other way"; and
+while there is a sense in which this is wholly true, the meaning
+attached to it by the mercantilists was that foreign <a name=
+"page287" id="page287"></a>competition meant national weakness.
+They could not conceive a commercial bargain which was profitable
+to both sides. Nations grow prosperous at each other's expense;
+wherefore a woolen trade in Ireland necessarily spells English
+unemployment. Even Davenant, who was in many respects on the high
+road to free trade, was in this problem adamant. Protection was
+essential in the colonial market; for unless the trade of the
+colonies was directed through England they might be dangerous
+rivals. So Ireland and America were sacrificed to the fear of
+British merchants, with the inevitable result that repression
+brought from both the obvious search for remedy.</p>
+<p>Herein it might appear that Adam Smith had novelty to
+contribute; yet nothing is more certain than that his full sense of
+the world as the only true unit of marketing was fully grasped
+before him. In 1691 Sir Dudley North published his <i>Discourses
+upon Trade</i>. Therein he clearly sees that commercial barriers
+between Great Britain and France are basically as senseless as
+would be commercial barriers between Yorkshire and <a name=
+"page288" id="page288"></a>Middlesex. Indeed, in one sense, North
+goes even further than Adam Smith, for he argues against the usury
+laws in terms Bentham would hardly have disowned. Ten years later
+an anonymous writer in a tract entitled <i>Considerations on the
+East India Trade</i> (1701) has no illusions about the evil of
+monopoly. He sees with striking clarity that the real problem is
+not at any cost to maintain the industries a nation actually
+possesses, but to have the national capital applied in the most
+efficient channels. So, too, Hume dismissed the Mercantile theory
+with the contemptuous remark that it was trying to keep water
+beyond its proper level. Tucker, as has been pointed out, was a
+free trader, and his opinion of the American war was that it was as
+mad as those who fought "under the peaceful Cross to recover the
+Holy Land"; and he urged, indeed, prophesied, the union with
+Ireland in the interest of commercial amity. Nor must the emphasis
+of the Physiocrats upon free trade be forgotten. There is no
+evidence now that Adam Smith owed this perception to his
+acquaintance with Quesnay and Turgot; but they may well have
+confirmed <a name="page289" id="page289"></a>him in it, and they
+show that the older philosophy was attacked on every side.</p>
+<p>Nor must we miss the general atmosphere of the time. On the
+whole his age was a conservative one, convinced, without due
+reason, that happiness was independent of birth or wealth and that
+natural law somehow could be made to justify existing institutions.
+The poets, like Pope, were singing of the small part of life which
+kings and laws may hope to cure; and that attitude is written in
+the general absence of economic legislation during the period.
+Religiously, the Church exalted the <i>status quo</i>; and where,
+as with Wesley, there was revolt, its impetus directed the mind to
+the source of salvation in the individual act. It may, indeed, be
+generally argued that the religious teachers acted as a social
+soporific. Where riches accumulated, they could be regarded as the
+blessing of God; where they were absent their unimportance for
+eternal happiness could be emphasized. Burke's early attack on a
+system which condemned "two hundred thousand innocent persons ...
+to so intolerable slavery" was, in truth, a justification of
+<a name="page290" id="page290"></a>the existing order. The social
+question which, in the previous century, men like Bellers and
+Winstanley had brought into view, dropped out of notice until the
+last quarter of the century. There was, that is to say, no
+organized resistance possible to the power of individualism; and
+resistance was unlikely to make itself heard once the resources of
+the Industrial Revolution were brought into play. Men discovered
+with something akin to ecstasy the possibilities of the new
+inventions; and when the protest came against the misery they
+effected, it was answered that they represented the working of that
+natural law by which the energies of men may raise them to success.
+And discontent could easily, as with the saintly Wilberforce, be
+countered by the assertion that it was revolt against the will of
+God.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p>Few lives represent more splendidly than that of Adam Smith the
+speculative ideal of a dispassionate study of philosophy. He was
+fortunate in his teachers and his friends. At Glasgow he was the
+<a name="page291" id="page291"></a>pupil of Francis Hutcheson; and
+even if he was taught nothing at Oxford, at least six years of
+leisure gave him ample opportunity to learn. His professorship at
+Glasgow not only brought him into contact with men like Hume, but
+also admitted him to intercourse with a group of business men whose
+liberal sentiments on commerce undoubtedly strengthened, if they
+did not originate, his own liberal views. At Glasgow, too, in 1759,
+he published his <i>Theory of Moral Sentiments</i>, written with
+sufficient power of style to obscure its inner poverty of thought.
+The book brought him immediately a distinguished reputation from a
+public which exalted elegance of diction beyond all literary
+virtues. The volatile Charles Townshend made him tutor to the Duke
+of Buccleuch, through whom Smith not only secured comparative
+affluence for the rest of his days, but also a French tour in which
+he met at its best the most brilliant society in Europe. The germ
+of his <i>Wealth of Nations</i> already lay hidden in those Glasgow
+lectures which Mr. Cannan has so happily recovered for us; and it
+was in a moment of leisure in France <a name="page292" id=
+"page292"></a>that he set to work to put them together in
+systematic fashion. Not, indeed, that the Frenchmen whom he met,
+Turgot, Quesnay and Dupont de Nemours, can be said to have done
+more than confirm the truths he had already been teaching. When he
+returned to Scotland and a competence ten years of constant labor
+were necessary before the <i>Wealth of Nations</i> was complete.
+After its publication, in 1776, Adam Smith did little save attend
+to the administrative duties of a minor, but lucrative office in
+the Customs. Until the end, indeed, he never quite gave up the
+hope, foreshadowed first in the <i>Moral Sentiments</i> of
+completing a gigantic survey of civilized institutions. But he was
+a slow worker, and his health was never robust. It was enough that
+he should have written his book and cherished friendships such as
+it is given to few men to possess. Hume and Burke, Millar the
+jurist, James Watt, Foulis the printer, Black the chemist and
+Hutton of geological fame&mdash;it is an enviable circle. He had
+known Turgot on intimate terms and visited Voltaire on Lake Geneva.
+Hume had told him that his book had "depth and solidity <a name=
+"page293" id="page293"></a>and acuteness"; the younger Pitt had
+consulted him on public affairs. Few men have moved amid such happy
+peace within the very centre of what was most illustrious in their
+age.</p>
+<p>We are less concerned here with the specific economic details of
+the <i>Wealth of Nations</i> than with its general attitude to the
+State. But here a limitation upon criticism must be noted. The man
+of whom Smith writes is man in search of wealth; by definition the
+economic motive dominates his actions. Such abuse, therefore, as
+Ruskin poured upon him is really beside the point when his
+objective is borne in mind. What virtually he does is to assume the
+existence of a natural economic order which tends, when
+unrestrained by counter-tendencies, to secure the happiness of men.
+"That order of things which necessity imposes in general," he
+writes, "... is, in every particular country promoted by the
+natural inclinations of man"; and he goes on to explain what would
+have resulted "if human institutions had never thwarted those
+natural inclinations." "All systems either of preference or of
+restraint, <a name="page294" id="page294"></a>therefore, being thus
+completely taken away," he writes again, "the obvious and simple
+system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord.
+Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is
+left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way....
+The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty in the
+attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to
+innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no
+human wisdom or knowledge would ever be sufficient; the duty of
+superintending the industry of private people and of directing it
+towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the
+society."</p>
+<p>The State, in this conception has but three
+functions&mdash;defence, justice and "the duty of erecting and
+maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions
+which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small
+number of individuals, to erect and maintain." The State, in fact,
+is simply to provide the atmosphere in which production is
+possible. Nor does Smith conceal his thought that the main function
+of justice <a name="page295" id="page295"></a>is the protection of
+property. "The affluence of the rich," he wrote, "excites the
+indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want and
+prompted by envy to invade their possessions. It is only under the
+shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable
+property, acquired by the labor of many years, or perhaps many
+successive generations, can sleep a single night in security." The
+attitude, indeed, is intensified by his constant sense that the
+capital which makes possible new productivity is the outcome of
+men's sacrifice; to protect it is thus to safeguard the sources of
+wealth itself. And even if the State is entrusted with education
+and the prevention of disease, this is rather for the general
+benefit they confer and the doubt that private enterprise would
+find them profitable than as the expression of a general rule.
+Collective effort of every kind awakened in him a deep distrust.
+Trade regulations such as the limitation of apprenticeship he
+condemned as "manifest encroachment upon the just liberty of the
+workman and of those who may be disposed to employ him." Even
+educational establishments <a name="page296" id="page296"></a>are
+suspect on the ground&mdash;not unnatural after his own experience
+of Oxford&mdash;that their possibilities of comfort may enervate
+the natural energies of men.</p>
+<p>The key to this attitude is clear enough. The improvement of
+society is due, he thinks not to the calculations of government but
+to the natural instincts of economic man. We cannot avoid the
+impulse to better our condition; and the less its effort is
+restrained the more certain it is that happiness will result. We
+gain, in fact, some sense of its inherent power when we bear in
+mind the magnitude of its accomplishment despite the folly and
+extravagance of princes. Therein we have some index of what it
+would achieve if left unhindered to work out its own destinies.
+Human institutions continually thwart its power; for those who
+build those institutions are moved rather "by the momentary
+fluctuations of affairs" than their true nature. "That insidious
+and crafty animal, vulgarly called a politician or statesman" meets
+little mercy for his effort compared to the magic power of the
+natural order. "In all countries where there is a tolerable
+security," he writes, <a name="page297" id="page297"></a>"every man
+of common understanding will endeavor to employ whatever stock he
+can command in procuring either present enjoyment or future
+profit." Individual spontaneity is thus the root of economic good;
+and the real justification of the state is the protection it
+affords to this impulse. Man, in fact, is by nature a trader and he
+is bound by nature to discover the means most apt to progress.</p>
+<p>Nor was he greatly troubled by differences of fortune. Like most
+of the Scottish school, especially Hutcheson and Hume, he thought
+that men are much alike in happiness, whatever their station or
+endowments. For there is a "never-failing certainty" that "all men
+sooner or later accommodate themselves to whatever becomes their
+permanent situation"; though he admits that there is a certain
+level below which poverty and misery go hand in hand. But, for the
+most part, happiness is simply a state of mind; and he seems to
+have had but little suspicion that differences of wealth might
+issue in dangerous social consequence. Men, moreover, he regarded
+as largely equal in their original powers; and differences of
+<a name="page298" id="page298"></a>character he ascribes to the
+various occupations implied in the division of labor. Each man,
+therefore, as he follows his self-interest promotes the general
+happiness of society. That principle is inherent in the social
+order. "Every man," he wrote in the <i>Moral Sentiments</i>, "is by
+nature first and principally recommended to his own care" and
+therein he is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was
+no part of his intention." The State, that is to say, is the sum of
+individual goods; whereby to better ourselves is clearly to its
+benefit. And that desire "which comes with us from the womb and
+never leaves us till we go to the grave" is the more efficacious
+the less it is restrained by governmental artifice. For we know so
+well what makes us happy that none can hope to help us so much as
+we help ourselves.</p>
+<p>Enlightened selfishness is thus the root of prosperity; but we
+must not fall into the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf to the
+plaint of the poor. He urged the employer to have regard to the
+health and welfare of the worker, a regard which was the voice of
+reason and humanity. Where <a name="page299" id="page299"></a>there
+was conflict between love of the <i>status quo</i> and a social
+good which Revolution alone could achieve, he did not, at least in
+the <i>Moral Sentiments</i>, hesitate to choose the latter. Order
+was, for the most part, indispensable; but "the greatest and
+noblest of all characters" he made the reformer of the State. Yet
+he is too impressed by the working of natural economic laws to
+belittle their influence. Employers, in his picture, are little
+capable of benevolence or charity. Their rule is the law of supply
+and demand and not the Sermon on the Mount. They combine without
+hesitation to depress wages to the lowest point of subsistence.
+They seize every occasion of commercial misfortune to make better
+terms for themselves; and the greater the poverty the more
+submissive do servants become so that scarcity is naturally
+regarded as more favorable to industry.</p>
+<p>Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is
+Smith's conception of nature. Nor can there be much doubt of what
+he thought its inner substance. Facile distinctions such as the
+effort of Buckle to show that while in the <i>Moral <a name=
+"page300" id="page300"></a>Sentiments</i> Adam Smith was dealing
+with the unselfish side of man's nature, in the <i>Wealth of
+Nations</i> he was dealing with a group of facts which required the
+abstraction of such altruistic elements, are really beside the
+point. Nature for Smith is simply the spontaneous action of human
+character unchecked by hindrances of State. It is, as Bonar has
+aptly said, "a vindication of the unconscious law present in the
+separate actions of men when these actions are directed by a
+certain strong personal motive." Adam Smith's argument is an
+assumption that the facts can be made to show the relative
+powerlessness of institutions in the face of economic laws grounded
+in human psychology. The psychology itself is relatively simple,
+and, at least in the <i>Wealth of Nations</i> not greatly different
+from the avowed assumptions of utilitarianism. He emphasizes the
+strength of reason in the economic field, and his sense that it
+enables men to judge much better of their best interests than an
+external authority can hope to do. And therefore the practices
+accomplished by this reason are those in which the impulses of men
+are to be found. <a name="page301" id="page301"></a>The order they
+represent is the natural order; and whatever hinders its full
+operation is an unwise check upon the things for which men
+strive.</p>
+<p>Obviously enough, this attitude runs the grave risk of seeming
+to abstract a single motive&mdash;the desire for wealth&mdash;from
+the confused welter of human impulses and to make it dominant at
+the expense of human nature itself. A hasty reading of Adam Smith
+would, indeed, confirm that impression; and that is perhaps why he
+seemed to Ruskin to blaspheme human nature. But a more careful
+survey, particularly when the <i>Moral Sentiments</i> is borne in
+mind suggests a different conclusion. His attitude is implicit in
+the general medium in which he worked. What he was trying to do was
+less to emphasize that men care above all things for the pursuit of
+wealth than that no institutional modifications are able to destroy
+the power of that motive to labor. There is too much history in the
+<i>Wealth of Nations</i> to make tenable the hypothesis of complete
+abstraction. And there is even clear a sense of a nature behind his
+custom when he speaks of a "sacred <a name="page302" id=
+"page302"></a>regard" for life, and urges that every man has
+property in his own labor. The truth here surely is that Smith was
+living in a time of commercial expansion. What was evident to him
+was the potential wealth to be made available if the obsolete
+system of restraint could be destroyed. Liberty to him meant
+absence of restraint not because its more positive aspect was
+concealed from him but rather because the kind of freedom wanted in
+the environment in which he moved was exactly that for which he
+made his plea. There is a hint that freedom as a positive thing was
+known to him from the fact that he relied upon education to relieve
+the evils of the division of labor. But the general context of his
+book required less emphasis upon the virtues of state-interference
+than upon its defects. His cue was to show that all the benefits of
+regulation had been achieved despite its interference; from which,
+of course, it followed that restraint was a matter of
+supererogation.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p>It would be tedious to praise the <i>Wealth of Nations</i>. It
+may be doubtful <a name="page303" id="page303"></a>whether Buckle's
+ecstatic judgment that it has had more influence than any other
+book in the world was justified even when he wrote; but certainly
+it is one of the seminal books of the modern time. What is more
+important is to note the perspective in which its main teaching was
+set. He wrote in the midst of the first significant beginnings of
+the Industrial Revolution; and his emphatic approval of Watt's
+experiments suggests that he was not unalive to its importance. Yet
+it cannot in any full sense be said that the Industrial Revolution
+has a large part in his book. The picture of industrial
+organization and its possibilities is too simple to suggest that he
+had caught any far reaching glimpse into the future. Industry, for
+him, is still in the last stage of handicraft; it is a matter of
+skillful workmanship and not of mechanical appliance. Capital is
+still the laborious result of parsimony. Credit is spoken of rather
+in the tones of one who sees it less as a new instrument of finance
+than a dangerous attempt by the aspiring needy to scale the heights
+of wealth. Profits are always a justified return for productive
+labor; <a name="page304" id="page304"></a>interest the payment for
+the use of the owner's past parsimony. Business is still the
+middleman distributing to the consumer on a small scale. He did
+not, or could not, conceive of an industry either so vast or so
+depersonalized as at present. He was rather writing of a system
+which, like the politics of the eighteenth century, had reached an
+equilibrium of passable comfort. His natural order was, at bottom,
+the beatification of that to which this equilibrium tended. Its
+benefits might be improved by free trade and free workmanship; but,
+upon the whole, he saw no reason to call in question its
+fundamental dogmas.</p>
+<p>Therein, of course, may be found the main secret of his
+omissions. The problem of labor finds no place in his book. The
+things that the poor have absent from their lives, that concept of
+a national minimum below which no State can hope to fulfil even the
+meanest of its aims, of these he has no conception. Rather the note
+of the book is a quiet optimism, impressed by the possibilities of
+constant improvement which lie imbedded in the human impulse to
+better itself. What he did not see is <a name="page305" id=
+"page305"></a>the way in which the logical outcome of the system he
+describes may well be the attainment of great wealth at a price in
+human cost that is beyond its worth. Therein, it is clear, all
+individualistic theories of the state miss the true essence of the
+social bond. Those who came after Adam Smith saw only half his
+problem. He wrote a consumer's theory of value. But whereas he had
+in mind a happy and contented people, the economics of Ricardo and
+Malthus seized upon a single element in human nature as that which
+alone the State must serve. Freedom from restraint came ultimately
+to mean a judgment upon national well-being in terms of the volume
+of trade. "It is not with happiness," said Nassau Senior, "but with
+wealth that I am concerned as a political economist; and I am not
+only justified in omitting, but am perhaps bound to omit, all
+considerations which have no influence upon wealth."</p>
+<p>In such an aspect, it was natural for the balance of
+investigation to swing towards the study of the technique of
+production; and with the growing importance of capital, as
+machinery was introduced, the <a name="page306" id=
+"page306"></a>worker, without difficulty, became an adjunct, easily
+replaced, to the machine. What was remembered then was the side of
+Adam Smith which looked upon enlightened selfishness as the key to
+social good. Regulation became anathema even when the evils it
+attempted to restrain were those which made the mass of the people
+incapable of citizenship. Even national education was regarded as
+likely to destroy initiative; or, as a pauper's dole which men of
+self-respect would regard with due abhorrence. The State, in short,
+ceased to concern itself with justice save insofar as the
+administration of a judicial code spelled the protection of the new
+industrial system. Nothing is more striking in the half-century
+after Adam Smith than the optimism of the economist and the
+business man in contrast to the hopeless despair of labor. That men
+can organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that
+until Francis Place even the workers themselves were
+half-convinced. The manufacturers were the State; and the whole
+intellectual strength of economics was massed to prove the
+rightness of the equation. The literature <a name="page307" id=
+"page307"></a>of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and
+Bray, exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and
+Robert Owen was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet
+of a new hope. The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out
+to the letter the unstated assumptions of Puritan economics. The
+poor were consigned to a God whose dictates were by definition
+beneficent; and if they failed to understand the curious incidence
+of his rewards that was because his ways were inscrutable. No one
+who reads the tracts of writers like Harriet Martineau can fail to
+see how pitiless was the operation of this attitude. Life is made a
+struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its ultimate meaning from
+the misery incident to it. The tragedy is excused because the
+export-trade increases in its volume. The iron law of wages, the
+assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of
+wealth, the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better
+his condition be sapped by giving to him that which his
+self-respect can better win&mdash;these became the unconscious
+assumptions of all economic discussion.</p>
+<a name="page308" id="page308"></a>
+<p>In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided
+it, we must not miss the element of truth that it contains. No
+poison is more subtly destructive of the democratic State than
+paternalism; and the release of the creative impulses of men must
+always be the coping-stone of public policy. Adam Smith is the
+supreme representative of a tradition which saw that release
+effected by individual effort. Where each man cautiously pursued
+the good as he saw it, the realization was bound, in his view, to
+be splendid. A population each element of which was active and
+alert to its economic problems could not escape the achievement of
+greatness. All that is true; but it evades the obvious conditions
+we have inherited. For even when the psychological inadequacies of
+Smith's attitude are put aside, we can judge his theory in the
+light of the experience it summarizes. Once it is admitted that the
+object of the State is the achievement of the good life, the final
+canon of politics is bound to be a moral one. We have to inquire
+into the dominant conception of the good life, the number of those
+upon whom it is intended that good shall be conferred.</p>
+<a name="page309" id="page309"></a>
+<p>In the light of this conception it is obvious enough that
+Smith's view is impossible. No mere conflict of private interests,
+however pure in motive, seems able to achieve a harmony of interest
+between the members of the State. Liberty, in the sense of a
+positive and equal opportunity for self-realization, is impossible
+save upon the basis of the acceptance of certain minimal standards
+which can get accepted only through collective effort. Smith did
+not see that in the processes of politics what gets accepted is not
+the will that is at every moment a part of the state-purpose, but
+the will of those who in fact operate the machinery of government.
+In the half-century after he wrote the men who dominated political
+life were, with the best intentions, moved by motives at most
+points unrelated to the national well-being. The fellow-servant
+doctrine would never have obtained acceptance in a state where, as
+he thought, employer and workman stood upon an equal footing.
+Opposition to the Factory Acts would never have developed in a
+community where it was realized that below certain standards of
+subsistence the <a name="page310" id="page310"></a>very concept of
+humanity is impossible. Modern achievement implies a training in
+the tools of life; and that, for most, is denied even in our own
+day to the vast majority of men. In the absence of legislation, it
+is certain that those who employ the services of men will be their
+political masters; and it will follow that their Acts of Parliament
+will be adapted to the needs of property. That shrinkage of the
+purpose of the State will mean for most not merely hardship but
+degradation of all that makes life worthy. Upon those stunted
+existences, indeed, a wealthy civilization may easily be builded.
+Yet it will be a civilization of slaves rather than of men.</p>
+<p>The individualism, that is to say, for which Adam Smith was
+zealous demands a different institutional expression from that
+which he gave it. We must not assume an <i>a priori</i>
+justification for the forces of the past. The customs of men may
+represent the thwarting of the impulses of the many at the expense
+of the few not less easily than they may embody a general desire;
+and it is surely a mistaken usage to dignify as natural <a name=
+"page311" id="page311"></a>whatever may happen to have occurred. A
+man may find self-realization not less in working for the common
+good than in the limited satisfaction of his narrow desire for
+material advancement. And that, indeed, is the starting-point of
+modern effort. Our liberty means the consistent expression of our
+personality in media where we find people like-minded with
+ourselves in their conception of social life. The very scale of
+civilization implies collective plans and common effort. The
+constant revision of our basic notions was inevitable immediately
+science was applied to industry. There was thus no reason to
+believe that the system of individual interests for which Smith
+stood sponsor was more likely to fit requirements of a new time
+than one which implied the national regulation of business
+enterprise. The danger in every period of history is lest we take
+our own age as the term in institutional evolution. Private
+enterprise has the sanction of prescription; but since the
+Industrial Revolution the chief lesson we have had to learn is the
+unsatisfactory character of that title. History is an unenviable
+record of bad metaphysics used <a name="page312" id=
+"page312"></a>to defend obsolete systems. It took almost a century
+after the publication of the <i>Wealth of Nations</i> for men to
+realize that its axioms represented the experience of a definite
+time. Smith thought of freedom in the terms most suitable to his
+generation and stated them with a largeness of view which remains
+impressive even at a century's distance.</p>
+<p>But nothing is more certain in the history of political
+philosophy than that the problem of freedom changes with each age.
+The nineteenth century sought release from political privilege; and
+it built its success upon the system prepared by its predecessor.
+It can never be too greatly emphasized that in each age the
+substance of liberty will be found in what the dominating forces of
+that age most greatly want. With Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and
+with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is always the summary of some
+special experience universalized. That does not mean that the past
+is worthless. Politics, as Seeley said, are vulgar unless they are
+liberalized by history; and a state which failed to see itself as a
+mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its <a name="page313"
+id="page313"></a>novelties upon foundations of sand. Suspicions of
+collective effort in the eighteenth century ought not to mean
+suspicion in the twentieth; to think in such fashion is to fall
+into the error for which Lassalle so finely criticized Hegel. It is
+as though one were to confound the accidental phases of the history
+of property with the philosophic basis of property itself. From
+such an error it is the task of history above all to free us. For
+it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as a perennial
+challenge to the coming time.</p>
+<p>The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the
+double tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth. On the one hand he
+is the founder of the classic political economy. With Ricardo, the
+elder Mill and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the
+production of wealth without regard to its moral environment; and
+the state for them is merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in
+which business men achieve their labors. There is nothing in them
+of that fine despair which made Stuart Mill welcome socialism
+itself rather than allow the continuance of the new capitalist
+system. Herein the <a name="page314" id="page314"></a>State is
+purged of moral purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the
+greatest happiness by insisting that the technique of production
+must dominate all other circumstances. Until the Reform Act of
+1867, the orthodox economists remained unchallenged. The use of the
+franchise was only beginning to be understood. The "new model" of
+trade unionism had not yet been tested in the political field. But
+it was discovered impossible to act any longer upon the assumptions
+of the abstract economic man. The infallible sense of his own
+interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for the
+simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously
+required training if they were to be applied to a complex world.
+Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because
+it failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be
+found for the creative energies of humble men.</p>
+<p>It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to
+understand the inner significance of the protest against this
+economic liberalism. Adam Smith had declared the source of value to
+lie in <a name="page315" id="page315"></a>labor; and, at the moment
+of its deepest agony, there were men willing to point the moral of
+his tale. That it represented an incautious analysis was, for them,
+unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path whereby
+economics could be reclaimed for moral science. For if labor was
+the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as
+though degradation was the sole payment for its services. They did
+not ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically
+profitable, but whether it was ethically right. No one can read the
+history of these years and fail to understand their uncompromising
+denial of its rightness. Their negation fell upon unheeding ears;
+but twenty years later, the tradition for which they stood came
+into Marx's hands and was fashioned by him into an interpretation
+of history. With all its faults of statement and of emphasis, the
+doctrine of the English socialists has been, in later hands, the
+most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics. It was a deliberate
+effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith's ideas, to create a
+commonwealth in the interests of the masses. Wealth, in <a name=
+"page316" id="page316"></a>its view, was less the mere production
+of goods than the accumulated happiness of humble men. The impulses
+it praised and sought through state-action to express were, indeed,
+different from those upon which Smith laid emphasis; and he would
+doubtless have stood aghast at the way in which his thought was
+turned to ends of which he did not dream. Yet he can hardly have
+desired a greater glory. He thus made possible not only knowledge
+of a State untrammelled in its economic life by moral
+considerations; but also the road to those categories wherein the
+old conception of co-operative effort might find a new expression.
+Those who trod in his footsteps may have repudiated the ideal for
+which he stood, but they made possible a larger hope in which he
+would have been proud and glad to share.</p>
+<hr class="long" /></div>
+<div id="bibliography"><br />
+<a name="page317" id="page317"></a>
+<h2>BIBLIOGRAPHY</h2>
+<p>This bibliography makes no pretence to completeness. It attempts
+only to enumerate the more obvious sources that an interested
+reader would care to examine.</p>
+<br />
+<h3>GENERAL</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>LESLIE STEPHEN.
+<ul>
+<li><i>History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century</i>.
+1876. Vol. II, Chapters IX and X.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W.E.H. LECKY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>History of England in the Eighteenth Century.</i></li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>A.L. SMITH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Political Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth and
+Eighteenth Centuries</i> in the <i>Cambridge Modern History</i>.
+Vol. VI, Chapter XXIII.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. BONAR.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Philosophy and Political Economy</i>. Chapters V-IX.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>F.W. MAITLAND.
+<ul>
+<li><i>An Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality</i> in
+<i>Collected Papers</i>. Vol. I.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<h3>CHAPTER II</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>JOHN LOCKE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Works</i> (Eleventh Edition), 10 volumes. London, 1812.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>H.R. FOX-BOURNE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of John Locke</i>. London, 1876.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>T.H. GREEN.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Principles of Political Obligation</i> in <i>Collected
+Works</i>. Vol. II. London, 1908.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>PETER. LORD KING.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Life and Letters of John Locke</i>. London, 1858.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>SIR F. POLLOCK.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Locke's Theory of the State</i> in <i>Proc. Brit. Acad.</i>.
+Vol. I. London, 1904.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>S.P. LAMPRECHT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Moral and Political Philosophy of Locke</i>. New York,
+1918.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>A.A. SEATON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts</i>.
+Cambridge, 1911.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J.N. FIGGIS.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Divine Right of Kings</i>. Cambridge, 1914.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<a name="page318" id="page318"></a>
+<h3>CHAPTER III</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>JEREMY COLLIER.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The History of Passive Obedience</i>. London, 1689.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>WILLIAM SHERLOCK.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Case of Resistance</i>. London, 1684.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>CHARLES LESLIE.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Case of the Regale</i> (Collected Works).
+Vol. Ill, p. 291.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Rehearsal</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The New Association</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Cassandra</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Finishing Stroke</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Obedience to Civil Government Clearly
+Stated</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Best Answer</i>.</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>The Best of All</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>SAMUEL GRASCOM.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Brief Answer</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>E. SHELLINGFLEET.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Vindication of their Majesties Authoritie</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>B. SHOWER.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Letter to a Convocation Man.</i></li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. WAKE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Authority of Christian Princes</i>. <i>The State of the
+Church</i> (1703).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>FRANCIS ATTERBURY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Rights, Powers and Privileges of an English Convocation</i>
+(1701).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>BENJAMIN HOADLY.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>Origins of Civil Government</i> (1710).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Preservative Against Nonjurors</i> (1716).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Works</i>, 3 vols. London (1773).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>WILLIAM LAW.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Defence of Church Principles</i> (ed. Gore). Edinburgh,
+1904.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. WARBURTON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Alliance between Church and State</i> (1736).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J.H. OVERTON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Nonjurors.</i> New York, 1903.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>T. LATHEBURY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>History of Convocation.</i> London, 1842.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<h3>CHAPTER IV</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>BERKELEY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain</i>
+(1721).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>H. ST. JOHN (Viscount Bolingbroke).
+<ul>
+<li><i>Works.</i> 5 vols. London, 1754.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>LORD EGMONT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts</i> (1742).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>DAVID HUME.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals</i>
+(1752).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Essays</i>. (1742-1752) ed. Green &amp; Grose.
+London, 1876.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. SICHEL.<a name="page319" id="page319"></a>
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Bolingbroke</i>. 2 vols. 1900-4.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. CHURTON COLLINS.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Bolingbroke and Voltaire in England</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. HILL BURTON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Hume</i>.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<h3>CHAPTER V</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>MONTESQUIEU.
+<ul>
+<li><i>L'Esprit des Lois</i> (1748).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J.J. ROUSSEAU.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Du Contrat Social</i> (1762). See ed. by Vaughan, 1918.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOHN BROWN.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times</i>
+(1757).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>ADAM FERGUSON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Essay on the History of Civil Society</i> (1767).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>WILLIAM BLACKSTONE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Commentaries</i> (1765-9).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JEREMY BENTHAM.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Fragment on Government</i> (1776). Ed. F.C. Montague,
+1891.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. DE LOLME.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Constitution of England</i> (1775).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>ROBERT WALLACE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Various Prospects</i> (1761).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOSEPH PRIESTLEY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Essay on the First Principles of Government</i> (1768).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>RICHARD PRICE.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>Observations on Civil Liberty</i> (1776).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Additional Observations</i> (1777).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>WILLIAM OGILVIE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Right of Property in Land</i> (1781). Ed. Macdonald,
+1891.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOSIAH TUCKER.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Treatise on Civil Government</i> (1781).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>SAMUEL JOHNSON.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Taxation No Tyranny</i> (1775).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>M. BEER.
+<ul>
+<li><i>History of British Socialism</i> (1919).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JAMES BOSWELL.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Samuel Johnson</i> (1791).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<h3>CHAPTER VI</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>EDMUND BURKE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Collected Works</i>. London, 1808.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOHN MORLEY.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Edmund Burke</i> (1867). <i>Life of Burke</i> (1887).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. MACCUNN.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Political Philosophy of Burke</i> (1908).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JUNIUS.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Letters</i> (1769-72). London, 1812.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>THOMAS PAINE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>The Rights of Man</i> (1791-2).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JAMES MACKINTOSH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Vendici&aelig; Gallic&aelig;</i> (1791).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<a name="page320" id="page320"></a>
+<h3>CHAPTER VII</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>CHARLES DAVENANT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Works</i>. London, 1771.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>SIR DUDLEY NORTH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Discourse upon Trade</i> (1691).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>ADAM SMITH.
+<ul>
+<li class="sub"><i>Theory of Moral Sentiments</i> (1759).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Wealth of Nations</i> (1776).</li>
+<li class="sub"><i>Lectures on Justice and Police</i>. (Ed. Cannan,
+1896).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W.R. SCOTT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Francis Hutcheson</i> (1900).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>JOHN RAE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Life of Adam Smith</i> (1895).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. BAGEHOT.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Adam Smith as a Person</i> in <i>Coll. Works</i>. Vol.
+VII.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>F.W. HIRST.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Adam Smith</i> (1904).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>W. HASBACH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Untersuchungen &uuml;ber Adam Smith</i> (1891).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>J. BONAR.
+<ul>
+<li><i>A Catalogue of Adam Smith's Library</i> (1894).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>T. CLIFFE LESLIE.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Adam Smith</i> in <i>Essays in Moral and Political
+Philosophy</i> (1879).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>E. TROELTSCH.
+<ul>
+<li><i>Die Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirchen</i> (1912).</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<hr class="long" /></div>
+<div id="index"><br />
+<a name="page321" id="page321"></a>
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Addison, <a href="#page69">69</a></li>
+<li>Andrewes, <a href="#page83">83</a></li>
+<li>Ashley, <a href="#page33">33-4</a></li>
+<li>Atterbury, <a href="#page102">102</a></li>
+<li>Austin, <a href="#page62">62</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Bagehot, <a href="#page9">9</a>, <a href=
+"#page249">249</a></li>
+<li>Barbeyrac, <a href="#page68">68</a></li>
+<li>Barrow, <a href="#page84">84</a></li>
+<li>Bellarmine, <a href="#page83">83</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a></li>
+<li>Bentham, <a href="#page23">23</a>, <a href="#page62">62</a>,
+<a href="#page72">72</a>, <a href="#page151">151</a>, <a href=
+"#page157">157</a>, <a href="#page175">175</a>, <a href=
+"#page194">194</a></li>
+<li>Berkeley, <a href="#page10">10</a>, <a href=
+"#page129">129</a></li>
+<li>Blackstone, <a href="#page163">163-4</a>, <a href=
+"#page174">174f</a></li>
+<li>Bolingbroke, <a href="#page69">69</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131f</a></li>
+<li>Bonald, <a href="#page277">277</a></li>
+<li>Bonar, <a href="#page300">300</a></li>
+<li>Bonwicke, <a href="#page82">82</a></li>
+<li>Boswell, <a href="#page209">209</a></li>
+<li>Bray, <a href="#page307">307</a>, <a href=
+"#page315">315</a></li>
+<li>Brown (J.), <a href="#page168">168</a></li>
+<li>Brown (R.), <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Burke, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href=
+"#page16">16</a>, <a href="#page30">30</a>, <a href=
+"#page157">157</a>, <a href="#page159">159</a>, <a href=
+"#page166">166</a>, <a href="#page221">221f</a>, <a href=
+"#page286">286</a></li>
+<li>Burnet, <a href="#page80">80</a>, <a href="#page87">87</a>,
+<a href="#page93">93</a></li>
+<li>Busher, <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Cartwright, <a href="#page97">97</a></li>
+<li>Chatham, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a></li>
+<li>Chillingworth, <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Chubb, <a href="#page128">128</a></li>
+<li>Coleridge, <a href="#page277">277</a></li>
+<li>Collier, <a href="#page84">84n</a></li>
+<li>Cowper, <a href="#page20">20</a></li>
+<li>Crabbe, <a href="#page20">20</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Dalrymple, <a href="#page8">8</a></li>
+<li>Darwin, <a href="#page67">67</a></li>
+<li>Davenant, <a href="#page283">283</a>, <a href=
+"#page287">287</a></li>
+<li>Defoe, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page128">128</a>,
+<a href="#page132">132</a></li>
+<li>Dicey, <a href="#page175">175</a>, <a href=
+"#page179">179</a></li>
+<li>Disraeli, <a href="#page132">132</a></li>
+<li>Divine Right, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href=
+"#page30">30</a></li>
+<li>Dodwell, <a href="#page82">82</a></li>
+<li>Dupont de Nemours, <a href="#page292">292</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Egmont, <a href="#page142">142</a></li>
+<li>Eldon, <a href="#page159">159</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Ferguson, <a href="#page172">172-4</a></li>
+<li>Fielding, <a href="#page160">160</a></li>
+<li>Filmer, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href="#page38">38</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Galsworthy, <a href="#page171">171-2</a></li>
+<li>George III, <a href="#page13">13</a>, <a href="#page15">15</a>,
+<a href="#page158">158</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>, <a href=
+"#page213">213f</a></li>
+<li>Godwin, <a href="#page10">10</a>, <a href="#page163">163</a>,
+<a href="#page222">222</a>, <a href="#page276">276</a></li>
+<li>Goldsmith, <a href="#page19">19</a>, <a href=
+"#page223">223</a></li>
+<li>Goodman, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Grascom, <a href="#page86">86</a></li>
+<li>Gray, <a href="#page160">160</a></li>
+<li>Green (T.H.), <a href="#page61">61</a>, <a href=
+"#page279">279</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Haldane, <a href="#page126">126</a></li>
+<li>Hales, <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Halifax, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page27">27</a></li>
+<li>Hall, <a href="#page17">17</a>, <a href="#page307">307</a></li>
+<li>Hamilton (J.L. &amp; B.), <a href="#page19">19</a></li>
+<li>Harrington, <a href="#page147">147</a></li>
+<li>Hegel, <a href="#page249">249</a>, <a href="#page277">277</a>,
+<a href="#page212">212-3</a></li>
+<li>Hickes, <a href="#page83">83</a><a name="page322" id=
+"page322"></a></li>
+<li>Hoadly, <a href="#page9">9</a>, <a href="#page22">22</a>,
+<a href="#page69">69</a>, <a href="#page107">107f</a></li>
+<li>Hobbes, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page16">16</a>,
+<a href="#page30">30</a>, <a href="#page40">40f</a>, <a href=
+"#page72">72</a>, <a href="#page91">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page278">278</a>, <a href="#page284">284</a></li>
+<li>Hodgskin, <a href="#page17">17</a>, <a href=
+"#page307">307</a></li>
+<li>Holmes (O.W.), <a href="#page63">63n</a>, <a href=
+"#page269">269</a></li>
+<li>Holt, <a href="#page14">14</a>,</li>
+<li>Hooker, <a href="#page44">44</a></li>
+<li>Hotman, <a href="#page57">57</a>, <a href="#page68">68</a></li>
+<li>Hume, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page11">11</a>,
+<a href="#page71">71</a>, <a href="#page92">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page143">143f</a>, <a href="#page278">278</a>, <a href=
+"#page284">284</a>, <a href="#page297">297</a></li>
+<li>Hutcheson, <a href="#page11">11</a>, <a href=
+"#page153">153</a>, <a href="#page155">155</a>, <a href=
+"#page291">291</a>, <a href="#page297">297</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Independents, <a href="#page40">40</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Jackson, <a href="#page84">84</a></li>
+<li>James II, <a href="#page24">24f</a>, <a href=
+"#page35">35</a></li>
+<li>Johnson (Dr.), <a href="#page18">18</a>, <a href=
+"#page210">210f</a>, <a href="#page223">223</a>, <a href=
+"#page230">230</a></li>
+<li>Junius, <a href="#page21">21</a>, <a href=
+"#page219">219</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Keble, <a href="#page82">82</a></li>
+<li>Kerr, <a href="#page82">82</a></li>
+<li>Knox, <a href="#page57">57</a>, <a href="#page83">83</a>,
+<a href="#page97">97</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Lassalle, <a href="#page313">313</a></li>
+<li>Laud, <a href="#page285">285</a></li>
+<li>Law, <a href="#page22">22</a>, <a href="#page108">108f</a></li>
+<li>Leslie, <a href="#page80">80</a>, <a href="#page85">85</a>,
+<a href="#page88">88</a>, <a href="#page90">90</a>, <a href=
+"#page97">97</a>, <a href="#page104">104</a>, <a href=
+"#page132">132</a></li>
+<li>Locke, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href="#page11">11</a>,
+<a href="#page21">21</a>, <a href="#page29">29-76</a>, <a href=
+"#page79">79</a>, <a href="#page197">197</a>, <a href=
+"#page207">207</a>, <a href="#page273">273</a>, <a href=
+"#page287">287</a></li>
+<li>de Lolme, <a href="#page10">10</a>, <a href=
+"#page183">183f</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Mackintosh, <a href="#page269">269</a></li>
+<li>Madison, <a href="#page63">63</a></li>
+<li>Maine, <a href="#page66">66</a>, <a href=
+"#page249">249</a></li>
+<li>Maistre, <a href="#page91">91</a>, <a href="#page252">252</a>,
+<a href="#page273">273</a></li>
+<li>Malthus, <a href="#page305">305</a></li>
+<li>Mandeville, <a href="#page129">129</a>, <a href=
+"#page284">284</a></li>
+<li>Mariana, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Martin, <a href="#page69">69</a></li>
+<li>Marx, <a href="#page312">312</a>, <a href=
+"#page315">315</a></li>
+<li>Melville, <a href="#page121">121</a></li>
+<li>Mill, <a href="#page157">157</a></li>
+<li>Milton, <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Molyneux, <a href="#page68">68</a></li>
+<li>Montesquieu, <a href="#page12">12</a>, <a href=
+"#page63">63</a>, <a href="#page160">160f</a>, <a href=
+"#page173">173</a>, <a href="#page183">183</a></li>
+<li>Morley, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page223">223</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Newton, <a href="#page37">37</a></li>
+<li>Newman, <a href="#page81">81</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a>,
+<a href="#page125">125</a></li>
+<li>North, <a href="#page287">287</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Ogilvie, <a href="#page199">199f</a></li>
+<li>Owen, <a href="#page17">17</a>, <a href="#page307">307</a></li>
+<li>Oxford Movement, <a href="#page81">81</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Paine, <a href="#page202">202</a>, <a href=
+"#page269">269</a></li>
+<li>Paley, <a href="#page157">157</a></li>
+<li>Pattison, <a href="#page10">10</a></li>
+<li>Penn, <a href="#page58">58</a></li>
+<li>Place, <a href="#page306">306</a></li>
+<li>Pope, <a href="#page69">69</a>, <a href="#page128">128</a>,
+<a href="#page132">132</a></li>
+<li>Price, <a href="#page196">196f</a></li>
+<li>Priestley, <a href="#page72">72</a>, <a href=
+"#page190">190f</a></li>
+<li>Proast, <a href="#page64">64</a></li>
+<li>Prynne, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page55">55</a></li>
+<li>Pufendorf, <a href="#page68">68</a></li>
+<li>Pulteney, <a href="#page217">217</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Quesnay, <a href="#page288">288</a>, <a href=
+"#page292">292</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Renan, <a href="#page249">249</a></li>
+<li>Ricardo, <a href="#page305">305</a></li>
+<li>Richardson, <a href="#page160">160</a></li>
+<li>Richardson (S.), <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Rousseau, <a href="#page8">8</a>, <a href="#page74">74</a>,
+<a href="#page162">162f</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>, <a href=
+"#page197">197</a>, <a href="#page276">276</a></li>
+<li>Royer-Collard, <a href="#page226">226</a></li>
+<li>Ruskin, <a href="#page293">293</a>, <a href=
+"#page301">301</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Sanderson, <a href="#page84">84</a></li>
+<li>Savigny, <a href="#page249">249</a>, <a href=
+"#page277">277</a></li>
+<li>Seeley, <a href="#page312">312</a></li>
+<li>Selden, <a href="#page9">9</a></li>
+<li>Senior, <a href="#page304">304</a></li>
+<li>Separation of Powers, <a href="#page63">63f</a></li>
+<li>Shaftesbury, <a href="#page11">11</a>, <a href=
+"#page128">128</a>, <a href="#page155">155</a><a name="page323" id=
+"page323"></a></li>
+<li>Sherlock (T.), <a href="#page108">108</a></li>
+<li>Sherlock (W.), <a href="#page87">87</a></li>
+<li>Shower, <a href="#page99">99</a></li>
+<li>Sidney, <a href="#page7">7</a>, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Smith (Adam), <a href="#page9">9</a>, <a href="#page16">16</a>,
+<a href="#page152">152</a>, <a href="#page195">195</a>, <a href=
+"#page258">258</a>, <a href="#page281">281f</a></li>
+<li>Smith (A.L.), <a href="#page140">140</a></li>
+<li>Snape, <a href="#page108">108</a></li>
+<li>Social Contract, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Spelman, <a href="#page9">9</a></li>
+<li>Spence, <a href="#page202">202</a></li>
+<li>Stammler, <a href="#page60">60</a></li>
+<li>Steele, <a href="#page284">284</a></li>
+<li>Stephen (F.), <a href="#page65">65</a></li>
+<li>Stephen (L.), <a href="#page108">108</a>, <a href=
+"#page223">223</a></li>
+<li>Stillingfleet, <a href="#page37">37</a>, <a href=
+"#page87">87</a>, <a href="#page93">93</a></li>
+<li>Suarez, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Taylor, <a href="#page52">52</a>, <a href="#page57">57</a></li>
+<li>Temple, <a href="#page283">283</a></li>
+<li>Thompson, <a href="#page307">307</a>, <a href=
+"#page215">215</a></li>
+<li>Tindal, <a href="#page123">123</a></li>
+<li>Tocqueville, <a href="#page254">254</a></li>
+<li>Toleration, <a href="#page52">52</a>, <a href=
+"#page64">64</a></li>
+<li>Tucker, <a href="#page71">71</a>, <a href="#page206">206f</a>,
+<a href="#page288">288</a></li>
+<li>Turgot, <a href="#page288">288</a>, <a href=
+"#page292">292</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Voltaire, <a href="#page12">12</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a>,
+<a href="#page160">160</a></li>
+</ul>
+<ul>
+<li>Wake, <a href="#page80">80</a>, <a href=
+"#page100">100f</a></li>
+<li>Wallace, <a href="#page188">188</a></li>
+<li>Walpole, <a href="#page13">13</a>, <a href="#page21">21</a>,
+<a href="#page128">128-30</a></li>
+<li>Warburton, <a href="#page69">69</a>, <a href=
+"#page118">118f</a>, <a href="#page192">192</a></li>
+<li>Wilberforce, <a href="#page290">290</a></li>
+<li>Wilkes, <a href="#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>,
+<a href="#page220">220</a></li>
+<li>William III, <a href="#page25">25f</a></li>
+<li>Williams (Roger), <a href="#page52">52</a></li>
+<li>Woolston, <a href="#page128">128</a></li>
+<li>Wordsworth, <a href="#page277">277</a></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Political Thought in England from
+Locke to Bentham, by Harold J. Laski
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Political Thought in England from Locke to
+Bentham, by Harold J. Laski
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham
+
+Author: Harold J. Laski
+
+Release Date: January 19, 2005 [EBook #14735]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David King and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+No. 103
+
+_Editors:_
+
+HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D. LL.D., F.B.A.
+PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
+PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND
+
+FROM LOCKE TO BENTHAM
+
+
+BY
+
+HAROLD J. LASKI
+
+
+SOMETIME EXHIBITIONER OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD, OF THE DEPARTMENT OF
+HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF STUDIES IN THE PROBLEM OF
+SOVEREIGNTY AND AUTHORITY IN THE MODERN STATE
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+LONDON
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+It is impossible for me to publish this book without some expression of
+the debt it owes to Leslie Stephen's _History of the English Thought in
+the Eighteenth Century_. It is almost insolent to praise such work; but
+I may be permitted to say that no one can fully appreciate either its
+wisdom or its knowledge who has not had to dig among the original texts.
+
+Were so small a volume worthy to bear a dedication, I should associate
+it with the name of my friend Walter Lippmann. He and I have so often
+discussed the substance of its problems that I am certain a good deal of
+what I feel to be my own is, where it has merit, really his. This volume
+is thus in great part a tribute to him; though there is little that can
+repay such friendship as he gives.
+
+H.J.L.
+
+HARVARD UNIVERSITY
+Sept. 15, 1919
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                                       PAGE
+
+  I. INTRODUCTION                                7
+
+ II. THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION           24
+
+III. CHURCH AND STATE                           77
+
+ IV. THE ERA OF STAGNATION                     127
+
+  V. SIGNS OF CHANGE                           159
+
+ VI. BURKE                                     213
+
+VII. THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM    281
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY                                   317
+
+INDEX                                          321
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The eighteenth century may be said to begin with the Revolution of 1688;
+for, with its completion, the dogma of Divine Right disappeared for ever
+from English politics. Its place was but partially filled until Hume and
+Burke supplied the outlines of a new philosophy. For the observer of
+this age can hardly fail, as he notes its relative barrenness of
+abstract ideas, to be impressed by the large part Divine Right must have
+played in the politics of the succeeding century. Its very absoluteness
+made for keen partisanship on the one side and the other. It could
+produce at once the longwinded rhapsodies of Filmer and, by repulsion,
+the wearisome reiterations of Algernon Sidney. Once the foundations of
+Divine Right had been destroyed by Locke, the basis of passionate
+controversy was absent. The theory of a social contract never produced
+in England the enthusiasm it evoked in France, for the simple reason
+that the main objective of Rousseau and his disciples had already been
+secured there by other weapons. And this has perhaps given to the
+eighteenth century an urbaneness from which its predecessor was largely
+free. Sermons are perhaps the best test of such a change; and it is a
+relief to move from the addresses bristling with Suarez and Bellarmine
+to the noble exhortations of Bishop Butler. Not until the French
+Revolution were ultimate dogmas again called into question; and it is
+about them only that political speculation provokes deep feeling. The
+urbanity, indeed, is not entirely new. The Restoration had heralded its
+coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common with Bolingbroke and
+Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an
+historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers
+in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different
+substitutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and
+Blackstone are respectable, they bear no comparison with masters like
+Selden and Sir Henry Spelman.
+
+Yet urbanity must not deceive us. The eighteenth century has an
+importance in English politics which the comparative absence of
+systematic speculation can not conceal. If its large constitutional
+outlines had been traced by a preceding age, its administrative detail
+had still to be secured. The process was very gradual; and the attempt
+of George III to arrest it produced the splendid effort of Edmund Burke.
+Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and stumbling; but it
+gave to the principle of consent a permanent place in English politics.
+It is the age which saw the crystallization of the party-system, and
+therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called
+the vital principle of representative government. Few discussions of the
+sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith
+gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite
+its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of Church
+and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed its name. De
+Lolme is the real parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in
+Bagehot's hands, become not the least fruitful type of political method.
+Blackstone, in a real sense, may be called the ancestor of Professor
+Dicey. The very calmness of the atmosphere only the more surely paved
+the way for the surprising novelties of Godwin and the revolutionists.
+
+Nor must we neglect the relation between its ethics and its politics.
+The eighteenth century school of British moralists has suffered somewhat
+beside the greater glories of Berkeley and Hume. Yet it was a great work
+to which they bent their effort, and they knew its greatness. The
+deistic controversy involved a fresh investigation of the basis of
+morals; and it is to the credit of the investigators that they attempted
+to provide it in social terms. It is, indeed, one of the primary
+characteristics of the British mind to be interested in problems of
+conduct rather than of thought. The seventeenth century had, for the
+most part, been interested in theology and government; and its
+preoccupation, in both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its
+conclusions unfitted for a period dominated by rationalism. Locke
+regarded his _Human Understanding_ as the preliminary to an ethical
+enquiry; and Hume seems to have considered his _Principles of Morals_
+the most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of
+Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have been
+represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been
+periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no one will be
+inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the spiritual idealism of
+the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson and the Wesleyan revival
+will make us generalize with caution. But the truth was that theological
+ethics had become empty and inadequate, and the problem was therefore
+urgent. That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith--to take
+only men of the first eminence--were thinking not less for politics than
+for ethics when they sought to justify the ways of man to man. For all
+of them saw that a theory of society is impossible without the provision
+of psychological foundations; and those must, above all, result in a
+theory of conduct if the social bond is to be maintained. That sure
+insight is, of course, one current only in a greater English stream
+which reaches back to Hobbes at its source and forward to T.H. Green at
+perhaps its fullest. Its value is its denial of politics as a science
+distinct from other human relations; and that is why Adam Smith can
+write of moral sentiments no less than of the wealth of nations. The
+eighteenth century saw clearly that each aspect of social life must find
+its place in the political equation.
+
+Yet it is undoubtedly an age of methods rather than of principles; and,
+as such its peaceful prosperity was well suited to its questions.
+Problems of technique, such as the cabinet and the Bank of England
+required the absence of passionate debate if they were in any fruitful
+fashion to be solved. Nor must the achievement of the age in politics be
+minimized. It was, of course, a complacent time; but we ought to note
+that foreigners of distinction did not wonder at its complacency.
+Voltaire and Montesquieu look back to England in the eighteenth century
+for the substance of political truths. The American colonies took alike
+their methods and their arguments from English ancestors; and Burke
+provided them with the main elements of justification. The very
+quietness, indeed, of the time was the natural outcome of a century of
+storm; and England surely had some right to be contented when her
+political system was compared with the governments of France and
+Germany. Not, indeed, that the full fruit of the Revolution was
+gathered. The principle of consent came, in practice and till 1760, to
+mean the government of the Whig Oligarchy; and the _Extraordinary Black
+Book_ remains to tell us what happened when George III gave the Tory
+party a new lease of power. There is throughout the time an
+over-emphasis upon the value of order, and a not unnatural tendency to
+confound the private good of the governing class with the general
+welfare of the state. It became the fixed policy of Walpole to make
+prosperity the mask for political stagnation. He turned political debate
+from principles to personalities, and a sterile generation was the
+outcome of his cunning.
+
+Not that this barrenness is without its compensations. The theories of
+the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within a generation. The
+constitutional ideas of the seventeenth century had no substance for an
+England where Anglicanism and agriculture were beginning to lose the
+rigid outlines of overwhelming predominance. What was needed was the
+assurance of safety for the Church that her virtue might be tested in
+the light of nonconformist practice on the one hand, and the new
+rationalism on the other. What was needed also was the expansion of
+English commerce into the new channels opened for it by the victories of
+Chatham. Mr. Chief Justice Holt had given it the legal categories it
+would require; and Hume and Adam Smith were to explain that commerce
+might grow with small danger to agricultural prosperity. Beneath the
+apparent calm of Walpole's rule new forces were fast stirring. That can
+be seen on every side. The sturdy morality of Johnson, the new literary
+forms of Richardson and Fielding, the theatre which Garrick founded upon
+the ruins produced by Collier's indignation, the revival of which Law
+and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the stagnation was sleep
+rather than death. The needed events of shock were close at hand. The
+people of England would never have discovered the real meaning of 1688
+if George III had not denied its principles. When he enforced the
+resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and
+English radicalism were born; for the _Present Discontents_ and the
+_Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights_ are the dawn of a
+splendid recovery. And they made possible the speculative ferment which
+showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and
+Rousseau. Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor
+despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the complacency of
+the eighteenth century. But the peace of the Tudors was the death-bed of
+the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism of the early eighteenth
+century which made possible the birth of democratic England.
+
+The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is deep-rooted in the conditions of
+the past. Locke could not have written had not Hobbes and Filmer
+defended in set terms the ideal of despotic government. He announced the
+advent of the modern system of parliamentary government; and from his
+time the debate has been rather of the conditions under which it is to
+work, than of the foundations upon which it is based. Burke, for
+example, wrote what constitutes the supreme analysis of the statesman's
+art. Adam Smith discussed in what fashion the prosperity of peoples
+could be best advanced. From Locke, that is to say, the subject of
+discussion is rather _politik_ than _staatslehre_. The great debate
+inaugurated by the Reformation ceased when Locke had outlined an
+intelligible basis for parliamentary government. Hume, Bolingbroke,
+Burke, are all of them concerned with the detail of political
+arrangement in a fashion which presupposes the acceptance of a basis
+previously known. Burke, indeed, toward the latter part of his life,
+awoke to the realization that men were dissatisfied with the traditional
+substance of the State. But he met the new desires with hate instead of
+understanding, and the Napoleonic wars drove the current of democratic
+opinion underground. Hall and Owen and Hodgskin inherited the thoughts
+of Ogilvie and Spence and Paine; and if they did not give them
+substance, at least they gave them form for a later time.
+
+Nor is the reason for this preoccupation far to seek. The advance of
+English politics in the preceding two centuries was mainly an advance of
+structure; yet relative at least to continental fact, it appeared
+liberal enough to hide the disharmonies of its inner content. The King
+was still a mighty influence. The power of the aristocracy was hardly
+broken until the Reform Bill of 1867. The Church continued to dominate
+the political aspect of English religious life until, after 1832, new
+elements alien from her ideals were introduced into the House of
+Commons. The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial
+Revolution, when a new class of men attained control of the nation's
+economic power. Only then was a realignment of political forces
+essential. Only then, that is to say, had the time arrived for a new
+theory of the State.
+
+The political ideas of the eighteenth century are thus in some sort a
+comment upon the system established by the Revolution; and that is, in
+its turn, the product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in
+the preceding age. But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or
+its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly
+aristocratic. From no accusation were its statesmen more anxious to be
+free than from that of a belief in democratic government. Whether Whigs
+or Tories were in power, it was always the great families who ruled. For
+them the Church, at least in its higher branches, existed; and the
+difference between nobleman and commoner at Oxford is as striking as it
+is hideous to this generation. For them also literature and the theatre
+made their display; and if Dr. Johnson could heap an immortal contumely
+upon the name of patron, we all know of the reverence he felt in the
+presence of the king. Divine Right and non-resistance were dead, but
+they had not died without a struggle. Freedom of the press and legal
+equality may have been obtained; but it was not until the passage of
+Fox's Libel Act that the first became secure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond
+have recently illumined for us the inward meaning of the second. The
+populace might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt
+upon an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the
+unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons. Such
+outbursts are yet the exception to the prevailing temper. The
+deliberations of Parliament were still, at least technically, a secret;
+and membership therein, save for one or two anomalies like Westminster
+and Bristol, was still the private possession of a privileged class. The
+Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract and general freedom, than a
+special release from the arbitrary will of a stupid monarch who aroused
+against himself every deep-seated prejudice of his generation. The
+England which sent James II upon his travels may be, as Hume pointed
+out, reduced to a pathetic fragment even of its electorate. The masses
+were unknown and undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to
+protest against some wise reform like Walpole's Excise Scheme, or to
+become, as in Goldsmith and Cowper and Crabbe, the object of
+half-pitying poetic sentiment. How deep-rooted was the notion of
+aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial
+fact Rousseau's demand for freedom. The protest of Burke against its
+supposed anarchy swept England like a flame; and only a courageous
+handful could be found to protest against Pitt's prostitution of her
+freedom.
+
+Such an age could make but little pretence to discovery; and, indeed, it
+is most largely absent from its speculation. In its political ideas this
+is necessarily and especially the case. For the State is at no time an
+unchanging organization; it reflects with singular exactness the
+dominating ideas of its environment. That division into government and
+subjects which is its main characteristic is here noteworthy for the
+narrowness of the class from which the government is derived, and the
+consistent inertia of those over whom it rules. There is curiously
+little controversy over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most
+men acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament. What balance of
+forces is necessary to its most perfect equilibrium may arouse
+dissension when George III forgets the result of half a century's
+evolution. Junius may have to explain in invective what Burke
+magistrally demonstrated in terms of political philosophy. But the
+deeper problems of the state lay hidden until Bentham and the
+revolutionists came to insist upon their presence. That did not mean
+that the eighteenth century was a soulless failure. Rather did it mean
+that a period of transition had been successfully bridged. The stage was
+set for a new effort simply because the theories of the older philosophy
+no longer represented the facts at issue.
+
+It was thus Locke only in this period who confronted the general
+problems of the modern State. Other thinkers assumed his structure and
+dealt with the details he left undetermined. The main problems, the
+Church apart, arose when a foreigner occupied the English throne and
+left the methods of government to those who were acquainted with them.
+That most happy of all the happy accidents in English history made
+Walpole the fundamental statesman of the time. He used his opportunity
+to the full. Inheriting the possibilities of the cabinet system he gave
+it its modern expression by creating the office of Prime Minister. The
+party-system was already inevitable; and with his advent to full power
+in 1727 we have the characteristic outlines of English representative
+government. Thenceforward, there are, on the whole, but three large
+questions with which the age concerned itself. Toleration had already
+been won by the persistent necessities of two generations, and the noble
+determination of William III; but the place of the Church in the
+Revolution State and the nature of that State were still undetermined.
+Hoadly had one solution, Law another; and the genial rationalism of the
+time, coupled with the political affiliations of the High Church party,
+combined to give Hoadly the victory; but his opponents, and Law
+especially, remained to be the parents of a movement for ecclesiastical
+freedom of which it has been the good fortune of Oxford to supply in
+each succeeding century the leaders. America presented again the problem
+of consent in the special perspective of the imperial relation; and the
+decision which grew out of the blundering obscurantism of the King
+enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the principles of
+1688. Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster empire; and the
+industrial system which his effort quickened could not live under an
+economic regime which still bore traces of the narrow nationalism of the
+Tudors. No man was so emphatically representative of his epoch as Adam
+Smith; and no thinker has ever stated in such generous terms the answer
+of his time to the most vital of its questions. The answer, indeed, like
+all good answers, revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the
+prospect of its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age
+that was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real
+appreciation of it. The American War and the two great revolutions
+brought a new race of thinkers into being. The French seed at last
+produced its harvest. Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even
+while he rejected his methods. For a time, indeed, the heat and dust of
+war obscured the issue that Bentham raised. But the certainties of the
+future lay on his side.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the attempt of
+James II to establish a despotism in alliance with France and Rome. It
+was almost entirely a movement of the aristocracy, and, for the most
+part, it was aristocratic opposition that it encountered. What it did
+was to make for ever impossible the thought of reunion with Rome and the
+theory that the throne could be established on any other basis than the
+consent of Parliament. For no one could pretend that William of Orange
+ruled by Divine Right. The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the
+deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not
+calculated to deceive even the warmest of William's adherents. An
+unconstitutional Parliament thereupon declared the throne vacant; and
+after much negotiation William and Mary were invited to occupy it. To
+William the invitation was irresistible. It gave him the assistance of
+the first maritime power in Europe against the imperialism of Louis XIV.
+It ensured the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an
+enemy who never slumbered. Nor did England find the new regime
+unwelcome. Every widespread conviction of her people had been wantonly
+outraged by the blundering stupidity of James. If a large fraction of
+the English Church held aloof from the new order on technical grounds,
+the commercial classes gave it their warm support; and many who doubted
+in theory submitted in practice. All at least were conscious that a new
+era had dawned.
+
+For William had come over with a definite purpose in view. James had
+wrought havoc with what the Civil Wars had made the essence of the
+English constitution; and it had become important to define in set terms
+the conditions upon which the life of kings must in the future be
+regulated. The reign of William is nothing so much as the period of that
+definition; and the fortunate discovery was made of the mechanisms
+whereby its translation into practice might be secured. The Bill of
+Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701) are the foundation-stones
+of the modern constitutional system.
+
+What, broadly, was established was the dependence of the crown upon
+Parliament. Finance and the army were brought under Parliamentary
+control by the simple expedient of making its annual summons essential.
+The right of petition was re-affirmed; and the independence of the
+judges and ministerial responsibility were secured by the same act which
+forever excluded the legitimate heirs from their royal inheritance. It
+is difficult not to be amazed at the almost casual fashion in which so
+striking a revolution was effected. Not, indeed, that the solution
+worked easily at the outset. William remained to the end a foreigner,
+who could not understand the inwardness of English politics. It was the
+necessities of foreign policy which drove him to admit the immense
+possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his own best
+safeguard in the foundation of the Bank of England. The Cabinet,
+towards the close of his reign, had already become the fundamental
+administrative instrument. Originally a committee of the Privy Council,
+it had no party basis until the ingenious Sunderland atoned for a score
+of dishonesties by insisting that the root of its efficiency would be
+found in its selection from a single party. William acquiesced but
+doubtfully; for, until the end of his life, he never understood why his
+ministers should not be a group of able counsellors chosen without
+reference to their political affiliations. Sunderland knew better for
+the simple reason that he belonged to that period when the Whigs and
+Tories had gambled against each other for their heads. He knew that no
+council-board could with comfort contain both himself and Halifax; just
+as William himself was to learn quite early that neither honor nor
+confidence could win unswerving support from John Churchill. There is a
+certain feverishness in the atmosphere of the reign which shows how many
+kept an anxious eye on St. Germain even while they attended the morning
+levee at Whitehall.
+
+What secured the permanence of the settlement was less the policy of
+William than the blunder of the French monarch. Patience, foresight and
+generosity had not availed to win for William more than a grudging
+recognition of his kingship. He had received only a half-hearted support
+for his foreign policy. The army, despite his protests, had been
+reduced; and the enforced return of his own Dutch Guards to Holland was
+deliberately conceived to cause him pain. But at the very moment when
+his strength seemed weakest James II died; and Louis XIV, despite
+written obligation, sought to comfort the last moments of his tragic
+exile by the falsely chivalrous recognition of the Old Pretender as the
+rightful English king. It was a terrible mistake. It did for William
+what no action of his own could ever have achieved. It suggested that
+England must receive its ruler at the hands of a foreign sovereign. The
+national pride of the people rallied to the cause for which William
+stood. He was king--so, at least in contrast to Louis' decision, it
+appeared--by their deliberate choice and the settlement of which he was
+the symbol would be maintained. Parliament granted to William all that
+his foreign policy could have demanded. His own death was only the
+prelude to the victories of Marlborough. Those victories seemed to seal
+the solution of 1688. A moment came when sentiment and intrigue combined
+to throw in jeopardy the Act of Settlement. But Death held the stakes
+against the gambler's throw of Bolingbroke; and the accession of George
+I assured the permanence of Revolution principles.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort
+to justify the innovations of 1688. He sought, as he said, "to establish
+the throne of our great Restorer, our present King William, and make
+good his title in the consent of the people." In the debate which
+followed his argument remained unanswered, for the sufficient reason
+that it had the common sense of the generation on his side. Yet Locke
+has suffered not a little at the hands of succeeding thinkers. Though
+his influence upon his own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed to
+him the acutest of his insights; though the principles of the American
+Revolution are in large part an acknowledged adoption of his own; he has
+become one of the political classics who are taken for granted rather
+than read. It is a profound and regrettable error. Locke may not possess
+the clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing
+into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the first
+of English political thinkers. He yet stated more clearly than either
+the general problem of the modern State. Hobbes, after all, worked with
+an impossible psychology and sought no more than the prescription
+against disorder. Burke wrote rather a text-book for the cautious
+administrator than a guide for the liberal statesman. But Locke saw that
+the main problem of the State is the conquest of freedom and it was for
+its definition in terms of individual good that he above all strove.
+
+Much, doubtless, of his neglect is due to the medium in which he worked.
+He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only possible
+retort to the theory of Divine Right. He so emphasized the principle of
+consent that when contractualism came in its turn to be discarded, it
+was discovered that Locke suffered far more than Hobbes by the change so
+made. For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as strong
+government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men,
+while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to
+their opportunity for moral expression. Nor did he, like Rousseau, seize
+upon the organic nature of the State. To him the State was always a mere
+aggregate, and the convenient simplicity of majority-rule solved, for
+him, the vital political problems. But Rousseau was translated into the
+complex dialectic of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he
+would have doubtless been the first to disown. Nor was Locke aided by
+his philosophic outlook. Few great thinkers have so little perceived the
+psychological foundations of politics. What he did was rather to fasten
+upon the great institutional necessity of his time--the provision of
+channels of assent--and emphasize its importance to the exclusion of all
+other factors. The problem is in fact more complex; and the solution he
+indicated became so natural a part of the political fabric that the
+value of his emphasis upon its import was largely forgotten when men
+again took up the study of foundations.
+
+John Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset on the 29th of August, 1632.
+His father was clerk to the county justices and acted as a captain in a
+cavalry regiment during the Civil War. Though he suffered heavy losses,
+he was able to give his son as good an education as the time afforded.
+Westminster under Dr. Busby may not have been the gentlest of academies,
+but at least it provided Locke with an admirable training in the
+classics. He himself, indeed, in the _Thoughts on Education_ doubted the
+value of such exercises; nor does he seem to have conceived any
+affection for Oxford whither he proceeded in 1652 as a junior student of
+Christ Church. The university was then under the Puritan control of Dr.
+John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its
+reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and
+ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that
+he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to
+metaphysics. There, too, he met Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis
+the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659
+he accepted a Senior Studentship of his college, which he retained until
+he was deemed politically undesirable in 1684. After toying with his
+father's desire that he should enter the Church, he began the study of
+medicine. Scientific interest won for him the friendship of Boyle; and
+while he was administering physic to the patients of Dr. Thomas, he was
+making the observations recorded in Boyle's _History of the Air_ which
+Locke himself edited after the death of his friend.
+
+Meanwhile accident had turned his life into far different paths. An
+appointment as secretary to a special ambassador opened up to him a
+diplomatic career; but his sturdy commonsense showed him his unfitness
+for such labors. After his visit to Prussia he returned to Oxford, and
+there, in 1667, in the course of his medical work, he met Anthony
+Ashley, the later Lord Shaftesbury and the Ahitophel of Dryden's great
+satire. The two men were warmly attracted to each other, and Locke
+accepted an appointment as physician to Lord Ashley's household. But he
+was also much more than this. The tutor of Ashley's philosophic
+grandson, he became also his patron's confidential counsellor. In 1663
+he became part author of a constitutional scheme for Carolina which is
+noteworthy for its emphasis, thus early, upon the importance of
+religious toleration. In 1672, when Ashley became Lord Chancellor, he
+became Secretary of Presentations and, until 1675, Secretary to the
+Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations. Meanwhile he carried on his
+medical work and must have obtained some reputation in it; for he is
+honorably mentioned by Sydenham, in his _Method of Curing Fevers_
+(1676), and had been elected to the Royal Society in 1668. But his real
+genius lay in other directions.
+
+Locke himself has told us how a few friends began to meet at his chamber
+for the discussions of questions which soon passed into metaphysical
+enquiry; and a page from a commonplace book of 1671 is the first
+beginning of his systematic work. Relieved of his administrative duties
+in 1675, he spent the next four years in France, mainly occupied with
+medical observation. He returned to England in 1679 to assist Lord
+Shaftesbury in the passionate debates upon the Exclusion Bill. Locke
+followed his patron into exile, remaining abroad from 1683 until the
+Revolution. Deprived of his fellowship in 1684 through the malice of
+Charles II, he would have been without means of support had not
+Shaftesbury bequeathed him a pension. As it was, he had no easy time.
+His extradition was demanded by James II after the Monmouth rebellion;
+and though he was later pardoned he refused to return to England until
+William of Orange had procured his freedom. A year after his return he
+made his appearance as a writer. The _Essay Concerning Human
+Understanding_ and the _Two Treatises of Government_ were both published
+in 1690. Five years earlier the _Letter Concerning Toleration_ was
+published in its Latin dress; and four years afterwards an English
+translation appeared. This last, however, perhaps on grounds of
+expediency, Locke never acknowledged until his will was published; for
+the time was not yet suited to such generous speculations. Locke was
+thus in his fifty-eighth year when his first admitted work appeared. But
+the rough attempts at the essay date from 1671, and hints towards the
+_Letter on Toleration_ can be found in fragments of various dates
+between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years of his life. Of the
+_Two Treatises_ the first seems to have been written between 1680 and
+1685, the second in the last year of his Dutch exile.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: On the evidence for these dates see the convincing argument
+of Mr. Fox-Bourne in his _Life of Locke_, Vol. II, pp. 165-7.]
+
+The remaining fourteen years of Locke's life were passed in
+semi-retirement in East Anglia. Though he held public office, first as
+Commissioner of Appeals, and later of Trade, for twelve years, he could
+not stand the pressure of London writers, and his public work was only
+intermittent. His counsel, nevertheless, was highly valued; and he seems
+to have won no small confidence from William in diplomatic matters.
+Somers and Charles Montagu held him in high respect, and he had the
+warm friendship of Sir Isaac Newton. He published some short discussions
+on economic matters, and in 1695 gave valuable assistance in the
+destruction of the censorship of the press. Two years earlier he had
+published his _Thoughts on Education_, in which the observant reader may
+find the germ of most of Emile's ideas. He did not fail to revise the
+_Essay_ from time to time; and his _Reasonableness of Christianity_,
+which, through Toland, provoked a reply from Stillingfleet and showed
+Locke in retort a master of the controversial art, was in some sort the
+foundation of the deistic debate in the next epoch. But his chief work
+had already been done, and he spent his energies in rewarding the
+affection of his friends. Locke died on October 28, 1704, amid
+circumstances of singular majesty. He had lived a full life, and few
+have so completely realized the medieval ideal of specializing in
+omniscience. He left warm friends behind him; and Lady Masham has said
+of him that beyond which no man may dare to aspire.[2]
+
+[Footnote 2: Fox-Bourne, _op. cit_. Letter from Lady Masham to Jean le
+Clerc.]
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Locke's _Two Treatises of Government_ are different both in object and
+in value. The first is a detailed and tiresome response to the historic
+imagination of Sir Robert Filmer. In his _Patriarcha_, which first saw
+the light in 1680, though it had been written long before, the latter
+had sought to reach the ultimate conclusion of Hobbes without the
+element of contract upon which the great thinker depended. "I consent
+with him," said Filmer of Hobbes, "about the Rights of _exercising_
+Government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it." That power
+must be absolute, Filmer, like Hobbes, has no manner of doubt; but his
+method of proof is to derive the title of Charles I from Adam. Little
+difficulties like the origin of primogeniture, or whence, as Locke
+points out, the universal monarchy of Shem can be derived, the good Sir
+Robert does not satisfactorily determine. Locke takes him up point by
+point, and there is little enough left, save a sense that history is the
+root of institutions, when he has done. What troubles us is rather why
+Locke should have wasted the resources of his intelligence upon so
+feeble an opponent. The book of Hobbes lay ready to his hand; yet he
+almost ostentatiously refused to grapple with it. The answer doubtless
+lies in Hobbes' unsavory fame. The man who made the Church a mere
+department of the State and justified not less the title of Cromwell
+than of the Stuarts was not the opponent for one who had a very
+practical problem in hand. And Locke could answer that he was answering
+Hobbes implicitly in the second _Treatise_. And though Filmer might
+never have been known had not Locke thus honored him by retort, he
+doubtless symbolized what many a nobleman's chaplain preached to his
+master's dependents at family prayers.
+
+The _Second Treatise_ goes to the root of the matter. Why does political
+power, "a Right of making Laws and Penalties of Death and consequently
+all less Penalties," exist? It can only be for the public benefit, and
+our enquiry is thus a study of the grounds of political obedience. Locke
+thus traverses the ground Hobbes had covered in his _Leviathan_ though
+he rejects every premise of the earlier thinker. To Hobbes the state of
+nature which precedes political organization had been a state of war.
+Neither peace nor reason could prevail where every man was his
+neighbor's enemy; and the establishment of absolute power, with the
+consequent surrender by men of all their natural liberties, was the only
+means of escape from so brutal a regime. That the state of nature was so
+distinguished Locke at the outset denies. The state of nature is
+governed by the law of nature. The law of nature is not, as Hobbes had
+made it, the antithesis of real law, but rather its condition
+antecedent. It is a body of rules which governs, at all times and all
+places, the conduct of men. Its arbiter is reason and, in the natural
+state, reason shows us that men are equal. From this equality are born
+men's natural rights which Locke, like the Independents in the Puritan
+Revolution, identifies with life, liberty and property. Obviously
+enough, as Hobbes had also granted, the instinct to self-preservation is
+the deepest of human impulses. By liberty Locke means the right of the
+individual to follow his own bent granted only his observance of the
+law of nature. Law, in such an aspect, is clearly a means to the
+realization of freedom in the same way that the rule of the road will,
+by its common acceptance, save its observers from accident. It promotes
+the initiative of men by defining in terms which by their very statement
+obtain acknowledgment the conditions upon which individual caprice may
+have its play. Property Locke derives from a primitive communism which
+becomes transmuted into individual ownership whenever a man has mingled
+his labor with some object. This labor theory of ownership lived, it may
+be remarked, to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the
+parent of modern socialism.
+
+The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes,
+pre-eminently social in character. There may be war or violence; but
+that is only when men have abandoned the rule of reason which is
+integral to their character. But the state of nature is not a civil
+State. There is no common superior to enforce the law of nature. Each
+man, as best he may, works out his own interpretation of it. But
+because the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient
+variety in the conceptions of justice. The result is uncertainty and
+chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which the
+weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable. It is here that the
+social contract emerges. But just as Locke's natural state implies a
+natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture, so does
+Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of reason than of
+hard necessity. It is a contract of each with all, a surrender by the
+individual of his personal right to fulfil the commands of the law of
+nature in return for the guarantee that his rights as nature ordains
+them--life and liberty and property--will be preserved. The contract is
+thus not general as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character.
+Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of
+some single man or group. On the contrary, it is a contract with the
+community as a whole which thus becomes that common political
+superior--the State--which is to enforce the law of nature and punish
+infractions of it. Nor is Locke's state a sovereign State: the very
+word "sovereignty" does not occur, significantly enough, throughout the
+treatise. The State has power only for the protection of natural law.
+Its province ends when it passes beyond those boundaries.
+
+Such a contract, in Locke's view, involves the pre-eminent necessity of
+majority-rule. Unless the minority is content to be bound by the will of
+superior numbers the law of nature has no more protection than it had
+before the institution of political society. And it is further to be
+assumed that the individual has surrendered to the community his
+individual right of carrying out the judgment involved in natural law.
+Whether Locke conceived the contract so formulated to be historical, it
+is no easy matter to determine. That no evidence of its early existence
+can be adduced he ascribes to its origin in the infancy of the race; and
+the histories of Rome and Sparta and Venice seem to him proof that the
+theory is somehow demonstrable by facts. More important than origins, he
+seems to deem its implications. He has placed consent in the foreground
+of the argument; and he was anxious to establish the grounds for its
+continuance. Can the makers of the original contract, that is to say,
+bind their successors? If legitimate government is based upon the
+consent of its subjects, may they withdraw their consent? And what of a
+child born into the community? Locke is at least logical in his consent.
+The contract of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously
+insisted, it is not a contract. Yet Locke urged that the primitive
+members of a State are bound to its perpetuation simply because unless
+the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in any
+satisfactory sense, would be impossible. With children the case is
+different. They are born subjects of no government or country; and their
+consent to its laws must either be derived from express acknowledgment,
+or by the tacit implication of the fact that the protection of the State
+has been accepted. But no one is bound until he has shown by the rule of
+his mature conduct that he considers himself a common subject with his
+fellows. Consent implies an act of will and we must have evidence to
+infer its presence before the rule of subjection can be applied.
+
+We have thus the State, though the method of its organization is not
+yet outlined. For Locke there is a difference, though he did not
+explicitly describe its nature, between State and Government. Indeed he
+sometimes approximates, without ever formally adopting, the attitude of
+Pufendorf, his great German contemporary, where government is derived
+from a secondary contract dependent upon the original institution of
+civil society. The distinction is made in the light of what is to
+follow. For Locke was above all anxious to leave supreme power in a
+community whose single will, as manifested by majority-verdict, could
+not be challenged by any lesser organ than itself. Government there must
+be if political society is to endure; but its form and substance are
+dependent upon popular institution.
+
+Locke follows in the great Aristotelian tradition of dividing the types
+of government into three. Where the power of making laws is in a single
+hand we have a monarchy; where it is exercised by a few or all we have
+alternatively oligarchy and democracy. The disposition of the
+legislative power is the fundamental test of type; for executive and
+judiciary are clearly dependent on it. Nor, as Hobbes argued, is the
+form of government permanent in character; the supreme community is as
+capable of making temporary as of registering irrevocable decisions. And
+though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness to the family, is
+the most primitive type of government, he denies Hobbes' assertion that
+it is the best. It seems, in his view, always to degenerate into the
+hands of lesser men who betray the contract they were appointed to
+observe. Nor is oligarchy much better off since it emphasizes the
+interest of a group against the superior interest of the community as a
+whole. Democracy alone proffers adequate safeguards of an enduring good
+rule; a democracy, that is to say, which is in the hands of delegates
+controlled by popular election. Not that Locke is anxious for the
+abolition of kingship. His letters show that he disliked the Cromwellian
+system and the republicanism which Harrington and Milton had based upon
+it. He was content to have a kingship divested of legislative power so
+long as hereditary succession was acknowledged to be dependent upon
+popular consent. The main thing was to be rid of the Divine Right of
+kings.
+
+We have thus an organ for the interpretation of natural law free from
+the shifting variety of individual judgment. We have a means for
+securing impartial justice between members of civil society, and to that
+means the force of men has been surrendered. The formulation of the
+rules by which life, liberty and property are to be secured is
+legislation and this, from the terms of the original contract, is the
+supreme function of the State. But, in Locke's view, two other functions
+still remain. Law has not only to be declared. It must be enforced; and
+the business of the executive is to secure obedience to the command of
+law. But Locke here makes a third distinction. The State must live with
+other States, both as regards its individual members, and as a
+collective body; and the power which deals with this aspect of its
+relationships, Locke termed "federative." This last distinction, indeed,
+has no special value; and its author's own defence of it is far from
+clear. More important, especially, for future history, was his emphasis
+of the distinction between legislature and executive. The making of laws
+is for Locke a relatively simple and rapid task; the legislature may do
+its work and be gone. But those who attend to their execution must be
+ceaseless in their vigilance. It is better, therefore, to separate the
+two both as to powers and persons. Otherwise legislators "may exempt
+themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both
+in its making and its execution, to their own private wish, and thereby
+come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community,
+contrary to the end of society and government." The legislator must
+therefore be bound by his own laws; and he must be chosen in such
+fashion that the representative assembly may fairly represent its
+constituencies. It was the patent anomalies of the existent scheme of
+distribution which made Locke here proffer his famous suggestion that
+the rotten boroughs should be abolished by executive act. One hundred
+and forty years were still to pass before this wise suggestion was
+translated into statute.
+
+Though Locke thus insisted upon the separation of powers, he realized
+that emergencies are the parent of special need; and he recognized that
+not only may the executive, as in England, share in the task of
+legislation, but also may issue ordinances when the legislature is not
+in session, or act contrary to law in case of grave danger. Nor can the
+executive be forced to summon the legislature. Here, clearly enough,
+Locke is generalizing from the English constitution; and its sense of
+compromise is implicit in his remarks. Nor is his surrender here of
+consent sufficient to be inconsistent with his general outlook. For at
+the back of each governmental act, there is, in his own mind, an active
+citizen body occupied in judging it with single-minded reference to the
+law of nature and their own natural rights. There is thus a standard of
+right and wrong superior to all powers within the State. "A government,"
+as he says, "is not free to do as it pleases ... the law of nature
+stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others."
+The social contract is secreted in the interstices of public statutes.
+
+Its corollary is the right of revolution. It is interesting that he
+should have adopted this position; for in 1676 he had uttered the
+thought that not even the demands of conscience[3] can justify
+rebellion. That was, however, before the tyranny of Charles had driven
+him into exile with his patron, and before James had attempted the
+subversion of all constitutional government. To deny the right of
+revolution was to justify the worst demands of James, and it is in its
+favor that he exerts his ablest controversial power. "The true remedy,"
+he says, "of force without authority is to oppose force to it." Let the
+sovereign but step outside the powers derived from the social contract
+and resistance becomes a natural right. But how define such invasion of
+powers? The instances Locke chose show how closely, here at least, he
+was following the events of 1688. The substitution of arbitrary will for
+law, the corruption of Parliament by packing it with the prince's
+instruments, betrayal to a foreign prince, prevention of the due
+assemblage of Parliament--all these are a perversion of the trust
+imposed and operate to effect the dissolution of the contract. The
+state of nature again supervenes, and a new contract may be made with
+one more fitted to observe it. Here, also, Locke takes occasion to deny
+the central position of Hobbes' thesis. Power, the latter had argued,
+must be absolute and there cannot, therefore, be usurpation. But Locke
+retorts that an absolute government is no government at all since it
+proceeds by caprice instead of reason; and it is comparable only to a
+state of war since it implies the absence of judgment upon the character
+of power. It lacks the essential element of consent without which the
+binding force of law is absent. All government is a moral trust, and the
+idea of limitation is therein implied. But a limitation without the
+means of enforcement would be worthless, and revolution remains as the
+reserve power in society. The only hindrance to its exertion that Locke
+suggests is that of number. Revolution should not, he urges, be the act
+of a minority; for the contract is the action of the major portion of
+the people and its consent should likewise obtain to the dissolution of
+the covenant.
+
+[Footnote 3: King, _Life of Locke_, pp. 62, 63.]
+
+The problem of Church and State demanded a separate discussion; and it
+is difficult not to feel that the great _Letter on Toleration_ is the
+noblest of all his utterances. It came as the climax to a long evolution
+of opinion; and, in the light of William's own conviction, it may be
+said to have marked a decisive epoch of thought. Already in the
+sixteenth century Robert Brown and William the Silent had denounced the
+persecution of sincere belief. Early Baptists like Busher and Richardson
+had finely denied its validity. Roger Williams in America, Milton in
+England had attacked its moral rightness and political adequacy; while
+churchmen like Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth had shown
+the incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate. Nor
+had example been wanting. The religious freedom of Holland was narrow,
+as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom. Rhode Island,
+Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Massachusetts had all embarked upon
+admirable experiment; and Penn himself had aptly said that a man may go
+to chapel instead of church, even while he remains a good constable.
+And in 1687, in the preface to his translation of Lactantius, Burnet had
+not merely attacked the moral viciousness of persecution, but had drawn
+a distinction between the spheres of Church and State which is a
+remarkable anticipation of Locke's own theory.
+
+Locke himself covers the whole ground; and since his opinions on the
+problem were at least twenty years old, it is clear that he was
+consistent in a worthy outlook. He proceeds by a denial that any element
+of theocratic government can claim political validity. The magistrate is
+concerned only with the preservation of social peace and does not deal
+with the problem of men's souls. Where, indeed, opinions destructive of
+the State are entertained or a party subversive of peace makes its
+appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the
+latter case force is the worst and last of remedies. In the English
+situation, it follows that all men are to be tolerated save Catholics,
+Mahomedans and atheists. The first are themselves deniers of the rights
+they would seek, and they find the centre of their political allegiance
+in a foreign power. Mahomedan morals are incompatible with European
+civil systems; and the central factor in atheism is the absence of the
+only ultimately satisfactory sanction of good conduct. Though Church and
+State are thus distinct, they act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is
+thus important to see why Locke insists on the invalidity of
+persecution. For such an end as the cure of souls, he argues, the
+magistrate has no divine legation. He cannot, on other grounds, use
+force for the simple reason that it does not produce internal
+conviction. But even if that were possible, force would still be
+mistaken; for the majority of the world is not Christian, yet it would
+have the right to persecute in the belief that it was possessed of
+truth. Nor can the implication that the magistrate has the keys of
+heaven be accepted. "No religion," says Locke finely, "which I believe
+not to be true can be either true or profitable to me." He thus makes of
+the Church an institution radically different from the ruling
+conceptions of his time. It becomes merely a voluntary society, which
+can exert no power save over its members. It may use its own ceremonies,
+but it cannot impose them on the unwilling; and since persecution is
+alien from the spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the
+limit of ecclesiastical disciplinary power. Nor must we forget the
+advantages of toleration. Its eldest child is charity, and without it
+there can be no honesty of opinion. Later controversy did not make him
+modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay's hands, to be a
+vital weapon in the political method of the nineteenth century.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Any survey of earlier political theory would show how little of novelty
+there is in the specific elements of Locke's general doctrine. He is at
+all points the offspring of a great and unbroken tradition; and that not
+the least when he seems unconscious of it. Definite teachers, indeed, he
+can hardly be said to have had; no one can read his book without
+perceiving how much of it is rooted in the problems of his own day. He
+himself has expressed his sense of Hooker's greatness, and he elsewhere
+had recommended the works of Grotius and Pufendorf as an essential
+element in education. But his was a nature which learned more from men
+than books; and he more than once insisted that his philosophy was woven
+of his own "coarse thoughts." What, doubtless, he therein meant was to
+emphasize the freshness of his contact with contemporary fact in
+contrast with the technical jargon of the earlier thinkers. At least his
+work is free from the mountains of allusion which Prynne rolled into the
+bottom of his pages; and if the first Whig was the devil, he is
+singularly free from the irritating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet
+even with these novelties, no estimate of his work would be complete
+which failed to take account of the foundations upon which he builded.
+
+Herein, perhaps, the danger is lest we exaggerate Locke's dependence
+upon the earlier current of thought. The social contract is at least as
+old as when Glaucon debated with Socrates in the market-place at Athens.
+The theory of a state of nature, with the rights therein implied, is the
+contribution, through Stoicism, of the Roman lawyers, and the great
+medieval contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism. To the latter, also,
+may be traced the separation of powers; and it was then but little more
+than a hundred years since Bodin had been taken to make the doctrine an
+integral part of scientific politics. Nor is the theory of a right to
+revolution in any sense his specific creation. So soon as the
+Reformation had given a new perspective to the problem of Church and
+State every element of Locke's doctrine had become a commonplace of
+debate. Goodman and Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among
+Catholics, the author of the _Vindiciae_ and Francis Hotman among the
+Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the concept of public power as a
+trust; with, of course, the necessary corollary that its abuse entails
+resistance. Algernon Sydney was at least his acquaintance; and he must
+have been acquainted with the tradition, even if tragedy spared him the
+details, of the _Discourses on Government_. Even his theory of
+toleration had in every detail been anticipated by one or other of a
+hundred controversialists; and his argument can hardly claim either the
+lofty eloquence of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent simplicity of William
+Penn.
+
+What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the manner of his
+writing on the one hand, and the fact of the Revolution on the other.
+Every previous thinker save Sydney--the latter's work was not published
+until 1689--was writing with the Church hardly less in mind than the
+purely political problems of the State; even the secular Hobbes had
+devoted much thought and space to that "kingdom of darkness" which is
+Rome. And, Sydney apart, the resistance they had justified was always
+resistance to a religious tyrant; and Cartwright was as careful to
+exclude political oppression from the grounds of revolution as Locke was
+to insist upon it as the fundamental excuse. Locke is, in fact, the
+first of English thinkers the basis of whose argument is mainly secular.
+Not, indeed, that he can wholly escape the trammels of ecclesiasticism;
+not until the sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible.
+But it is clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground
+from that which arrested the attention of his predecessors. He is
+attempting, that is to say, a separation between Church and State not
+merely in that Scoto-Jesuit sense which aimed at ecclesiastical
+independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as
+such. The central problem is with him political, and all other questions
+are subsidiary to it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any
+previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of
+medieval ideals. Church and State have become transposed in their
+significance. The way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.
+
+The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since made an
+end of the social contract as an explanation of state-origins; and with
+it, of necessity, has gone the conception of natural rights as anterior
+to organized society. The problem, as we now know, is far more complex
+than the older thinkers imagined. Yet Locke's insistence on consent and
+natural rights has received new meaning from each critical period of
+history since he wrote. The theory of consent is vital because without
+the provision of channels for its administrative expression, men tend to
+become the creatures of a power ignorant at once and careless of their
+will. Active consent on the part of the mass of men emphasizes the
+contingent nature of all power and is essential to the full realization
+of freedom; and the purpose of the State, in any sense save the mere
+satisfaction of material appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled. The
+concept of natural right is most closely related to this position. For
+so long as we regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there
+is at no point adequate safeguard against their usurpation. A merely
+legal theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of
+political philosophy.
+
+No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if his effort
+to make rights something more than interests under juridical protection
+can not be accepted in the form he made it, the underlying purpose
+remains. A State, that is to say, which aims at giving to men the full
+capacity their trained initiative would permit is compelled to regard
+certain things as beyond the action of an ordinary legislature. What
+Stammler calls a "natural law with changing content"[4]--a content
+which changes with our increasing power to satisfy demand--is essential
+if the state is to live the life of law. For here was the head and
+centre of Locke's enquiry. "What he was really concerned about," said
+T.H. Green, "was to dispute 'the right divine of kings to govern
+wrong.'" The method, as he conceived, by which this could be
+accomplished was the limitation of power. This he effected by two
+distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in character.
+
+[Footnote 4: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, p. 64., and
+the references there cited.]
+
+The external method has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the first
+place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state. To
+Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of
+gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at
+such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like
+Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the
+interest of individual exertion. But for Locke the real guarantee of
+right lies in another direction. What his whole work amounts to in
+substance--it is a significant anticipation of Rousseau--is a denial
+that sovereignty can exist anywhere save in the community as a whole. A
+common political superior there doubtless must be; but government is an
+organ to which omnipotence is wanting. So far as there is a sovereign at
+all in Locke's book, it is the will of that majority which Rousseau
+tried to disguise under the name of the general will; but obviously the
+conception lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the
+means of operation. The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen,
+under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there is
+lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof that an
+unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember that the
+shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the direction of
+Locke's attitude. That omnicompetence of Parliament which Bentham and
+Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke admits, in later hands, of
+exactly the amelioration he had in mind; and its ethical inadequacy
+becomes the more obvious the more closely it is studied.[5]
+
+[Footnote 5: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chap. I.]
+
+The internal limitation Locke suggested is of more doubtful value.
+Government, he says, in substance, is a trustee and trustees abuse their
+power; let us therefore divide it as to parts and persons that the
+temptation to usurp may be diminished. There is a long history to this
+doctrine in its more obvious form, and it is a lamentable history. It
+tied men down to a tyrannous classification which had no root in the
+material it was supposed to distinguish. Montesquieu took it for the
+root of liberty; Blackstone, who should have known better, repeated the
+pious phrases of the Frenchman; and they went in company to America to
+persuade Madison and the Supreme Court of the United States that only
+the separation of powers can prevent the approach of tyranny. The facts
+do not bear out such assumption. The division of powers means in the
+event not less than their confusion. None can differentiate between the
+judge's declaration of law and his making of it.[6] Every government
+department is compelled to legislate, and, often enough, to undertake
+judicial functions. The American history of the separation of powers
+has most largely been an attempt to bridge them; and all that has been
+gained is to drive the best talent, save on rare occasion, from its
+public life. In France the separation of powers meant, until recent
+times, the excessive subordination of the judiciary to the cabinet. Nor
+must we forget, as Locke should have remembered, the plain lesson of the
+Cromwellian constitutional experiments. That the dispersion of power is
+one of the great needs of the modern State at no point justifies the
+rigid categories into which Locke sought its division.[7]
+
+[Footnote 6: Cf. Mr. Justice Holmes' remarks in _Jensen_ v.
+_Southern Pacific_, 244 U.S. 221.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, pp. 70 f.]
+
+Nor must we belittle the criticism, in its clearest form the work of
+Fitz James Stephen,[8] that has been levelled at Locke's theory of
+toleration. For the larger part of the modern world, his argument is
+acceptable enough; and its ingenious compromises have made it especially
+representative of the English temper. Yet much of it hardly meets the
+argument that some of his opponents, as Proast for example, had made.
+His conception of the visible church as no part of the essence of
+religion could win no assent from even a moderate Anglican; and, once
+the visible church is admitted, Locke's facile distinction between
+Church and State falls to the ground. Nor can it be doubted that he
+underestimated the power of coercion to produce assent; the policy of
+Louis XIV to the Huguenots may have been brutal, but its efficacy must
+be unquestionable. And it is at least doubtful whether his theory has
+any validity for a man who held, as Roman Catholics of his generation
+were bound to hold, that the communication of his particular brand of
+truth outweighed in value all other questions. "Every Church," he wrote,
+"is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical"; but to any
+earnest believer this would approximate to blasphemy. Nor could any
+serious Christian accept the view that "under the gospel '...there is no
+such thing as a Christian commonwealth'"; to Catholics and Presbyterians
+this must have appeared the merest travesty of their faith.
+
+[Footnote 8: Cf. also Coleridge's apt remark. _Table Talk_, Jan. 3,
+1834.]
+
+Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the true progenitor of Benthamism,
+and his work can hardly be understood save in this context. Just as in
+his ethical enquiries it was always the happiness of the individual that
+he sought, so in his politics it was the happiness of the subject he had
+in view. In each case it was to immediate experience that he made his
+appeal; and this perhaps explains the clear sense of a contempt for past
+tradition which pervades all his work. "That which is for the public
+welfare," he said, "is God's will"; and therein we have the root of that
+utilitarianism which, as Maine pointed out, is the real parent of all
+nineteenth century change. And with Locke, as with the Benthamites, his
+clear sense of what utilitarianism demanded led to an over-emphasis of
+human rationalism. No one can read the _Second Treatise_ without
+perceiving that Locke looked upon the State as a machine which can be
+built and taken to pieces in very simple fashion. Herein, undoubtedly,
+he over-simplified the problem; and that made him miss some of the
+cardinal points a true psychology of the State must seize. His very
+contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection for the rational. It
+resulted in his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives
+imbedded in the political act. The significance of herd instinct and the
+vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him. All
+this is of defect; and yet excusably. For it needed the demonstration by
+Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to see the real substance
+of Aristotle's vision that man is embedded in political society.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Once Locke's work had become known, its reputation was secure. Not,
+indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation. Men were not
+wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and felt that
+anything but reason must be the test of truth. Those who stood by the
+ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism and the roots of
+atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the theories of Filmer could
+find defenders against him in the Indian summer of prerogative under
+Queen Anne. John Hutton informed a friend that he was not less dangerous
+than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the nonjuring sect.
+But these, after all, were but the eddies of a stream fast burying
+itself in the sands. For most, the Revolution was a final settlement,
+and Locke was welcome as a writer who had discovered the true source of
+political comfort. So it was that William Molyneux could embody the
+ideas of the "incomparable treatise" in his demand for Irish freedom; a
+book which, even in those days, occasioned some controversy. Nor is it
+uninteresting to discover that the translation of Hotman's
+_Franco-Gallia_ should have been embellished with a preface from one
+who, as Molyneux wrote to Locke,[9] never met the Irish writer without
+conversing of their common master. How rapidly the doctrine spread we
+learn from a letter of Bayle's in which, as early as 1693, Locke has
+already became "the gospel of the Protestants." Nor was his immediate
+influence confined to England. French Huguenots and the Dutch drew
+naturally upon so happy a defender; and Barbeyrac, in the translation of
+Pufendorf which he published in 1706, cites no writer so often as
+Locke. The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell were
+almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the accused
+counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his speech for the
+defence.
+
+[Footnote 9: Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX. 435.]
+
+More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the _Spectator_, on six
+separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose possession is a
+national glory. Defoe in his _Original Power of the People of England_
+made Locke the common possession of the average man, and offered his
+acknowledgments to his master. Even the malignant genius of Swift
+softened his hate to find the epithet "judicious" for one in whose
+doctrines he can have found no comfort. Pope summarized his teaching in
+the form that Bolingbroke chose to give it. Hoadly, in his _Original and
+Institution of Civil Government_, not only dismisses Filmer in a first
+part each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second
+section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to conceal
+the care with which the _Second Treatise_ had also been pillaged. Even
+Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of belittling all rivals in the
+field he considered his own to call him, in that _Divine Legation_ which
+he considered his masterpiece, "the honor of this age and the instructor
+of the future"; but since Warburton's attack on the High Church theory
+is at every point Locke's argument, he may have considered this
+self-eulogy instead of tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis, on the eve of English
+Radicalism, published a noble edition of his book. And there is perhaps
+a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke's economic
+tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the
+_Craftsman_, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole. That is
+irrefutable evidence of the position he had attained.
+
+Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons. There still
+remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke's
+separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch. The
+most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline
+of a social contract more daring even than his own. The authors of the
+_Declaration of Independence_ had still, in words taken from Locke, to
+reassert the state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of North
+Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the Philadelphia
+Convention. Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned against him and
+what was permanent in his work was being cast into the new form required
+by the time. A few sentences of Hume were sufficient to make the social
+contract as worthless as the Divine Right of kings, and when Blackstone
+came to sum up the result of the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual
+terms it was with a full admission that he was making use of fiction so
+far as he went behind the settlement of 1688. Nor is the work of Dean
+Tucker without significance. The failure of England in the American war
+was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked to
+Locke as the author of their principles. "The Americans," he wrote,
+"have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present war"; and in
+his _Treatise Concerning Civil Government_ and his _Four Letters_ he
+declares himself unable to understand on what Locke's reputation was
+based. Meanwhile the English disciples of Rousseau in the persons of
+Price and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol of the
+levellers of England," was the parent also of French destructiveness.
+Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he had dealt with the
+contract theory it ceased to influence political speculation in England.
+Its place was taken by the utilitarian doctrine which Hume had outlined;
+and once Bentham's _Fragment_ had begun to make its way, a new epoch
+opened in the history of political ideas.
+
+Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this renaissance; but,
+once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to other gods men turned.
+For Bentham made an end of natural rights; and his contempt for the past
+was even more unsparing than Locke's own. It is more instructive to
+compare his work with Hobbes and Rousseau than with later thinkers; for
+after Hume English speculation works in a medium Locke would not have
+understood. Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which
+made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English
+philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the
+grimness of facts about him. Yet he need not fear the comparison with
+the earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of
+the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy
+ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each one of
+which is in some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's
+view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil
+character is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept
+Hobbes' Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a
+kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges; but
+Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the other,
+pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the Hobbesian
+view. And anyone who surveys the history of Church and State in America
+will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred years the
+separateness for which Locke contended is not without its justification.
+Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes
+makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids
+them to judge. Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where
+Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder. At every
+point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the
+future has been on Locke's side. He may have defended his cause less
+splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that
+he had a more splendid cause to defend.
+
+With Rousseau there is no contrast, for the simple reason that his
+teaching is only a broadening of the channel dug by Locke. No element
+integral to the _Two Treatises_ is absent from the _Social Contract_.
+Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw deeper than his predecessor. The
+form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance
+Locke can perhaps hardly claim. He understood the organic character of
+the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow
+individualism. It is yet difficult to see that the contribution upon
+which Rousseau's fame has mainly rested is at any point a real advance
+upon Locke. The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms,
+really means the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we
+enquire how that general will is to be known, we come, after much
+shuffling, upon the will of that majority in which Locke also put his
+trust. Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an
+assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also Locke
+was anxious. But he did not think an infallible criterion existed for
+its detection; and he was satisfied with the convenience of a simple
+numerical test. Nor would it be difficult to show that Locke's state has
+more real room for individuality than Rousseau's. The latter made much
+show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in
+the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the
+confines of a city-state. Once, that is to say, we deal with modern
+problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke--what limits
+shall we place upon the power of government? Rousseau has only
+emphasized the urgency of the debate.
+
+Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching
+and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility
+that a final answer can be found to political questions. Each age has
+new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would
+condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the
+attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites
+disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless, even for our
+own day, the kind of work Locke did. In the largest sense, his questions
+are still our own. In the largest sense, also, we are near enough to his
+time to profit at each step of our own efforts by the hints he proffers.
+The point at which he stood in English history bears not a little
+resemblance to our own. The emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem
+of freedom. The problem, now as then, was its translation into
+institutional terms. It is the glory of Locke that he brought a generous
+patience and a searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his
+generation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CHURCH AND STATE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The Revolution of 1688 drew its main source of strength from the
+traditional dislike of Rome, and the eager desire to place the Church of
+England beyond the reach of James' aggression. Yet it was not until a
+generation had passed that the lines of ecclesiastical settlement were,
+in any full sense clear. The difficulties involved were mostly
+governmental, and it can hardly even yet be said that they have been
+solved. The nature of the relation between Church and State, the
+affiliation between the Church and Nonconformist bodies, the character
+of its internal government--all these had still to be defined. Nor was
+this all. The problem of definition was made more complex by schism and
+disloyalty. An important fraction of the Church could not accept at all
+the fact of William's kingship; and if the larger part submitted, it
+cannot be said to have been enthusiastic.
+
+Nor did the Church make easy the situation of the Nonconformists.
+Toleration of some kind was rapidly becoming inevitable; and with a
+Calvinist upon the throne persecution of, at any rate, the Presbyterians
+became finally impossible. Yet the definition of what limits were to be
+set to toleration was far from easy. The Church seemed like a fortress
+beleaguered when Nonjurors, Deists, Nonconformists, all alike assaulted
+her foundations. To loosen her hold upon political privilege seemed to
+be akin to self-destruction. And, after all, if Church and State were to
+stand in some connection, the former must have some benefit from the
+alliance. Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege for
+all who could not accept the special brand of religious doctrine? Locke,
+at least, denied the assumption, and argued that since Churches are
+voluntary societies, they cannot and ought not to have reciprocal
+relation with the State. But Locke's theory was meat too strong for the
+digestion of his time; and no statesman would then have argued that a
+government could forego the advantage of religious support. And William,
+after all, had come to free the church from her oppressor. Freedom
+implied protection, and protection in that age involved establishment.
+It was thus taken for granted by most members of the Church of England
+that her adoption by the State meant her superiority to every other form
+of religious organization. Superiority is, by its nature exclusive, the
+more especially when it is united to a certainty of truth and a kinship
+with the dominant political interest of the time. Long years were thus
+to pass before the real meaning of the Toleration Act secured
+translation into more generous statutes.
+
+The problem of the Church's government was hardly less complex. The very
+acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are in an age of
+settlement. Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless due to the dislike
+of all High Churchmen for William; with their consequent unwillingness
+to admit the full meaning of his ecclesiastical supremacy. Much also is
+due to the fact that the bench of bishops, despite great figures like
+Tillotson and Wake, was necessarily chosen for political aptitude rather
+than for religious value. Nor did men like Burnet and Hoadly, for all
+their learning, make easy the path for brethren of more tender
+consciences. The Church, moreover, must have felt its powers the more
+valuable from the very strength of the assault to which she was
+subjected. And the direct interference with her governance implied by
+the Oaths of Allegiance and of Abjuration raised questions we have not
+yet solved. It suggested the subordination of Church to State; and men
+like Hickes and Leslie were quick to point out the Erastianism of the
+age. It is a fact inevitable in the situation of the English Church that
+the charge of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick
+resentment. She cannot be a church unless she is a _societas perfecta_;
+she cannot have within herself the elements of perfect fellowship if
+what seem the plain commands of Christ are to be at the mercy of the
+king in Parliament. That is the difficulty which lies at the bottom of
+the debate with Wake in one age and with Hoadly in the next. In some
+sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and it is
+in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked with the
+Oxford Movement. But Newman and his followers are the unconscious
+sponsors of a debate which grows in volume; and to discuss the thoughts
+of Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a vital aspect, the study of
+contemporary ideas.
+
+We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William's advisers
+who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy. It raised in acute
+form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more than a century, been
+the main foundation of the alliance between throne and altar in England.
+The demand precipitated a schism which lingered on, though fitfully,
+until the threshold of the nineteenth century. The men who could not
+take the oath were, many of them, among the most distinguished churchmen
+of the time. Great ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of
+Canterbury and one of the seven who had gained immortality by his
+resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of Bath and Wells,
+scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men like Charles Leslie,
+born with a genius for recrimination; much, it is clear, of what was
+best in the Church of England was to be found amongst them. There is not
+a little of beauty, and much of pathos in their history. Most, after
+their deprivation, were condemned to poverty; few of them recanted. The
+lives of men like Sancroft and Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are
+part of the great Anglican tradition of earnest simplicity which later
+John Keble was to illustrate for the nineteenth century. The Nonjurors,
+as they were called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of
+their effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph
+Taylor, to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that
+the history even of their decline is without its interest; and the
+study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the
+Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for students of
+ecclesiastical history.
+
+Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than
+religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past. At the
+bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they
+represent. That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular
+state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the
+allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had
+declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main opponents,
+moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men like Andrewes must
+have felt that when they answered Bellarmine they were in substance also
+defenders of their Church. After the great controversy of James I's
+reign resistance as a duty had come to be regarded as a main element in
+Jesuit and Nonconformist teaching; with the result that its antithesis
+became, as a consequence of the political situation, no less integral a
+part of Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that
+the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to
+the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the
+main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope that it
+would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is
+this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like Barrow
+and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper. When they urge
+the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty
+of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with
+contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect. The Church of
+England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.
+
+How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the
+seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and Sanderson
+sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates its widespread
+acceptance as the result of the Revolution. Four hundred clergy
+abandoned their preferment because James ruled by Divine Right; and they
+could not in conscience resist even his iniquities. An able tract of
+1689[10] had collected much material to show how integral the doctrine
+was to the beliefs of the Church. Had William's government, indeed,
+refrained from the imposition of the oath, it is possible that there
+might have been no schism at all; for the early Nonjurors at
+least--perhaps Hickes and Turner are exceptions--would probably have
+welcomed anything which enabled the avoidance of schism. Once, however,
+the oath was imposed three vital questions were raised. Deprivation
+obviously involved the problem of the power of the State over the
+Church. If the act of a convention whose own legality was at best
+doubtful could deprive the consecrated of their position, was the Church
+a Church at all, or was it the mere creature of the secular power? And
+what, moreover, of conscience? It could not be an inherent part of the
+Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the sake of
+peace. Later thinkers added the purely secular argument that resistance
+in one case made for resistance in all. Admit, it was argued by Leslie,
+the right to disobey, and the fabric of society is at a stroke
+dissolved. The attitude is characteristic of that able controversialist;
+and it shows how hardly the earlier notions of Divine Right were to
+die.
+
+[Footnote 10: _The History of Passive Obedience_. Its author was
+Jeremy Collier.]
+
+These theories merit a further examination. Williams, later the Bishop
+of Chichester, had argued that separation on the basis of the oath was
+unreasonable. "All that the civil power here pretends to," he wrote "is
+to secure itself against the practices of dissatisfied persons." The
+Nonjurors, in this view, were making an ecclesiastical matter of a
+purely secular issue. He was answered, among others, by Samuel Grascom,
+in an argument which found high favor among the stricter of his sect.
+"The matter and substance of these Oaths," he said, "is put into the
+prayers of the Church, and so far it becomes a matter of communion. What
+people are enjoined in the solemn worship to pray for, is made a matter
+of communion; and if it be simple, will not only justify, but require a
+separation." Here is the pith of the matter. For if the form and
+substance of Church affairs is thus to be left to governmental will,
+then those who obey have left the Church and it is the faithful remnant
+only who constitute the true fellowship. The schism, in this view, was
+the fault of those who remained subject to William's dominion. The
+Nonjurors had not changed; and they were preserving the Church in its
+integrity from men who strove to betray it to the civil power.
+
+This matter of integrity is important. The glamour of Macaulay has
+somewhat softened the situation of those who took the oaths; and in his
+pages the Nonjurors appear as stupid men unworthily defending a dead
+cause. It is worth while to note that this is the merest travesty.
+Tillotson, who succeeded Sancroft on the latter's deprivation, and
+Burnet himself had urged passive resistance upon Lord William Russell as
+essential to salvation; Tenison had done likewise at the execution of
+Monmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick, White Kennett, had all written in its
+favor; and to William Sherlock belongs the privilege of having defended
+and attacked it in two pamphlets each of which challenges the pithy
+brilliance of the other. Clearly, so far as consistency is in question,
+the Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their
+side. And even if it is said that the policy of James introduced a new
+situation the answer surely is that Divine Right and non-resistance can,
+by their very nature, make no allowance for novelty.
+
+The root, then, of this ecclesiastical contention is the argument later
+advanced by Leslie in his "Case of the Regale and the Pontificate" in
+which he summarized the Convocation dispute. The State, he argues, has
+no power over bishops whose relationship to their flock is purely
+spiritual and derived from Christ. The Church is independent of all
+civil institution, and must have therefore within herself the powers
+necessary to her life as a society. Leslie repudiates Erastianism in the
+strongest terms. Not only is it, for him, an encroachment upon the
+rights of Christ, but it leads to deism in the gentry and to dissent
+among the common people. The Church of England comes to be regarded as
+no more than the creature of Parliamentary enactment; and thus to leave
+it as the creature of human votes, is to destroy its divinity.
+
+It is easy enough to see that men who felt in this fashion could hardly
+have decided otherwise than as they did. The matter of conscience,
+indeed, was fundamental to their position. "I think," said the Bishop of
+Worcester on his death-bed, "I could suffer at a stake rather than take
+this oath." That, indeed, represents the general temper. Many of them
+did not doubt that James had done grievous wrong; but they had taken the
+oath of allegiance to him, and they saw in their conscience no means of
+escape from their vow. "Their Majesties," writes the author of the
+account of Bishop Lake's death, "are the two persons in the world whose
+reign over them, their interest and inclination oblige them most to
+desire, and nothing but conscience could restrain them from being as
+forward as any in all expressions of loyalty." In such an aspect, even
+those who believe their attitude to have been wrong, can hardly doubt
+that they acted rightly in their expression of it. For, after all,
+experience has shown that the State is built upon the consciences of
+men. And the protest they made stands out in the next generation in
+vivid contrast to a worldly-minded and politically-corrupt Church which
+only internal revolution could awaken from its slumbers.
+
+No one represents so admirably as Charles Leslie the political argument
+of the case. At bottom it is an argument against anarchy that he
+constructs, and much of what he said is medieval enough in tone to
+suggest de Maistre's great defence of papalism as the secret of
+world-order. He stands four square upon divine right and passive
+obedience. "What man is he who can by his own natural authority bend the
+conscience of another? That would be far more than the power of life,
+liberty or prosperity. Therefore they saw the necessity of a divine
+original." Such a foundation, he argued elsewhere, is necessary to
+order, for "if the last resort be in the people, there is no end of
+controversy at all, but endless and unremediable confusion." Nor had he
+sympathy for the Whig attack on monarchy. "The reasons against Kings,"
+he wrote, "are as strong against all powers, for men of any titles are
+subject to err, and numbers more than fewer." And nothing can unloose
+the chain. "Obedience," he said in the _Best of All_, "is due to
+commonwealths by their subjects even for conscience' sake, where the
+princes from whom they have revolted have given up their claim."
+
+The argument has a wider history than its controversial statement might
+seem to warrant. At bottom, clearly enough, it is an attack upon the new
+tradition which Locke had brought into being. What seems to impress it
+most is the impossibility of founding society upon other than a divine
+origin. Anything less will not command the assent of men sufficiently to
+be immune from their evil passions. Let their minds but once turn to
+resistance, and the bonds of social order will be broken. Complete
+submission is the only safeguard against anarchy. So, a century later,
+de Maistre could argue that unless the whole world became the subject of
+Rome, the complete dissolution of Christian society must follow. So,
+too, fifty years before, Hobbes had argued for an absolute dominion lest
+the ambitions and desires of men break through the fragile boundaries of
+the social estate.
+
+The answer is clear enough; and, indeed, the case against the Nonjurors
+is nowhere so strong as on its political side. Men cannot be confined
+within the limits of so narrow a logic. They will not, with Bishop Ken,
+rejoice in suffering as a doctrine of the Cross. Rather will oppression
+in its turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience
+which provokes to action. Here was the root of Locke's doctrine of
+consent; for unless the government, as Hume was later to point out, has
+on its side the opinion of men, it cannot hope to endure. The fall of
+James was caused, not as the Nonjurors were tempted to think, by popular
+disregard of Divine personality, but by his own misunderstanding of the
+limits to which misgovernment may go. Here their opponents had a
+strong case to present; for, as Stillingfleet remarked, if William had
+not come over there might have been no Church of England for the
+Nonjurors to preserve. And other ingenious compromises were suggested.
+Non-resistance, it was argued by Sherlock, applied to government in
+general; and the oath, as a passage in the _Convocation Book_ of Overall
+seemed to suggest, might be taken not less to a _de facto_ monarch than
+to one _de jure_. Few, indeed would have taken the ground of Bishop
+Burnet, and allotted the throne to William and Mary as conquerors of
+the Kingdom; at least the pamphlet in which this uncomfortable doctrine
+was put forward the House of Commons had burned by the common hangman.
+
+What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense. Much the
+ablest attack upon their position was Stillingfleet's defence of the
+policy employed in filling up the sees vacated by deprivation; and it is
+remarkable that the theory he employs is to insist that unless the
+lawfulness of what had been done is admitted, the Nonjuror's position is
+inevitable. "If it be unlawful to succeed a deprived bishop," he
+wrote,[11] "then he is the bishop of the diocese still: and then the law
+that deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament
+that made that law no king and Parliament: and how can this be
+reconciled with the Oath of Allegiance, unless the Doctor can swear
+allegiance to him who is no King and hath no authority to govern." All
+this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the mere fact that it could
+be used as argument against them is proof that they were out of touch
+with the national temper. What they wanted was a legal revolution which
+is in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was
+deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly
+pressed. But the leaders of a revolution "tread a path of fire"; and the
+fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in the fact that
+this was an age when men acted on their principles. William and his
+advisers, with the condition of Ireland and Scotland a cause for
+agitation, with France hostile, with treason and plot not absent from
+the episcopate itself, had no easy task; what, in the temper of the
+time, gives most cause for consideration, is the moderate spirit in
+which they accomplished it.
+
+[Footnote 11: _A Vindication of their Majesties' Authority to fill
+the Sees of the Deprived Bishops_ (1691).]
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which the
+Church of England had to confront in these troubled years. The
+definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the moment
+it aroused less bitterness, was in the long run more intricate in its
+nature. That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of
+prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied. But greater things were
+in the air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of
+Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would have
+been admitted to the Church. It is this which explains the acrimonious
+debates of the next two years. The hatred of the Church for dissent can
+only be understood by those who study with care the insults heaped upon
+her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars. That men who had striven for
+her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen
+as tragic as ironical. Nor must we miss the political aspect of the
+matter. William had received an eager, if natural, support from
+Nonconformists; and since the vast majority of them was Whig in temper,
+the greater the degree of toleration, the greater likelihood there was
+of an attack upon the Church. Exclusion thus became a fundamental
+article of the Tory creed; and it was the more valued because it
+enabled them to strike at their opponents through an institution which
+at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710, still showed an overwhelming hold
+upon the mass of the people.
+
+The attitude of mind herein implied is in large part the reaction from
+the Erastian temper of the government. Under William, that temper is
+intelligible enough; for unless he held the Church in strict control, he
+must have felt that he was giving a large handle to his enemies. Under
+Anne, the essence of the situation remained unchanged, even though her
+eager sympathy with the Church was beyond all question. William had
+relieved Nonconformists from the burden of penal statute; the Occasional
+Conformity Act of 1713 broadly continued the exclusion of all save the
+more yielding of them from political office. When the Hanoverians
+succeeded they were willing to repeal its more rigid intolerance; but
+the Test Act remained as evidence that the Dissenters were not yet
+regarded as in a full sense part of the national life.
+
+The reasons for the hatred of dissent go back in part to the Civil War
+and in part also to the feeling of common ground between the dissenting
+interest and Rome which was born of the struggle under Elizabeth and
+James. The pamphlets are innumerable; and most of them deserve the
+complete obliquity into which they have fallen. We are told, in the
+eighteenth as in the seventeenth century, that the Presbyterian theory
+of government is inconsistent with the existence of the civil power.
+"They claim," said Leslie, "power to abrogate the laws of the land
+touching ecclesiastical matters, if they judge them hurtful or
+unprofitable... They require the civil magistrate to be subject to their
+power." Of Knox or Cartwright this is no unfair account; but of the
+later Presbyterians it is the merest travesty. It supposes that they
+would be willing to push to the utmost limit the implications of the
+theory of the two kingdoms--a supposition which their passive submission
+to the Act of 1712 restoring lay patronage decisively refutes. Bramhall
+had no doubt that their discipline was "the very quintessence of refined
+popery," and the argument is repeated by a hundred less learned
+pamphleteers. Neither the grim irony of Defoe nor the proven facts of
+the case could wean either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of
+the people from the belief that the Revolution endangered the very
+existence of the Church and that concession would be fatal. So stoutly
+did the Church resist it that the accession of George I alone, in
+Lecky's view, prevented the repeal of the Toleration Act and the
+destruction of the political benefits of the Revolution.
+
+But nowhere was the temper of the time more clearly displayed than in
+the disputes over Convocation. To William's advisers, perhaps, more than
+to the Church itself their precipitation is due; for had they not, at
+the outset of the reign, suggested large changes in the liturgy
+suspicions then aroused might well have slumbered. As it was, the
+question of the royal supremacy immediately came into view and the
+clergy spared no effort to meet the issue so raised. And this they felt
+the more bitterly because the upper house of Convocation, two-thirds of
+which were William's nominees, naturally inclined to his side. Both
+under William and Anne the dispute continued, and the lower clergy
+shrank from no opportunity of conflict. They fought the king, the
+archbishop, the upper house. They attacked the writings of Toland and
+Burnet, the latter's book since recognized as one of the great treasures
+of Anglican literature. In the main, of course, the struggle was part of
+the perennial conflict between High Church doctrine and
+latitudinarianism. But that was only a fragment of the issue. What
+really was in question was the nature of the State's power over the
+Church. That could be left unanswered so long, as with James I and
+Charles, the two powers had but a single thought. The situation changed
+only when State and Church had different policies to fulfil and
+different means for their attainment.
+
+The controversy had begun on the threshold of William's accession; but
+its real commencement dates from 1697. In that year was published the
+_Letter to a Convocation Man_, probably written by Sir Bartholomew
+Shower, an able if unscrupulous Jacobite lawyer, which maliciously,
+though with abounding skill, raised every question that peaceful
+churchmen must have been anxious to avoid. The _Letter_ pointed out the
+growth of infidelity and the increasing suspicion that the Church was
+becoming tainted with Socinian doctrine. Only the assembly of
+Convocation could arrest these evils. The author did not deny that the
+king's assent was necessary to its summons. But he argued that once the
+Convocation had met, it could, like Parliament, debate all questions
+relevant to its purpose. "The one of these courts," said Shower, "is of
+the same power and use with regard to the Church as the other is in
+respect to the State," and he insisted that the writ of summons could
+not at any point confine debate. And since the Convocation was an
+ecclesiastical Parliament, it followed that it could legislate and thus
+make any canons "provided they do not impugn common law, statutes,
+customs or prerogative." "To confer, debate and resolve," said Shower,
+"without the king's license, is at common law the undoubted right of
+convocation."
+
+Here was a clear challenge which was at once answered, in _The Authority
+of Christian Princes_, by William Wake, who was by far the most learned
+of the latitudinarian clergy, and the successor of Tenison in the see of
+Canterbury. His argument was purely historical. He endeavored to show
+that the right to summon ecclesiastical synods was always the
+prerogative of the early Christian princes until the aggression of the
+popes had won church independence. The Reformation resumed the primitive
+practice; and the Act of Submission of 1532 had made it legally
+impossible for the clergy to discuss ecclesiastical matters without
+royal permission. Historically, the argument of Wake was irrefutable;
+but what mostly impressed the Church was the uncompromising Erastianism
+of his tone. Princes, he said, "may make what laws or constitutions they
+think fit for the Church.... a canon is but as matter prepared for the
+royal stamp." In this view, obviously, the Church is more than a
+department of the State. But Wake went even farther, "I cannot see why
+the Supreme Magistrate," he wrote, "who confessedly has a power to
+confirm or reject their (Convocation's) decrees, may not also make such
+other use of them as he pleases, and correct, improve, or otherwise
+alter their resolutions, according to his own liking, before he gives
+his authority to them."
+
+So defined no Church could claim in any true sense the headship of
+Christ; for it was clearly left at the mercy of the governmental view of
+expedient conduct. Wake's answer aroused a sensation almost as acute as
+the original _Letter_ of Shower. But by far the ablest criticism it
+provoked was that of Francis Atterbury, then a young student of Christ
+Church and on the threshold of his turbulent career. His _Rights, Powers
+and Privileges of an English Convocation Stated and Vindicated_ not only
+showed a masterly historic sense in its effort to traverse the
+unanswerable induction of Wake, but challenged his position more
+securely on the ground of right. The historical argument, indeed, was
+not a safe position for the Church, and Wake's rejoinder in his _State
+of the Church_ (1703) is generally conceded to have proved his point, so
+far as the claim of prescription is concerned. But when Atterbury moves
+to the deeper problem of what is involved in the nature of a church, he
+has a powerful plea to make. It is unnecessary now to deal with his
+contention that Wake's defence of the Royal Supremacy undermines the
+rights of Parliament; for Wake could clearly reply that the seat of that
+power had changed with the advent of the Revolution. Where the avoidance
+of sympathy is difficult is in his insistence that no Church can live
+without an assembly to debate its problems, and that no assembly can be
+real which is subject to external control. "Their body," as he remarks,
+"will be useless to the State and by consequence contemptible"; for its
+opinions will not be born of that free deliberation which can alone
+ensure respect. Like all High Churchmen, Atterbury has a clear sense
+that Church and State can no longer be equated, and he is anxious to
+preserve the personality of the Church from the invasions of an alien
+body. To be real, it must be independent, and to be independent, it must
+have organs of self-expression. But neither William nor Anne could
+afford to forego the political capital involved in ecclesiastical
+control and Erastian principles proceeded to their triumph.
+
+Here, as elsewhere, it was Charles Leslie who best summed up the
+feeling of High Churchmen. His _Case of the Regale_ (1701) is by far the
+ablest of his many able performances. He saw at the outset that the real
+issue was defined by the Church's claim to be a divine society, with
+rights thus consecrated by the conditions of its origin. If it was
+divine, invasion did not touch its _de jure_ rights. "How," he asked,
+"can rights that are divine be given up? If they are divine, no human
+authority can either supersede or limit them.... How can rights that are
+inherent be given up? If they are inherent, they are inseparable. The
+right to meet, to consult, to make rules or canons for the regulation of
+the society, is essential to every society as such ... can she then part
+with what is essential to her?" Nor could it be denied that "where the
+choice of the governors of one society is in the hands of another
+society, that society must be dependent and subject to the other." The
+Church, in the Latitudinarian view was thus either the creature of the
+state or an _imperium in imperio_; but Leslie would not admit that
+fruitful stumbling block to the debate. "The sacred and civil powers
+were like two parallel lines which could never meet or interfere ... the
+confusion arises ... when the civil power will take upon them to control
+or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her spiritual authority."
+He did not doubt that the Church should give securities for its loyalty
+to the king, and renounce any effort at the coercion of the civil
+magistrate. But the Church was entitled to a similar privilege, and
+kings should not "have their beneficence and protection to the Church of
+Christ understood as a bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their
+hands the powers committed into her charge by Christ." Nor did he fail
+to point out the suicidal nature of Erastianism. For the church's hold
+upon men is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her
+principles. "When they see bishops," he wrote wisely, "made by the
+Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court
+language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a judge
+at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand from the
+Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest security of her
+government."
+
+The argument is powerful enough; though it should be noted that some of
+its implications remain undetermined. Leslie does not say how the
+spheres of Church and State are to be differentiated. He does not
+explain the methods whereby an establishment is to be made compatible
+with freedom. For it is obvious that the partnership of Church and State
+must be upon conditions; and once the State had permitted the existence
+of creeds other than that of its official adoption, it could not
+maintain the exclusive power for which the Church contended. And when
+the Church not only complained of State-betrayal, but attempted the use
+of political means to enforce remedial measures it was inevitable that
+statesmen would use the weapons ready to their hand to coerce it to
+their will. The real remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness
+but disestablishment.
+
+That this is the meaning of the struggle did not appear until the reign
+of George I. What is known as the Bangorian controversy was due to the
+posthumous publication, in 1716, of the papers of George Hickes, the
+most celebrated of the Nonjurors in his generation. The papers are of
+no special import; but taken in connection with the Jacobite rising of
+1715 they seemed to imply a new attack upon the Revolution settlement.
+So, at least, they were interpreted by Benjamin Hoadly, then Bishop of
+Bangor, and a stout upholder of the Latitudinarian school. The conflict
+today has turned to dust and ashes; and few who read the multitude of
+pamphlets it evoked, or stand amazed at their personal bitterness, can
+understand why more than a hundred writers should have thought it
+necessary to inform the world of their opinions, or why the London Stock
+Exchange should have felt so passionate an interest in the debate as to
+cease for a day the hubbub of its transactions. Nor can any one make
+heroes from the personalities of its protagonists. Hoadly himself was a
+typical bishop of the political school, who rose from humble
+circumstances to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester through a
+remarkable series of translations. Before the debate of 1716, he was
+chiefly known by two political tracts in which he had rewritten, in less
+cogent form, and without adequate acknowledgment, the two treatises of
+Locke. He clearly realized how worthless the dogma of Divine Right had
+become, without being certain of the principles by which it was to be
+replaced. Probably, as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is
+the result of a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy. If
+God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we
+must seek a human explanation of political facts. And he became
+convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to
+ecclesiastical than to secular politics. Of his opponents, by far the
+ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be said to
+have respected, and the parent, through his mystical writings, of the
+Wesleyan movement. Snape, then Provost of Eton, was always incisive; and
+his pamphlet went through seventeen editions in a single year and
+provoked seven replies within three months. Thomas Sherlock would not be
+either himself or his father's son, were he not caustic, logical and
+direct. But Hoadly and Law between them exhaust the controversy, so far
+as it has meaning for our own day. The less essential questions like
+Hoadly's choice of friends, his attitude to prayer, the accuracy of the
+details in his account of the Test Act, the cause of his refusal to
+answer Law directly, are hardly now germane to the substance of the
+debate. Hoadly's position is most fully stated in his _Preservative
+against the Principles and Practice of Nonjurors_ which he published in
+1716 as a counterblast to the papers of Hickes; and they are briefly
+summarized in the sermon preached before the King on March 31, 1717, on
+the text "My Kingdom is not of this world," and published by royal
+command. Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and qualifications, some
+simple points emerge. What he was doing was to deprive the priesthood of
+claims to supernatural authority that he might vindicate for civil
+government the right to preserve itself not less against persons in
+ecclesiastical office than against civil assailants. To do so he is
+forced to deny that the miraculous powers of Christ and the Apostles
+descended to their successors. For if that assumption is made we grant
+to fallible men privileges which confessedly belong to persons outside
+the category of fallibility. And, exactly in the fashion of Leslie in
+the _Regale_ he goes on to show that if a Church is a supernatural
+institution, it cannot surrender one jot or tittle of its prerogative.
+It is, in fact, an _imperium in imperio_ and its conflict with the state
+is inevitable. But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what
+is its nature? Hoadly here attacks the doctrine which lies at the basis
+of all ecclesiastical debate. The Church, he claims, is not a visible
+society, presided over by men who have authority directly transmitted by
+Christ. There are not within it "viceregents who can be said properly to
+supply his place; no interpreters upon whom his subjects are absolutely
+to depend; no judges over the conscience or religion of his people. For
+if this were so that any such absolute viceregent authority, either for
+the making of new laws, or interpreting old ones, or judging his
+subjects, in religious matters, were lodged in any men upon earth, the
+consequence would be that what still retains the name of the Church of
+Christ would not be the kingdom of Christ, but the kingdom of those men
+invested with such authority. For whoever hath such an authority of
+making laws is so far a king, and whoever can add new laws to those of
+Christ, equally obligatory, is as truly a king as Christ himself. Nay,
+whosoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken
+laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes,
+and not the person who first wrote and spoke them."
+
+The meaning is clear enough. What Hoadly is attacking is the theory of a
+visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense superstructure of
+miracle and infallibility erected thereon. The true Church of Christ is
+in heaven; and the members of the earthly society can but try in a
+human, blundering way, to act with decency and justice. Apostolic
+succession, the power of excommunication, the dealing out of forgiveness
+for men's sins, the determination of true doctrine, insofar as the
+Church claims these powers, it is usurping an authority that is not its
+own. The relation of man to God is his private affair, and God will ask
+from him sincerity and honesty, rather than judge him for his
+possession of some special set of dogmas. Clearly, therefore, if the
+Church is no more than this, it has no supernatural pretensions to
+oppose to the human claims of the State. And since the State must have
+within itself all the means of sufficient life, it has the right to
+resist the ecclesiastical onslaught as based upon the usurpation of
+power assumed without right. And in later treatises Hoadly did for
+ceremonial exactly what he had done for church government. The eucharist
+became a piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an
+announcement--"a mere external thing"--that the rules of the fellowship
+have been broken. It at no point is related to the sinner's opportunity
+of salvation.
+
+In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has no
+monopoly of truth. It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but reason
+alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes. Nor does its
+judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the truth of
+things. The real root of faith is not the possession of an infallible
+dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which you happen to
+believe. For the magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the
+table of your springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based
+upon that table; from which it follows that things like the Test and
+Corporation Acts have no real political validity. They have been imposed
+upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping power; and
+the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem as valid as that
+of a member of the Church of England.
+
+All this sounds sensible enough; though it is curious doctrine in the
+mouth of a bishop of that church. And this, in fact, is the
+starting-point of Law's analysis of Hoadly. No one who reads the
+unsparing vigor of his criticism can doubt that Law must have been
+thoroughly happy in the composition of his defence; and, indeed, his is
+the only contribution to the debate which may claim a permanent place in
+political literature. In one sense, indeed, the whole of Law's answer is
+an _ignoratio elenchi_, for he assumes the truth of that which Hoadly
+sets out to examine, with the inevitable result that each writer is, for
+the most part, arguing from different premises. But on the assumption
+that Hoadly is a Christian, Law's argument is an attack of great power.
+He shows conclusively that if the Church of England is no more than
+Hoadly imagines it to be, it cannot, in any proper historic sense, be
+called the Church of England at all. For every one of the institutions
+which Hoadly calls an usurpation, is believed by Churchmen to be
+integral to its nature. And if sincerity alone is to count as the test,
+then there cannot, for the existing world, be any such thing as
+objective religious truth. It subverted not merely absolute
+authority--which the Church of England did not claim--but any authority
+in the Church. It impugned the authority of the Crown to enforce
+religious belief by civil penalties. Hoadly's rejection of authority,
+moreover, is in Law's view fatal to government of any kind. For all
+lawful authority must affect eternal salvation insofar as to disobey it
+is to sin. The authority the Church possesses is inherent in the very
+nature of the Church; for the obligation to a belief in Christianity is
+the same thing as to a belief in that Church which can be shown to
+represent Christ's teaching.
+
+From Law's own point of view, the logic of his position is undeniable;
+and in his third letter to Hoadly, the real heart of his attack, he
+touches the centre of the latter's argument. For if it is sincerity
+which is alone important it would follow that things false and wrong are
+as acceptable to God as things true and right, which is patently absurd.
+Nor has Hoadly given us means for the detection of sincerity. He seemed
+to think that anyone was sincere who so thought himself; but, says Law,
+"it is also possible and as likely for a man to be mistaken in those
+things which constitute true sincerity as in those things which
+constitute true religion." Clearly, sincerity cannot be the pith of the
+matter; for it may be mistaken and directed to wrong ends. The State, in
+fact, may respect conscience, but Hoadly is no more entitled to assume
+the infallibility of private belief than he is to deny the infallibility
+of the Church's teaching. That way lies anarchy.
+
+Here, indeed, the antagonists were on common ground. Both had denied the
+absolute character of any authority; but while Hoadly virtually
+postulates a Church which logically is no more than those who accept
+the moral law as Christ described it, Law restricts the Church to that
+society which bears the traditional marks of the historic institution.
+On Hoadly's principles, there was no reason why anyone not hostile to
+the civil power should not enjoy political privilege; on Law's there was
+every reason simply because those who denied the doctrines of the High
+Church refused a truth open for their acceptance. Law, indeed, goes so
+far as to argue that in the light of his principles Hoadly should be a
+Deist; and there is ground for what, in that age, was a valuable point
+to make. The sum total of it all is that for the bishop the outward
+actions of men alone concern the State; while Law insists that the root
+of action and the test of fitness is whether men have seen a certain
+aspect of the truth and grasped it.
+
+The result, to say the least, was calamitous. In May of 1717,
+convocation met and the Lower House immediately adopted an unanimous
+report condemning the "Preservative" and the sermon. But Hoadly had the
+government behind him and the convocation was prorogued before further
+action could be taken. Snape, Hare, Mosse and Sherlock, all of whom were
+chaplains royal, and had been drawn into the conflict, were dismissed
+from their office; and for more than one hundred and thirty-five years
+convocation was not again summoned. It was a striking triumph for
+Erastianism, though the more liberal principles of Hoadly were less
+successful. Robert Walpole was on the threshold of his power, and, as a
+manager of Sacheverell's impeachment, he had seen the hold of the Church
+upon the common people, may even, indeed, have remembered that Hoadly's
+own dwelling had been threatened with destruction in the popular
+excitement. _Quieta non movere_ was his motto; and he was not interested
+in the niceties of ecclesiastic metaphysic. So the Test Act remained
+immovable until 1828; while the annual Act of Indemnity for its
+infractions represented that English genius for illogical mitigation
+which solves the deeper problems of principle while avoiding the
+consideration of their substance.
+
+In the hundred and twenty years which passed between the Bangorian
+Controversy and the Oxford Movement, there is only one volume upon the
+problem of Church and State which deserves more than passing notice.
+Bishop Warburton was the Lord Brougham of his age; and as its
+self-constituted universal provider of intellectual fare, he deemed it
+his duty to settle this, amongst others of the eternal questions. The
+effort excited only the contempt of Leslie Stephen--"the peculiar
+Warburton mixture," he says "of sham logic and bluster." Yet that is
+hardly fair to the total result of Warburton's remarks. He tried to
+steer a middle path between the logical result of such Erastianism as
+that of the _Independent Whig_, on the one hand, and the excessive claim
+of High Churchmanship on the other. Naturally enough, or the writer
+would not be Warburton, the book is full of tawdry rhetoric and stupid
+quibbles. But the _Alliance between Church and State_ (1736) set the
+temper of speculation until the advent of Newman, and is therefore
+material for something more than contempt. It acutely points out that
+societies generate a personality distinct from that of their members in
+words reminiscent of an historic legal pronouncement.[12] "When any
+number of men," he says, "form themselves into a society, whether civil
+or religious, this society becomes a body different from that aggregate
+which the number of individuals composed before the society was
+formed.... But a body must have its proper personality and will, which
+without these is no more than a shadow or a name."
+
+[Footnote 12: Dicey, _Law and Opinion in England_ (2nd edition),
+p. 165.]
+
+And that is the root of Warburton's pronouncement. The Church is a
+society distinct from the State, but lending to that body its assistance
+because without the sanction of religion the full achievement of the
+social purpose is impossible. There is thus an alliance between them,
+each lending its support to the other for their common benefit. The two
+remain distinct; the union between them is of a federal kind. But they
+interchange their powers, and this it is which explains at once the
+royal supremacy and the right of Churchmen to a share in the
+legislature. This also it is which explains the existence of a Test
+Act, whereby those who might injure that which the State has undertaken
+to protect are deprived of their power to evil. And, in return, the
+Church engages to "apply its utmost endeavors in the service of the
+State." It becomes attached to its benefactor from the privilege it
+receives; and the dangers which might arise from its natural
+independence are thus obviated. For a federal union precludes the grave
+problem of an _imperium in imperio_, and the "mischiefs which so
+terrified Hobbes" are met by the terms upon which it is founded.
+
+It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The contract
+does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton "in the same
+archive with the famous original compact between monarch and people"
+which has been the object of vast but fruitless searches. Nor does the
+Act of Submission bear upon its face the marks of that tender care of
+the protection of an independent society which Warburton declared a
+vital tenet of the Union. Yet such criticisms miss the real significance
+of the theory. It is really the introduction into English politics of
+that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and
+Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit
+was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a
+secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the
+superior. Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it
+pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had
+seemed mutually exclusive.
+
+Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the English Church
+because its temper, under the aegis of Laudian views, had been in
+substance theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly expressed the compromise
+the dominant party of the Church had then in mind. They did, indeed,
+mistake the power of the Church, or, rather, they submitted to the State
+so fully that what they had intended for a partnership became an
+absorption. So that the Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep
+enough to make the Church no more than a moral police department of the
+State. Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by
+fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct
+to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The
+Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and
+its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the
+obstrusive Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence
+slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until Newman's advent was
+the provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility. It
+is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church which
+was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The opponents of
+Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a
+plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making. They saw that a
+Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control
+of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth
+their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment
+and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to
+be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal
+and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the
+Church to possess an ethos of her own. It was thus against the
+sovereignty of the State that they protested. Somewhere, a line must be
+drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be
+safeguarded. For its supporters could not be true to their divine
+mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to
+impose its will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious
+body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they
+repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived from the
+State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an
+authority not rightly its own.
+
+The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment. For here
+the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived
+upon terms of her own definition. That was possible before the
+Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of
+rationalism the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become
+unacceptable. If the Church was to become so intimately involved with
+the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to complain, if
+statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to sacrifice it to
+the attainment of that ideal. For the real secret of independence is,
+after all, no more than independence. The Church sought it without being
+willing to pay the price. And this it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge
+triumphant from an ordeal where logically he should have failed. The
+State, by definition is an absorptive animal; and the Church had no
+right to complain if the price of its privileges was royal supremacy. A
+century so self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the
+difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High Church
+theory.
+
+Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next century.
+The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the seventeenth
+century, to the ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.[13] In
+fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law. Like them, it was
+searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it
+discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the
+sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation. "The
+State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words might have been
+written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement, indeed, like its
+predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and when Lord Brougham told
+the House of Lords that the idea of the Church possessing "absolute and
+unalienable rights" was a "gross and monstrous anomaly" because it would
+make impossible the supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the
+result of a doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first
+completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this
+controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury has
+told the House of Lords,[14] "... see the absolute need, if a Church is
+to be strong and vigorous, for the Church, _qua_ church, to be able to
+say what it can do as a church." "The rule of the sovereign, the rule of
+Parliament," replied Lord Haldane,[15] "extend as far as the rule of the
+Church. They are not to be distinguished or differentiated, and that was
+the condition under which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the
+Church of England." Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic
+theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the problem
+of its sovereignty. "A free church in a free state," now, as then, may
+be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to build it.
+
+[Footnote 13: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chapter III.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34,
+p. 992 (June 3, 1919).]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p 1002.
+The quotation does not fully represent Lord Haldane's views.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ERA OF STAGNATION
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of unexampled calm
+in English politics, which lasted until the expulsion of Walpole from
+power in 1742. No vital questions were debated, nor did problems of
+principle force themselves into view; and if the Jacobites remained in
+the background as an element invincibly hostile to absorption, the
+failure of their effort in 1715 showed how feeble was their hold on
+English opinion. Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had
+nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably
+recorded in Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and
+meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the reign
+of George III, they were amenable to management. In the result, an
+opposition in the classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question
+to be considered was the personalities who were to share in power. The
+dominating temper of Walpole decided that issue; and he gave thereby to
+the political struggle the outlines in which it was encased for a
+generation.
+
+It is a dull period, but complacent; for it was not an unprosperous
+time. Agriculture and commerce both were abundant; and the increasing
+development of towns shows us that the Industrial Revolution loomed in
+the near distance. The eager continuance of the deistic controversy
+suggests that there was something of novelty beneath the calm; for
+Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck at the root of religious belief,
+and Shaftesbury's exaltation of Hellenism not only contributed to the
+_Aufklarung_ in Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not
+to go unchallenged. But the literature of the time is summarized in
+Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of
+the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the
+latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop
+Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his
+_Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721) shows rather
+the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea
+Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought.
+Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with
+seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the
+estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite
+the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole
+governed. It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the
+keynote of the time. An able speaker, without being a great orator, a
+superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men
+low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the
+man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions
+to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over
+the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from
+office. One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney,
+Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility. He maintained himself in
+office by a corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically
+conceived. An opposition developed less on principle than on the belief
+that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for concentration.
+The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save personal animosity
+upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions could only seize upon a
+doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain as the pretext of the war it
+was Walpole's ambition no less than policy to avoid. From 1726 until
+1735 the guiding spirit of the party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter
+year he quarrelled with Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in
+high dudgeon to France. But in the years of his leadership he had
+evolved a theory of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the
+intellectual bankruptcy of the time.
+
+To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to remember
+the peculiar character of his career. He had attained to the highest
+office under Anne at an exceptionally early age; and his period of
+power had been distinguished by the vehemence with which he pursued the
+ideal of a strict division of parties and the expulsion of all alien
+elements from the government. But he had staked all his fortunes upon a
+scheme he had neither the resolution to plan nor the courage to execute;
+and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had been followed
+by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to his reputation and
+place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the
+King's mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to
+political place. His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from
+power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance between the
+Tories and malcontent Whigs for Walpole's overthrow. The alliance
+succeeded, though too late for Bolingbroke to enjoy the fruits of
+success; but in effecting the purgation of the Tory party from its taint
+of Jacobitism he rendered no inconsiderable service. His foundation,
+moreover, of the _Craftsman_--the first official journal of a political
+party in England--showed his appreciation of the technique of political
+controversy. Most of it is dead now, and, indeed, no small part of its
+contemporary success is due to the making of comment in terms of the
+immediate situation, as also by its consistent use of a personal
+reference which has, save in the mass, no meaning for today. Though,
+doubtless, the idea of its inception was derived from journals like
+Defoe's _Review_ and Leslie's _Rehearsal_, which had won success, its
+intimate connection with the party leadership was a novel element; and
+it may therein claim a special relation to the official periodicals of a
+later generation.
+
+The reputation of Bolingbroke as a political philosopher is something
+that our age can hardly understand. "A solemn trifler," Lord Morley has
+called him; and it is difficult to know why his easy declamation was so
+long mistaken for profound thought. Much, doubtless, is due to that
+personal fascination which made him the inspiration of men so different
+as Pope and Voltaire; and the man who could supply ideas to Chatham and
+Disraeli cannot be wholly devoid of merit. Certainly he wrote well, in
+that easy elegance of style which was the delight of the eighteenth
+century; and he is consistently happy in his choice of adjectives. But
+his work is at every point embellished with that affectation of
+classical learning which was the curse of his age. He sought no general
+truths, and he is free from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any
+enthusiasm save that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his
+political writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize
+his animosity. The _Dissertation on Parties_ (1734) and the _Idea of a
+Patriot King_ (1738) might have betrayed us, taken alone, into regarding
+their author as a disinterested observer watching with regret the
+development of a fatal system; but taken in conjunction with the _Letter
+to Sir W. Windham_ (1717), which was not published until after his
+death, and is written with an acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to
+honesty, they reveal the opinions as no more than a mask for ambition
+born of hate.
+
+The whole, of course, must have some sort of background; and the
+_Letters on the Study of History_ (1735) was doubtless intended to
+supply it. Experience is to be the test of truth, since history is
+philosophy teaching by example. But Bolingbroke's own argument supplies
+its refutation. His history is an arbitrary selection of instances
+intended to illustrate the particular ideas which happened to be
+uppermost in his mind. The Roman consuls were chosen by annual election;
+whence it is clear that England should have, if not an annual, at least
+a triennial parliament. He acknowledges that the past in some degree
+unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks upon the
+evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger
+aspect than their immediate environment. But his history is intended
+less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy
+of citation. Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content
+with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration. He is willing,
+indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the
+reign of James I; though he shows his lack of true perception when he
+ascribes the true inwardness of the Reformation to the greed of the
+monarch for the spoils of the clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses
+him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events.
+Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the
+real root of great changes. And when he expresses a "thorough contempt"
+for the kind of work scholars such as Scaliger and Petavius had
+achieved, he shows his entire ignorance of the method whereby alone a
+knowledge of general principle can be attained.
+
+A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high
+notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings is too
+stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king
+important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the Church; for
+Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with such matters as
+the apostolic succession. He makes great show of his love of liberty,
+which is the true end of government; and we are informed with a vast
+solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in which it always stands. So that
+the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told
+what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained. The social compact
+seems to win his approbation and we learn that the secret of the
+British constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual
+independency. But what the powers are, and how their independence is
+preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of
+Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria
+against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the
+secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of
+standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told
+that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and
+vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for
+corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his
+sincerity. The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no
+difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how
+completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted. He
+wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He would have
+disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen from Parliament.
+The press was to be free; and there is at least a degree of generous
+insight in his plea for a wider commercial freedom in colonial matters.
+Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man with
+the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the committee for the
+settlement of disputed elections? And what else can we see in his desire
+for liberty of the press save a desire to fight Walpole in the open,
+without fear of the penalties his former treason had incurred?
+
+His value can be tested in another way. His _Idea of a Patriot King_ is
+the remedy for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty years old when it
+appeared, and he had then been in active politics for thirty-five years,
+so that we are entitled to regard it as the fruit of his mature
+experience. He was too convinced that the constitution was "in the
+strictest sense a bargain, a conditional contract between the prince and
+the people" to attempt again the erection of a system of prerogative.
+Yet it is about the person of the monarch that the theory hinges. He is
+to have no powers inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for
+such restraints will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil
+propensities of a bad king. What is needed is a patriot king who will
+destroy corruption and awaken the spirit of liberty. His effective
+government will synchronize with the commencement of his reign; and he
+will at once dismiss the old and cunning ministers, to replace them by
+servants who are wise. He will not stand upon party, but upon the State.
+He will unite the forces of good counsel into a single scheme.
+Complaints will be answered, the evildoers punished. Commerce will flow
+on with uninterrupted prosperity, and the navy of England receive its
+due meed of attention. His conduct must be dignified, and he must
+acquire his influence not apart from, but on account of, the affection
+of his people. "Concord," says Bolingbroke in rhapsodical prospection,
+"will appear breeding peace and prosperity on every hand"; though he
+prudently hopes also that men will look back with affection upon one
+"who desired life for nothing so much as to see a King of Great Britain
+the most powerful man in the country, and a patriot King at the head of
+a united people."
+
+Bolingbroke himself has admitted that such a monarch would be a "sort of
+standing miracle," and perhaps no other comment upon his system is
+required. A smile in Plato at the sight of his philosopher-King in such
+strange company might well be pardoned. It is only necessary to point
+out that the person whom Bolingbroke designates for this high function
+was Frederick, Prince of Wales, to us the most meagre of a meagre
+generation, but to Bolingbroke, by whose grace he was captivated, "the
+greatest and most glorious of human beings." This exaltation of the
+monarch came at a time when a variety of circumstances had combined to
+show the decrease of monarchical sentiment. It bears upon its every page
+the marks of a personal antagonism. It is too obviously the programme of
+a party to be capable of serious interpretation as a system. The
+minister who is to be impeached, the wise servants who are to gain
+office, the attack on corruption, the spirited foreign policy--all these
+have the earmarks of a platform rather than of a philosophy. Attacks on
+corruption hardly read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the
+one solid evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger of
+finance in politics. For none of the Tories save Barnard, who owed his
+party influence thereto, understood the financial schemes of Walpole;
+and since they were his schemes obviously they represented the triumph
+of devilish ingenuity. The return of landed men to power would mean the
+return of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country
+squires, the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that
+Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a regime which already
+faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power. The pamphlet was the
+cornerstone in the education of Frederick's son; and when George III
+came to the throne he proceeded to give such heed to his master as the
+circumstances permitted. It is perhaps, as Mr. A.L. Smith has argued,
+unfair to visit Bolingbroke with George's version of his ideal; yet they
+are sufficiently connected for the one to give the meaning to the other.
+Chatham, indeed, was later intrigued by this ideal of a national party;
+and before Disraeli discovered that England does not love coalitions he
+expended much rhetoric upon the beauties of a patriotic king. But
+Chatham was a wayward genius who had nothing of that instinct for common
+counsel which is of the essence of party government; while it is
+necessary to draw a firm line between Disraeli's genial declamation and
+his practice when in office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort
+founded upon the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that
+his own last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of
+the event which he looked to as the inauguration of the golden age.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political thought;
+the system continued, though the men were different. What alone can be
+detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which found its
+sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the strength of
+which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king. An able
+pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival of this unlooked-for portent.
+_Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts_ (1742) was, though it is
+anonymous,[16] obviously written by one in touch with the inner current
+of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of Walpole, though he sees
+the chaos in its result. "A republican spirit," he says, "has strangely
+arisen"; and he goes on to tell how the electors of London and
+Westminster were now regarding their members as delegates to whom
+instructions might be issued. "A new party of malcontents" had arisen,
+"assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People."
+They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ... and
+endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands
+that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the
+people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so
+obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society,
+to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves."
+The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike, that temper which
+produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible for Cartwright and
+Horne Tooke and Sir Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English
+radicalism.
+
+[Footnote 16: It was probably written by Lord Egmont.]
+
+Yet the influence of that temper still lay a generation ahead; and the
+next piece of import comes from a mind which, though perhaps the most
+powerful of all which have applied themselves to political philosophy in
+England, was, from its very scepticism, incapable of constructive
+effort. David Hume was thirty-one years of age when he published (1742)
+the first series of his essays; and his _Treatise of Human Nature_ which
+had fallen "dead-born from the press" was in some sort compensated by
+the success of the new work. The second part, entitled _Political
+Discourses_, was published in 1752, almost simultaneously with the
+"_Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals_." As in the case of
+Hume's metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful
+dissolvent the century was to see. Yet nowhere was so clearly to be
+demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had fallen.
+
+Hume, of course, is always critical and suggestive, and even if he had
+no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new turn to speculation.
+There is something almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes
+divine right and the social contract. The one is an inevitable deduction
+from theism, but it protects an usurper not less than an hereditary
+king, and gives a "divine commission" as well to a constable as to the
+most majestic prince. The proponents of the social contract are in no
+better case. "Were you to preach," he remarks, "in most parts of the
+world that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary
+consent, or on a mutual promise, the magistrate would soon imprison you
+as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience; if your friends did
+not before shut you up as delirious for advancing such absurdities." The
+original contract could not be produced, and, even if it were, it would
+suppose the "consent of the fathers to bind the children even to the
+most remote generations." The real truth, as he remarks, is that "almost
+all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains
+any record in story, have been founded originally on usurpation, or on
+conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary
+subjection of the people." If we then ask why obedience is possible, the
+sufficient answer is that "it becomes so familiar that most men never
+make any inquiry about its origin or cause, any more than about the
+principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of nature."
+
+Government, in short, is dependent upon the inescapable facts of
+psychology. It might be unnecessary if all desires could be individually
+fulfilled by making them, or if man showed to his fellow-men the same
+tender regard he has for himself. So happy a condition does not exist;
+and government is the most useful way of remedying the defects of our
+situation. A theologian might say that Hume derives government from
+original sin; to which he would have replied by denying the fall. His
+whole attitude is simply an insistence that utility is the touchstone of
+institutions, and he may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its
+application to the whole field of political science. He knows that
+opinion is the sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie
+at the base of the thoughts which get accepted. He does not, indeed,
+deny that fear and consent enter into the attitude of men; he simply
+asserts that these also are founded upon a judgment of utility in the
+thing judged. We obey because otherwise "society could not subsist," and
+society subsists for its utility. "Men," he says "could not live at all
+in society, at least in a civilized society, without laws and
+magistrates and judges, to prevent the encroachments of the strong upon
+the weak, of the violent upon the just and equitable."
+
+Utilitarianism is, of course, above all a method; and it is not unfair
+to say of Hume that he did not get very far beyond insistence on that
+point. He sees that the subjection of the many to the few is rooted in
+human impulse; but he has no penetrating inquiry, such as that of Locke
+or Hobbes, into the purpose of such subjection. So, too, it is the sense
+of public interest which determines men's thoughts on government, on who
+should rule, and what should be the system of property; but the ethical
+substance of these questions he leaves undetermined. Politics, he
+thinks, may one day be a science; though he considers the world still
+too young for general truths therein. The maxims he suggests as of
+permanent value, "that a hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals,
+and a people voting by their representatives form the best monarchy,
+autocracy and democracy"; that "free governments ... are the most
+ruinous and oppressive to their provinces"; that republics are more
+favorable to science, monarchies to art; that the death of a political
+body is inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most
+thinkers at the present time. And when he constructs an ideal
+constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be regarded as
+practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is obvious that the
+historical method had not yet come fully into being.
+
+Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an avoidance
+of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic insight that he had.
+He has a keen eye for the absurdity of Pope's maxim that administration
+is all in all; nothing can ever make the forms of government immaterial.
+He accepts Harrington's dictum that the substance of government
+corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as later
+thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces. He sees that
+the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or withstand the new balance
+of property in the State; a prophecy of which the accuracy was
+demonstrated by the failure of George III. "In all governments," as he
+says, "there is a perpetual intestinal struggle, open or secret,"
+between Authority and Liberty; though his judgment that neither "can
+ever absolutely prevail," shows us rather that we are on the threshold
+of _laissez-faire_ than that Hume really understood the problem of
+freedom. He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of
+the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular
+government. He saw the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency
+to persist in terms of men instead of principles. He was convinced of
+the necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and
+no one, save Adam Smith, has more acutely insisted upon the evil effect
+on commerce of an absolute government. He emphasized the value of
+freedom of the press, in which he saw the secret whereby the mixed
+government of England was maintained. "It has also been found," he said
+in a happy phrase, "... that the people are no such dangerous monsters
+as they have been represented, and that it is in every respect better to
+guide them like rational creatures than to lead or drive them like brute
+beasts." There is, in fact, hardly a page of his work in which some such
+acuteness may not be found.
+
+Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is absent. Hume was a typical
+child of one aspect of the eighteenth century in his hatred of
+enthusiasm, and the form in which he most abominates it is religious.
+Why people's religious opinions should lead to antagonism he could no
+more understand than why people should refuse to pass one another on a
+road. Wars of religion thus seemed to him based upon a merely frivolous
+principle; and in his ideal commonwealth he made the Church a department
+of the State lest it should get out of hand. He was, moreover, a static
+philosopher, disturbed by signs of political restlessness; and this led
+to the purgation of Whig doctrines from his writings, and their
+consistent replacement by a cynical conservatism. He was always afraid
+that popular government would mean mob-rule; and absolute government is
+accordingly recommended as the euthanasia of the British constitution.
+Not even the example of Sweden convinced him that a standing army might
+exist without civil liberty being endangered; and he has all the noxious
+fallacies of his time upon the balance of power. Above all, it is
+striking to see his helplessness before the problem of national
+character. Mainly he ascribes it to the form of government, and that in
+turn to chance. Even the friend of Montesquieu can see no significance
+in race or climate. The idea, in fact, of evolution is entirely absent
+from his political speculation. Political life, like human life, ends in
+death; and the problem is to make our egress as comfortable as we can,
+for the prime evil is disturbance. It is difficult not to feel that
+there is almost a physical basis in his own disease for this love of
+quiet. The man who put indolence among the primary motives of human
+happiness was not likely to view novel theories with unruffled temper.
+
+Hume has an eminent place among economists, and for one to whom the
+study of such phenomena was but a casual inquiry, it is marvelous how
+much he saw. He is free from the crude errors of mercantilism; and
+twenty years before Adam Smith hopes, "as a British subject," for the
+prosperity of other countries. "Free communication and exchange" seems
+to him an ordinance of nature; and he heaps contempt upon those
+"numberless bars, obstructions and imposts which all nations of Europe,
+and none more than England, have put upon trade." Specie he places in
+its true light as merely a medium of exchange. The supposed antagonism
+between commerce and agriculture he disposes of in a half-dozen
+effective sentences. He sees the place of time and distance in the
+discussion of economic want. He sees the value of a general level of
+economic equality, even while he is sceptical of its attainment. He
+insists upon the economic value of high wages, though he somewhat
+belittles the importance of wealth in the achievement of happiness.
+Before Bentham, who on this point converted Adam Smith, he knew that the
+rate of interest depends upon the supply of and demand for loans. He
+insists that commerce demands a free government for its progress,
+pointing out, doubtless from his abundant French experience, that an
+absolute government gives to the commercial class an insufficient status
+of honor. He pointed out, doubtless with France again in his mind, the
+evils of an arbitrary system of taxation. "They are commonly converted,"
+he says with unwonted severity, "into punishments on industry; and also,
+by their unavoidable inequality, are more grievous, than by the real
+burden which they impose." And he emphasizes his belief that the best
+taxes are those which, like taxes upon luxury, press least upon the
+poor.
+
+Such insight is extraordinary enough in the pre-Adamite epoch; but even
+more remarkable are his psychological foundations. The wealth of the
+State, he says, is the labor of its subjects, and they work because the
+wants of man are not a stated sum, but "multiply every moment upon
+him." The desire for wealth comes from the idea of pleasure; and in the
+_Treatise on Human Nature_ he discusses with superb clarity the way in
+which the idea of pleasure is related at once to individual satisfaction
+and to that sympathy for others which is one of the roots of social
+existence. He points out the need for happiness in work. "The mind," he
+writes, "acquires new vigor, enlarges its powers and faculties, and by
+an assiduity in honest industry both satisfies its own appetites and
+prevents growth of unnatural ones"; though, like his predecessor,
+Francis Hutcheson, he overemphasizes the delights opened by civilization
+to the humbler class of men. He gives large space in his discussion to
+the power of will; and, indeed, one of the main advantages he ascribed
+to government was the compulsion it puts upon us to allow the categories
+of time and space a part in our calculations. He does not, being in his
+own life entirely free from avarice, regard the appetite for riches as
+man's main motive to existence; though no one was more urgent in his
+insistence that "the avidity of acquiring goods and possessions for
+ourselves and our nearest friends is ... destructive of society" unless
+balanced by considerations of justice. And what he therein intended may
+be gathered from the liberal notions of equality he manifested. "Every
+person," he wrote in a famous passage, "if possible ought to enjoy the
+fruits of his labor in a full possession of all the necessaries, and
+many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt but such an equality
+is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less the happiness
+of the rich than it adds to that of the poor." It is clear that we have
+moved far from the narrow confines of the old political arithmetic. The
+theory of utility enables Hume to see the scope of economics--the word
+itself he did not know--in a more generous perspective than at any
+previous time. It would be too much to say that his grasp of its
+psychological foundation enabled him entirely to move from the
+limitations of the older concept of a national prosperity expressed only
+in terms of bullion to the view of economics as a social science. But at
+least he saw that economics is rooted in the nature of men and therein
+he had the secret of its true understanding. _The Wealth of Nations_
+would less easily have made its way had not the insight of Hume prepared
+the road for its reception.
+
+What, then, and in general, is his place in the history of political
+thought? Clearly enough, he is not the founder of a system; his work is
+rather a series of pregnant hints than a consecutive account of
+political facts. Nor must we belittle the debt he owes to his
+predecessors. Much, certainly, he owed to Locke, and the full radiance
+of the Scottish enlightenment emerges into the day with his teaching.
+Francis Hutcheson gave him no small inspiration; and Hutcheson means
+that he was indebted to Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy
+commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in
+that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is
+characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth
+century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is
+entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism. He first
+showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between
+ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He brings to an end
+what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical school." After him we
+are done with the abuse of history to bolster up Divine Right and social
+contract; for there is clearly present in his use of facts a true sense
+of historical method. He put an end also to the confusion which resulted
+from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong
+independent of all positive law. He took the facts as phenomena to be
+explained rather than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be
+maintained in part defiance of them. Conventional Whiggism has no
+foothold after he has done with its analysis. His utilitarianism was the
+first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract
+school; and even if he was not the first to see through its
+pretensions--that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury--he was the first
+to show the grounds of their uselessness. He saw that history and
+psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy.
+So that even if he could not himself construct it the hints at least
+were there.
+
+[Footnote 17: There are few books which show so clearly as Lorimer's
+_Institutes of Nations_ (1872) how fully the Scottish school was in the
+midstream of European thought.]
+
+His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion. The
+metaphysics of Burke, so far as one may use a term he would himself have
+repudiated, are largely those of Hume. The place of habit and of social
+instinct alongside of consent, the perception that reason alone will not
+explain political facts, the emphasis upon resistance as of last resort,
+the denial that allegiance is a mere contract to be presently explained,
+the deep respect for order--all these are, after all, the fabric from
+which the thought of Burke was woven. Nor is there in Bentham's defence
+of Utilitarianism argument in which he would have recognized novelty.
+Herein, at least, his proof that morality is no more than general
+opinion of utility constructs, in briefer form, the later arguments of
+Bentham, Paley and the Mills, nor can their mode of statement claim
+superiority to Hume's. So that on either side of his work he foreshadows
+the advent of the two great schools of modern political thought. His
+utilitarianism is the real path by which radical opinion at last found
+means of acceptance. His use of history is, through Burke, the ancestor
+of that specialized conservatism begotten of the historical method. If
+there is thus so much, it is, of course, tempting to ask why there is
+not more. If Hume has the materials why did he fail to build up a system
+from them? The answer seems twofold. In part it is the man himself. His
+genius, as his metaphysics show, lay essentially in his power of
+destruction; and the man who gave solipsism to philosophy was not likely
+to effect a new creation in politics. In part, also, the condition of
+the time gave little stimulus to novelty. Herein Hume was born a
+generation too early. Had he written when George III attempted the
+destruction of the system of the Revolution, and when America and France
+combined to raise again the basic questions of politics, he might have
+done therein what Adam Smith effected in his own field. But the time had
+not yet come; and it was left to Burke and Bentham to reap where he had
+sown.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SIGNS OF CHANGE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+From Hume until the publication of Burke's _Present Discontents_ (1770)
+there is no work on English politics of the first importance. Walpole
+had fallen in 1742; but for the next fifteen years his methods dominated
+the parliamentary scene. It was only with the advent of the elder Pitt
+to power that a new temper may be observed, a temper quickened by what
+followed on the accession of George III. Henceforward, it is not untrue
+to say that the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it
+was no longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French
+Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim
+satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the
+standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight, though
+collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for men to
+grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater
+prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to
+victory. Something of the exhilaration of these years we can still catch
+in the letters which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to
+turn off with easy laughter his deep sense of pride. In the House of
+Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show that a
+new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the
+first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in
+the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent.
+
+So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single
+source, the French influence is the effective cause of change. Voltaire
+and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole's
+administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw.
+Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the
+good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution,
+and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience. Yet
+when he came, in 1762, to publish the _Contrat Social_ it was obvious
+that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real meaning of their
+work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English
+institutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the
+simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and
+one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a
+general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of
+English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing--less
+admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a _Habeas
+Corpus_ and a _lettre de cachet_, the regular succession of Parliaments,
+all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a
+magnificent achievement. The English constitution revealed to France an
+immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration. Even to
+Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was
+a generalization from its significance at a special crisis. Hume had
+partial glimpses of its inner substance. But for most it had become a
+discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs. Its analysis as a
+connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil
+Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was
+more significant was the realization of Montesquieu's import
+simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence.
+Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers.
+Rousseau's time was not yet; though within a score of years it was
+possible to see him as the rival to Burke's conservatism.
+
+It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which underlies
+the _Esprit des Lois_ (1748). It is a commonplace now that Montesquieu
+is to be regarded as the founder of the historical method. The present
+is to be explained by its ancestry. Laws, governments, customs are not
+truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin
+and the country from which they derive. It would be inaccurate, with
+Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the
+systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in
+the most complete unreality, are to be found in Godwin's _Political
+Justice_; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time
+such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his
+faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly
+saw--the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the
+high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past
+wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened
+this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But
+Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main
+mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that
+decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the
+true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the
+importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid
+Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in his inaugural lecture as
+Vinerian professor. He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to
+which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent
+utterance both in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention, and in
+the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What, perhaps, is most
+immediately significant is his famous praise of the British
+Constitution--the secret of which he entirely misapprehended--and his
+discovery of its essence in the separation of powers. The short sixth
+chapter of his eleventh book is the real keynote of Blackstone and De
+Lolme. It led them to investigate, on principles of at least doubtful
+validity, an edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the
+last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth
+antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated
+structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That it
+was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been
+made. The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines have been
+more noxious in their consequence than this theory of checks and
+balances. But Blackstone's _Commentaries_ (1765-9) produced Bentham's
+_Fragment on Government_ (1776), and with that book we enter upon the
+realistic study of the British Constitution.
+
+Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from
+English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an
+influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those
+that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to
+avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference
+between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power
+of government which Locke had proposed. It is a removal at every point
+conditioned by the interest of the people. For Rousseau declared that
+the existing distribution of power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and
+he made the people sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their
+achievement in the shape of sinister interest. The powers of the people
+thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for
+innovation. It is easy enough then to understand why such a philosophy
+should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager sympathy for humble
+men, his optimistic faith in the immediate prospect of popular power
+were to Burke the symptoms of insane delusion and their author "the
+great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England."
+But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's influence was the
+success of the American Revolution; and no one had done more than Burke
+himself to promote its cause and justify its principles. That revolution
+established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its
+statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America
+guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the
+soberness with which it checked the supposed weakness of the sovereign
+people. America made herself independent while what was best in Europe
+combined in enthusiastic applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of
+Rousseau had been taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of
+power could remove what deliberation was impotent to secure. Here
+Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage
+denied. Nor, at the moment, was it influential except in the general
+impetus it gave to thought. But from the moment of its appearance it is
+an undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its metaphysical
+form it failed to command acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its
+results were victorious. Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the
+conclusions he recommends so much as in the language in which he clothes
+them. Either make a final end of the optimism of men like Hume and
+Blackstone, or the veneration for the past which is at the root of
+Burke's own teaching.
+
+It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the
+stimulus it did. Montesquieu came to praise the British constitution at
+a time when good men were aghast at its perversion. There was no room in
+many years for revolution, but at least there was place for hearty
+discontent and a seeking after new methods. Of that temper two men so
+different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are the political symbols. The
+former's rise to power upon the floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant
+nothing so much as a protest against the cynical corruption of the
+previous generation. Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly
+awaking to a sense of its own power. The French creed was too purely
+logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its
+entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden
+shoes played not a little part in its rejection. The rights of man made
+only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was
+involved in that rejection; and then it was too late. But no one could
+feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and
+Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for
+thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is
+nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes.
+The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is
+attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the
+French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would
+have been a supreme achievement.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757. John Brown's
+_Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_ is largely
+forgotten now; though it went through seven editions in a year and was
+at once translated into French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in
+the vast Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of
+comment upon the _Characteristics_ of Shaftesbury. His book is too
+evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with reverence, to
+make us doubt its derivation. There is the same reliance upon Livy and
+Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking generalization; though the
+argument upon which Brown's conclusions are based is seldom given,
+perhaps because his geometric clarity of statement impressed him as
+self-demonstrative. Brown's volumes are an essay upon the depravity of
+the times. He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering
+sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing
+so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the
+universities out of hand, in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would
+not have rejected. He deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men
+trifle with Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would,
+appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become
+nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the
+theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The
+neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown
+in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to
+the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling
+penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the
+army devote themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize
+money. Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour
+brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman. The poor, indeed,
+the middle class, and the legal and medical professions, Brown
+specifically exempts from this indictment. But he emphasizes his belief
+that this is unimportant. "The manners and principles of those who
+lead," he says, "... not of those who are governed ... will ever
+determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the continuance or
+dissolution of a state."
+
+This profligacy Brown compares to the languid vice which preceded the
+fall of Carthage and of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great
+Britain at the hands of France, unless it can be cured. So far as he has
+an explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the
+decay of religious sentiment. His remedy is only Bolingbroke's Patriot
+King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen to the height
+of power. What mainly stirred Englishmen was the prophecy of defeat on
+the morrow of the disastrous convention of Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe
+and Clive repaired that royal humiliation Brown seems to have died a
+natural death. What is more interesting than his prophecies was the
+evidence of a close reading of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is
+the product of the climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and
+sullen temper. Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of
+England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the
+simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation.
+Brown has no passion, and his book reads rather like Mr. Galsworthy's
+_Island Pharisees_ sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a
+well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of attention
+to the evils of his time. It describes undoubted facts, and it shows
+that the era of content has gone. But its careful periods and strangely
+far-off air lack the eagerness for truth which Rousseau put into his
+questions. Brown can neither explain nor can he proffer remedy. He sees
+that Pitt is somehow significant; but when he rules out the popular
+voice as devoid of all importance, he deprives himself of the means
+whereby to grasp the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted. Nothing
+could prove more strongly the exactitude of Burke's _Present
+Discontents_. Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of
+Junius.
+
+Hume was the friend of Montesquieu, though twenty years his junior; and
+the _Esprit des Lois_ travelled rapidly to Scotland. There it caught the
+eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a treatise on refinement, and by the
+influence of Hume and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
+University of Edinburgh. Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular
+in his time, and certainly he has a skill for polished phrase, and a
+genial paraphrase of other men's ideas. His _Essay on the History of
+Civil Society_ (1767), which in a quarter of a century went through six
+editions, was thought by Helvetius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume
+himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its
+suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some
+fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the investigation of
+savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government. He
+sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature. He
+insists, probably after conversation with Adam Smith, upon the social
+value of the division of functions. He does not doubt the original
+equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his age has reached the limit
+of its useful growth. Property he traces back to a parental desire to
+make a better provision for children "than is found under the
+promiscuous management of many copartners." Climate has the new
+importance upon which Montesquieu has insisted; or, at least, as it
+"ripens the pineapple and the tamarina," so it "inspires a degree of
+mildness that can even assuage the rigours of despotical government."
+The priesthood--this is Hume--becomes a separate influence under the
+sway of superstition. Liberty, he says, "is maintained by the continued
+differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in
+behalf of equitable government." The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is
+certainly not here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in
+the obscurity into which he has fallen. The _Esprit des Lois_ took
+twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of men
+like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped. Facile
+popularisers of this sort may have mollified the drawing-room; but they
+did not add to political ideas.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the students of
+constitutional law. Blackstone's _Commentaries on the Laws of England_
+(1765-9) has had ever since its first publication an authority such as
+Coke only before possessed. "He it is," said Bentham, "who, first of
+all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the
+language of the Scholar and the Gentleman." Certainly, as Professor
+Dicey has remarked, "the book contains much real learning about our
+system of government." We are less concerned here with Blackstone as an
+antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy. Here his
+purpose seems obvious enough. The English constitution raised him from
+humble means through a Professorship at Oxford to a judgeship in the
+Court of Common Pleas. He had been a member of Parliament and refused
+the office of Solicitor-General. He had thus no reason to be
+dissatisfied with the conditions of his time; and the first book of the
+_Commentaries_ is nothing so much as an attempt to explain why English
+constitutional law is a miracle of wisdom.
+
+Constitutional law, as such, indeed, found no place in Blackstone's
+book. It creeps in under the rights of persons, where he deals with the
+power of king and Parliament. His treatment implies a whole philosophy.
+Laws are of three kinds--of nature, of God, and of the civil state.
+Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is "a rule of civil conduct
+prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and
+prohibiting what is wrong." It is, he tells us, "called a rule to
+distinguish it from a compact or agreement." It derives from the
+sovereign power, of which the chief character is the making of laws.
+Society is based upon the "wants and fears" of men; and it is coeval
+with their origin. The idea of a state of nature "is too wild to be
+seriously admitted," besides being contrary to historical knowledge.
+Society implies government, and whatever its origins or its forms there
+"must be in all of them a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled
+authority, in which the _jura summa imperii_, or rights of sovereignty
+reside." The forms of government are classified in the usual way; and
+the British constitution is noted as a happy mixture of them all. "The
+legislature of the Kingdom," Blackstone writes, "is entrusted to three
+powers entirely independent of each other; first the King, secondly the
+lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical assembly of
+persons, chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour
+or their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by
+the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy;
+and as this aggregate body, actuated by different springs and attentive
+to different interests, composes the British Parliament and has the
+supreme disposal of everything; there can be no inconvenience attempted
+by either of the three branches, but will be withstood by one of the
+other two; each branch being armed with a negative power, sufficient to
+repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous." It
+is in the king in Parliament that British sovereignty resides. Eschewing
+the notion of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the
+implications of it are secured. "The constitutional government of this
+island," he says, "is so admirably tempered and compounded, that nothing
+can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the equilibrium of power between
+one branch of the legislature and the rest."
+
+All this is not enough; though, as Bentham was to show in his _Fragment
+on Government_, it is already far too much. "A body of nobility," such
+is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, "is also more
+peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded constitution, in order
+to support the rights of both the Crown and people, by forming a barrier
+to withstand the encroachments of both ... if they were confounded with
+the mass of the people, and like them had only a vote in electing
+representatives, their privileges would soon be borne down and
+overwhelmed by the popular torrent, which would effectually level all
+distinctions." "The Commons," he says further, "consist of all such men
+of property in the kingdom as have not seats in the House of Lords." The
+legal irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. "He is not only
+incapable of doing wrong," says Blackstone, "but even of thinking wrong;
+he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or
+weakness," though he points out that the constitution "has allowed a
+latitude of supposing the contrary." The powers of the King are
+described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of William the
+Norman than to the backstairs corruption of George III. The right of
+revolution is noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals
+rather than of law.
+
+"Its true defect," says Professor Dicey of the _Commentaries_, "is the
+hopeless confusion both of language and of thought introduced into the
+whole subject of constitutional law by Blackstone's habit--common to all
+the lawyers of his time--of applying old and inapplicable terms to new
+institutions." This is severe enough; yet Blackstone's sins are deeper
+than the criticism would suggest. He introduced into English political
+philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of substance upon
+which the whole vicious theory of checks and balances was erected. He
+made no distinction between the unlimited sovereignty of law and the
+very obviously limited sovereignty of reality. He must have known that
+to talk of the independence of the branches of the legislature was
+simple nonsense at a time when King and peers competed for the control
+of elections to the House of Commons. His idealization of a peerage
+whose typical spiritual member was Archbishop Cornwallis and whose
+temporal embodiment was the Duke of Bedford would not have deceived a
+schoolboy had it not provided a bulwark against improvement. It was
+ridiculous to describe the Commons as representative of property so long
+as places like Manchester and Sheffield were virtually disfranchised.
+His picture of the royal prerogative was a portrait against every detail
+of which what was best in England had struggled in the preceding century
+and a half. He has nothing to say of the cabinet, nothing of ministerial
+responsibility, nothing of the party system. What he did was to produce
+the defence of a non-existent system which acted as a barrier to all
+legal, and much political, progress in the next half-century. He gave
+men material without cause for satisfaction.
+
+As a description of the existing government there is thus hardly an
+element of Blackstone's work which could stand the test of critical
+inquiry. But even worse was its philosophy. As Bentham pointed out, he
+was unaware of the distinction between society and government. The state
+of nature exists, or fails to exist, with startling inconsistency.
+Blackstone, in fact, was a Lockian who knows that Hume and Montesquieu
+have cut the ground from under his master's feet, and yet cannot
+understand how, without him, a foundation is to be supplied. Locke,
+indeed, seems to him, as a natural conservative, to go too far, and he
+rejects the original contract as without basis in history; yet
+contractual notions are present at every fundamental stage of his
+argument. The sovereign power, so we are told, is irresistible; and then
+because Blackstone is uncertain what right is to mean, we hear of moral
+limitations upon its exercise. He speaks continually of representation
+without any effort to examine into the notions it conveys. The members
+of society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify
+existent inequalities. "The natural foundations of sovereignty," he
+writes, "are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and
+power." Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have been
+taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the actual
+exertion of authority. Nor has he clear notions of the way in which
+property is to be founded. Communism, he writes in seventeenth century
+fashion, is the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the
+earth to men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the
+soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions. This is
+pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are utterly
+remote from the logical result of his own premises.
+
+The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these questions, only
+the most confused sort of notions. He had to preface his work with some
+sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded
+it. The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some
+uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to
+the great sceptic's speculations. So that he was driven back upon
+notions he felt to be false, without a proper realization of their
+falsity. His use of Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a
+great idea can be in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than
+the fertility it contained. The merit of Blackstone is his learning,
+which was substantial, his realization that the powers of law demand
+some classification, his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is
+right alike in searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying
+the historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was
+little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions
+of his time to question its assumptions.
+
+De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with Blackstone,
+what he failed to see was even more remarkable than what he did
+perceive, his book has real ability and merit. De Lolme was a citizen of
+Geneva, who published his _Constitution of England_ in 1775, after a
+twelve months' visit to shores sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to
+die in obscurity and want. His book, as he tells us in his preface, was
+no mean success, though he derived no profit from it. Like Blackstone,
+he was impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional
+equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty. The attitude was
+not unnatural in one who, with his head full of Montesquieu, was a
+witness of the struggle between Junius and the King. He has, of course,
+the limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of
+government in purely mechanical terms. "It is upon the passions of
+mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the
+action of the various parts of a state depends. The machine may vary as
+to its dimensions; but its movement and acting springs still remain
+intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks of government as "a great
+ballet or dance in which ... everything depends upon the disposition of
+the figures." He does not deal, that is to say, with men as men, but
+only as inert adjuncts of a machine by which they are controlled. Such
+an attitude is bound to suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction.
+It regards historic forces as distinct from the men related to them.
+Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to
+unstability. The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal
+power against the popular. The King's interest is safeguarded by the
+division of Parliament into two Houses, each of which rejects the
+encroachment of the other upon the executive. His power is limited by
+parliamentary privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and
+so forth. The theory was not true; though it represented with some
+accuracy the ideals of the time.
+
+Nor must we belittle what insight De Lolme possessed. He saw that the
+early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented the
+continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with the
+result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the English
+people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior power. He
+understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was the
+independence of the judges. He realized that the party-system--he never
+used the actual term--while it provides room for men's ambitions at the
+same time prevents the equation of ambition with indispensability. "Woe
+to him," says De Lolme, "... who should endeavor to make the people
+believe that their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single
+citizen." He sees the paramount value of freedom of the press. This, as
+he says, with the necessity that members should be re-elected, "has
+delivered into the hands of the people at large the exercise of the
+censorial power." He has no doubt but that resistance is the remedy
+whereby governmental encroachment can be prevented; "resistance," he
+says, "is the ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of
+power." He points out how real is the guarantee of liberty where the
+onus of proof in criminal cases is thrown upon the government. He
+regards with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military
+arm, and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it
+has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding to
+the royal power. Nor can he fail to admire the insight which organizes
+"the agitation of the popular mind," not as "the forerunner of violent
+commotions" but to "animate all parts of the state." Therein De Lolme
+had grasped the real essence of party government.
+
+It was, of course, no more than symptomatic of his time that cabinet and
+prime minister should have escaped his notice. A more serious defect was
+his inability, with the Wilkes contest prominently in his notice, to
+see that the people had assumed a new importance. For the masses,
+indeed, De Lolme had no enthusiasm. "A passive share," he thought, "was
+the only one that could, with safety to the state, be trusted" to the
+humble man. "The greater part," he wrote, "of those who compose this
+multitude, taken up with the care of providing for their subsistence,
+have neither sufficient leisure, nor even, in consequence of their
+imperfect education, the degree of information, requisite for functions
+of this kind." Such an attitude blinded him to the significance of the
+American conflict, which he saw unattended by its moral implications. He
+trusted too emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that
+institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George III
+could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a sense of its
+own power. The real social forces of the time found there no channels of
+activity; and the difference between De Lolme and Bagehot is the
+latter's power to go behind the screen of statute to the inner sources
+of power.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The basis of revolutionary doctrine was already present in England when,
+in 1762, Rousseau published his _Contrat Social_. With its fundamental
+doctrines Locke had already made his countrymen familiar; and what was
+needed for the appreciation of its teaching was less a renaissance than
+discontent. So soon as men are dissatisfied with the traditional
+foundations of the State, a gospel of natural rights is certain to make
+its appearance. And, once the design of George III had been made
+familiar by his treatment of Chatham and Wilkes, the discontent did not
+fail to show itself. Indeed, in the year before the publication of
+Rousseau's book, Robert Wallace, a Scottish chaplain royal, had written
+in his _Various Prospects_ (1761) a series of essays which are at once
+an anticipation of the main thesis of Malthus and a plea for the
+integration of social forces by which alone the mass of men could be
+raised from misery. In the light of later experience it is difficult not
+to be impressed by the modernist flavour of Wallace's attack. He
+insists upon the capacity of men and the disproportion between their
+potential achievement and that which is secured by actual society. Men
+are in the mass condemned to ignorance and toil; and the lust of power
+sets man against his neighbor to the profit of the rich. Wallace traces
+these evils to private property and the individualistic organization of
+work, and he sees no remedy save community of possessions and a
+renovated educational system. Yet he does not conceal from himself that
+it is to the interest of the governing class to prevent a revolution
+which, beneficent to the masses, would be fatal to themselves; nor does
+he conceive it possible until the fertility of men has been reduced to
+the capacity of the soil. He speculates upon the chances of a new spirit
+among men, of an all-wise legislator, and of the beneficent example of
+colonies upon the later Owenite model. But his book is contemporaneous
+with our own ideas rather than with the thoughts of his generation. Nor
+does it seem to have excited any general attention.
+
+It is five years after Rousseau that we see the first clear signs of his
+influence. Naturally enough the men amongst whom the new spirit spread
+abroad were the Nonconformists. For more than seventy years they had
+been allowed existence without recognition. None had more faithfully
+supported the new dynasty than they; none had been paid less for their
+allegiance. Their utmost effort could secure only a sparing mitigation
+of the Test Act. All of them were Whigs, and the doctrines of Locke
+suited exactly their temper and their wants. There were amongst them
+able men in every walk of life, and they were apt to publication. Joseph
+Priestley, in particular, gave up with willingness to mankind what was
+obviously meant for chemical science. A few years previously Brown of
+the _Estimate_ had submitted a scheme for national education, in which
+the essential principle was Church control. Priestley had answered him,
+and was encouraged by friends to expand his argument into a general
+treatise. His _Essay on the First Principles of Government_ appeared in
+1768; and, if for nothing else, it would be noteworthy because it was
+therein that the significance of the "greatest happiness principle"
+first flashed across Bentham's mind. But the book shows more than this.
+"I had placed," says Priestley with due modesty, "the foundation of some
+of the most valuable interests of mankind on a broader and firmer basis
+than Mr. Locke"; and the breadth and firmness are Rousseau's
+contribution.
+
+Certainly we herein meet new elements. On the very threshold of the book
+we meet the dogma of the perfectibility of man. "Whatever," Priestley
+rhapsodizes, "was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious
+and paradisaical, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive." "The
+instrument of this progress ... towards this glorious state" is
+government; though a little later we are to find that the main business
+of government is noninterference. Men are all equal, and their natural
+rights are indefeasible. Government must be restrained in the interests
+of liberty. No man can be governed without his consent; for government
+is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in
+exchange for a power to share in public decisions. It thus follows that
+the people must be sovereign, and interference with their natural
+rights will justify resistance. Every government, he says, is "in its
+original principles, and antecedent to its present form an equal
+republic"; wherefore, of course, it follows that we must restore to men
+the equality they have lost. And, equally, of course, this would bestow
+upon the Nonconformists their full citizenship; for Warburton's
+_Alliance_, to attack which Priestley exhausts all the resources of his
+ingenuity, has been one of the main instruments in their degradation.
+"Unbounded liberty in matters of religion," which means the abolition of
+the Establishment, promises to be "very favorable to the best interests
+of mankind."
+
+So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for English
+Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import. It can never be
+forgotten in the history of political ideas that the alliance of Church
+and State made Nonconformists suspicious of government interference.
+Their original desire to be left unimpeded was soon exalted into a
+definite theory; and since political conditions had confined them so
+largely to trade none felt as they did the hampering influence of
+State-restrictions. The result has been a great difficulty in making
+liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the organic
+nature of the State. It remains for them almost entirely a police
+institution which, once it aims at the realization of right, usurps a
+function far better performed by individuals. There is no sense of the
+community; all that exists is a sum of private sentiments. "Civil
+liberty," says Priestley, "has been greatly impaired by an abuse of the
+maxim that the joint understanding of all the members of a State,
+properly collected, must be preferable to that of individuals; and
+consequently that the more the cases are in which mankind are governed
+by this united reason of the whole community, so much the better;
+whereas, in truth, the greater part of human actions are of such a
+nature, that more inconvenience would follow from their being fixed by
+laws than from their being left to every man's arbitrary will." If my
+neighbor assaults me, he suggests, I may usefully call in the police;
+but where the object is the discovery of truth, the means of education,
+the method of religious belief, individual initiative is superior to
+State action. The latter produces an uniform result "incompatible with
+the spirit of discovery." Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just
+to posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future. Men are
+too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all action.
+
+Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past tradition; and
+the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered broadcast over his
+pages. Nevertheless the basis upon which he defended his ideas was a
+utilitarianism hardly less complete than that which Bentham made the
+instrument of revolution. "Regard to the general good," he says, "is the
+main method by which natural rights are to be defended." "The good and
+happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any
+State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state
+must finally be determined." In substance, that is to say, if not
+completely in theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to
+those of expediency. His chief attack upon religious legislation is
+similarly based upon considerations of policy. His view of the
+individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates
+all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual
+energy. Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar
+fashion to Adam Smith and his followers. Priestley, of course, was
+inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief
+instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that
+government has the future in its hands than that government action may
+well be decisive for good or evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism
+is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all
+doors. That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made
+discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school
+which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of
+unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of
+that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it
+encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the
+energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the
+previous age.
+
+It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley exerted;
+certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small. Dr. Richard
+Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he might have had has
+been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents. His sinking-fund scheme
+was taken up by the younger Pitt, and proved, though the latter believed
+in it to the last, to be founded upon an arithmetical fallacy which did
+not sit well upon a fellow of the Royal Society. His sermon on the
+French Revolution provoked the _Reflections_ of Burke; and, though much
+of the right was on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he
+survived Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day,
+and he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English
+revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb optimism;
+for the rigid _a priori_ morality of which he was the somewhat muddled
+defender was less favorable to a confidence in reason. He had a good
+deal of John Brown's fear that luxury was the seed of English
+degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the
+population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential
+to the general thesis he had to make.
+
+Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to print by
+the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely popular, his
+_Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty_ (1776) attained its eighth
+edition within a decade. This, with its supplement _Additional
+Observations_ (1777), presents a perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their
+ancestry concealed. They represent the tradition of Locke, modified by
+the importations of Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume,
+and he takes sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has
+little or nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument
+is upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government, and
+self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator.
+Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to its last
+consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public services"; laws are
+"particular provisions or regulations established by Common Consent for
+gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are "trustees or deputies
+for carrying these regulations into execution." And almost in the words
+of Rousseau, Price goes on to admit that liberty, "in its most perfect
+degree, can be enjoyed only in small states where every independent
+agent is capable of giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen
+into public offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though
+he thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize the
+sacrifice of liberty involved.
+
+But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized.
+"Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust; and
+all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects the theory
+of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with self-government; if
+the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its life, it would betray its
+constituents and dissolve itself. "If omnipotence," he writes, "can with
+any sense be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all
+legislative authority originates; that is, in the People." Such a
+system is alone compatible with the ends of government, since it cannot
+be supposed that men "combine into communities and institute government"
+for self-enslavement. Nor is any other political system "consistent with
+the natural equality of mankind"; by which Price means that no man "is
+constituted by the author of nature the vassal or subject of another, or
+has any right to give law to him, or, without his consent, to take away
+any part of his property or to abridge him of his liberty." From all of
+which it is concluded that liberty is inalienable; and a people which
+has lost it "must have a right to emancipate themselves as soon as they
+can." The aptness of the argument to the American situation is obvious
+enough; and nowhere is Price more happy or more formidable than when he
+applies his precepts to phrases like "the unity of the empire" and the
+"honor of the kingdom" which were so freely used to cover up the
+inevitable results of George's obstinacy.
+
+The _Essay on the Right of Property in Land_ (1781) of William Ogilvie
+deserves at least a passing notice. The author, who published his book
+anonymously, was a Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen and
+an agriculturist of some success. His own career was distinctly
+honorable. The teacher of Sir James Mackintosh, he had a high reputation
+as a classical scholar and deserves to be remembered for his effort to
+reform a college which had practically ceased to perform its proper
+academic functions. His book is virtually an essay upon the natural
+right of men to the soil. He does not doubt that the distress of the
+times is due to the land monopoly. The earth being given to men in
+common, its invasion by private ownership is a dangerous perversion. Men
+have the right to the full product of their labor; but the privileges of
+the landowner prevent the enjoyment of that right. The primary duty of
+every State is the increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation
+is that which has the greatest number of free and independent
+cultivators. But governments attend rather to the interest of the higher
+classes, even while they hold out the protection of the common people as
+the main pretext of their authority. The result is their maintenance of
+land-monopoly even though it affects the prime material of all essential
+industries, prevents the growth of population, and makes the rich
+wealthier at the expense of the poor. It breeds oppression and
+ignorance, and poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative.
+He points out how a nation is dominated by its landlords, and how they
+have consistently evaded the fiscal burdens they should bear. Only in a
+return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source of an
+increase in happiness.
+
+Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to speak of
+actual changes, he had little more to propose than a system of peasant
+proprietorship. What is striking in the book is its sense of great,
+impending changes, its thorough grasp of the principle of utility, its
+realization of the immense agricultural improvement that is possible if
+the landed system can be so changed as to bring into play the impulses
+of humble men. He sees clearly enough that wealth dominates the State;
+and his interpretation of history is throughout economic. Ogilvie is
+one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who, chiefly through
+Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special current of their own in
+the great tide of protest against the unjust situation of labor. Like
+them, he builds his system upon natural rights; though, unlike them, his
+natural rights are defended by expediency and in a style that is always
+clear and logical. The book itself has rather a curious history. At its
+appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind. Mackintosh
+knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against the amiable
+delusion that its excellence would persuade the British government to
+force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the East India Company.
+Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby, it was intended to
+instruct the Chartists in the secret of their oppression; and therein it
+may well have contributed to the tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus
+O'Connor. In 1891 the problem of the land was again eagerly debated
+under the stimulus of Mr. Henry George; and a patriotic Scotchman
+published the book with biographical notes that constitute one of the
+most amazing curiosities in English political literature.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Against the school of Rousseau's English disciples it is comparatively
+easy to multiply criticisms. They lacked any historic sense. Government,
+for them, was simply an instrument which was made and unmade at the
+volition of men. How complex were its psychological foundations they had
+no conception; with the single factor of consent they could explain the
+most marvellous edifice of any time. They were buried beneath a mountain
+of metaphysical right which they never related to legal facts or to
+political possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions
+of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to
+investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led. They
+overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy themselves
+with political affairs. They made no proper allowance for the protective
+armour each social system must acquire by the mere force of
+prescription. Nor is there sufficient allowance in their attitude for
+those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman must
+of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to say, so
+completely with _staatslehre_ that they do not admit the mollifying
+influence of _politik_. They search for principles of universal right,
+without the perception that a right which is to be universal must
+necessarily be so general in character as to be useless in its
+application.
+
+Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their
+insight. They were protesting against a system strongly upheld on
+grounds which now appear to have been simply indefensible. The business
+of government had been made the private possession of a privileged
+class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from
+the minds of most men engaged in its direction. The loss of America, the
+heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the
+Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and
+North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most
+to the fact that principle is a vital part of policy. The revolutionists
+recalled men to the need of explaining, no less than carrying on, the
+government of the Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by
+elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid
+intrigues of the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government
+as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful
+reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the
+governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political
+controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle
+of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind
+and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had
+in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his
+Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer
+like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated,
+unconvinced. It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part
+of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes of
+Europe and America before they would give serious heed; and even then
+they met antagonism with nothing save oppression and hate. Yet the
+doctrines remained; for thought, after all, is killed by reasoned answer
+alone. And when the first gusts of war and revolution had passed, the
+cause for which they stood was found to have permeated all classes save
+that which had all to lose by learning.
+
+We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and
+Priestley as representing more than an important segment of opinion. The
+opposition to their theories was not less articulate than their own
+defence of them. Some, like Burke, desired a purification of the
+existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had no sort of sympathy with
+new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least, deserves some mention less for
+the inherent value of what he had to say, than for the nature of the
+opinions he expounded. Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a
+reputation alike in political and economic enquiry. He represents the
+sturdy nationalism of Arbuthnot's _John Bull_, the unreasoned prejudice
+against all foreigners, the hatred of all metaphysics as inconsistent
+with common sense, the desire to let things be on the ground that the
+effort after change is worse than the evil of which men complain. His
+_Treatise on Civil Government_ (1781) is in many ways a delightful book,
+bluff, hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that
+is all its own. He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the first
+place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the second, to
+explode the new bubble of Rousseau's followers. The second point takes
+the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as Tucker shrewdly saw,
+the theories of the school may trace their ancestry. He analyses the
+theory of consent in such fashion as to show that if its adherents could
+be persuaded to be logical, they would have to admit themselves
+anarchists. He has no sympathy with the state of nature; the noble
+savage, on investigation, turns out to be a barbaric creature with a
+club and scalping knife. Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or,
+as he prefers, somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that
+does not mean that the actual governors can be dismissed when any
+eccentric happens to take exception to their views. He has no sympathy
+with parliamentary reform. Give the mob an increase of power, he says,
+and nothing is to be expected but outrage and violence. He thinks the
+constitution very well as it is, and those who preach the evils of
+corruption ought to prove their charges instead of blasphemously
+asserting that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
+
+Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own. He does not doubt that
+the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered upon them.
+Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as ever George III
+himself could have desired. But not for one moment would he fight them
+to compel their return to British allegiance. If the American colonies
+want to go, let them by all means cut adrift. They are only a useless
+source of expenditure. The trade they represent does not depend upon
+allegiance but upon wants that England can supply if she keeps shop in
+the proper way, if, that is, she makes it to their interest to buy in
+her market. Indeed, colonies of all kinds seem to him quite useless.
+They ever are, he says, and ever were, "a drain to and an incumbrance on
+the Mother-country, requiring perpetual and expensive nursing in their
+infancy, and becoming headstrong and ungovernable in proportion as they
+grow up." All wise relations depend upon self-interest, and that needs
+no compulsion. If Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up,
+the result would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and
+contracts effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal
+industry encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that
+mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-century
+before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean crustily explaining
+his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had just rejected Edmund
+Burke for advocating free trade with Ireland.
+
+No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr. Johnson.
+Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of gloomy
+prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of the source
+from which they come. He thought life a poor thing at the best and took
+a low view of human nature. "The notion of liberty," he told the
+faithful Boswell, "amuses the people of England and helps to keep off
+the _tedium vitae_." The idea of a society properly organized into ranks
+and societies he always esteemed highly. "I am a friend to
+subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of
+society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the
+offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he seems to
+have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as the worst of
+sins. He did not believe in the honesty of republicans; they levelled
+down, but were never inclined to level up. Men, he felt, had a part to
+act in society, and their business was to fulfil their allotted station.
+Rousseau was a very bad man: "I would sooner sign a sentence for his
+transportation than that of any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey
+these many years." Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth
+while was freedom in private concerns. He blessed the government in the
+case of general warrants and thought the power of the Crown too small.
+Toleration he considered due to an inapt distinction between freedom to
+think and freedom to talk, and any magistrate "while he thinks himself
+right ... ought to enforce what he thinks." The American revolt he
+ascribed to selfish faction; and in his _Taxation no Tyranny_ (1775) he
+defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite ground
+of the necessity of subordination. He was willing, he said, to love all
+mankind except an American.
+
+Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an
+acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and
+fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the
+letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He
+knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe
+under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the _Idler_ as
+one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish
+as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the
+sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt
+for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular.
+There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of
+the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time
+was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as
+elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental
+questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no age
+are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is
+diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require
+something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's attitude
+would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but
+where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to
+contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in
+a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to
+look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BURKE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the
+king stands outside the categories of political conflict. He is the
+dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory,
+is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is
+largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came
+to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has
+passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent
+widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have
+secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first
+twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort
+of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once
+more the balance of power. Nor was the effort defeated without a
+struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.
+
+And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time
+highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost much credit
+during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the
+elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended
+for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power. A
+generation of corrupt practice and the final defeat of Stuart hopes had
+already deprived the Whigs of any special hold on their past ideals.
+They were divided already into factions the purpose of which was no more
+than the avid pursuit of place and pension. Government by connection
+proved itself irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also
+that once corruption was centralized there was no limit to its
+influence, granted only the absence of great questions. When George III
+transferred that organization from the office of the minister to his own
+court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his success. For more
+than forty years the Tories had been excluded from office; and they
+were more than eager to sell their support. The Church had become the
+creature of the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was
+towards benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind
+of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He
+had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and a
+reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's first book
+can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor was it obvious
+that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the
+great Whig families.
+
+What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of the
+king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined somewhat
+to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was excessively ignorant
+and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no one but himself, and he
+totally misunderstood the true nature of his office. There is no
+question which arose in the first forty years of his reign in which he
+was not upon the wrong side and proud of his error. He was wrong about
+Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about France. He
+demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked every measure for
+the purification of the political system. He supported the Slave trade
+and he opposed the repeal of the Test Act. He prevented the grant of
+Catholic emancipation at the one moment when it might have genuinely
+healed the wounds of Ireland. He destroyed by his perverse creations the
+value of the House of Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly
+determined to make his will the criterion of policy; and his design
+might have succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to
+its greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen
+with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in politics.
+The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the court upon a
+broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as the event proved,
+could be as subservient to the king as to his minister.
+
+Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with characteristic
+stupidity, the king did not know the proper instruments for his
+purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the suspicion of
+the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder Pitt. In the Wilkes
+affair he threw the clearest light of the century upon the true nature
+of the House of Commons. His own system of proscription restored to the
+Whig party not a little of the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to
+supply them with a philosophy. Chatham remained the idol of the people
+despite his hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of
+representative government and of personal liberty. He lost America and
+it was not his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he
+received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had made
+him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt was to
+compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George's
+effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature
+of things, survive that analysis.
+
+Not, of course, that George ever lacked defenders. As early as 1761, the
+old rival of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage had condemned to
+obsolescence, published his _Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the
+new Reign_. Pulteney urged the sovereign no longer to be content with
+the "shadow of royalty." He should use his "legal prerogatives" to check
+"the illegal claims of factious oligarchy." Government had become the
+private possession of a few powerful men. The king was but a puppet in
+leading strings. The basis of government should be widened, for every
+honest man was aware that distinctions of party were now merely nominal.
+The Tories should be admitted to place. They were now friendly to the
+accession and they no longer boasted their hostility to dissent. They
+knew that Toleration and the Establishment were of the essence of the
+Constitution. Were once the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would
+cease and Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom. "The
+ministers," he said, "will depend on the Crown not the Crown on
+ministers" if George but showed "his resolution to break all factitious
+connections and confederacies." The tone is Bolingbroke's, and it was
+the lesson George had insistently heard from early youth. How sinister
+was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in political
+exile, with Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants threatening the whole
+basis of past liberties.
+
+The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the meaning of
+the new synthesis was Junius. That his anonymity concealed the malignant
+talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now beyond denial. Junius, indeed,
+can hardly claim a place in the history of political ideas. His genius
+lay not in the discussion of principle but the dissection of
+personality. His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled
+him to inform the general public of facts which were the private
+possession of the inner political circle. His mind was narrow and
+pedantic. He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he
+maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough
+was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He
+was never generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his
+calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness the nature of the
+issue and he was a powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king.
+He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the
+unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover, appearing as
+they did in the daily journals gave the press a significance in politics
+which it has never lost. He made the significance of George's effort
+known to the mass of men at a time when no other means of information
+was at hand. The opposition was divided; the king's friends were in a
+vast majority; the publication of debates was all but impossible.
+English government was a secret conflict in which the entrance of
+spectators was forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate.
+It was the glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. Not even the
+combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord Mansfield's
+doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of his vituperation
+and Wilkes' courage. Bad men have sometimes been the instruments of
+noble destiny; and there are few more curious episodes in English
+history than the result of this alliance between revengeful hate and
+insolent ambition.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was the
+ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict its real
+place in philosophy. There is no immortality save in ideas; and it was
+Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in which he was the
+liberal protagonist. His career is illustrative at once of the merits
+and defects of English politics in the eighteenth century. The son of an
+Irish Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, he served, after learning
+what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to
+politics in the upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied,
+along with Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal;
+though the _Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful_ (1756) shows
+his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special
+possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub Street that he appears
+to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge
+which made him without equal in the House of Commons. His earliest
+production was a _Vindication of Natural Society_ (1756), written in the
+manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative
+satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the
+basis of Godwin's _Political Justice_. After a vain attempt to serve in
+Ireland with "Single-Speech" Hamilton, he became the private secretary
+to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the one section of the Whig party to
+which an honorable record still remained. That connection secured for
+him a seat in Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six;
+and henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading
+members. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very
+outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still, in the
+eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in the short
+months during which he held office, the minor office of
+Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom all
+England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a place at
+the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great
+lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has
+endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which
+statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.
+
+For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain
+acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep
+comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a singularly lovable
+figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said Johnson; and Goldsmith
+has told us how he wound his way into a subject like a serpent. Macaulay
+thought him the greatest man since Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest
+master of civil wisdom in our tongue." "No English writer," says Sir
+Leslie Stephen, "has received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics."
+Even when the last criticism has been made, detraction from these
+estimates is impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent
+was his temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which
+he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with
+Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal
+antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in
+self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone
+delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal
+a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of
+comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe.
+His alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics,
+unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never
+guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public welfare.
+No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to the service of
+the nation with less regard for personal advancement. No English
+statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a mass of details to the
+principle they involve.
+
+He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no influence to
+whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics, indeed, bear upon
+their face the preoccupation with the immediate problems of the House of
+Commons. Yet through them all the principles that emerge form a
+consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the
+passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw it
+with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to
+challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the maxims
+of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London out to India
+and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian ryot's wrongs as for
+the iniquities of English policy to Ireland. With less width of mind
+than Hume and less intensity of gaze than Adam Smith, he yet had a width
+and intensity which, fused with his own imaginative sympathy, gave him
+more insight than either. He had an unerring eye for the eternal
+principles of politics. He knew that ideals must be harnessed to an Act
+of Parliament if they are not to cease their influence. Admitting while
+he did that politics must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find
+good reason why expediency should be identified with what he saw as
+right. It is a stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English
+politics to whom a greater immediate influence may be ascribed, just as
+in political philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of
+Hobbes and Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and
+speculation his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like
+him before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer
+Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his practical
+insight was far less profound. Hamilton had Burke's full grasp of
+political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation. So that he remains
+a figure of uniqueness. He may, as Goldsmith said, have expended upon
+his party talents that should have illuminated the universal aspect of
+the State. Yet there is no question with which he dealt that he did not
+leave the richer for his enquiry.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the
+immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he was at
+every point upon the side of the future. Where constitutional reform was
+in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy;
+though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid
+conservatism. In the last decade of his life he encountered the greatest
+cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the Reformation, and it is not too
+much to say that at every point he missed the essence of its meaning.
+Yet even upon France and the English Constitution he was full of
+practical sagacity. Had his warning been uttered without the fury of
+hate that accompanied it, he might well have guided the forces of the
+Revolution into channels that would have left no space for the military
+dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real evils
+of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently inveighed,
+forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch of wise and
+continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had
+little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he
+was ready to praise. What impressed him was less the evils of the
+constitution than its possibilities, could the defects quite alien from
+its nature but be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a deeper
+vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke's
+conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was too much the
+apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles involved in the
+overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense of a Divine Providence
+taking thought for the welfare of men to interfere with violence in his
+handiwork. The tinge of caution is never absent, even from his most
+liberal moments; and he was willing to endure great evil if it seemed
+dangerous to estimate the cost of change.
+
+His American speeches are the true text-book for colonial
+administration. He put aside the empty plea of right which satisfied
+legal pedants like George Grenville. What moved him was the tragic
+fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not
+maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom. He never
+concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the
+maintenance of English liberties. "Armies," he said many years later,
+"first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English
+constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though
+in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection,
+would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself." He had
+firm hold of that insidious danger which belittles freedom itself in the
+interest of curtailing some special desire. "In order to prove that the
+Americans have no right to their liberties," he said in the famous
+_Speech on Conciliation with America_ (1775), "we are every day
+endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our
+own." The way for the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke
+saw, prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character
+of the American contest. His own receipt was sounder. In the _Speech on
+American Taxation_ (1774) he had riddled the view that the fiscal
+methods of Lord North were likely to succeed. The true method was to
+find a way of peace. "Nobody shall persuade me," he told a hostile House
+of Commons, "when a whole people are concerned that acts of lenity are
+not means of conciliation." "Magnanimity in politics," he said in the
+next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and
+little minds go ill together." He did not know, in the most superb of
+all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment against a whole people. He
+would win the colonies by binding them to England with the ties of
+freedom. "The question with me," he said, "is not whether you have a
+right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your
+interest to make them happy." The problem, in fact, was one not of
+abstract right but of expediency; and nothing could be lost by
+satisfying American desire. Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was
+apparent to every first-class mind in England. But the obstinate king
+prevailed; and Burke's great protest remained no more than material for
+the legislation of the future. Yet it was something that ninety years
+after his speech the British North America Act should have given his
+dreams full substance.
+
+Ireland had always a place apart in Burke's affections, and when he
+first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in his
+thoughts was the desire to assist its freedom. He saw that here, as in
+America, no man will be argued into slavery. A government which defied
+the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster. How could
+it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its
+subjects? Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the
+Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan? The system of Protestant
+control, he said in the _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_ (1792), was
+"well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a
+people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself." The
+Catholics paid their taxes; they served with glory in the army and navy.
+Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth. "Common sense," he
+said, "and common justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a
+people for their slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for
+great, general and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will
+destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that
+the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress
+them. "No man will assert seriously," he said, "that when people are of
+a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them
+with something to complain of." The advantages of subjects were, as he
+urged, their right; and a wise government would regard "all their
+reasonable wishes as so many claims." To neglect them was to have a
+nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.
+
+There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to
+mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research may well have
+shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has
+so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there
+maintained. He was the first English statesman fully to understand the
+moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make
+impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an
+eternal challenge to their malignant complacency. He did not ask the
+abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the
+wisdom of its conquest. All that he insisted upon was this, that in
+imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code. A
+lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white. The European must
+respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by
+law to respect them in his own State. "If we are not able," he said, "to
+contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity
+become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for
+their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that
+country to our constitution." England must be in India for India's
+benefit or not at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as
+the East India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are
+instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was the
+antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a magnificent
+passage, "before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless
+prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites
+continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting." Sympathy
+with the native, regard for his habits and wants, the Company's servants
+failed to display. "The English youth in India drink the intoxicating
+draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear
+it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in
+principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert
+themselves for the excesses of their premature power. The consequences
+of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably
+such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the
+rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries
+of India are given to seas and winds to be blown about in every breaking
+up of the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean." More than a
+century was to pass before the wisest of Burke's interpreters attempted
+the translation of his maxims into statute. But there has never, in any
+language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in
+imperial adventure. "The situation of man," said Burke, "is the
+preceptor of his duty." He saw how a nation might become corrupted by
+the spoils of other lands. He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of
+a later cruelty at home. Men will complain of their wrongdoing in the
+remoter empire; and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in
+unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield. He denied that the
+government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction.
+Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit.
+He abhorred the politics of prestige. He knew the difficulties involved
+in administering distant territories, the ignorance and apathy of the
+public, the consequent erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong
+will fail of discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let
+us do what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can
+do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national
+reputation." That is a general truth not less in Africa and China than
+in India itself. The main thought in Burke's mind was the danger lest
+colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of arbitrary ideas. That
+his own safeguards were inadequate is clear enough at the present time.
+He knew that the need was good government. He did not nor could he
+realize how intimately that ideal was connected with self-government.
+Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final outcome of his teaching.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+A background so consistent as this in the inflexible determination to
+moralize political action resulted in a noble edifice. Yet, through it
+all, the principles of policy are rather implied than admitted. It was
+when he came to deal with domestic problems and the French Revolution
+that Burke most clearly showed the real trend of his thought. That trend
+is unmistakable. Burke was a utilitarian who was convinced that what was
+old was valuable by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity. The State
+appeared to him an organic compound that came but slowly to its full
+splendour. It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible. Political
+philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from
+experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty. While he
+did not belittle the value of reason, he was always impressed by the
+immense part played by prejudice in the determination of policy. He had
+no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb
+prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates. Nor must we
+miss the religious aspect of his philosophy. He never doubted that
+religion was the foundation of the English State. "Englishmen," he said
+in the _Reflections on the French Revolution_ (1790), "know, and what is
+better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society
+and the source of all good and of all comfort." The utterance is
+characteristic, not merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its
+ultimate reliance upon a mystic explanation of social facts. Nothing was
+more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. The
+only safeguard he could find was in empiricism.
+
+This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his earliest
+publication; but it remained with him to the end. He would not discuss
+America in terms of right. "I do not enter into these metaphysical
+distinctions," he said in the _Speech on American Taxation_, "I hate the
+very sound of them." "One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state," he
+wrote in the _Reflections_, "is the propensity of the people to resort
+to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a _Speech on the
+Duration of Parliament_, "when men are driven to search into the
+foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of a social contract he
+declared "at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles," and he
+found no sense in the doctrine of popular sovereignty. "The lines of
+morality," he said in the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_ (1791),
+"are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as
+well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These
+exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic but
+by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of the
+virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the
+standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious
+conclusion. "This," he said, "is the true touchstone of all theories
+which regard man and the affairs of men--does it suit his nature in
+general, does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?"
+
+Of the truth of this general attitude it is difficult to make denial.
+But when Burke came to apply it to the British Constitution the "rules
+of prudence" he was willing to admit are narrow enough to cause
+surprised enquiry. He did not doubt that the true end of a legislature
+was "to give a direction, a form, a technical dress ... to the general
+sense of the community"; he admitted that popular revolt is so much the
+outcome of suffering that in any dispute between government and people,
+the presumption is at least equal in the latter's favor. He urged the
+acceptance of Grenville's bill for improving the method of decision upon
+disputed elections. He made a magnificent defence of the popular cause
+in the Middlesex election. He was in favor of the publication of
+parliamentary debates and of the voting lists in divisions. He supported
+almost with passion the ending of that iniquitous system by which the
+enfranchisement of revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir
+of electoral support. His _Speech on Economical Reform_ (1780) was the
+prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack upon the waste of the
+Civil list.
+
+Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go. He was
+against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that
+the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible. He
+opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason
+that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature. He would
+not, as in the great speech at Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that
+a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather
+than a representative of his own convictions. "Government and
+legislation," he said, "are matters of reason and of judgment"; and once
+the private member had honorably arrived at a decision which he thought
+was for the interest of the whole community, his duty was done. All
+this, in itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke's admirable
+grasp of the practical application of attractive theories to the event.
+But it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic
+constitutional change which is more dubious. He had no sympathy with the
+Radicals. "The bane of the Whigs," he said, "has been the admission
+among them of the corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by
+persuading many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs
+inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers." "If the
+nation at large," he wrote in another letter, "has disposition enough to
+oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of government is, in
+my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the general disposition be
+against a virtuous and manly line of public conduct, there is no form
+into which it can be thrown that will improve its nature or add to its
+energy"; and in the same letter he foreshadows a possible retirement
+from the House of Commons as a protest against the growth of radical
+opinion in his party. He resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage
+qualification. He had no sympathy with the effort either to add to the
+county representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs. The framework
+of the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent. He deplored all
+criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials. "Our
+representation," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the necessary
+imperfections of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to
+be." It was in the same temper that he resisted all effort at the
+political relief of the Protestant dissenters. "The machine itself," he
+had said, "is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the
+materials were sound"; and he never moved from that opinion.
+
+Burke's attitude was obsolete even while he wrote; yet the
+suggestiveness of his very errors makes examination of their ground
+important. Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the name
+of expediency. His opponents argued that, since men are by nature equal,
+it must follow that they have an equal right to self-government. To
+Burke, the admission of this principle would have meant the overthrow of
+the British constitution. Its implication was that every institution not
+of immediate popular origin should be destroyed. To secure their ends,
+he thought, the radicals were compelled to preach the injustice of those
+institutions and thus to injure that affection for government upon which
+peace and security depend. Here was an effort to bring all institutions
+to the test of logic which he thought highly dangerous. "No rational man
+ever did govern himself," he said, "by abstractions and universals." The
+question for him was not the abstract rightness of the system upon some
+set of _a priori_ principles but whether, on the whole, that system
+worked for the happiness of the community. He did not doubt that it did;
+and to overthrow a structure so nobly tested by the pressure of events
+in favor of some theories outside historic experience seemed to him
+ruinous to society. Government, for him, was the general harmony of
+diverse interests; and the continual adjustments and exquisite
+modifications of which it stood in need were admirably discovered in the
+existing system. Principles were thus unimportant compared to the
+problem of their application. "The major," he said of all political
+premises, "makes a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory depends
+upon the little minor of circumstances."
+
+To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription. The
+presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change,
+we act at our peril. "Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid
+of all titles, not only to property, but to what is to secure that
+property, to government." Because he saw the State organically he was
+impressed by the smallness both of the present moment and the
+individual's thought. It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the
+species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost
+always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had the
+opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to
+preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a reason; and
+that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So the prescriptive
+title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the
+soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and
+man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by
+prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not
+less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution. So, too,
+his main attack on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be
+discussed." He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but
+at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a
+past experience which built according to the general need. Nor does he
+doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist
+that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth,"
+he said, "may be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that
+certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the
+truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company
+charity, the highest of the virtues."
+
+Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of
+political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that
+danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was
+balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must
+always govern the immediate decision. "When the reason of old
+establishments is gone," he said in his _Speech on Economical Reform_,
+"it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them." "A
+disposition to preserve and an ability to improve," he wrote in the
+_Reflections on the French Revolution_, "taken together would be my
+standard of a statesman." But that "ability to improve" conceals two
+principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold. "All the reformations
+we have hitherto made," he said, "have proceeded upon the principle of
+reference to antiquity"; and the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_,
+which is the most elaborate exposition of his general attitude, proceeds
+upon the general basis that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future.
+Nor is this all. "If I cannot reform with equity," said Burke, "I will
+not reform at all"; and equity seems here to mean a sacrifice of the
+present and its passionate demands to the selfish errors of past policy.
+
+Burke, indeed, was never a democrat, and that is the real root of his
+philosophy. He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the
+necessity of some degree of popular representation. But he was entirely
+satisfied with current Whig principles, could they but be purged of
+their grosser deformities. He knew too well how little reason is wont to
+enter into the formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice of
+innovation to its power. He saw so much of virtue in the old order, that
+he insisted upon the equation of virtue with quintessence. Men of great
+property and position using their influence as a public trust, delicate
+in their sense of honor, and acting only from motives of right--these
+seemed to him the men who should with justice exercise political power.
+He did not doubt that "there is no qualification for government but
+virtue and wisdom ... wherever they are actually found, they have, in
+whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport to heaven";
+but he is careful to dissociate the possibility that they can be found
+in those who practice the mechanical arts. He did not mean that his
+aristocracy should govern without response to popular demand. He had no
+objection to criticism, nor to the public exercise of government. There
+was no reason even for agreement, so long as each party was guided by an
+honorable sense of the public good. This, so he urged, was the system
+which underlay the temporary evils of the British Constitution. An
+aristocracy delegated to do its work by the mass of men was the best
+form of government his imagination could conceive. It meant that
+property must be dominant in the system of government, that, while
+office should be open to all, it should be out of the reach of most.
+"The characteristic essence of property," he wrote in the _Reflections_,
+"... is to be unequal"; and he thought the perpetuation of that
+inequality by inheritance "that which tends most to the perpetuation of
+society itself." The system was difficult to maintain, and it must be
+put out of the reach of popular temptation. "Our constitution," he said
+in the _Present Discontents_, "stands on a nice equipoise, with sharp
+precipices and deep waters on all sides of it. In removing it from a
+dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a danger towards
+oversething it on the other." In straining, that is to say, after too
+large a purification, we may end with destruction. And Burke, of course,
+was emphatic upon the need that property should be undisturbed. It was
+always, he thought, at a great disadvantage in any struggle with
+ability; and there are many passages in which he urges the consequent
+special representation which the adequate defence of property requires.
+
+The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the
+sanctity of past experience. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, Taine and
+Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and Lecky in England, have all urged
+what is in effect a similar plea. We must not break what Bagehot called
+the cake of custom, for men have been trained to its digestion, and new
+food breeds trouble. Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a
+people, and while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform. The true
+idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of
+the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be
+drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness;
+and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society
+would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance
+of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel
+impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance,
+we should disturb beyond repair the intricate equilibrium of countless
+ages. The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present
+is thus the true guide to our policy. "We ought," he said in a famous
+sentence, "to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend."
+
+It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the
+French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the destiny
+which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth
+century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to
+hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of
+religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious
+edifice. He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant
+abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an
+overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than
+the English Parliament. Privileges were scattered to the winds in a
+single night. Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical
+theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred. The
+doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and
+noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect
+justification. On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by
+the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past
+history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the
+truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious
+spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before
+a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared
+incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of
+social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive
+privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body
+politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became
+convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their
+disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves.
+In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of
+ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less
+barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and
+Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not
+unnatural thing. But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty
+years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too
+great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.
+
+Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point
+consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported the
+Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for
+in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the
+other. And when we make allowances for the grave errors of personal
+taste, the gross exaggeration, the inability to see the Revolution as
+something more than a single point in time, it becomes obvious enough
+that his criticism, de Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we
+possess from the generation which knew the movement as a living thing.
+The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as
+the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to
+the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that
+freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of
+doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form
+which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he
+exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom.
+"The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the _Reflections_, "the
+objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and
+therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable
+either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs." The note
+recurs in substance throughout his criticism. Much of its application,
+indeed, will not stand for one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for
+instance, he correlates the monarchical government of France with the
+English constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688.
+The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles,
+but the roots were absent from their national experience.
+
+A year after the publication of the _Reflections_ he himself perceived
+the narrowness of that judgment. In the _Thoughts on French Affairs_
+(1791) he saw that the essence of the Revolution was its foundation in
+theoretic dogma. It was like nothing else in the history of the world
+except the Reformation; which last event it especially resembles in its
+genius for self-propagation. Herein he has already envisaged the
+importance of that "_patrie intellectuelle_" which Tocqueville
+emphasized as born of the Revolution. That led Burke once again to
+insist upon the peculiar genius of each separate state, the difficulties
+of a change, the danger of grafting novelties upon an ancient fabric. He
+saw the certainty that in adhering to an abstract metaphysical scheme
+the French were in truth omitting human nature from their political
+equation; for general ideas can find embodiment in institutional forms
+only after they have been moulded by a thousand varieties of
+circumstance. The French created an universal man not less destructive
+of their practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists.
+They omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must
+demand; with the result that, despite themselves, they came rather to
+destroy than to fulfil. Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the
+harvest of their failure.
+
+Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of the past
+which played so large a part in the revolutionary consciousness. "We are
+afraid," he wrote in the _Reflections_, "to put men to live and trade
+each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this
+stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to
+avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of
+ages." Of Sieyes' building constitutions overnight, this is no unfair
+picture; but it points a more general truth never long absent from
+Burke's mind. Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much
+a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought
+finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small. For
+Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie
+buried in the remote experience of the state. So that men like
+Robespierre were asking from their subjects an impossible task. That
+which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations
+was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to
+be enduring. Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the
+English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories
+with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical
+landmarks of his own neighborhood. For the motives which underlie all
+human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard.
+That upon which they feed submits to change; but the effort is slow and
+the disappointments many. The Revolution taught the populace the thirst
+for power. But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human
+effort without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it
+exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers
+limitation to right ends.
+
+The later part of Burke's attack upon the Revolution does not belong to
+political philosophy. No man is more responsible than he for the temper
+which drew England into war. He came to write rather with the zeal of a
+fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted
+with new ideas. Yet even the _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ (1796) have
+flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that even in the
+midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. So that it is
+permissible to think he did not lightly pen those sentences on peace
+which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert of extravagant rhetoric. "War
+never leaves where it found a nation," he wrote, "it is never to be
+entered upon without mature deliberation." That was a lesson his
+generation had still to learn; nor did it take to heart the even nobler
+passage that follows. "The blood of man," he said, "should never be shed
+but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our
+friends, for our God, for our country, for mankind. The rest is vanity;
+the rest is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that
+century's history that these words were written to justify an effort of
+which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two angles. It
+is easy to show that his picture of the British Constitution was remote
+from the facts even when he wrote. Every change that he opposed was
+essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed
+none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed. Such criticism
+would be at almost every point just; and yet it would fail to touch the
+heart of Burke's position. What is mainly needed is analysis at once of
+his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke
+came to his maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we
+have it upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so
+clearly apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in
+what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian changes
+of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment even for him who
+burdened himself unduly to restore the Beaconsfield estate. No man was
+more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries
+of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious
+inference that once the means of government were made known those who
+possessed the knowledge would demand their share in its application. He
+did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself
+the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which
+Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the
+adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has
+been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a sense to
+have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining the foundations
+of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant
+dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the
+expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the
+facts at issue. No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained
+why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever
+to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy
+and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized
+that Wilkes was but the symptom.
+
+Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of
+political privilege was drawing to its close. That is the real meaning
+of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream of tendency
+not less active in England than abroad. In France, indeed, the lines
+were more sharply drawn than elsewhere. The rights men craved were not,
+as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the
+result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries. A
+power that knew no responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only
+from the accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation
+to offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay,
+these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his generation
+to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past. It is not
+difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the tennis-court at
+Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to be condemned. Burke's
+caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils
+rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good. In a less degree,
+the same is true of England. The constitution that Burke called upon
+men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford
+powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old
+Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the statute-book a
+penal code which hardly yielded to the noble attack of Romilly. These,
+which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble
+ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform
+they were willing to destroy.
+
+The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past
+as the very institutions it came to condemn. The innovations were the
+inevitable outcome of past oppression. Burke refused to see that aspect
+of the picture. He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to
+the half-wilful errors of the past. The man who grounded his faith in
+historic experience refused to admit as history the elements alien from
+his special outlook. He took that liberty not to venerate where he was
+unable to comprehend which he denied to his opponents. Nor did he admit
+the uses to which his doctrine of prescription was bound to be put in
+the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men. No one will object to
+privilege for a Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a
+different thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of
+whom Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham
+will one day emerge. He justifies the privileges of the English Church
+in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to see what men
+like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do with religion. The
+doctrine of prescription might be admirable if all statesmen were so
+wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men it becomes no more than
+the protective armour of vested interests into the ethics of which it
+refuses us leave to examine.
+
+That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke's philosophy, and it
+deserves more examination than it has received. In part it is a
+rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning animal. It
+puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human action; and it
+thus is distrustful of thought as leading into channels to which the
+nature of man is not adapted. Novelty, which is assumed to be the
+outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon which
+civilization depends. Thought is destructive of peace; and it is argued
+that we know too little of political phenomena to make us venture into
+the untried places to which thought invites us. Yet the first of many
+answers is surely the most obvious fact that if man is so much the
+creature of his custom no reason would prevail save where they proved
+inadequate. If thought is simply a reserve power in society, its
+strength must obviously depend upon common acceptance; and that can only
+come when some routine has failed to satisfy the impulses of men. But we
+may urge a difficulty that is even more decisive. No system of habits
+can ever hope to endure long in a world where the cumulative power of
+memory enables change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure
+at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a
+general desire. It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and,
+indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it
+is conscious of itself. The uncritical routine of which Burke is the
+sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of virtue. Yet in modern
+civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that
+consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy. Our
+real need is less the automatic response to ancient stimulus than power
+to know what stimulus has social value. We need, that is to say, the
+gift of criticism rather than the gift of inert acceptance. Not, of
+course, that the habits which Burke so earnestly admired are at all part
+of our nervous endowment in any integral sense. The short space of the
+French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an
+essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian
+school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take
+that as proof of the ease with which essential habit may be acquired.
+Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized
+life. It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered;
+but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous
+response to the chords struck by another hand.
+
+Burke's answer would, of course, have been that he was not a democrat.
+He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity as low. He
+thought of the people--it was obviously a generalization from his
+time--as consistently prone to disorder and checked only by the force of
+ancient habit. Yet he has himself supplied the answer to that attitude.
+"My observation," he said in his _Speech on the East India Bill_, "has
+furnished me with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or
+education which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of
+government." We can go further than that sober caution. We know that
+there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that
+is the training of the mass of men to interest in it. We know that no
+State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without
+representation. Indeed, if proof were here wanting, an examination of
+the eighteenth century would supply it. Few would deny that statesmen
+are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life
+they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the
+dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion of a
+part of the State from sharing in its guidance. Nor did Burke remember
+his own wise saying that "in all disputes between the people and their
+rulers the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people";
+and he quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully's which traces
+popular violence to popular suffering. No one can watch the economic
+struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the
+pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they
+represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too
+intolerable to be borne. Burke himself, as his own speeches show, knew
+little or nothing of the pain involved in the agrarian changes of his
+age. The one way to avoid violent outbreak is not exclusion of the
+people from power but their participation in it. The popular sense of
+right may often, as Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of
+statesmen. It is not necessary to equate the worth of untrained
+commonsense with experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run,
+neglect of common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.
+
+This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground. For the case against Burke's
+aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal. He did not
+inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors
+of a whole people. Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham
+was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent. Once it is
+admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect
+institutional room must be found for its expression. The State is
+morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped. There is something
+curious here in Burke's inability to suspect deformity in a system which
+gave his talents but partial place. He must have known that no one in
+the House of Commons was his equal. He must have known how few of those
+he called upon to recognize the splendor of their function were capable
+of playing the part he pictured for them. The answer to a morally
+bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in
+its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact
+that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for
+power. Burke gave no hint of how the level of his governing class could
+be maintained. He said nothing of what education might accomplish for
+the people. He did not examine the obvious consequences of their
+economic status. Had his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of
+that States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in
+their inexperience, might have given him pause. The "obscure provincial
+advocates ... stewards of petty local jurisdictions ... the fomenters
+and conductors of the petty war of village vexation" legislated, out of
+their inexperience, for the world. Their resolution, their constancy,
+their high sense of the national need, were precisely the qualities
+Burke demanded in his governing class; and the States-General did not
+move from the straight path he laid down until they met with intrigue
+from those of whom Burke became the licensed champion.
+
+Nor is it in the least clear that his emphasis upon expediency is, in
+any real way, a release from metaphysical inquiry. Rather may it be
+urged that what was needed in Burke's philosophy was the clear avowal
+of the metaphysic it implied. Nothing is more greatly wanted in
+political inquiry than discovery of that "intuition more subtle than any
+articulate major premise" which, as Mr. Justice Holmes has said, is the
+true foundation of so many of our political judgments. The theory of
+natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong rather in
+its form than in its substance. It clearly suffered from its mistaken
+effort to trace to an imaginary state of nature what was due to a
+complex experience. It suffered also from its desire to lay down
+universal formulae. It needed to state the rights demanded in terms of
+the social interests they involved rather than in the abstract ethic
+they implied. But the demands which underlay the thought of men like
+Price and Priestley was as much the offspring of experience as Burke's
+own doctrine. They made, indeed, the tactical mistake of seeking to give
+an unripe philosophic form to a political strategy wherein, clearly
+enough, Burke was their master. But no one can read the answers of Paine
+and Mackintosh, who both were careful to avoid the panoply of
+metaphysics, to the _Reflections_, without feeling that Burke failed
+to move them from their main position. Expediency may be admirable in
+telling the statesmen what to do; but it does not explain the sources of
+his ultimate act, nor justify the thing finally done. The unconscious
+deeps which lie beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent
+than the motives that are avowed. Action is less their elimination than
+their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we have
+the full materials for judgment.
+
+Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is surely
+unanswerable. The things that men desire correspond, in some rough
+fashion, to the things they need. Natural rights are nothing more than
+the armour evolved to protect their vital interests. Upon the narrow
+basis of legal history it is, of course, impossible to protect them.
+History is rather the record of the thwarting of human desire than of
+its achievement. But upon the value of certain things there is a
+sufficient and constant opinion to give us assurance that repression
+will ultimately involve disorder. Nor is there any difference between
+the classes of men in this regard. Forms, indeed, will vary; and the
+power we have of answering demand will always wait upon the discoveries
+of science. Our natural rights, that is to say, will have a changing
+content simply because this is not a static world. But that does not
+mean, as Burke insisted, that they are empty of experience. They come,
+of course, mainly from men who have been excluded from intimate contact
+with the fruits of power. Nonconformists in religion, workers without
+land or capital save the power of their own hands, it is from the
+disinherited that they draw, as demands, their strength. Yet it is
+difficult to see, as Burke would undoubtedly have insisted, that they
+are the worse from the source whence they derive. Rather do they point
+to grave inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of
+which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience. The
+unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack
+of moral insight into the problem he confronted.
+
+That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation; and its
+cause seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic outlook. He was profoundly
+religious; and he did not doubt that the order of the universe was the
+command of God. It was, as a consequence, beneficent; and to deny its
+validity was, for him, to doubt the wisdom of God. "Having disposed," he
+wrote, "and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will,
+but to His, He had, in and by that disposition, vitally subjected us to
+act the part which belongs to the place assigned us." The State, in
+fact, it is to be built upon the sacrifice of men; and this they must
+accept as of the will of God. We are to do our duty in our allotted
+station without repining, in anticipation, doubtless, of a later reward.
+What we are is thus the expression of his goodness; and there is a real
+sense in which Burke may be said to have maintained the inherent
+rightness of the existing order. Certainly he throws a cloak of
+religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property;
+and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely
+part of the same attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect this
+background with his antagonism to the French Revolution. What there was
+most distressing to him was the overthrowal of the Church, and he did
+not hesitate, in very striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion
+with infidelity. Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced
+that a social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his _Letters on a
+Regicide Peace_ have a good deal of that relentless illogic which made
+de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from ultramontanism with
+the road to a denial of all faith. Nothing is more difficult than to
+deal with a thinker who has had a revelation; and this sense that the
+universe was a divine mystery not to be too nearly scrutinized by man
+grew greatly upon Burke in his later years. It was not an attitude which
+reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the
+presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.
+
+There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like
+later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with
+something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him was the
+idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it,
+was not of the essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that
+the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the
+purpose itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the
+deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of
+the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it
+should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper. It
+never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic
+purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur.
+We do not come to grips with the facts. What we are bidden to remember
+is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be. The existing order
+is beatified as a necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to
+separate out the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts
+in time and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do
+not at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.
+
+Yet it is surely evident that in the heat and stress of social life, we
+cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our judgment. We may
+well enough regard the corruption of the monarchy under the later
+Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under Victoria;
+but that does not make it any the less corrupt. We may even see how a
+monistic view of society is possible to one who, like Burke, is uniquely
+occupied with the public good. But the men who, like Muir and Hardy in
+the treason trials of the Revolution, think rather in terms of the
+existing disharmonies than the beauty of the purpose upon which they
+rest, are only human if they think those disharmonies more real than the
+purpose they do not meet. They were surely to be pardoned if, reading
+the _Reflections_ of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more
+vital than their harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with
+which privileges they did not share were defended. It is even possible
+to understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as Burke
+had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it was against
+that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that they were in
+revolt. For them the fact of discontinuity was vital. They could not but
+ask for happiness in their own individual lives no less than in the
+State of which they were part. They came to see that without
+self-government in the sense of their own active participation in power,
+such happiness must go unfulfilled. The State, in fact, may have the
+noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also
+mortal men. The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic. The
+test of allegiance to established institutions became immediately the
+achievement for which they were responsible. The achievement, as they
+urged, was hardly written with adequacy in terms of the lives of humble
+men. That was why they judged no attitude of worth which sought the
+equation of the real and the ideal. The first lesson of their own
+experience of power was the need for its limitation by the instructed
+judgment of free minds.[18]
+
+[Footnote 18: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, pp. 65-9.]
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the romantic
+movement, to the _Contrat Social_ of Rousseau and the _Political
+Justice_ of Godwin, than was Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the
+romantics that Burke's fundamental influence remains. His attitude to
+reason, his exaltation of passion and imagination over the conscious
+logic of men, were of the inmost stuff of which they were made. In that
+sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative revolution
+of the generation which followed him. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, de
+Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the later Wordsworth in
+England, are in a true sense his disciples. That does not mean that any
+of them were directly conscious of his work but that the movement he
+directed had its necessary outcome in their defence of his ideals. The
+path of history is strewn with undistributed middles; and it is possible
+that in the clash between his attitude and that of Bentham there were
+the materials for a fuller synthesis in a later time. Certainly there is
+no more admirable corrective in historical politics that the contrast
+they afford.
+
+It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the greatness of his
+effort. Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless to live rather as
+the author of some maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than
+as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished implications,
+is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or Bentham. His very defects
+are lessons in themselves. His unhesitating inability to see how
+dangerous is the concentration of property is standing proof that men
+are over-prone to judge the rightness of a State by their own wishes.
+His own contempt for the results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless
+lesson in the virtue of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His
+disregard of popular desire suggests the fatal ease with which we
+neglect the opinion of those who stand outside the active centre of
+political conflict. Above all, his hostility to the Revolution should at
+least make later generations beware lest novelty of outlook be unduly
+confounded with erroneous doctrine.
+
+Yet even when such deduction has been made, there is hardly a greater
+figure in the history of political thought in England. Without the
+relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the moral insight of
+T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties of each. He brought to
+the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a
+lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as
+no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of insight are things
+that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political
+complexity. Unquestionably, his speculation is rather that of the orator
+in the tribune than of the thinker in his study. He never forgot his
+party, and he wrote always in that House of Commons atmosphere which
+makes a man unjust to the argument and motives of his opponent. Yet,
+when the last word of criticism has been made, the balance of
+illumination is immense. He illustrates at its best the value of that
+party-system the worth of which made so deep an impression on all he
+wrote. He showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate
+great principles. He showed also that allegiance to party is never
+inconsistent with the deeper allegiance to the demand of conscience.
+When he came to the House of Commons, the prospects of representative
+government were very dark; and it is mainly to his emphasis upon its
+virtues that its victory must be attributed. Institutional change is
+likely to be more rapid than in his generation; for we seem to have
+reached that moment when, as he foresaw, "they who persist in opposing
+that mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of
+Providence itself than the mere designs of men." The principles upon
+which we proceed are doubtless different from those that he commended;
+yet his very challenge to their wisdom only gives to his warning a
+deeper inspiration for our effort.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The Industrial Revolution is hardly less a fundamental change in the
+habits of English thought than in the technique of commercial
+production. Alongside the discoveries of Hargreaves and Crompton, the
+ideas of Hume and Adam Smith shifted the whole perspective of men's
+minds. The Revolution, indeed, like all great movements, did not
+originate at any given moment. There was no sudden invention which made
+the hampering system of government-control seem incompatible with
+industrial advance. The mercantilism against which the work of Adam
+Smith was so magistral a protest was already rather a matter of external
+than internal commerce when he wrote. He triumphed less because he
+suddenly opened men's eyes to a truth hitherto concealed than because he
+represented the culmination of certain principles which, under various
+aspects, were common to his time. The movement for religious toleration
+is not only paralleled in the next century by the movement for economic
+freedom, but is itself in a real sense the parent of the latter. For it
+is not without significance that the pre-Adamite economists were almost
+without exception the urgent defenders of religious toleration. The
+landowners were churchmen, the men of commerce largely Nonconformist;
+and religious proscription interfered with the balance of trade. When
+the roots of religious freedom had been secured, it was easy for them to
+transfer their argument to the secular sphere.
+
+Nothing, indeed, is more important in the history of English political
+philosophy than to realize that from Stuart times the Nonconformists
+were deeply bitten with distrust of government. Its courts of special
+instance hampered industrial life at every turn in the interest of
+religious conformity. Their heavy fines and irritating restrictions upon
+foreign workmen were nothing so much as a tax upon industrial progress.
+What the Nonconformists wanted was to be left alone; and Davenant
+explained the root of their desire when he tells of the gaols crowded
+with substantial tradesmen whose imprisonment spelt unemployment for
+thousands of workmen. Sir William Temple, in his description of Holland,
+represents economic prosperity as the child of toleration. The movement
+for ecclesiastical freedom in England, moreover, became causally linked
+with that protest against the system of monopolies with which it was the
+habit of the court to reward its favorites. Freedom in economic matters,
+like freedom in religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity
+shall exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition.
+The latter easily became imbued with religious significance. English
+puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work was the will
+of God and its performance the test of grace. The greater the energy of
+its performance, the greater the likelihood of prosperity; and thence it
+is but a step to argue that the free development of a man's industrial
+worth is the law of God. Success in business, indeed, became for many a
+test of religious grace, and poverty the proof of God's disfavor. Books
+like Steele's _Religious Tradesman_ (1684) show clearly how close is the
+connection. The hostility of the English landowners to the commercial
+classes in the eighteenth century is at bottom the inheritance of
+religious antagonism. The typical qualities of dissent became a certain
+pushful exertion by which the external criteria of salvation could be
+secured.
+
+Much of the contemporary philosophy, moreover, fits in with this
+attitude. From the time of Bacon, the main object of speculation was to
+disrupt the scholastic teleology. In the result the State becomes
+dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the self-interest of
+each is the starting-point of all inquiry. Hobbes built his state upon
+the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the individual enter political
+life for the benefits that accrue therefrom. The cynicism of Mandeville,
+the utilitarianism of Hume, are only bypaths of the same tradition. The
+organic society of the middle ages gives place to an individual who
+builds the State out of his own desires. Liberty becomes their
+realization; and the object of the State is to enable men in the
+fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their private wants. How far
+is that conception from the Anglican outlook of the seventeenth century,
+a sermon of Laud's makes clear. "If any man," he said,[19] "be so
+addicted to his private interest that he neglects the common State, he
+is void of the sense of piety, and wishes peace and happiness for
+himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the
+commonwealth and in the body of the Church." So Platonic an outlook was
+utterly alien from the temper of puritanism. They had no thought of
+sacrificing themselves to an institution which they had much ground for
+thinking existed only for their torment. The development of the
+religious instinct to the level of salvation found its philosophic
+analogue in the development of the economic sense of fitness. The State
+became the servant of the individual from being his master; and service
+became equated with an internal policy of _laissez-faire_.
+
+[Footnote 19: Sermon of June 19, 1621. Works (ed. of 1847), p. 28.]
+
+Such summary, indeed, abridges the long process of release from which
+the eighteenth century had still to suffer; nor does it sufficiently
+insist upon the degree to which the old idea of state control still held
+sway in external policies of trade. Mercantilism was still in the
+ascendant when Adam Smith came to write. Few statesmen of importance
+before the younger Pitt had learned the secret of its fallacies; and,
+indeed, the chief ground for difference between Chatham and Burke was
+the former's suspicion that Burke had embraced the noxious doctrine of
+free trade. Mercantilism, by the time of Locke, is not the simple error
+that wealth consists in bullion but the insistence that the balance of
+trade must be preserved. Partly it was doubtless derived from the
+methods of the old political arithmetic of men like Petty and Davenant;
+the individual seeks a balance at the end of his year's accounting and
+so, too, the State must have a balance. "A Kingdom," said Locke, "grows
+rich or poor just as a farmer does, and no other way"; and while there
+is a sense in which this is wholly true, the meaning attached to it by
+the mercantilists was that foreign competition meant national weakness.
+They could not conceive a commercial bargain which was profitable to
+both sides. Nations grow prosperous at each other's expense; wherefore a
+woolen trade in Ireland necessarily spells English unemployment. Even
+Davenant, who was in many respects on the high road to free trade, was
+in this problem adamant. Protection was essential in the colonial
+market; for unless the trade of the colonies was directed through
+England they might be dangerous rivals. So Ireland and America were
+sacrificed to the fear of British merchants, with the inevitable result
+that repression brought from both the obvious search for remedy.
+
+Herein it might appear that Adam Smith had novelty to contribute; yet
+nothing is more certain than that his full sense of the world as the
+only true unit of marketing was fully grasped before him. In 1691 Sir
+Dudley North published his _Discourses upon Trade_. Therein he clearly
+sees that commercial barriers between Great Britain and France are
+basically as senseless as would be commercial barriers between Yorkshire
+and Middlesex. Indeed, in one sense, North goes even further than Adam
+Smith, for he argues against the usury laws in terms Bentham would
+hardly have disowned. Ten years later an anonymous writer in a tract
+entitled _Considerations on the East India Trade_ (1701) has no
+illusions about the evil of monopoly. He sees with striking clarity that
+the real problem is not at any cost to maintain the industries a nation
+actually possesses, but to have the national capital applied in the most
+efficient channels. So, too, Hume dismissed the Mercantile theory with
+the contemptuous remark that it was trying to keep water beyond its
+proper level. Tucker, as has been pointed out, was a free trader, and
+his opinion of the American war was that it was as mad as those who
+fought "under the peaceful Cross to recover the Holy Land"; and he
+urged, indeed, prophesied, the union with Ireland in the interest of
+commercial amity. Nor must the emphasis of the Physiocrats upon free
+trade be forgotten. There is no evidence now that Adam Smith owed this
+perception to his acquaintance with Quesnay and Turgot; but they may
+well have confirmed him in it, and they show that the older philosophy
+was attacked on every side.
+
+Nor must we miss the general atmosphere of the time. On the whole his
+age was a conservative one, convinced, without due reason, that
+happiness was independent of birth or wealth and that natural law
+somehow could be made to justify existing institutions. The poets, like
+Pope, were singing of the small part of life which kings and laws may
+hope to cure; and that attitude is written in the general absence of
+economic legislation during the period. Religiously, the Church exalted
+the _status quo_; and where, as with Wesley, there was revolt, its
+impetus directed the mind to the source of salvation in the individual
+act. It may, indeed, be generally argued that the religious teachers
+acted as a social soporific. Where riches accumulated, they could be
+regarded as the blessing of God; where they were absent their
+unimportance for eternal happiness could be emphasized. Burke's early
+attack on a system which condemned "two hundred thousand innocent
+persons ... to so intolerable slavery" was, in truth, a justification of
+the existing order. The social question which, in the previous century,
+men like Bellers and Winstanley had brought into view, dropped out of
+notice until the last quarter of the century. There was, that is to say,
+no organized resistance possible to the power of individualism; and
+resistance was unlikely to make itself heard once the resources of the
+Industrial Revolution were brought into play. Men discovered with
+something akin to ecstasy the possibilities of the new inventions; and
+when the protest came against the misery they effected, it was answered
+that they represented the working of that natural law by which the
+energies of men may raise them to success. And discontent could easily,
+as with the saintly Wilberforce, be countered by the assertion that it
+was revolt against the will of God.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Few lives represent more splendidly than that of Adam Smith the
+speculative ideal of a dispassionate study of philosophy. He was
+fortunate in his teachers and his friends. At Glasgow he was the pupil
+of Francis Hutcheson; and even if he was taught nothing at Oxford, at
+least six years of leisure gave him ample opportunity to learn. His
+professorship at Glasgow not only brought him into contact with men like
+Hume, but also admitted him to intercourse with a group of business men
+whose liberal sentiments on commerce undoubtedly strengthened, if they
+did not originate, his own liberal views. At Glasgow, too, in 1759, he
+published his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, written with sufficient
+power of style to obscure its inner poverty of thought. The book brought
+him immediately a distinguished reputation from a public which exalted
+elegance of diction beyond all literary virtues. The volatile Charles
+Townshend made him tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch, through whom Smith
+not only secured comparative affluence for the rest of his days, but
+also a French tour in which he met at its best the most brilliant
+society in Europe. The germ of his _Wealth of Nations_ already lay
+hidden in those Glasgow lectures which Mr. Cannan has so happily
+recovered for us; and it was in a moment of leisure in France that he
+set to work to put them together in systematic fashion. Not, indeed,
+that the Frenchmen whom he met, Turgot, Quesnay and Dupont de Nemours,
+can be said to have done more than confirm the truths he had already
+been teaching. When he returned to Scotland and a competence ten years
+of constant labor were necessary before the _Wealth of Nations_ was
+complete. After its publication, in 1776, Adam Smith did little save
+attend to the administrative duties of a minor, but lucrative office in
+the Customs. Until the end, indeed, he never quite gave up the hope,
+foreshadowed first in the _Moral Sentiments_ of completing a gigantic
+survey of civilized institutions. But he was a slow worker, and his
+health was never robust. It was enough that he should have written his
+book and cherished friendships such as it is given to few men to
+possess. Hume and Burke, Millar the jurist, James Watt, Foulis the
+printer, Black the chemist and Hutton of geological fame--it is an
+enviable circle. He had known Turgot on intimate terms and visited
+Voltaire on Lake Geneva. Hume had told him that his book had "depth and
+solidity and acuteness"; the younger Pitt had consulted him on public
+affairs. Few men have moved amid such happy peace within the very centre
+of what was most illustrious in their age.
+
+We are less concerned here with the specific economic details of the
+_Wealth of Nations_ than with its general attitude to the State. But
+here a limitation upon criticism must be noted. The man of whom Smith
+writes is man in search of wealth; by definition the economic motive
+dominates his actions. Such abuse, therefore, as Ruskin poured upon him
+is really beside the point when his objective is borne in mind. What
+virtually he does is to assume the existence of a natural economic order
+which tends, when unrestrained by counter-tendencies, to secure the
+happiness of men. "That order of things which necessity imposes in
+general," he writes, "... is, in every particular country promoted by
+the natural inclinations of man"; and he goes on to explain what would
+have resulted "if human institutions had never thwarted those natural
+inclinations." "All systems either of preference or of restraint,
+therefore, being thus completely taken away," he writes again, "the
+obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its
+own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of
+justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own
+way.... The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty in the
+attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable
+delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or
+knowledge would ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the
+industry of private people and of directing it towards the employments
+most suitable to the interests of the society."
+
+The State, in this conception has but three functions--defence, justice
+and "the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and
+certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of
+any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain."
+The State, in fact, is simply to provide the atmosphere in which
+production is possible. Nor does Smith conceal his thought that the main
+function of justice is the protection of property. "The affluence of
+the rich," he wrote, "excites the indignation of the poor, who are often
+both driven by want and prompted by envy to invade their possessions. It
+is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that
+valuable property, acquired by the labor of many years, or perhaps many
+successive generations, can sleep a single night in security." The
+attitude, indeed, is intensified by his constant sense that the capital
+which makes possible new productivity is the outcome of men's sacrifice;
+to protect it is thus to safeguard the sources of wealth itself. And
+even if the State is entrusted with education and the prevention of
+disease, this is rather for the general benefit they confer and the
+doubt that private enterprise would find them profitable than as the
+expression of a general rule. Collective effort of every kind awakened
+in him a deep distrust. Trade regulations such as the limitation of
+apprenticeship he condemned as "manifest encroachment upon the just
+liberty of the workman and of those who may be disposed to employ him."
+Even educational establishments are suspect on the ground--not
+unnatural after his own experience of Oxford--that their possibilities
+of comfort may enervate the natural energies of men.
+
+The key to this attitude is clear enough. The improvement of society is
+due, he thinks not to the calculations of government but to the natural
+instincts of economic man. We cannot avoid the impulse to better our
+condition; and the less its effort is restrained the more certain it is
+that happiness will result. We gain, in fact, some sense of its inherent
+power when we bear in mind the magnitude of its accomplishment despite
+the folly and extravagance of princes. Therein we have some index of
+what it would achieve if left unhindered to work out its own destinies.
+Human institutions continually thwart its power; for those who build
+those institutions are moved rather "by the momentary fluctuations of
+affairs" than their true nature. "That insidious and crafty animal,
+vulgarly called a politician or statesman" meets little mercy for his
+effort compared to the magic power of the natural order. "In all
+countries where there is a tolerable security," he writes, "every man
+of common understanding will endeavor to employ whatever stock he can
+command in procuring either present enjoyment or future profit."
+Individual spontaneity is thus the root of economic good; and the real
+justification of the state is the protection it affords to this impulse.
+Man, in fact, is by nature a trader and he is bound by nature to
+discover the means most apt to progress.
+
+Nor was he greatly troubled by differences of fortune. Like most of the
+Scottish school, especially Hutcheson and Hume, he thought that men are
+much alike in happiness, whatever their station or endowments. For there
+is a "never-failing certainty" that "all men sooner or later accommodate
+themselves to whatever becomes their permanent situation"; though he
+admits that there is a certain level below which poverty and misery go
+hand in hand. But, for the most part, happiness is simply a state of
+mind; and he seems to have had but little suspicion that differences of
+wealth might issue in dangerous social consequence. Men, moreover, he
+regarded as largely equal in their original powers; and differences of
+character he ascribes to the various occupations implied in the
+division of labor. Each man, therefore, as he follows his self-interest
+promotes the general happiness of society. That principle is inherent in
+the social order. "Every man," he wrote in the _Moral Sentiments_, "is
+by nature first and principally recommended to his own care" and therein
+he is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of
+his intention." The State, that is to say, is the sum of individual
+goods; whereby to better ourselves is clearly to its benefit. And that
+desire "which comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go
+to the grave" is the more efficacious the less it is restrained by
+governmental artifice. For we know so well what makes us happy that none
+can hope to help us so much as we help ourselves.
+
+Enlightened selfishness is thus the root of prosperity; but we must not
+fall into the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf to the plaint of the
+poor. He urged the employer to have regard to the health and welfare of
+the worker, a regard which was the voice of reason and humanity. Where
+there was conflict between love of the _status quo_ and a social good
+which Revolution alone could achieve, he did not, at least in the _Moral
+Sentiments_, hesitate to choose the latter. Order was, for the most
+part, indispensable; but "the greatest and noblest of all characters" he
+made the reformer of the State. Yet he is too impressed by the working
+of natural economic laws to belittle their influence. Employers, in his
+picture, are little capable of benevolence or charity. Their rule is the
+law of supply and demand and not the Sermon on the Mount. They combine
+without hesitation to depress wages to the lowest point of subsistence.
+They seize every occasion of commercial misfortune to make better terms
+for themselves; and the greater the poverty the more submissive do
+servants become so that scarcity is naturally regarded as more favorable
+to industry.
+
+Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is Smith's
+conception of nature. Nor can there be much doubt of what he thought its
+inner substance. Facile distinctions such as the effort of Buckle to
+show that while in the _Moral Sentiments_ Adam Smith was dealing with
+the unselfish side of man's nature, in the _Wealth of Nations_ he was
+dealing with a group of facts which required the abstraction of such
+altruistic elements, are really beside the point. Nature for Smith is
+simply the spontaneous action of human character unchecked by hindrances
+of State. It is, as Bonar has aptly said, "a vindication of the
+unconscious law present in the separate actions of men when these
+actions are directed by a certain strong personal motive." Adam Smith's
+argument is an assumption that the facts can be made to show the
+relative powerlessness of institutions in the face of economic laws
+grounded in human psychology. The psychology itself is relatively
+simple, and, at least in the _Wealth of Nations_ not greatly different
+from the avowed assumptions of utilitarianism. He emphasizes the
+strength of reason in the economic field, and his sense that it enables
+men to judge much better of their best interests than an external
+authority can hope to do. And therefore the practices accomplished by
+this reason are those in which the impulses of men are to be found. The
+order they represent is the natural order; and whatever hinders its full
+operation is an unwise check upon the things for which men strive.
+
+Obviously enough, this attitude runs the grave risk of seeming to
+abstract a single motive--the desire for wealth--from the confused
+welter of human impulses and to make it dominant at the expense of human
+nature itself. A hasty reading of Adam Smith would, indeed, confirm that
+impression; and that is perhaps why he seemed to Ruskin to blaspheme
+human nature. But a more careful survey, particularly when the _Moral
+Sentiments_ is borne in mind suggests a different conclusion. His
+attitude is implicit in the general medium in which he worked. What he
+was trying to do was less to emphasize that men care above all things
+for the pursuit of wealth than that no institutional modifications are
+able to destroy the power of that motive to labor. There is too much
+history in the _Wealth of Nations_ to make tenable the hypothesis of
+complete abstraction. And there is even clear a sense of a nature behind
+his custom when he speaks of a "sacred regard" for life, and urges that
+every man has property in his own labor. The truth here surely is that
+Smith was living in a time of commercial expansion. What was evident to
+him was the potential wealth to be made available if the obsolete system
+of restraint could be destroyed. Liberty to him meant absence of
+restraint not because its more positive aspect was concealed from him
+but rather because the kind of freedom wanted in the environment in
+which he moved was exactly that for which he made his plea. There is a
+hint that freedom as a positive thing was known to him from the fact
+that he relied upon education to relieve the evils of the division of
+labor. But the general context of his book required less emphasis upon
+the virtues of state-interference than upon its defects. His cue was to
+show that all the benefits of regulation had been achieved despite its
+interference; from which, of course, it followed that restraint was a
+matter of supererogation.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It would be tedious to praise the _Wealth of Nations_. It may be
+doubtful whether Buckle's ecstatic judgment that it has had more
+influence than any other book in the world was justified even when he
+wrote; but certainly it is one of the seminal books of the modern time.
+What is more important is to note the perspective in which its main
+teaching was set. He wrote in the midst of the first significant
+beginnings of the Industrial Revolution; and his emphatic approval of
+Watt's experiments suggests that he was not unalive to its importance.
+Yet it cannot in any full sense be said that the Industrial Revolution
+has a large part in his book. The picture of industrial organization and
+its possibilities is too simple to suggest that he had caught any far
+reaching glimpse into the future. Industry, for him, is still in the
+last stage of handicraft; it is a matter of skillful workmanship and not
+of mechanical appliance. Capital is still the laborious result of
+parsimony. Credit is spoken of rather in the tones of one who sees it
+less as a new instrument of finance than a dangerous attempt by the
+aspiring needy to scale the heights of wealth. Profits are always a
+justified return for productive labor; interest the payment for the use
+of the owner's past parsimony. Business is still the middleman
+distributing to the consumer on a small scale. He did not, or could not,
+conceive of an industry either so vast or so depersonalized as at
+present. He was rather writing of a system which, like the politics of
+the eighteenth century, had reached an equilibrium of passable comfort.
+His natural order was, at bottom, the beatification of that to which
+this equilibrium tended. Its benefits might be improved by free trade
+and free workmanship; but, upon the whole, he saw no reason to call in
+question its fundamental dogmas.
+
+Therein, of course, may be found the main secret of his omissions. The
+problem of labor finds no place in his book. The things that the poor
+have absent from their lives, that concept of a national minimum below
+which no State can hope to fulfil even the meanest of its aims, of these
+he has no conception. Rather the note of the book is a quiet optimism,
+impressed by the possibilities of constant improvement which lie
+imbedded in the human impulse to better itself. What he did not see is
+the way in which the logical outcome of the system he describes may
+well be the attainment of great wealth at a price in human cost that is
+beyond its worth. Therein, it is clear, all individualistic theories of
+the state miss the true essence of the social bond. Those who came after
+Adam Smith saw only half his problem. He wrote a consumer's theory of
+value. But whereas he had in mind a happy and contented people, the
+economics of Ricardo and Malthus seized upon a single element in human
+nature as that which alone the State must serve. Freedom from restraint
+came ultimately to mean a judgment upon national well-being in terms of
+the volume of trade. "It is not with happiness," said Nassau Senior,
+"but with wealth that I am concerned as a political economist; and I am
+not only justified in omitting, but am perhaps bound to omit, all
+considerations which have no influence upon wealth."
+
+In such an aspect, it was natural for the balance of investigation to
+swing towards the study of the technique of production; and with the
+growing importance of capital, as machinery was introduced, the worker,
+without difficulty, became an adjunct, easily replaced, to the machine.
+What was remembered then was the side of Adam Smith which looked upon
+enlightened selfishness as the key to social good. Regulation became
+anathema even when the evils it attempted to restrain were those which
+made the mass of the people incapable of citizenship. Even national
+education was regarded as likely to destroy initiative; or, as a
+pauper's dole which men of self-respect would regard with due
+abhorrence. The State, in short, ceased to concern itself with justice
+save insofar as the administration of a judicial code spelled the
+protection of the new industrial system. Nothing is more striking in the
+half-century after Adam Smith than the optimism of the economist and the
+business man in contrast to the hopeless despair of labor. That men can
+organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that until
+Francis Place even the workers themselves were half-convinced. The
+manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of
+economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation. The
+literature of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray,
+exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and Robert Owen
+was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet of a new hope.
+The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out to the letter the
+unstated assumptions of Puritan economics. The poor were consigned to a
+God whose dictates were by definition beneficent; and if they failed to
+understand the curious incidence of his rewards that was because his
+ways were inscrutable. No one who reads the tracts of writers like
+Harriet Martineau can fail to see how pitiless was the operation of this
+attitude. Life is made a struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its
+ultimate meaning from the misery incident to it. The tragedy is excused
+because the export-trade increases in its volume. The iron law of wages,
+the assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of wealth,
+the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better his
+condition be sapped by giving to him that which his self-respect can
+better win--these became the unconscious assumptions of all economic
+discussion.
+
+In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided it, we
+must not miss the element of truth that it contains. No poison is more
+subtly destructive of the democratic State than paternalism; and the
+release of the creative impulses of men must always be the coping-stone
+of public policy. Adam Smith is the supreme representative of a
+tradition which saw that release effected by individual effort. Where
+each man cautiously pursued the good as he saw it, the realization was
+bound, in his view, to be splendid. A population each element of which
+was active and alert to its economic problems could not escape the
+achievement of greatness. All that is true; but it evades the obvious
+conditions we have inherited. For even when the psychological
+inadequacies of Smith's attitude are put aside, we can judge his theory
+in the light of the experience it summarizes. Once it is admitted that
+the object of the State is the achievement of the good life, the final
+canon of politics is bound to be a moral one. We have to inquire into
+the dominant conception of the good life, the number of those upon whom
+it is intended that good shall be conferred.
+
+In the light of this conception it is obvious enough that Smith's view
+is impossible. No mere conflict of private interests, however pure in
+motive, seems able to achieve a harmony of interest between the members
+of the State. Liberty, in the sense of a positive and equal opportunity
+for self-realization, is impossible save upon the basis of the
+acceptance of certain minimal standards which can get accepted only
+through collective effort. Smith did not see that in the processes of
+politics what gets accepted is not the will that is at every moment a
+part of the state-purpose, but the will of those who in fact operate the
+machinery of government. In the half-century after he wrote the men who
+dominated political life were, with the best intentions, moved by
+motives at most points unrelated to the national well-being. The
+fellow-servant doctrine would never have obtained acceptance in a state
+where, as he thought, employer and workman stood upon an equal footing.
+Opposition to the Factory Acts would never have developed in a community
+where it was realized that below certain standards of subsistence the
+very concept of humanity is impossible. Modern achievement implies a
+training in the tools of life; and that, for most, is denied even in our
+own day to the vast majority of men. In the absence of legislation, it
+is certain that those who employ the services of men will be their
+political masters; and it will follow that their Acts of Parliament will
+be adapted to the needs of property. That shrinkage of the purpose of
+the State will mean for most not merely hardship but degradation of all
+that makes life worthy. Upon those stunted existences, indeed, a wealthy
+civilization may easily be builded. Yet it will be a civilization of
+slaves rather than of men.
+
+The individualism, that is to say, for which Adam Smith was zealous
+demands a different institutional expression from that which he gave it.
+We must not assume an _a priori_ justification for the forces of the
+past. The customs of men may represent the thwarting of the impulses of
+the many at the expense of the few not less easily than they may embody
+a general desire; and it is surely a mistaken usage to dignify as
+natural whatever may happen to have occurred. A man may find
+self-realization not less in working for the common good than in the
+limited satisfaction of his narrow desire for material advancement. And
+that, indeed, is the starting-point of modern effort. Our liberty means
+the consistent expression of our personality in media where we find
+people like-minded with ourselves in their conception of social life.
+The very scale of civilization implies collective plans and common
+effort. The constant revision of our basic notions was inevitable
+immediately science was applied to industry. There was thus no reason to
+believe that the system of individual interests for which Smith stood
+sponsor was more likely to fit requirements of a new time than one which
+implied the national regulation of business enterprise. The danger in
+every period of history is lest we take our own age as the term in
+institutional evolution. Private enterprise has the sanction of
+prescription; but since the Industrial Revolution the chief lesson we
+have had to learn is the unsatisfactory character of that title. History
+is an unenviable record of bad metaphysics used to defend obsolete
+systems. It took almost a century after the publication of the _Wealth
+of Nations_ for men to realize that its axioms represented the
+experience of a definite time. Smith thought of freedom in the terms
+most suitable to his generation and stated them with a largeness of view
+which remains impressive even at a century's distance.
+
+But nothing is more certain in the history of political philosophy than
+that the problem of freedom changes with each age. The nineteenth
+century sought release from political privilege; and it built its
+success upon the system prepared by its predecessor. It can never be too
+greatly emphasized that in each age the substance of liberty will be
+found in what the dominating forces of that age most greatly want. With
+Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is
+always the summary of some special experience universalized. That does
+not mean that the past is worthless. Politics, as Seeley said, are
+vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed
+to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its
+novelties upon foundations of sand. Suspicions of collective effort in
+the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to
+think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so
+finely criticized Hegel. It is as though one were to confound the
+accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis
+of property itself. From such an error it is the task of history above
+all to free us. For it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as
+a perennial challenge to the coming time.
+
+The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double
+tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth. On the one hand he is the
+founder of the classic political economy. With Ricardo, the elder Mill
+and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the production of wealth
+without regard to its moral environment; and the state for them is
+merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in which business men achieve
+their labors. There is nothing in them of that fine despair which made
+Stuart Mill welcome socialism itself rather than allow the continuance
+of the new capitalist system. Herein the State is purged of moral
+purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the greatest happiness by
+insisting that the technique of production must dominate all other
+circumstances. Until the Reform Act of 1867, the orthodox economists
+remained unchallenged. The use of the franchise was only beginning to be
+understood. The "new model" of trade unionism had not yet been tested in
+the political field. But it was discovered impossible to act any longer
+upon the assumptions of the abstract economic man. The infallible sense
+of his own interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for
+the simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously
+required training if they were to be applied to a complex world.
+Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because it
+failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be found
+for the creative energies of humble men.
+
+It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to understand
+the inner significance of the protest against this economic liberalism.
+Adam Smith had declared the source of value to lie in labor; and, at
+the moment of its deepest agony, there were men willing to point the
+moral of his tale. That it represented an incautious analysis was, for
+them, unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path
+whereby economics could be reclaimed for moral science. For if labor was
+the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as
+though degradation was the sole payment for its services. They did not
+ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically profitable,
+but whether it was ethically right. No one can read the history of these
+years and fail to understand their uncompromising denial of its
+rightness. Their negation fell upon unheeding ears; but twenty years
+later, the tradition for which they stood came into Marx's hands and was
+fashioned by him into an interpretation of history. With all its faults
+of statement and of emphasis, the doctrine of the English socialists has
+been, in later hands, the most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics.
+It was a deliberate effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith's ideas, to
+create a commonwealth in the interests of the masses. Wealth, in its
+view, was less the mere production of goods than the accumulated
+happiness of humble men. The impulses it praised and sought through
+state-action to express were, indeed, different from those upon which
+Smith laid emphasis; and he would doubtless have stood aghast at the way
+in which his thought was turned to ends of which he did not dream. Yet
+he can hardly have desired a greater glory. He thus made possible not
+only knowledge of a State untrammelled in its economic life by moral
+considerations; but also the road to those categories wherein the old
+conception of co-operative effort might find a new expression. Those who
+trod in his footsteps may have repudiated the ideal for which he stood,
+but they made possible a larger hope in which he would have been proud
+and glad to share.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+This bibliography makes no pretence to completeness. It attempts only to
+enumerate the more obvious sources that an interested reader would care
+to examine.
+
+
+
+GENERAL
+
+
+LESLIE STEPHEN. _History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_.
+1876. Vol. II, Chapters IX and X.
+
+W.E.H. LECKY. _History of England in the Eighteenth Century._
+
+A.L. SMITH. _Political Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth and
+Eighteenth Centuries_ in the _Cambridge Modern History_. Vol. VI,
+Chapter XXIII.
+
+J. BONAR. _Philosophy and Political Economy_. Chapters V-IX.
+
+F.W. MAITLAND. _An Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality_ in
+_Collected Papers_. Vol. I.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+JOHN LOCKE. _Works_ (Eleventh Edition), 10 volumes. London, 1812.
+
+H.R. FOX-BOURNE. _Life of John Locke_. London, 1876.
+
+T.H. GREEN. _The Principles of Political Obligation_ in _Collected
+Works_. Vol. II. London, 1908.
+
+PETER. LORD KING. _The Life and Letters of John Locke_. London, 1858.
+
+SIR F. POLLOCK. _Locke's Theory of the State_ in _Proc. Brit. Acad._.
+Vol. I. London, 1904.
+
+S.P. LAMPRECHT. _The Moral and Political Philosophy of Locke_. New York,
+1918.
+
+A.A. SEATON. _The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts_.
+Cambridge, 1911.
+
+J.N. FIGGIS. _The Divine Right of Kings_. Cambridge, 1914.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+JEREMY COLLIER. _The History of Passive Obedience_. London, 1689.
+
+WILLIAM SHERLOCK. _The Case of Resistance_. London, 1684.
+
+CHARLES LESLIE. _The Case of the Regale_ (Collected Works). Vol. III,
+                   p. 291.
+                _The Rehearsal_.
+                _The New Association_.
+                _Cassandra_.
+                _The Finishing Stroke_.
+                _Obedience to Civil Government Clearly Stated_.
+                _The Best Answer_.
+                _The Best of All_.
+
+SAMUEL GRASCOM. _A Brief Answer_.
+
+E. SHELLINGFLEET. _A Vindication of their Majesties Authoritie_.
+
+B. SHOWER. _A Letter to a Convocation Man._
+
+W. WAKE. _The Authority of Christian Princes_. _The State of the Church_
+(1703).
+
+FRANCIS ATTERBURY. _Rights, Powers and Privileges of an English
+Convocation_ (1701).
+
+BENJAMIN HOADLY. _Origins of Civil Government_ (1710).
+                 _Preservative Against Nonjurors_ (1716).
+                 _Works_, 3 vols. London (1773).
+
+WILLIAM LAW. _A Defence of Church Principles_ (ed. Gore). Edinburgh,
+1904.
+
+W. WARBURTON. _Alliance between Church and State_ (1736).
+
+J.H. OVERTON. _The Nonjurors._ New York, 1903.
+
+T. LATHEBURY. _History of Convocation._ London, 1842.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+BERKELEY. _Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721).
+
+H. ST. JOHN (Viscount Bolingbroke). _Works._ 5 vols. London, 1754.
+
+LORD EGMONT. _Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts_ (1742).
+
+DAVID HUME. _Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals_ (1752).
+            _Essays_. (1742-1752) ed. Green & Grose. London, 1876.
+
+W. SICHEL. _Life of Bolingbroke_. 2 vols. 1900-4.
+
+J. CHURTON COLLINS. _Bolingbroke and Voltaire in England_.
+
+J. HILL BURTON. _Life of Hume_.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+MONTESQUIEU. _L'Esprit des Lois_ (1748).
+
+J.J. ROUSSEAU. _Du Contrat Social_ (1762). See ed. by Vaughan, 1918.
+
+JOHN BROWN. _Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_
+(1757).
+
+ADAM FERGUSON. _Essay on the History of Civil Society_ (1767).
+
+WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. _Commentaries_ (1765-9).
+
+JEREMY BENTHAM. _A Fragment on Government_ (1776). Ed. F.C. Montague,
+1891.
+
+J. DE LOLME. _The Constitution of England_ (1775).
+
+ROBERT WALLACE. _Various Prospects_ (1761).
+
+JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. _Essay on the First Principles of Government_ (1768).
+
+RICHARD PRICE. _Observations on Civil Liberty_ (1776). _Additional
+Observations_ (1777).
+
+WILLIAM OGILVIE. _The Right of Property in Land_ (1781). Ed. Macdonald,
+1891.
+
+JOSIAH TUCKER. _Treatise on Civil Government_ (1781).
+
+SAMUEL JOHNSON. _Taxation No Tyranny_ (1775).
+
+M. BEER. _History of British Socialism_ (1919).
+
+JAMES BOSWELL. _Life of Samuel Johnson_ (1791).
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+EDMUND BURKE. _Collected Works_. London, 1808.
+
+JOHN MORLEY. _Edmund Burke_ (1867). _Life of Burke_ (1887).
+
+J. MACCUNN. _The Political Philosophy of Burke_ (1908).
+
+JUNIUS. _Letters_ (1769-72). London, 1812.
+
+THOMAS PAINE. _The Rights of Man_ (1791-2).
+
+JAMES MACKINTOSH. _Vendiciae Gallicae_ (1791).
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+CHARLES DAVENANT. _Works_. London, 1771.
+
+SIR DUDLEY NORTH. _A Discourse upon Trade_ (1691).
+
+ADAM SMITH. _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ (1759).
+            _Wealth of Nations_ (1776).
+            _Lectures on Justice and Police_. (Ed. Cannan, 1896).
+
+W.R. SCOTT. _Life of Francis Hutcheson_ (1900).
+
+JOHN RAE. _Life of Adam Smith_ (1895).
+
+W. BAGEHOT. _Adam Smith as a Person_ in _Coll. Works_. Vol. VII.
+
+F.W. HIRST. _Adam Smith_ (1904).
+
+W. HASBACH. _Untersuchungen ueber Adam Smith_ (1891).
+
+J. BONAR. _A Catalogue of Adam Smith's Library_ (1894).
+
+T. CLIFFE LESLIE. _Adam Smith_ in _Essays in Moral and Political
+Philosophy_ (1879).
+
+E. TROELTSCH. _Die Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirchen_ (1912).
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Addison, 69
+Andrewes, 83
+Ashley, 33-4
+Atterbury, 102
+Austin, 62
+
+Bagehot, 9, 249
+Barbeyrac, 68
+Barrow, 84
+Bellarmine, 83, 121
+Bentham, 23, 62, 72, 151, 157, 175, 194
+Berkeley, 10, 129
+Blackstone, 163-4, 174f
+Bolingbroke, 69, 131f
+Bonald, 277
+Bonar, 300
+Bonwicke, 82
+Boswell, 209
+Bray, 307, 315
+Brown (J.), 168
+Brown (R.), 52
+Burke, 7, 8, 16, 30, 157, 159, 166, 221f, 286
+Burnet, 80, 87, 93
+Busher, 52
+
+Cartwright, 97
+Chatham, 132, 167, 188, 262
+Chillingworth, 52
+Chubb, 128
+Coleridge, 277
+Collier, 84n
+Cowper, 20
+Crabbe, 20
+
+Dalrymple, 8
+Darwin, 67
+Davenant, 283, 287
+Defoe, 8, 128, 132
+Dicey, 175, 179
+Disraeli, 132
+Divine Right, 7, 30
+Dodwell, 82
+Dupont de Nemours, 292
+
+Egmont, 142
+Eldon, 159
+
+Ferguson, 172-4
+Fielding, 160
+Filmer, 7, 38
+
+Galsworthy, 171-2
+George III, 13, 15, 158, 188, 213f
+Godwin, 10, 163, 222, 276
+Goldsmith, 19, 223
+Goodman, 57
+Grascom, 86
+Gray, 160
+Green (T.H.), 61, 279
+
+Haldane, 126
+Hales, 52
+Halifax, 8, 27
+Hall, 17, 307
+Hamilton (J.L. & B.), 19
+Harrington, 147
+Hegel, 249, 277, 212-3
+Hickes, 83
+Hoadly, 9, 22, 69, 107f
+Hobbes, 8, 16, 30, 40f, 72, 91, 278, 284
+Hodgskin, 17, 307
+Holmes (O.W.), 63n, 269
+Holt, 14,
+Hooker, 44
+Hotman, 57, 68
+Hume, 8, 11, 71, 92, 143f, 278, 284, 297
+Hutcheson, 11, 153, 155, 291, 297
+
+Independents, 40
+
+Jackson, 84
+James II, 24f, 35
+Johnson (Dr.), 18, 210f, 223, 230
+Junius, 21, 219
+
+Keble, 82
+Kerr, 82
+Knox, 57, 83, 97
+
+Lassalle, 313
+Laud, 285
+Law, 22, 108f
+Leslie, 80, 85, 88, 90, 97, 104, 132
+Locke, 7, 11, 21, 29-76, 79, 197, 207, 273, 287
+de Lolme, 10, 183f
+
+Mackintosh, 269
+Madison, 63
+Maine, 66, 249
+Maistre, 91, 252, 273
+Malthus, 305
+Mandeville, 129, 284
+Mariana, 57
+Martin, 69
+Marx, 312, 315
+Melville, 121
+Mill, 157
+Milton, 52
+Molyneux, 68
+Montesquieu, 12, 63, 160f, 173, 183
+Morley, 132, 223
+
+Newton, 37
+Newman, 81, 122, 125
+North, 287
+
+Ogilvie, 199f
+Owen, 17, 307
+Oxford Movement, 81
+
+Paine, 202, 269
+Paley, 157
+Pattison, 10
+Penn, 58
+Place, 306
+Pope, 69, 128, 132
+Price, 196f
+Priestley, 72, 190f
+Proast, 64
+Prynne, 8, 55
+Pufendorf, 68
+Pulteney, 217
+
+Quesnay, 288, 292
+
+Renan, 249
+Ricardo, 305
+Richardson, 160
+Richardson (S.), 52
+Rousseau, 8, 74, 162f, 188, 197, 276
+Royer-Collard, 226
+Ruskin, 293, 301
+
+Sanderson, 84
+Savigny, 249, 277
+Seeley, 312
+Selden, 9
+Senior, 304
+Separation of Powers, 63f
+Shaftesbury, 11, 128, 155
+Sherlock (T.), 108
+Sherlock (W.), 87
+Shower, 99
+Sidney, 7, 57
+Smith (Adam), 9, 16, 152, 195, 258, 281f
+Smith (A.L.), 140
+Snape, 108
+Social Contract, 57
+Spelman, 9
+Spence, 202
+Stammler, 60
+Steele, 284
+Stephen (F.), 65
+Stephen (L.), 108, 223
+Stillingfleet, 37, 87, 93
+Suarez, 57
+
+Taylor, 52, 57
+Temple, 283
+Thompson, 307, 215
+Tindal, 123
+Tocqueville, 254
+Toleration, 52, 64
+Tucker, 71, 206f, 288
+Turgot, 288, 292
+
+Voltaire, 12, 132, 160
+
+Wake, 80, 100f
+Wallace, 188
+Walpole, 13, 21, 128-30
+Warburton, 69, 118f, 192
+Wilberforce, 290
+Wilkes, 167, 188, 220
+William III, 25f
+Williams (Roger), 52
+Woolston, 128
+Wordsworth, 277
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Political Thought in England from
+Locke to Bentham, by Harold J. Laski
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