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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>
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