Political thought in England from Locke to Bentham

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THE GIFT OF

LAW SCHOOL

K>3a: HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

/■.

U- • l;C. i>o .

HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

No. 103

Editors :

HERBERT FISHER. M.A., F.B^
Prof. GILBERT MURRAY. Lnx.D.

LL.D., F.B.A.
Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
Prof. WILUAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.

POLITICAL THOUGHT
IN ENGLAND

FROM
LOCKE TO BENTHAM

HAROLD J. LASKI

:ew college, oxford, ot th

mSTOBY IN HARVARD UNtVERSTTY,
STUBIES IN THE P

THE hoderH state

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

Or

7

r'

QosmxsBtt xpao

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

HARVARD^
UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

OCT U ly/--

NOTE

' It is impossible for me to publish this
book without some expression of the debt it
owes to Leslie Stephen's History of the Eng-
lish Thought in the Eighteenth Century. It is
almost insolent to praise such work; but I
may be permitted to say that no one can
fully appreciate either its wisdom or its
knowledge who has not had to dig among
the original texts.

Were so small a volume worthy to bear a
dedication, I should associate it with the
name of my friend Walter Lippmann. He
and I have so often discussed the substance
of its problems that I am certain a good
deal of what I feel to be my own is, where
it has merit, really his. This volume is
thus in great part a tribute to him; though
there is little that can repay such friendship
as he gives.

rl. J. Li,

HaBVARD UNiyEBSITT

Sept. 15, 1919

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGB

I. Intkoduction 7

n. The Principm3S or the Revolution 24

in. Chukch and State 77

IV. The Era of Stagnation . . . 127

V. Signs of Change 159

VI. Burke 213

VIL The Foundations of Economic

Liberalism 281

Bibliography 317

Index 321

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The eighteenth century may be said to
begin with the Revolution of 1688; for,
with its completion, the dogma of Divine
Right disappeared for ever from English
politics. Its place was but partially filled
until Hume and Burke supplied the out-
lines of a new philosophy. For the ob-
server 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 pol-
itics 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 rhap-
sodies of Filmer and, by repulsion, the
wearisome reiterations of Algernon Sid-
ney. Once the foundations of Divine
Right had been destroyed by Locke, the
basis of passionate controversy was ab-

8 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

sent. 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 dog-
mas again called into question; and it is
about them only that political speculation
provokes deep feeling. The urbanity, in-
deed, is not entirely new. The Restora-
tion had heralded its coming, and the tone
of Halifax has more in common with
Bolingbroke and Himie than with Hobbes
and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth cen-
tury 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 respect-

INTRODUCTION d

able, they bear no comparison with mas-
ters like Selden and Sir Henry Spelman,
Yet urbanity must not deceive us. The
eighteenth century has an importance in
English politics which the comparative ab-
sence of systematic speculation can not
conceal. If its large constitutional out-
lines had been traced by a preceding age,
its administrative detail had still to be se- j
cured. 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 stimibling; but it
gave to the principle of consent a perma- *--
nent place in English politics. It is the
age which saw the crystallization of the k
party-system, and therein it may perhaps "^
lay claim to have recognized what Bage-
hot called the vital principle of represen-
tative 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.

10 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

De Lolme is the real parent of that inter-
pretative 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 Pro-
fessor Dicey. The very calmness of the
atmosphere only the more surely paved
the way for the surprising novelties of
Godwin and the revolutionists.

Nor must we neglect the relation be-
tween its ethics and its politics. The
eighteenth century school of British mor-
alists 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 great-
ness. 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 in-
. terested in problems of conduct rather
V than of thought. The seventeenth cen-
tury had, for the most part, been inter-
ested in theology and government ; and its
preoccupation, in both domains, with
supernatural sanctions, made its conclu-

INTRODUCTION 11

sions unfitted for a period dominated by
rationalism. Locke regarded his Human
Understanding as the preliminary to an
ethical enquiry ; and Hume seems to have
considered his Principles of Morals the
most vital of his works. It may be true,
as the mordant insight of Mark Pattison
suggested, that "those periods in which
morals have been represented as the
proper study of man, and his only busi-
ness, have been periods of spiritual abase-
ment and poverty." Certainly no one will
be inclined to claim for the eighteenth cen-
tury the spiritual idealism of the seven-
teenth, 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, Himie and
Adam Smith — to take only men of the
first eminence — were thinking not less
for politics than for ethics when they
sought to justify the ways of man to man.
For all of them saw that a theory of so-
ciety is impossible without the provision
of psychological foundations; and those

12 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

^ must, above all, result in a theory of con-
duct 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 po-
litical equation.
X r-" Yet it is undoubtedly an age of methods
^ \ rather than of principles ; and, as such its
1 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

INTUODUCTION 13

of political truths. The American colonies
took alike their methods and their argu-
ments 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 po-
litical system was compared with the gov-
ernments of France and Germany. Not,
indeed, that the full fruit of the Revolu-
tion was gathered. The principle of con-
sent came, in practice and till 1760, to
mean the government of the Whig Oli-
garchy; and the Extraordinary Black
Book remains to tell us what happened
when George III gave the Tory party a
new lease of power. There is throughout
the time an over-emphasis upon the value
of order, and a not imnatural tendency to
confoimd the private good of the govern-
ing class with the general welfare of the
state. It became the fixed policy of Wal-
pole to make prosperity the mask for po-
litical stagnation. He turned political de-
bate from principles to personalities, and
a sterile generation was the outcome of
his cunning.

1 ■

j> '

14 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

Not that this barrenness is without its
compensations. The theories of the Revo-
lution had exhausted their fruitfulness
within a generation. The constitutional
ideas of the seventeenth century had no
substance for an England where Angli-
j canism and agriculture were beginning to
I 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,
s^ 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 re-
quire ; 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 foimded upon the
ruins produced by Collier's indignation.

INTRODUCTION 16

the revival of which Law and Wesley are
the great symbols, show that the stagna-
tion 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 ncft denied its principles.
When he enforced the resignation of the
elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund
Burke and English radicalism were born;
for the Present Discontents and the So-
ciety for the Support of the Bill of Rights
are the dawn of a splendid recovery. And
they made possible the speculative fer-
ment which showed that England was at
last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu
and Rousseau. Just as the shock of the
Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor
despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife
produce the complacency of the eighteenth
century. But the peace of the Tudors was
the death-bed of the Stuarts; and it was
the stagnant optimism of the early
eighteenth century which made possible
the birth of democratic England.

The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is
deep-rooted in the conditions of the past.
Locke could not have written had not

1

V

r

16 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

Hobbes and Filmer defended in set terms
the ideal of despotic government. He an-
nomiced the advent of the modern system
of parliamentary government; and from
his time the debate has been rather of the
conditions imder which it is to work, than
of the fomidations upon which it is based.
Burke, for example, wrote what consti-
tutes the supreme analysis of the states-
man's art. Adam Smith discussed in what
fashion the prosperity of peoples could be
best advanced. From Locke, that is to
say, the subject of discussion is rather
politik than staatslehre. The great de-
bate inaugurated by the Reformation
ceased when Locke had outlined an in-
telligible basis for parliamentary govern-
ment. Hume, Bolingbroke, Burke, are
all of them concerned with the detail of
political arrangement in a fashion which
presupposes the acceptance of a basis pre-
viously known. Burke, indeed, toward
the latter part of his life, awoke to the
reahzation 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

INTRODUCTION 17

underground. Hall and Owen and
Hodgskin inherited the thoughts of Ogil-
vie and Spence and Paine ; and if they did
not give them substance, at least they gave
them form for a later time.

Nor is the reason for this preoccupation
far to seek. The advance of English poli-
tics in the preceding two centuries was
mainly an advance of structure ; yet rela-
tive at least to continental fact, it ap-
peared hberal enough to hide the
disharmonies of its inner content. The
King was still a mighty influence. The
power of the aristocracy was hardly
broken imtil the Reform Bill of 1867.
The Church continued to dominate the
political aspect of English religious life
until, after 1832, new elements alien from
her ideals were introduced into the House
of Commons. The conditions of change
lay implicit in the Industrial Revolution,
when a new class of men attained control
of the nation's economic power. Only
then was a realignment of political forces
essential. Only then, that is to say, had
the time arrived for a new theory of the
State.

The political ideas of the eigtheentlv

18 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

1

century are thus in some sort a comment
upon the system established by the Revo-
lution ; and that is, in its turn, the product
of the struggle between Parliament and
Crown in the preceding age. But we can-
not 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 be-
tween nobleman and commoner at Oxford
is as striking as it is hideous to this gener-
ation. For them also literature and the
theatre made their display; and if Dr.
Johnson could heap an immortal con-
tumely upon the name of patron, we all
know of the reverence he felt in the pres-
ence 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 ob-
tained ; but it was not until the passage of
Fox's Libel Act that the first became se-

INTRODUCTION 19

cure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have
recently illumined for us the inward mean-
ing 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 mon-
arch-ridden House of Commons. Such
outbursts are yet the exception to the pre-
vailing 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 posses-
sion of a privileged class. The Revolu-
tion, in fact, meant less an abstract and
general freedom, than a special release
from the arbitrary will of a stupid mon- 1
arch 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

20 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGI?T

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 coura-
geous handful could be found to protest
against Pitt's prostitution of her freedom.
Such an age could make but little pre-
tence 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 re-
flects with singular exactness the domi-
nating 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 contro-
versy 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

INTRODUCTION 21

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 magis-
trally 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 tran- ^
sition had been successfully bridged. The
stage was set for a new effort simply be-
cause the theories of the older philosophy
no longer represented the facts at issue.>
It was thus Locke only in this period
who confronted the general problems of
the modern State. Other thinkers assumed
his structure and dealt with the details he
left undetermined. The main problems,
the Church apart, arose when a foreigner
occupied the English throne and left the
methods of government to those who were \/
acquainted with them. That most happy
of all the happy accidents in English his-
tory maiie Walpole the fundamental
statesman of the time. He used his op-
portunity to the full. Inheriting the pos-

\^

1

22 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

sibilities 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 rep-
resentative 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 gener-
ations, 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 for-
tune of Oxford to supply in each succeed-
ing century the leaders. America pre-
sented again the problem of consent in the
special perspective of the imperial rela-
tion; and the decision which grew out of

INTRODUCTION 23

the blundering obscurantism of the King
enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply
to revivify the principles of 1688. Chat-
ham meanwhile had stumbled upon a
vaster empire; and the industrial system
which his effort quickened could not live
under an economic regime which still bore *"
traces of the narrow nationalism of the
Tudors. No man was so emphatically
representative of his epoch as Adam
Smith; and no thinker has ever stated in
such generous terms the answer of his time
to the most vital of its questions. The
answer, indeed, like all good answers, re-
vealed 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 pro-
duced its harvest. Bentham absorbed the
purpose of Rousseau even while he re-
jected his methods. For a time, indeed,
the heat and dust of war obscured the
issue that Bentham raised. But the cer-
tainties of the future lay on his side.

CHAPTER II

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

The English Revolution was in the
main a protest against the attempt of
James II to establish a despotism in al-
liance with France and Rome. It was
almost entirely a movement of the aris-
tocracy, and, for the most part, it was aris-
tocratic opposition that it encountered.
^Vhat it did was to make for ever impos-
sible 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
WilUam's adherents. An unconstitutional
Parliament thereupon declared the throne

24

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 25

vacant; and after much negotiation
William and Mary were invited to occupy
it. To William the invitation was irre-
sistible. It gjave him the assistance of the
first maritime power in Europe against
the imperialism of Louis XIV. It en-
sured the survival of Protestantism
against the encroachments of an enemy
who never slumbered. Nor did England
find the new regime unwelcome. Every
widespread conviction of her people had
been wantonly outraged by the blundering
stupidity of James. If a large fraction of
the English Church held aloof from the
new order on technical grounds, the com-
mercial classes gave it their warm sup-
port; and many who doubted in theory
submitted in practice. All at least were
conscious that a new era had dawned.

For William had come over with a defi-
nite 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 regu-
lated. The reign of William is nothing
so much as the period of that definition;

26 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 Settle-
ment (1701) are the foundation-stones of
the modern constitutional system.

What, broadly, was established was the
dependence of the crown upon Parlia-
ment. Finance and the army were
brought under Parliamentary control by
the simple expedient of making its annual
simimons essential. The right of petition
was re-affirmed; and the independence of
the judges and ministerial responsibility
were secured by the same act which for-
ever 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 ef-
fected. Not, indeed, that the solution
worked easily at the outset. William re-
mained 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 im-
mense possibilities of the party-system as
also to accept his own best safeguard in
the foundation of the Bank of England.

PRINCIPLES OF THE TIE VOLUTION 27

The Cabinet, towards the close of his
reign, had already become the funda-
mental administrative instrument. Origi-
nally a committee of the Privy Council, it
had no party basis imtil the ingenious
Sunderland atoned for a score of dishon-
esties by insisting that the root of its effi-
ciency 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
f everishness in the atmosphere of the reign
which shows how many kept an anxious
eye on St. Germain even while they at-
tended the morning levee at Whitehall.
What secured the permanence of the

28 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

settlement was less the policy of William
than the blmider 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 mo-
ments of his tragic exile by the falsely
chivalrous recognition of the Old Pre-
tender as the rightful English king. It
was a terrible mistake. It did for William
what no action of his own could ever have
achieved. It suggested that England
must receive its ruler at the hands of a
foreign sovereign. The national pride of
the people rallied to the cause for which
William stood. He was king — so, at
least in contrast to Louis' decision, it ap-
peared — by their deliberate choice and
the settlement of which he was the symbol
would be maintained. Parliament granted

PRINCIPLES OP THE REVOLUTION 29

to William all that his foreign policy could
have demanded. His own death was only
the prelude to the victories of Marl-
borough. 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 perma-
nence of Revolution principles.

II

The theorist of the Revolution is Locke ;
and it was his conscious effort to justify
the innovations of 1688. He sought, as
he said, "to establish the throne of our
great Restorer, our present King Wil-
liam, and make good his title in the con-
sent of the people." In the debate which
followed his argument remained unan-
swered, 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

/

30 ENGLISH POLITICAI. THOUGHT

to him the acutest of his insights; though
the principles of the American Revolu-
tion 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 pro-
found and regrettable error. Locke may
not possess the clarity and ruthless logic
of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing
into a phrase the experience of a lifetime
which makes Burke the first of English
political thinkers. He yet stated more
clearly than either the general problem of
the modern State. Hobbes, after all,
worked with an impossible psychology
and sought no more than the prescription
against disorder. Burke wrote rather a
text-book for the cautious administrator
than a guide for the liberal statesman.
But Locke saw that the main problem of
the State is the conquest of freedom and it
was for its definition in terms of individual
good that he above all strove.

Much, doubtless, of his neglect is due
to the medium in which he worked. He
wrote at a time when the social contract
seemed the only possible retort to the
theory of Divine Right. He so empha-

PRINCIPLES OP THE REVOLUTION 31

sized the principle of consent that when
contractualism came in its turn to be dis-
carded, it wa5 discovered that Locke suf-
fered 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 nat-
ural badness of men, while Locke as-
sumed their goodness and made his
contract essential to their opportunity for
moral expression. Nor did he, like Rous-

. seau, 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 psy-
chological foundations of politics. What
he did was rather to fasten upon the great
institutional necessity of his time — the
provi3ion of channels of assent — and em-
phasize its importance to the exclusion of
all other factors. The problem is in fact

32 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

more complex; and the solution he indi-
cated became so natm-al a part of the po-
litical fabric that the value of his emphasis
upon its import was largely forgotten
when men again took up the study of
foimdations.

John Locke was bom at Wrington in
Somerset on the 29th of August, 1632.
His father was clerk to the county jus-
tices and acted as a captain in a cavalry
regiment during the Civil War. Though
he suffered heavy losses, he was able to
give his son as good an education as the
time afforded. Westminster under Dr.
Busby may not have been the gentlest of
academies, but at least it provided Locke
with an admirable training in the classics.
He himself, indeed, in the Thoughts on
Education doubted the value of such ex-
ercises ; nor does he seem to have conceived
any affection for Oxford whither he pro-
ceeded 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 in-
tellectual laxity rescued it from the
"wrangling and ostentation" of the peri-

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 33

patetic 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 re-
spect. In 1659 he accepted a Senior Stu-
dentship of his college, which he retained
until he was deemed politically undesir-
able 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 friend-
ship of Boyle; and while he was adminis-
tering physic to the patients of Dr.
Thomas, he was making the observations
recorded in Boyle's History of the Air
which Locke himself edited after the
death of his friend.

Meanwhile accident had turned his life
into far different paths. An appointment
as secretary to a special ambassador
opened up to him a diplomatic career ; but
his sturdy commonsense showed him his
unfitness for such labors. After his visit
to Prussia he returned to Oxford, and
there, in 1667, in the course of his medical
work, he met Anthony Ashley, the later

34 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 phy-
sician 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 coun-
sellor. 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 tolera-
tion. In 1672, when Ashley became Lord
Chancellor, he became Secretary of Pres-
entations and, imtil 1675, Secretary to the
Coimcil of Trade and Foreign Planta-
tions. Meanwhile he carried on his medi-
cal work and must have obtained some
reputation in it ; for he is honorably men-
tioned by Sydenham, in his Method of
Curing Fevers (1676), and had been
elected to the Royal Society in 1668. But
his real genius lay in other directions.

Locke himself has told us how a few
friends began to meet at his chamber for
the discussions of questions which soon
passed into metaphysical enquiry; and a
page from a commonplace book of 1671

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 35

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 Shaftes-
bury in the passionate debates upon the
Exclusion Bill. Locke followed his
patron into exile, remaining abroad from
1683 imtil 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 be-
queathed him a pension. As it was, he
had no easy time. His extradition was
demanded by James II after the Mon-
mouth rebellion; and though he was later
pardoned he refused to return to England
imtil William of Orange had procured his
freedom. A year after his return he made
his appearance as a writer. The Essay ^
Concerning Human Understanding and
the Two Treatises of Government were
both published in 1690. Five years earlier „
the Letter Concerning Toleration was
published in its Latin dress ; and four
years afterwards an English translation
appeared. This last, however, perhaps on

36 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

grounds of expediency, Locke never ac-
knowledged 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 ad-
mitted work appeared. But the rough at-
tempts at the essay date from 1671, and
hints towards the Letter on Toleration
can be found in fragments of various dates
between the twenty-eighth and thirty-
fifth years of his life. Of the Two
Treatises the first seems to have been
written between 1680 and 1685, the
second in the last vear of his Dutch exile/
The remaining fourteen years of
Locke's life were passed in semi-retire-
ment in East Anglia. Though he held
public office, first as Commissioner of Ap-
peals, and later of Trade, for twelve years,
he could not stand the pressure of London
writers, and his public work was only in-
termittent. His counsel, nevertheless, was
highly valued; and he seems to have won
no small confidence from William in dip-
lomatic matters. Somers and Charles
Montagu held him in high respect, and he

1 On the evidence for these dates see the convincing
argrument of Mr. Fox-Bourne in his Life of Locke,
Vol. II, pp. 165-7.

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 87

had the warm friendship of Sir Isaac
Newton. He published some short dis-
cussions on economic matters, and in 1695
gave valuable assistance in the destruction
of the censorship of the press. Two years
earlier he had published his Thoughts on
Education, in which the observant reader
may find the germ of most of Smile's.
ideas. He did not fail to revise the Essay
from time to time ; and his Reasonableness
of Christianity, which, through Toland,
provoked a reply from StiUingfleet 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 al-
ready been done, and he spent his energies
in rewarding the affection of his friends.
Locke died on October 28, 1704, amid
circvmistances of singular majesty. He
had lived a full life, and few have so com-
pletely 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/

^ Fox-Boume, op. cU. Letter from Lady Masham to
Jean le Clerc.

38 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

III

Locke's Two Treatises of Government
are different both in object and in value.
The first is a detailed and tiresome re-
sponse to the historic imagination of Sir
Robert Fihner. In his Patnarcha, 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 Fihner of
Hobbes, "about the Rights of eccerdsing
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 imiversal 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

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 39

Locke should have wasted the resources
of his intelligence upon so feeble an op-
ponent. 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 de-
partment 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 an-
swering Hobbes implicitly in the second
Treatise. And though Filmer might
never have been known had not Locke
thus honored him by retort, he doubtless
symbolized what many a nobleman's chap-
lain preached to his master's dependents
at family prayers.

The Second Treatise goes to the root
of the matter. Why does political power,
"a Right of making Laws and Penalties
of Death and consequently all less Pen-
alties," exist? It can only be for the public
benefit, and our enquiry is thus a study of
the groimds of political obedience. Locke
thus traverses the groimd Hobbes had
covered in his Lexnathan though he rejects

I
I

\

40 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 pre-
vail 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 re-
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 ante-
cedent. 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 im-
pulses. By liberty Locke means the
right of the individual to follow his own

PRINCIPLES OP THE REVOLUTION 41

bent granted only his observance of the
law of nature. Law, in such an aspect, is
clearly a means to the realization of free-
dom 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 ac-
knowledgment the conditions upon which
individual caprice may have its play.
Property Locke derives from a primitive
commimism which becomes transmuted
into individual ownership whenever a man
has mingled his labor with some object.
This labor theory of ownership lived, it
may be remarked, to become, in the hands
of Hodgskin and Thompson, the parent
of modern socialism.

The state of nature is thus, in contrast
to the argument of Hobbes, pre-eminently
social in character. There may be war or
violence; but that is only when men have
abandoned the rule of reason which is in-
tegral 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 be-

42 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

cause the intelligences of men are dif-
ferent there is an inconvenient variety in
the conceptions of justice. The result is
uncertainty and chaos; and means of es-
cape must be foimd from a condition
which the weakness, of men must ulti-
mately 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 rep-
resent rather the triumph of reason than
of hard necessity. It is a contract of each
with all, a surrender by the individual of
his personal right to fulfil the commands
of the law of nature in return for the
guarantee that his rights as nature ordains
them — life and liberty and property —
will be preserved. The contract is thus
not general as with Hobbes but limited
and specific in character. Nor is it, as
Hobbes made it, the resignation of power
into the hands of some single man or
group. On the contrary, it is a contract
with the commimity as a whole which thus
becomes that common political superior —
the State — which is to enforce the law of
nature and punish infractions of it. Nor

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 43

is Locke's state a sovereign State : the very
word "sovereignty" does not occur, sig-
nificantly enough, throughout the treatise.
The State has power only for the protec-
tion of natural law. Its province ends
when it passes beyond those boundaries.

Such a contract, in Locke's view, in-
volves the pre-eminent necessity of ma-
jority-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 institu-
tion of political society. And it is further
to be assumed that the individual has sur-
rendered to the commimity his individual
right of carrying out the judgment in-
volved in natural law. Whether Locke
conceived the contract so formulated to be
historical, it is no easy matter to deter-
mine. That no evidence of its early ex-
istence 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 some-
how demonstrable by facts. More im-
portant than origins, he seems to deem its
implications. He has placed consent in
the foreground of the argument; and he

44 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 bom 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
boimd to its perpetuation simply because
unless the majority had power to enforce
obedience government, in any satisfactory
sense, would be impossible. With chil-
dren the case is different. They are bom
subjects of no government or country;
and their consent to its laws must either
be derived from express acknowledg-
ment, 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 com-
mon 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.

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 45

We have thus the State, though the
method of its organization is not yet out-
lined. For Locke there is a difference,
though he did not explicitly describe its
nature, between State and Government.
Indeed he sometimes approximates, with-
out ever formally adopting, the attitude of
Pufendorf, his great German contempo-
rary, 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 com-
mimity whose single will, as manifested by
, majority-verdict, could not be challenged
by any lesser organ than itself. Govern-
ment there must be if political society is
to endure ; but its form and substance are
dependent upon popular institution.

Locke follows in the great Aristotelian
tradition of dividing the types of govern-
ment into three. Where the power of
making laws is iii a single hand we have
a monarchy ; where it is exercised by a few
or all we have alternatively oligarchy and
dembcracy. The disposition of the legis-
lative power is the fundamental test of

46 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

type; for executive and judiciary are
clearly dependent on it. Nor, as Hobbes
argued, is the form of government per-
manent in character; the supreme com-
munity 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 ob-
serve. Nor is oligarchy much better off
since it emphasizes the interest of a group
against the superior interest of the com-
munity as a whole. Democracy alone
proffers adequate safeguards of an en-
during 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 king-
ship. His letters show that he disliked the
Cromwellian system and the republi-
canism 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 acknowl-

PRINCIPLES OP THE REVOLUTION 4ft

edged to be dependent upon popular con-
sent. The main thing was to be rid of the
Divine Right of kings.

We have thus an organ for the interpre-
tation of natural law free from the shift-
ing variety of individual judgment. We
have a means for securing impartial jus-
tice 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 fimction 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 in-
dividual members, and as a collective
body ; and the power which deals with this
aspect of its relationships, Locke termed
"federative." This last distinction, in-
deed, has no special value ; and its author's
own defence of it is far from clear. More
important, especially, for future history,

48 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

was his emphasis of the distinction be-
tween 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 cease-
less in their vigilance. It is better, there-
fore, 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 com-
munity, contrary to the end of society and
government." The legislator must there-
fore be bound by his own laws; and he
must be chosen in such fashion that the
representative assembly may fairly rep-
resent its constituencies. It was the patent
anomalies of the existent scheme of dis-
tribution which made Locke here proffer
his famous suggestion that the rotten
boroughs should be abolished by execu-
tive act. One hundred and forty years
were still to pass before this wise sugges-
tion was translated into statute.

Though Locke thus insisted upon the

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 49

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 ordi-
nances when the legislature is not in ses-
sion, 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 re-
marks. Nor is his surrender here of con-
sent sufficient to be inconsistent with his
general outlook. For at the back of each
governmental act, there is, in his own
mind, an active citizen body occupied in
judging it with single-minded reference
to the law of nature and their own natural
rights. There is thus a standard of right
and wrong superior to all powers within
the State. "A government," as he says, "is
not free to do as it pleases . . . the law
of nature stands as an eternal rule to all
men, legislators as well as others." The
social contract is secreted in the interstices
of public statutes.

Its corollary is the right of revolvit\o\Y*

60 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

It is interesting that he should have
adopted this position; for in 1676 he had
uttered the thought that not even the de-
mands of conscience^ 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 gov-
ernment. 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 au-
thority is to oppose force to it." Let the
sovereign but step outside the powers de-
rived from the social contract and resist-
ance becomes a natural right. But how
define such invasion of powers? The in-
stances 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 instru-
ments, betrayal to a foreign prince, pre-
vention of the due assemblage of Parlia-
ment — all these are a perversion of the
trust imposed and operate to effect the

1 King, IAf9 of Locke, pp. 62, 63.

PRINCIPLES OP THE REVOLUTION 61

dissolution of the contract. The state of
nature again supervenes, and a new con-
tract may be made with one more fitted to
observe it. Here, also, Locke takes oc-
casion to deny the central position of
Hobbes' thesis. Power, the latter had ar-
gued, must be absolute and there cannot,
therefore, be usurpation. But Locke re-
torts that an absolute government is no
government at all since it proceeds by
caprice instead of reason; and it is com-
parable only to a state of war since it im-
plies 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 gov-
ernment is a moral trust, and the idea of
limitation is therein implied. But a limi-
tation without the means of enforcement
would be worthless, and revolution re-
mains as the reserve power in society.
The only hindrance to its exertion that
Locke suggests is that of number. Revo-
lution 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.

52 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

The problem of Church and State de-
manded a separate discussion; and it is
difficult not to feel that the great Letter
on Toleration is the noblest of all his ut-
terances. 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 cen-
tury Robert Brown and William the
Silent had denounced the persecution of
sincere belief. Early Baptists like Busher
and Richardson had finelv 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 incom-
patibility between a religion of love and a
spirit of hate. Nor had example been
wanting. The religious freedom of Hol-
land was narrow, as Spinoza had foimd,
but it was still freedom. Rhode Island,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Mas-
sachusetts had all embarked upon admir-
able experiment; and Penn himself had
aptly said that a man may go to chapel
instead of church, even while he remains

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 53

a good constable. And in 1687, in the
preface to his translation of Lactantius,
Burnet had not merely attacked the moral
viciousness of persecution, but had drawn
a distinction between the spheres of
Church and State which is a remarkable
anticipation of Locke's own theory.

Locke himself covers the whole ground ;
and since his opinions on the problem were
at least twenty years old, it is clear that
he was consistent in a worthy outlook. He
proceeds by a denial that any element of
theocratic government can claim political
validity. The magistrate is concerned
only with the preservation of social peace
and does not deal with the problem of
men's souls. Where, indeed, opinions de-
structive of the State are entertained or a
party subversive of peace makes its ap-
pearance, 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

64 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

power. Mahomedan morals are incom-
patible with European civil systems; and
the central factor in atheism is the absence
of the only ultimately satisfactory sanc-
tion 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 groimds, 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 ma-
jority 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 be-
lieve 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 volimtary society,
which can exert no power save over its
members. It may use its own ceremonies.

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 55

but it cannot impose them on the imwill-
ing; and since persecution is alien from
the spirit of Christ, exclusion from mem-
bership 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 contro-
versy did not make him modify these prin-
ciples; and they lived, in Macaulay's
hands, to be a vital weapon in the political
method of the nineteenth century.

IV

Any survey of earlier political theory
would show how little of novelty there is
in the specific elements of Locke's gen-
eral doctrine. He is at all points the off-
spring of a great and imbroken tradition ;
and that not the least when he seems un-
conscious 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 else-
where had recommended the works of

66 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

Grotius and Puf endorf as an essential ele-
ment 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 fresh-
ness 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 irri-
tating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet
even with these novelties, no estimate of
his work would be complete which failed
to take account of the foimdations upon
which he builded.

Herein, perhaps, the danger is lest we
exaggerate Locke's dependence upon the
earlier current of thought. The social
contract is at least as old as when Glaucon
debated with Socrates in the market-place
at Athens. The theory of a state of
nature, with the rights therein implied, is
the contribution, through Stoicism, of the
Roman lawyers, and the great medieval

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 67

contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism.
To the latter, also, may be traced the sep-
aration of powers; and it was then but
little more than a hundred years since
Bodin had been taken to make the doc-
trine 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 Presby-
terians, Suarez and Mariana among
Catholics, the author of the Vindicice 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 en-
tails resistance. Algernon Sydney was at
least his acquaintance; and he must have
been acquainted with the tradition, even
if tragedy spared him the details, of the
Discourses on Government. Even his
theory of toleration had in every detail
been anticipated by one or other of a hun-
dred controversialists; and his argument
can hardly claim either the lofty eloquence

58 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent simplicity
of William Pemi.

What differentiates Locke from all his
predecessors is the manner of his writing
on the one hand, and the fact of the Revo-
lution on the other. Every previous
thinker save Sydney — the latter's work
was not published until 1689 — was writ-
ing with the Church hardly less in mind
than the purely political problems of the
State; even the secular Hobbes had de-
voted 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 re-
ligious tyrant; and Cartwright was as
careful to exclude political oppression
from the groimds of revolution as Locke
was to insist upon it as the fundamental
V" ' excuse. Locke is, in fact, the first of Eng-
lish thinkers the basis of whose argument
is mainly secular. Not, indeed, that he can
wholly escape the trammels of ecclesias-
ticism; 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.

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 59

He is atten[ipting, that is to say, a separa-
tion between Church and State not merely
in that Seoto-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
pohtical, and all other questions are sub-
sidiary 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 signifi-
cance. The way, as a consequence, lies
open to new dogmas.

The historical research of the nineteenth
century has long since made an end of the
social contract as an explanation of state-
origins ; and with it, of necessity, has gone
the conception of natural rights as an-
terior 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

r

60 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

become the creatures of a powjer 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 realiza-
tion of freedom; and the purpose of the
State, in any sense save the mere satis-
faction 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 safe-
guard against their usurpation. A
merely legal theory of the State can never,
therefore, exhaust the problems of polit-
ical philosophy.

No thinker has seen this fact more
clearly than Locke; and if his effort to
make rights something more than interests
under juridical protection can not be ac-
cepted in the form he made it, the under-
lying 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 "nat-

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 61

ural law with changing content" ^ — a
content which changes with our increasing
power to satisfy demand — is essential if
the state is to live the life of law. For
here was the head and centre of Locke's
enquiry. **What he was really concerned
about," said T. H. Green, "was to dis-
pute *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.

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

1 Cf. my Authority in the Modern State, p. 64., and
the references there cited.

62 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

amounts to in substance — it is a signifi-
cant anticipation of Rousseau — is a
denial that sovereignty can exist anywhere
save in the community as a whole. A com-
mon poKtical 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 Rous-
seau tried to disguise imder the name of
the general will ; but obviously the concep-
tion lacks precision enough to give the no-
tion 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 imavoidable, 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 Par-
liament which Bentham and Austin crys-
tallized 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.*

1 Cf. my Problem of Sovereignty, Chap. I.

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 63

The internal limitation Locke sug-
gested is of more doubtful value. Govern-
ment, he says, in substance, is a trustee and
trustees abuse their power; let us there-
fore divide it as to parts and persons that
the temptation to usurp may be dimin-
ished. There is a long history to this doc-
trine 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 distin-
, guish. 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 com-
pany 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 declara-
tion of law and his making of it.^ Every
government department is compelled to
legislate, and, often enough, to undertake

1 Cf. Mr. Jujstice Holmes' remarks in Jensen v.
Southern Pacific, 244 U. S. 221.

64 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

judicial functions. The American history
of the separation of powers has moi^
largely been an attempt to bridge them;
and all that has been gained is to drive the
best talent, save on rare occasion, f fom its
public life. In France the separation of
powers meant, imtil recent times, the ex-
cessive 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 modem
State at no point justifies the rigid cate-
gories into which Locke sought its
division.^

Nor must we belittle the criticism, in its
clearest form the work of Fitz James
Stephen,^ that has been levelled at Locke's
theory of toleration. For the larger part
of the modern world, his argument is ac-
ceptable enough; and its ingenious com-
promises have made it especially represen-
tative of the English temper. Yet much
of it hardly meets the argument that some
of his opponents, as Proast for example,

1 Cf. my Authority in the Modern State, pp. 70 f.

2 Cf. also Coleridge's apt remark. Table Talk, Jan.
8, 1834.

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 66

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 be-
tween Church and State falls to the
ground. Nor can it be doubted that
he imderestimated the power of coer-
cion 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 Ro-
man 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 approxi-
mate to blasphemy. Nor could any seri-
ous Christian accept the view that "under
the gospel ' . . . there is no such thing as
a Christian commonwealth' " ; to Catholics
and Presbyterians this must have ap-
peared the merest travesty of their faith.
Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the

66 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

/ true progenitor of Benthamism, and his
work can hardly be miderstood save in this
context. Just as in his ethical enquiries
it was always the happiness of the indi-
vidual 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 ex-
perience that he made his appeal ; and this
perhaps explains the clear sense of a con-
tempt for past tradition which pervades
all his work. "That which is for the pub-
lic welfare," he said, "is God's will"; and
therein we have the root of that utilitar-
ianism 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 utili-
j tarianism demanded led to an over-empha-
sis of human rationalism. No one can read
the Second Treatise without perceiving
that Locke looked upon the State as a ma-
chine which can be built and taken to
pieces in very simple fashion. Herein, im-
doubtedly, he over-simplified the problem ;
and that made him miss some of the cardi-
nal points a true psychology of the State
must seize. His very contractualism, in-
deed, is part of this affection for the ra-

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 67

tionaL It resulted in his failure to per-
ceive how complex is the mass of motives
imbedded in the political act. The signifi-
cance of herd instinct and the vast primi-
tive 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 sub-
stance of Aristotle's vision that man is
embedded in political society.

V

Once Locke's work had become known,
its reputation was secure. Not, indeed,
that it was entirely welcome to his genera-
tion. 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 re-
publicanism and the roots of atheistic doc-
trine in his work ; and even the theories of
Filmer could find defenders against him
in the Indian summer of prerogative im-
der Queen Anne. John Hutton informed
a friend that he was not less dangerous

68 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 Moly-
neux could embody the ideas of the "in-
comparable treatise" in his demand for
Irish freedom ; a book which, even in those
days, occasioned some controversy. Nor
is it uninteresting to discover that the
translation of Hotman's Franco-Gallia
should have been embellished with a pref-
ace from one who, as Molyneux wrote to
Locke,^ never met the Irish writer with-
out 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 Pufen-
dorf which he published in 1706, cites no

1 Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX. 436.

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 69

writer so often as Locke. The speeches
for the prosecution in the trial of Sache-
verell were ahnost wholesale adaptations
of his teaching ; and even the accused coun-
sel admitted the legality of James' deposi-
tion in his speech for the defence.

More valuable testimony is not wanting.
In the Spectator^ on six separate occa-
sions, Addison speaks of him as one whose
possession is a national glory. Defoe in
his Original Power of the People of Eng-
land made Locke the common possession
of the average man, and offered his ac-
knowledgments 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 simimarized his teach-
ing in the form that Bolingbroke chose
to give it. Hoadly, in his Original and In-
stitution of Civil Government, not only
dismisses Filmer in a first part each page
of which is modelled upon Locke, but
adds a second section in which a defence of
Hooker serves rather clumsily to conceal
the care with which the Second Treatise
had also been pillaged. Even Warburton
ceased for a moment bis habit of belittling

70 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

all rivals in the field he considered his own
to call him, in that Divine Legation which
he considered his masterpiece, "the honor
of this age and the instructor of the
future" ; but since Warburton's attack on
the High Church theory is at every point
Locke's argument, he may have consid-
ered this self -eulogy instead of tribute.
Sir Thomas HoUis, on the eve of English
Radicalism, published a noble edition of
his book. And there is perhaps a certain
humor in the remembrance that it was to
Locke's economic tracts that Bolingbroke
went for the arguments with which, in the
Craftsman^ he attacked the excise scheme
of Walpole. That is irrefutable evidence
of the position he had attained.

Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and
for cogent reasons. There still remained
the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu
when he made Locke's separation of
powers the keystone of his own more
splendid arch. The most splendid of all
sciolists was still to use his book for the
outline of a social contract more daring
even than his own. The authors of the
Declaration of Independence had still, in
words taken from Locke, to reassert the

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 71

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 simi 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 signifi-
cance. The failure of England in the
American war was already evident; and it
was not without justice that he looked
to Locke as the author of their principles.
"The Americans," he wrote, "have made
the maxims of Locke the ground of the
present war"; and in his Treatise Con-
cerning Civil Government and his
Four Letters he declares himself unable to
understand on what Locke's reputation
was based. Meanwhile the English disci-
ples of Rousseau in the persons of Price

72 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

and Priestley suggested to him that
Locke, "the idol of the levellers of Eng-
land," was the parent also of French de-
r structiveness. 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
L^ which Hume had outlined; and once
Bentham's Fragment had begun to make
its way, a new epoch opened in the history
of political ideas.

Locke might, indeed, claim that he had
a part in this renaissance; but, once the
influence of Burke had passed, it was to
other gods men turned. For Bentham
made an end of natural rights; and his
contempt for the past was even more un-
sparing than Locke's own. It is more
instructive to compare his work with
Hobbes and Bousseau than with later
thinkers; for after Hume English specu-
lation works in a medium Locke would
not have understood. Clearly enough, he
has nothing of the relentless logic which
made Hobbes' mind the clearest instru-
ment in the history of English philosophy.
Nor ha§; he Hobbes' ^eijs^ of style or pun-

PRINCIPLES OP THE REVOLUTION 73

gent grasp of the grimness of facts about
him. Yet he need not fear the comparison
with the eariier 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 approxi-
mation to the Hobbesian view. And any-
one who surveys the history of Church and
State in America will be tempted to assert
that in the last hundred years the sepa-
rateness 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 con-
science the subjects of a power he forbids

74 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

them to judge. Locke saw that vigilance
is the sister of liberty, where Hobbes dis-
missed 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 splen-
didly than his rival; but it will at least be
admitted by most that he had a more
splendid cause to defend.

With Rousseau there is no con-
trast, for the simple reason that his teach-
ing is only a broadening of the channel
dug by Locke. No element integral to
the Two Treatises is absent from the So^
cial Contract. Rousseau, indeed, in many
aspects saw deeper than his predecessor.
The form into which he threw his ques-
tions 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 contribu-
tion upon which Rousseau's fame has
mainly rested is at any point a real ad-
vance upon Locke. The general will, in
practical instead of semi-mystic terms.

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 75

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 ma-
jority 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 in-
dividuality than Rousseau's. The latter
made much show of an impartible and in-
alienable 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
modem problems our real enquiry is still
the question of Locke — what limits shall
we place upon the power of government?
Rousseau has only emphasized the
urgency of the debate.

Wherein, perhaps, the most profound
distinction between Locke's teaching and
our own timg may be discovered is in our

76 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

sense of the impossibility that a final an-
swer can be found to political questions.
Each age has new materials at its com-
mand; and, today, a static philosophy
would condemn itself before completion.
We do not build Utopias ; and the attempt
to discover the eternal principles of polit-
ical 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 re-
semblance to our own. The emphasis, now
as then, is upon the problem of freedom.
The problem, now as then, was its trans-
lation into institutional terms. It is the
glory of Locke that he brought a generous
patience and a searching wisdom to the so-
lution he proffered to his generation.

CHAPTER III

CHUBCH AND STATE IN THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

^

I

The Revolution of 1688 drew its main
source of strength from the traditional
dislike of Rome, and the eager desire to
place the Church of England beyond the
reach of James' aggression. Yet it was
not imtil a generation had passed that the
lines of ecclesiastical settlement were, in
any full sense clear. The difficulties in-
volved 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 gov-
ernment — all these had still to be defined.
Nor was this all. The problem of defi-
nition was made more coniplex by schism
and disloyalty. An important fraction of

77

78 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

the Church could not accept at all the fact
of William's kingship; and if the larger
part submitted, it cannot be said to have
been enthusiastic.

Nor did the Church make easy the situ-
ation of the Nonconformists. Toleration
of some kind was rapidly becoming in-
evitable; 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 be-
leaguered when Nonjurors, Deists, Non-
conformists, all alike assaulted her foun-
dations. To loosen her hold upon political
privilege seemed to be akin to self-destruc-
tion. 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 ex-
clusion from its privilege for all who could
not accept the special brand of religious
doctrine? Locke, at least, denied the as-
sumption, and argued that since Churches
are volimtary societies, they cannot and
ought not to have reciprocal relation with
the State. But Locke's theory was meat

CHURCH AND STATE 79

too strong for the digestion of his time;
and no statesman would then have argued
that a government could forego the ad-
vantage of religious support. And
William, after all, had come to free the
church from her oppressor. Freedom im-
plied protection, and protection in that
age involved establishment. It was thus ~7
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. Su-_^'
periority is, by its nature exclusive, the
more especially when it is united to a cer-
tainty 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 se-
cured translation into more generous
statutes.

The problem of the Church's govern-
ment was hardly less complex. The very
acerbity with which it was discussed pro-
claims 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 un-
willingness to admit the full meaning of

80 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 sug-
gested 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 situ-
ation of the English Church that the
charge of subjection to the State should
rouse a deep and quick resentment. She
cannot be a church unless she is a societas
perfecta; she cannot have within herself
the elements of perfect fellowship if what
seem the plain commands of Christ are to
be at the mercy of the king in Parlia-
ment. That is the difficulty which lies at

CHURCH AND STATE 81

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 uncon-
scious sponsors of a debate which grows in
volume; and to discuss the thoughts of
Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a
vital aspect, the study of contemporary
ideas.

We are not here concerned with the
wisdom of those of William's advisers who
exacted an oath of allegiance from the
clergy. It raised in acute form the val-
idity 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,
imtil the threshold of the nineteenth cen-
tury. 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

82 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 depriva-
tion, were condemned to poverty; few of
them recanted. The lives of men like San-
croft and Ken and the younger Ambrose
Bonwicke are part of the great Anglican
tradition of earnest simplicity which Jater
John Keble was to illustrate for the nine-
teenth century. The Nonjurors, as they
were called, were not free from bitterness ;
and the historv 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 ecclesi-
astical history.

Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring

CHURCH AND STATE 83

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 de-
fenders 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 Noncon-
formist 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 dissent-

\

84 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

ing churches there was little hope that it
would continue to exist once the monarchy
was overthrown. And it is this, unques-
tionably, which explains why stout ec-
clesiastics 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 sov-
ereignty of the Church; and that means
the triumph of men who looked with con-
temptuous hatred upon Nonconformists
of every sect. The Church of England
taught non-resistance as the condition of
its own survival.

How deep-rooted this doctrine had be-
come in the course of the seventeenth cen-
tury 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 in-
iquities. An able tract of 1689^ had col-
lected much material to show how in-

1 The History of Passive Obedience, Its author was
Jeremy Collier.

CHURCH AND STATE 85

tegral the doctrine was to the beliefs of the
Church. Had William's government, in-
deed, refrained from the imposition of
the oath, it is possible that there might
have been no schism at all; for the early
Nonjurors at least — perhaps Hickes and
Turner are exceptions — would probably
have welcomed anything which enabled
the avoidance of schism. Once, however,
the oath was imposed three vital questions
were raised. Deprivation obviously in-
volved the problem of the power of the
State over the Church. If the act of a con-
vention 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 dis-
obey, and the fabric of society is at a
stroke dissolved. The attitude is charac-
teristic of that q^ble controversialist; anc}

86 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT.

it shows how hardly the earlier notions of
Divine Right were to die.

These theories merit a further exami-
nation. 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 be-
comes a matter of communion. What
people are enjoined in the solemn worship
to pray for, is made a matter of com-
munion ; 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 Chiu'ch and it is
the faithful remnant only who constitute
the true fellowship. The schism, in this

CHURCH AND STATE 87

view, was the fault of those who remained
subject to William's dominion. The Non-
jurors had not changed; and they were
preserving the Church in its integrity
from men who strove to betray it to the
civil power.

This matter of integrity is important.
The glamour of Macaulay has somewhat
softened the situation of those who took
the oaths; and in his pages the Nonjurors
appear as stupid men unworthily defend-
ing a dead cause. It is worth while to note
that this is the merest travesty. Tillot-
son, who succeeded Bancroft 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 execu-
tion of Monmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick,
White Kennett, had all written in its
favor; and to William Sherlock belongs
the privilege of having defended and at-
tacked it in two pamphlets each of which
challenges the pithy brilliance of the other.
Clearly, so far as consistency is in ques-
tion, the Nonjurors might with justice
contend that they had right on their side.
And even if it is said that the policy of

88 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

James introduced a new situation the an-
swer surely is that Divine Right and non-
resistance can, by their very nature, make
no allowance for novelty.

The root, then, of this ecclesiastical con-
tention 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 spirit-
ual and derived from Christ. The
Church is independent of all civil institu-
tion, and must have therefore within her-
self 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 re-
garded as no more than the creature of
Parliamentary enactment; and thus to
leave it as the creature of human votes, is
to destroy its divinity.

It is easy enough to see that men who
felt in this fashion could hardly have de-
cided otherwise than as they did. The

CHURCH AND STATE 89

matter of conscience, indeed, was funda-
mental 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 al-
legiance to him, and they saw in their con-
science 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 ex-
pressions 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 politi-
cally-corrupt Church which only internal
revolution could awaken from its slum-
bers.

90 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 de-
fence 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 nat-
ural authority bend the conscience of an-
other? 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 ^Vhig at-
tack on monarchy. "The reasons against
Kings," he wrote, "are as strong against
all powers, for men of any titles are sub-
ject to err, and numbers more than
fewer." And nothing can unloose the
chain. "Obedience," he said in the Best
of All, "is due to commonwealths by their
subjects even for conscience' sake, where

CHURCH AND STATE 91

the princes from whom they have revolted
have given up their claim."

The argument has a wider history thaii
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 impossi-
bility 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,
HobbeiS had argued for an absolute do-
minion lest the ambitions and desires of
men break through the fragile boundaries
of the social estate.

The answer is clear enough; and, in-
deed, the case against the Nonjurors is
nowhere so strong as on its political side.
Men cannot be confined within the limits

92 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

of so narrow a logic. They will not, with
Bishop Ken, rejoice in suffering as a doc-
trine of the Cross. Rather will oppression
in its turn arouse a sense of wrong and
that be parent of a conscience which pro-
vokes 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 mis-
understanding of the limits to which mis-
government may go. Here their op-
ponents 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 compro-
mises were suggested. Non-resistance, it
was argued by Sherlock, applied to gov-
ernment in general; and the oath, as a
passage in the Convocation Book of Over-
all seemed to suggest, might be taken not
less to a de facto monarch than to one de
jure. Few, indeed would have taken the
ground of Bishop Burnet, and allotted the

CHURCH AND STATE 93

throne to William and Mary as con-
querors of the Kingdom; at least the
pamphlet in which this uncomfortable
doctrine was put forward the House of
Commons had burned by the common
hangman.

What really defeated the Nonjurors'
claims was commonsense. Much the
ablest attack upon their position was Still-
ingfleet's defence of the policy employed
in filling up the sees vacated by depriva-
tion; and it is remarkable that the theory
he employs is to insist that unless the law-
fulness of what had been done is admitted,
the Nonjuror's position is inevitable. "If
it be unlawful to succeed a deprived
bishop," he wrote/ "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 Al-
legiance, unless the Doctor can swear al-
legiance to him who is no King and hath
no authority to govern." All this the
Nonjurors would have admitted, and the

1 A Vindication of their Majesties' Authority to fill
the Sees of the Deprived Bishops (1691).

94 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

mere fact that it could be used as argu-
ment 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 prin-
ciples. 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 epis-
copate 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.

Ill

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

CHURCH AND STATE 95

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 Com-
prehension, by which all save the more
extreme Dissenters would have been ad-
mitted 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 ad-
mitted to her privileges seemed to Church-
men 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 tolera-
tion, 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

96 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

because it enabled them to strike at their
opponents through an institution which at
the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710, still
showed an overwhelming hold upon the
mass of the people.

The attitude of mind herein implied is
in large part the reaction from the Eras-
tian 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 be-
yond all question. William had relieved
Nonconformists from the burden of penal
statute; the Occasional Conformity Act
of 1713 broadly continued the exclusion
of all save the more yielding of them from
political office. When the Hanoverians
succeeded they were willing to repeal its
more rigid intolerance; but the Test Act
remained as evidence that the Dissenters
were not yet regarded as in a full sense
part of the national life.

The reasons for the hatred of dissent go
back in part to the Civil War and in part

CHURCH AND STATE 97

also to the feeling of common gromid be-
tween 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 in-
consistent 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 re-
quire the civil magistrate to be subject to
their power." Of Knox or Cartwright
this is no unfair account ; but of the later
Presbyterians it is the merest travesty.
It supposes that they would be willing to
push to the utmost limit the implications
of the theory of the two kingdoms — a
supposition which their passive submission
to the Act of 1712 restoring lay patronage
decisively refutes. Bramhall had no doubt
that their discipline was "the very quin-
tessence of refined popery," and the argu-
ment is repeated by a hundred less learned
pamphleteers. Neither the grim irony of

98 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

Defoe nor the proven facts of the case
could wean either the majority of Church-
men 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, pre-
vented the repeal of the Toleration Act
and the destruction of the political benefits
of the Revolution.

But nowhere was the temper of the time
more clearly displayed than in the dis-
putes 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 lit-
urgy 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, nat-
urally inclined to his side. Both under
William and Anne the dispute continued.

CHURCH AND STATE 99

and the lower clergy shrank from no op-
portunity 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 con-
flict between High Church doctrine and
latitudinarianism. But that was only a
fragment of the issue. What really was
in question was the nature of the State's
power over the Church. That could be
left unanswered so long, as with James I
and Charles, the two powers had but a
single thought. The situation changed
only when State and Church had different
policies to fulfil and different means for
their attainment.

The controversy had begun on the
threshold of William's accession; but its
real commencement dates from 1697. In
that year was published the Letter to a
Convocation Man, probably written by
Sir Bartholomew Shower, an able if un-
scrupulous Jacobite lawyer, which mali-
ciously, though with abounding skill,
raised every question that peaceful

100 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

churchmen must have been anxious to
avoid. The Letter pointed out the growth
of infidelity and the increasing suspicion
that the Church was becoming tainted
with Socinian doctrine. Only the as-
sembly 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 Parlia-
ment, 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 Con-
vocation was an ecclesiastical Parliament,
it followed that it could legislate and thus
make any canons "provided they do not
impugn common law, statutes, customs or
prerogative." "To confer, debate and
resolve," said Shower, "without the king's
license, is at common law the undoubted
right of convocation."

Here was a clear challenge which was
at once answered, m The Authority of
Christian Princes, by William Wake, who

CHURCH AND STATE 101

was by far the most learned of the lati-
tudinarian clergy, and the successor of
Tenison in the see of Canterbury. His
argument was purely historical. He en-
deavored to show that the right to summon
ecclesiastical synods was always the pre-
rogative 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 dis-
cuss ecclesiastical matters without* royal
permission. Historically, the argument
of Wake was irrefutable ; but what mostly
impressed the Church was the uncompro-
mising Erastia nism of his tone. Princes,
he said, "maylnake what laws or consti-
tutions 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 Magis-
trate," he wrote, "who confessedly has a
power to confirm or reject their (Convo-
cation's) decrees, may not also make such
other use of them as be pleases, and cor-

\>

102 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGtiT

rect, improve, or otherwise alter their res-
ohitions, according to his own liking,
before he gives his authority to them."

So defined no Church could claim in
any true sense the headship of Christ ; for
it was clearly left at the mercy of the gov-
ernmental view of expedient conduct.
Wake's answer aroused a sensation almost
as acute as the original Letter of Shower.
But by far the ablest criticism it provoked
was that of Francis Atterbury, then a
i young student of Christ Church and on
the threshold of his turbulent career. His
Bights, Powers and Privileges of an
English Convocation Stated and Vindi-
cated not only showed a masterly historic
sense in its effort to traverse the iman-
swerable induction of Wake, but chal-
lenged his position more securely on the
ground of right. The historical argu-
ment, indeed, was not a safe position for
the Church, and Wake's rejoinder in his
State of the Church (1703) is generally
conceded to have proved his point, so far
as the claim of prescription is concerned.
But when Atterbury moves to the deeper
problem of what is involved in the natiu'e
of a church, he has a powerful plea to

CHURCH AND STATE 103

make. It is unnecessary now to deal with
his contention that Wake's defence of the
Royal Supremacy imdermines the rights
of Parliament; for Wake could clearly
reply that the seat of that power had
changed with the advent of the Revolu-
tion. Where the avoidance of sympathy
is difficult is in his insistence that nol
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 con-
sequence 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 in-
vasions of an alien body. To be real, it
must be independent, and to be indepen-
dent, it must have organs of self-expres-
sion. But neither William nor Anne
could afford to forego the political capital
involved in ecclesiastical control and Eras-
tian principles proceeded to their triumph.
Here, as elsewhere^ it was Charles ;

104 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

r L eslie w ho best summed up the feeling of
; High Churchmen. His Case of the Re-
gale (1701) is by far the ablest of his
many able performances. He saw at the
outset that the real issue was delfined by
the Church's claim to be a divine society,
with rights thus consecrated by the con-
\ X ditions of its origin. If it was divine, in-
\1 vasion did not touch its de jure rights.
"How," he asked, "can rights that are
divine be given up? If they are divine,
no human authority can either supersede
or limit them. . . . How can rights that
are inherent be given up? If they are
inherent, they are inseparable. The right
to meet, to consult, to make rules or
canons for the regulation of the society, is
essential to every society as such . . .
can she then part with what is essential to
her?" Nor could it be denied that "where
the choice of the governors of one society
is in the hands of another society, that
society must be dependent and subject to
the other." The Church, in the Latitudi-
narian view was thus either the creature of
the state or an imperium in imperio; but
Leslie would not' admit that fruitful
stumbling block to the debate. "The

CHURCH aKB state i06

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 under-
stood as a bribe to her, to betray and de-
liver up into their hands the powers com-
mitted 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 im-
agine 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 before-
hand from the Court; and by this means
the state has lost the greatest security of
her government."

^

\

106 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

The argument is powerful enough;
though it should be noted that some of its
implications remain undetermined. Les-
lie 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 polit-
ical 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 exclu-
siveness but disestablishment.

That this is the meaning of the struggle
did not appear until the reign of George
I. What is known as the Bangorian con-
troversy was due to the posthumous pub-
lication, in 1716, of the papers of George
Hickes, the most celebrated of the Non-

CHURCH AND STATE 107

jurors in his generation. The papers are
of no special import; but taken in con-
nection 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
^HoadlSa^then Bishop of Bangor, and a '^
stout upholder of thef X^jttitudin arian
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
imderstand 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. Be-
fore the debate of 1716, he was chiefly
known by two political tracts in which lie
had rewritten, in less cogent form, and

108 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

without adequate acknowledgment, the
two treatises of Locke. He clearly
realized how worthless the dogma of Di-
vine 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 ex-
planation of political facts. And he be-
came convinced that this attitude applies
not less completely to ecclesiastical than
. r to secular politics. Of his opponents, by
I far the ablest was William , Law, the only
"theologian whom Gibbon maynbe 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 ex-
haust the controversy, so far as it has

L.-

/

CHURCH AND STATE 109

meaning for our own day. The less essen-
tial questions like Hoadly's choice of
friends, his attitude to prayer, the ac-
curacy of the details in his account of the
Test Act, the cause of his refusal to an-
swer Law directly, are hardly now ger-
mane to the substance of the debate.
Hoadly's position is most fully stated in >^
his Preservative against the Principles
and Practice of Nonjurors which he pub-
lished in 1716 as a counterblast to the
papers of Hickes; and they are briefly
summarized in the sermon preached be-
fore 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 qualifi-
cations, some simple points emerge.
What he was doing was to deprive the
priesthood of claims to supernatural au-
thority 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 de-
scended to their successors. For if that
assumption is made we grant to fallible

110 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

men privileges which confessedly belong
to persons outside the category of falli-
bility. And, exactly in the fashion of
Leslie in the Regale he goes on to show
that if a Church is a supernatural institu-
tion, it cannot surrender one jot or tittle of
its prerogative. It is, in fact, an imperium
in imperio and its conflict with the state is
inevitable. But if the Church is not a su-
pernatural 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 so-
ciety, presided over by men who have au-
thority 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 mak-
ing 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

t ■:

CHURCH AND STATE 111

Christ, but the kingdom of those men in-
vested with such authority. For whoever
hath such an authority of making laws is
so far a king, and whoever can add new
laws to those of Christ, equally obligatory,
is as truly a king as Christ himself. Nay,
whosoever hath an absolute authority to
interpret any written or spoken laws, it is
he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents
and purposes, and not the person who
first wrote and spoke them."

The meaning is clear enough. What
Hoadly is attacking is the theory of a
visible Church of Christ on earth, with
the immense superstructure of miracle and
infallibility erected thereon. The true
Church of Christ is in heaven; and the
members of the earthly society can but
try in a human, blundering way, to act
with decency and justice. Apostolic suc-
cession, 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

112 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

I

him for his possession of some special set
of dogmas. Clearly, therefore, if the
Church is no more than this, it has no su-
pernatural pretensions to oppose to the
human claims of the State. And since the
State must have within itself aU the means
of sufficient life, it has the right to resist
the ecclesiastical onslaught as based upon
the usurpation of power assimied 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 excom-
munication nothing more than an an-
nouncement — "a mere external thing"
— that the rules of the fellowship have
been broken. It at no point is related to
the sinner's opportunity of salvation.

In such an aspect, it would clearly fol-
low that the Church has no monopoly of
truth. It can, indeed, judge its own be-
liefs; 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 do^na in which you

CHURCH AND STATE 113

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 polit-
ical validity. They have been imposed
upon the State by the narrow interpre-
tations of an usurping power; and the
Nonconformist claim to citizenship would
thus seem as valid as that of a member of
the Church of England.

All this sounds sensible enough ; though
it is curious doctrine in the mouth of a
bishop of that church. And this, in fact,
is the starting-point of Law's analysis of
Hoadly. No one who reads the unsparing
vigor of his criticism can doubt that Law
must have been thoroughly happy in the
composition of his defence; and, indeed,
his is the only contribution to the debate
which may claim a permanent place in po-
litical literature. In one sense, indeed, the
whole of Law's answer is an ignoratio
elenchi, for he assimies 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

V

114 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 Eng-
land 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 be-
lieved by Churchmen to be integral to its
nature. And if sincerity alone is to coimt
as the test, then there cannot, for the ex-
isting world, be any such thing as ob-
jective religious truth. It subverted not
merely absolute authority — which the
Church of England did not claim — but
any authority in the Church. It impugned
the authority of the Crown to enforce re-
ligious 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 pos-
sesses is inherent in the very nature of the
Church; for the obligation to a belief in
Christianity is the same thing as to a be-
lief in that Church which can be shown to
represent Christ's teaching.

CHURCH AND STATE 115

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 accept-
able to God as things true and right, which
is patently absurd. Nor has Hoadly
given us means for the detection of sin-
cerity. 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 infalli-
bility of private belief than he is to deny
the infallibility of the Church's teaching.
That way lies anarchy.

Here, indeed, the antagonists were on
common ground. Both had denied the
absolute character of any authority; but
while Hoadly virtually postulates a

116 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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
i 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 be-
cause those who denied the doctrines of
the High Church refused a truth open
for their acceptance. Law, indeed, goes
so far as to argue that in the light of his
principles Hoadly should be a Deist ; and
there is ground for what, in that age, was
a valuable point to make. The sum total
of it all is that for the bishop the outward
actions of men alone concern the State;
while Law insists that the root of action
and the test of fitness is whether men have
seen a certain aspect of the truth and
grasped it.

The result, to say the least, was calami-

\ tous. In May of 1717, convocation met

and the Lower House immediately

adopted an unanimous report condemning

the "Preservative" and the sermon. But

Y Hoadly had the government behind him

CHURCH AND STATE 117

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 oflice; and for more than one hun-
dred 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 suc-
cessful. 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 remem-
bered that Hoadly's own dwelling had
been threatened with destruction in the
popular excitement. Quieta non movere
was his motto; and he was not interested
in the niceties of ecclesiastic metaphysic.
So the Test Act remained immovable until /
1828; while the annual Act of Indemnity
for its infractions represented that Eng-
lish genius for illogical mitigation which
solves the deeper problems of principle
while avoiding the consideration of their
substance.

In the hundred and twenty years which

118 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

passed between the Bangorian Contro-
versy and the Oxford Movement, there is
only one volume upon the problem of
Church and State which deserves more
than passing notice. Bishop Warburton
^ was the Lord Brougham of his age; and
as its self -constituted universal provider
of intellectual fare, he deemed it his duty
to settle this, amongst others of the
eternal questions. The effort excited only
the contempt of Leslie Stephen — "the
peculiar Warburton mixture," he says "of
sham logic and bluster." Yet that is
hardly fair to the total result of War-
burton's remarks. He tried to steer a
middle path between the logical result of
such Erastianism as that of the Indepen-
dent Whig, on the one hand, and the ex-
. cessive claim of High Churchmanship on
the other. Naturally enough, or the
writer would not be Warburton, the book
is full of tawdry rhetoric and stupid
quibbles. But the Alliance between
^ Church and State (1736) set the temper
of speculation until the advent of New-
man, and is therefore material for some-
thing more than contempt. It acutely
points out that societies generate a per-

CHURCH AND STATE 119

sonality distinct from that of their mem-
bers in words reminiscent of an historic
legal pronouncement/ "When any nmn-
ber 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 in-
dividuals composed before the society was
formed. . . . But a body must have its
proper personality and will, which with-
out these is no more than a shadow or a
name."

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 dis-
tinct; 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.

1 Dicey, Law and Opinion in England (2nd edition),
p. 166.

1

^

120 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 ser-
vice of the State." It becomes attached to
its benefactor from the privilege it re-
ceives ; and the dangers which might arise
from its natural independence are thus
obviated. For a federal union precludes
the grave problem of an imperium in im-
periOj and the "mischiefs which so terri-
fied Hobbes" are met by the terms upon
which it is founded.

It is easy enough to discover the loop-
holes in the theory. The contract does
not exist, or, at least, it is placed by War-
burton "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 Warbur-
ton declared a vital tenet of the Union.
Yet such criticisms miss the real signifi-
N# cance of the theory. It is really the in-

CHURCH AND STATE 121

troduction into English politics of that
notion of the two societies which, a cen-
tury before, Melville and Bellarmine had
made so fruitful. With neither Presby-
terian nor Jesuit was the separation com-
plete, 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 bal-
ance of power between claims which, be-
fore, had seemed mutually exclusive.

Until the Toleration Act, the theory
was worthless to the English Church be-
cause its temper, under the aegis of
Laudian views, had been in substance
theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly ex-
pressed 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 in-
tended for a partnership became an ab-
sorption. 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 re-

122 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

placed by fashionable prelates like Com-
wallis, who made Lambeth Palace an ad-
junct to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seek-
ing pluralists like Bishop Watson- The
Church could not even perceive the mean-
ing of the Wesleyan revolt ; and its charity
was the irritating and complacent patron-
age of the obstrusive Hannah More. Its
learning decayed, its intelligence slum-
bered; and the main function it fulfilled
imtil 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 merelv an annex to the ini-
quities of the civil list.

IV

No one can mistake the significance of

I this conflict. The opponents of Eras-

i tianism had a deep sense of their corporate

I 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

CHURCH AND STATE 123

their head. If the Church was to be at
the mercy of private judgment and poHt-
ical 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 reli-
gious body to which the State had con-
ceded certain rights and dignities, they
repudiated with passion. The life af the
Church was not derived ffom the State;
and for the latter to attempt its circum-
scription was to usurp an authority not
rightly its own.

The real difficulty of this attitude lay in
the establishment. For here the Church
was, at bottom, declaring that the State
life must be lived upon terms of her own

124 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

definition. That was possible before the
Reformation ; but with the advent of Non-
conformity and the growth of rationalism
the exclusive character of the Church's
solution had become unacceptable. If the
Church was to become so intimately in-
volved 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 attain-
ment of that ideal. For the real secret of
independence is, after all, no more than in-
dependence. The Church sought it with-
out 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 defi-
nition is an absorptive animal; and the
Church had no right to complain if the
price of its privileges was royal su-
premacy. A century so self-satisfied as
the eighteenth would not have faced the
difficulties involved in giving political ex-
pression to the High Church theory.

Yet the protest remained, and it bore
a noble fruit in the next century. The
Oxford movement is usually regarded as
a return to the seventeenth century, to

CHURCH AND STATE 126

the ideals, that is to say, of Laud and
Andrewes.^ 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 "abso-
lute and unalienable rights" was a "gross
and monstrous anomaly" because it would
make impossible the supremacy of Parlia-
ment, 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, ^

1 Cf. my Problem of Sovereignty, Chapter III.

2 Parliamentary Debates. Fifth Series, Vol. 34,
p. 992 (June 3, 1919).

126 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

"... see the absolute need, if a Church
is to be strong and vigorous, for the
Churchy qua church, to be able to say what
it can do as a church." "The rule of the
sovereign, the rule of Parliament," replied
Lord Haldane,^ "extend as far as the rule
of the Church. They are not to be dis-
tinguished 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.

1 Parliamentary Debates^ Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p.
1002. The quotation does not fully represent Lord
Haldane*s views.

CHAPTER IV

THE ERA OF STAGNATION

With the accession of George I, there
ensued an era of unexampled calm in
English politics, which lasted until the ex-
pulsion 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,

127

128 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 en-
cased for a generation.

It is a dull period, but complacent ; for
it was not an unprosperous time. Agri-
cultiu-e and commerce both were abun-
dant; and the increasing development of
towjis shows us that the Industrial Revo-
lution loomed in the near distance. The
eager continuance of the deistic contro-
versy 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 exal-
tation of Hellenism not only contributed
to the Aufhlarung in Scotland, but sug-
gested that Christian ideals were not to go
imchallenged. But the literature of the
time is summarized in Pope ; and the easy
neatness of his verses is quaintly repre-
sentative of the Georgian peace. Defoe
and Swift had both done their work; and
the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 129

die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley,
indeed, was convinqed of the decadence of
England ; but his Essay towards Prevent-
ing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721)
shows rather the effect of the speculative
mania which culminated in the South Sea
Bubble upon a noble moral nature than
a genius for political thought. Certainly
no one in that generation was likely to
regard with seriousness proposals for the
endowment of motherhood and a tax upon
the estate of bachelors. The cynical soph-
istries of Mandeville were, despite the in-
dignation 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 intelli-
gence, Walpole was not the man, either in
type of mind or of temperament, to bring
great questions to the foreground of de-
bate. He was content to maintain his
hold over the respect of the Crown, and
to pimish able rivals by exclusion from
office. One by one, the younger men of

130 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

talent, Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield,
Pitt, were driven into hostility. He main-
tained 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 dis-
plays the intellectual bankruptcy of the
time.

To understand the argument of Boling-
broke it is necessary to remember ^lhe~pe-
culiar character of his career. He had
attained to the highest office under Anne
at an exceptionally early age; and his

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 131

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 exe-
cute ; and his flight to France, on the Han-
overian accession, had been followed by
his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded
alike to his reputation and place; and
through an enormous bribe to the bottom-
less 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 cre-
ating an alliance between the Tories and
malcontent Whigs for Walpole's over-
throw. The alliance succeeded, though
too late for Bolingbroke to enjoy the
fruits of success ; but in effecting the pur-
gation of the Tory party from its taint of
Jacobitism he rendered no inconsiderable
service. His foundation, moreover, of the
Craftsman — the first official journal of
a political party in England — showed his
appreciation of the technique of political

132 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 refer-
ence which has, save in the mass, no mean->
ing for today. Though, doubtless, the
idea of its inception was derived from
journals like Defoe's Review and Leslie V
Rehearsal, which had won success, its in-
timate connection with the party leader-
ship was a novel element; and it may
therein claim a special relation to the offi-
cial periodicals of a later generation.

The reputation of Bolingbroke as a po-
litical 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 decla-
mation 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 can-
not be wholly devoid of merit. Certainly
he wrote well, in that easy elegance of
style which was the delight of the eigh-

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 133

teenth 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 ac-
cusation of sincerity. Nor has he any en-
thusiasm save that of bitter partisanship.
He hated Walpole, and his political writ-
ings are, at bottom, no more than an
attempt to generalize his animosity. The
Dissertation on Parties (1734) and the
Idea of a Patriot King ( 1738) might have
betrayed us, taken alone, into regarding
their author as a disinterested observer
watching with regret the development of
a fatal system; but taken in conjunction
with the Letter to Sir TV. Windham
(1717), which was not published until
after his death, and is written with an
acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to hon-
esty, they reveal the opinions as no more
than a mask for ambition bom of hate.

The whole, of course, must have some
sort of background ; and the Letters on the
Study of History (1735) was doubtless
intended to supply it. Experience is to
be the test of truth, since history is phil-

134 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

osophy teaching by example. But Boling-
broke's own argument supplies its refuta-
tion. His history is an arbitrary selection
of instances intended to illustrate the par-
ticular ideas which happened to be upper-
most 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

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 135

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 ex-
presses a "thorough contempt" for the
kind of work scholars such as Scaliger and
Petavius had achieved, he shows his entire
ignorance of the method whereby alone a
knowledge of general principle can be
attained.

A clear vision, of course, he has, and he
was not beguiled by high notions of pre-
rogative or the like. The divine right of
kings is too stupid to be worth the trouble
of refutation; all that makes a king im-
portant is the authority he exerts. So,
too, with the Church ; for Bolingbroke, as 't
a professed deist, has no trouble with such J
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

136 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

secret of the British constitution is the
balance of powers and their mutual inde-
pendency. 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 rejec-
tion of which has been the secret of Eng-
lish 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 pros-
pect of enjoying office and vast patron-
age ; and a great enough show is made of
his hatred for corruption as to convince at
least some critics of distinction of his sin-
cerity. 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 rotton boroughs and excluded place-
men from Parliament. The press was to
be free; and there is at least a degree of
generous insight in his plea for a wider

THE ERA OP STAGNATION 137

commercial freedom in colonial matters.
Yet what, after all, does this mean save
that he is fighting a man with the patron-
age at his disposal and a majority upon
the committee for the settlement of dis-
puted elections? And what else can we
see in his desire for liberty of the press
save a desire to fight Walpole in the open,
without fear of the penalties his former
treason had incurred?

His value can be tested in another way.
His Idea of a Patriot King is the remedy
for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty
years old when it appeared, and he had
then been in active politics for thirty-five
years, so that we are entitled to regard it
as the fruit of his mature experience. He
was too convinced that the constitution
was "in the strictest sense a bargain, a
conditional contract between the prince
and the people" to attempt again the erec-
tion 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 propen-
sities of a bad king. What is needed is a

138 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

[ patriot king who will destroy corruption
V_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 xminterrupted 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 affec-
tion of his people. "Concord," says Bo-
lingbroke in rhapsodical prospection, "will
appear breeding peace and prosperity on
every hand"; though he prudently hopes
also that men will look back with affection
upon one "who desired life for nothing so
much as to see a King of Great Britain
the most powerful man in the country,
and a patriot King at the head of a united
people."

Bolingbroke himself has admitted that
such a monarch would be a "sort of stand-

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 139

ing miracle," and perhaps no other com-
ment upon his system is required. A
smile in Plato at the sight of his phi-
losopher-King in such strange company-
might well be pardoned. It is only nec-
essary to point out that the person whom
Bolingbroke designates for this high func-
tion was Frederick, Prince of Wales, to
us the most meagre of a meagre genera-
tion, but to Bolingbroke, by whose grace
he was captivated, "the greatest and most
glorious of himian beings." This exalta-
tion of the monarch came at a time when
a variety of circumstances had combined
to show the decrease of monarchical senti-
ment. 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 sys-
tem. The minister who is to be impeached,
the wise servants who are to gain office,
the attack on corruption, the spirited
foreign policy — all these have the ear-
marks of a platform rather than of a phi-
losophy. 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

140 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 coimtry squires, the last
resort of enthusiasm for Church and King,
feeling that Bolingbroke had here empha-
sized the dangers of a regime which al-
ready faintly foreshadowed their exclusion
from power. The pamphlet was the
cornerstone in the education of Fred-
erick's son; and when George III came
to the throne he proceeded to give such
heed to his master as the circimistances
permitted. It is perhaps, as Mr. A. L.
Smith has argued, imfair to visit Boling-
broke 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.

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 141

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 dec-
lamation and his practice when in office.
It is sufficient to say that the one effort
founded upon the principles of Boling-
broke ended in disaster ; and that his own
last reflections express a bitter disillusion
at the result of the event which he looked
to as the inauguration of the golden age.

II

The fall of Walpole, indeed, released
no energies for political thought ; the sys-
tem continued, though the men were dif-
ferent. What alone can be detected is the
growth of a democratic opinion which
f oimd 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 pam-
phlet of the time shows us the arrival of
this imlooked-for portent. Faction de-
tected by the Evidence of Facts (1742)

142 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

was, though it is anonymous/ 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 in-
structions might be issued. "A new party
of malcontents" had arisen, "assimiing 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 resimie 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 so-
ciety, to divest themselves of it, and to
delegate it forever from themselves." The
writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dis-
like, that temper which produced the
Wilkes affair, and made it possible for
Cartwright and Home Tooke and Sir

1 It was probably written by Lord Egmont.

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 143

Thomas Hollis to become the founders of
English radicalism.

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 Himie was thirty-one years
of age when he published (1742) the first
series of his essays; and his Treatise of
Human Nature which had fallen "dead-
bom from the press" was in some sort
compensated by the success of the new
work. The second part, entitled Political
Discourses, was published in 1752, almost
simultaneously with the ^^ Inquiry concern-
ing the Principles of Morals/^ As in the
case of Hume's metaphysical studies, they
constitute the most powerful dissolvent
the century was to see. Yet nowhere was
so clearly to be demonstrated the eutha-
nasia into which English poUtics had
fallen.

Hume, of course, is always critical and
suggestive, and even if he had no distinc-
tive contribution to make, he gave a new

[.

144 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

turn to speculation. Thiere is something
almost of magic in the ease with which he
demolishes divine right and the social con-
tract. 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 al-
together on voluntary consent, or on a
mutual promise, the magistrate would
soon imprison you as seditious for loosen-
ing the ties of obedience; if your friends
did not before shut you up as delirious for
advancing such absurdities." The orig-
inal contract could not be produced, and,
even if it were, it would suppose the "con-
sent of the fathers to bind the children
even to the most remote generations."
The real truth, as he remarks, is that "al-
most all the governments which exist at
present, or of which there remains any
record in story, have been founded origi-
nally on usurpation, or on conquest, or
both, without any pretence of a fair con-

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 146

sent 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 imiversal
laws of nature."

Government, in short, is dependent
upon the inescapable facts of psychology.
It might be unnecessary if all desirejs 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 institu-
tions, 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 ac-

1

146 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

cepted. He does not, indeed, deny tihat
fear and consent enter into the attitude of
men; he simply asserts that these also are
fomided upon a judgment of utility in
the thing judged. We obey because
otherwise "society could not subsist," and
society subsists for its utility. "Men," he
says "could not live at all in society, at
least in a civilized society, without laws
and magistrates and judges, to prevent
the encroachments of the strong upon the
weak, of the violent upon the just and
equitable."

Utilitarianism is, of course, above all a
method; and it is not unfair to say of
Hume that he did not get very far beyond
insistence on that point. He sees that
the subjection of the many to the few is
rooted in human impulse; but he has no
penetrating inquiry, such as that of Locke
or Hobbes, into the purpose of such sub-
jection. 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

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 147

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 rep-
resentatives 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 po-
litical body is inevitable; would none of
Ihem, probably, be accepted by most
thinkers at the present time. And when
he constructs an ideal constitution, irre-
spective of time and place, which is to be
regarded as practical because it resembles
that of Holland, ii; is obvious that the
historical method had not yet come fully
into being.

Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep
wisdom, and it would be an avoidance of
justice not to note the extent of the spas-
modic 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

148 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

dictum that the substance of government
corresponds to the distribution of prop-
erty, 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,"
show^s us rather that we are on the
threshold of laissez-faire than that Hume
really understood the problem of freedom.
He realized that the House of Commons
had become the pivot of the State ; though
he looked with dread upon the onset of
popular government. He saw the inev-
itability of parties, as also their tendency
to persist in terms of men instead of prin-
ciples. 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 govern-

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 149

ment. He emphasized the value of free-
dom of the press, in which he saw the
secret whereby the mixed govermnent of
England was maintained. "It has also
been found," he said in a happy phrase,
". . . that the people are no such dan-
gerous monsters as they have been repre-
sented, and that it is in every respect
better to guide them like rational crea-
tures than to lead or drive them like brute
beasts." There is, in fact, hardly a page
of his work in which some such acuteness
may not be found.

Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is
absent. Hume was a typical child of one
aspect of the eighteenth century in his
hatred of enthusiasm, and the form in
which he most abominates it is religious.
Why people's religious opinions should
lead to antagonism he could no more un-
derstand 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 de-
partment of the State lest it should get out
of hand. He was, moreover, a static phil-
osopher, disturbed by signs of political

160 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 accord-
ingly recommended as the euthanasia of
the British Constitution. Not even the ex-
ample 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 strik-
ing to see his helplessness before the prob-
lem 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 evo-
lution is entirely absent from his political
speculation. Political life, like himian
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

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 151

happiness was not likely to view novel
theories with unruffled temper.

Hume has an eminent place among
economists, and for one to whom the study
of such phenomena was but a casual in-
quiry, it is marvelous how much he saw.
He is free from the crude errors of mer-
cantilism; 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 mediimi of
exchange. The supposed antagonism be-
tween commerce and agriculture he dis-
poses of in a half-dozen effective sen-
tences. 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 impor-
tance of wealth in the achievement of

152 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 gov-
ernment for its progress, pointing out,
doubtless from his abundant French ex-
perience, that an absolute government
gives to the commercial class an insuffi-
cient status of honor. He pointed out,
doubtless with France again in his mind,
the evils of an arbitrary system of taxa-
tion. "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 be-
lief that the best taxes are those which,
like taxes upon luxury, press least upon
the poor.

Such insight is extraordinary enough in
the pre- Adamite epoch ; but even more re-
markable are his psychological founda-
tions. 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

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 153

him." The desire for wealth comes from
the idea of pleasure; and in the Treatise
on Human Nature he discusses with su-
perb 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 un-
natural ones"; though, like his prede-
cessor, Francis Hutcheson, he overempha-
sizes 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 advan-
tages 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 mo-
tive to existence ; though no one was more
urgent in his insistence that "the avidity
of acquiring goods and possessions for

154 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 mani-
fested. "Every person," he wrote in a
famous passage, "if possible ought to en-
joy the fruits of his labor in a full pos-
session of all the necessaries, and many of
the conveniences of life. No one can
doubt but such an equality is most suit-
able to human nature, and diminishes
much less the happiness of the rich than
it adds to that of the poor." It is clear
that we have moved far from the narrow
confines of the old political arithmetic.
The theory of utility enables Hume to see
the scope of economics — the word itself
he did not know — in a more generous
perspective than at any previous time. It
would be too much to say that his grasp of
its psychological foundation enabled him
entirely to move from the limitations of
the older concept of a national prosperity
expressed only in terms of bullion to the
view of economics as a social science. But
at least he saw that economics is rooted in
the nature of men and therein he had the

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 155

secret of its true understanding. The
Wealth of Nations would less easily have
made its way had not the insight of Hume
prepared the road for its reception.

What, then, and in general, is his place
in the history of political thought ? Clearly
enough, he is not the founder of a system ;
his work is rather a series of pregnant
hints than a consecutive account of po-
litical 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 in-
spiration; atid Hutcheson means that he
was indebted to Shaftesbury. Indeed,
there is much of the sturdy commonsense
of the Scottish school about him, particu-
larly perhaps in that interweaving of
ethics, politics and economics, which is
characteristic of the school from Hutche-
son in the middle seventeenth century, to
the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nine-
teenth.^ He is entitled to be considered

1 There are few books which show so clearly as
Lorimer's Institutes of Nations (1872) how fully the
Scottish school was in the midstream of European
thought.

^r

156 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 so-
cial contract; for there is clearly present
in his use of facts a true sense of historical
method. He put an end also to the con-
fusion' 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 ex-
plained rather than as illustrations of
some favorite thesis to be maintained in
part defiance of them. Conventional
Whiggism has no foothold after he has
done with its analysis. His utilitarianism
was the first efficient substitute for the
labored metaphysics of the contract
school ; and even if he was not the first to
see through its pretensions — that is per-
haps the claim of Shaftesbury — he was
the first to show the grounds of their use-
lessness. He saw that history and psy-
chology together provide the materials for

THE ERA OF STAGNATION 167

a political philosophy. So that even if he
could not himself construct it the hints at
least were there.

His suggestiveness, indeed, may be
measured in another fashion. The meta-
physics 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 em-
phasis upon resistance as of last resort, the
denial that allegiance is a mere contract to
be presently explained, the deep respect
for order — all these are, after all, the
fabric from which the thought of Burke
was woven. Nor is there in Bentham's de-
fence of Utilitarianism argument in which
he would have recognized novelty. Here-
in, at least, his proof that morality is no
more than general opinion of utility con-
structs, in briefer form, the later argu-
ments of Bentham, Paley and the Mills,
nor can their mode of statement claim su-
periority to Hume's. So that on either
side of his work he foreshadows the advent
of the two great schools of modern polit-
ical thought. His utilitarianism is the real

i
/

158 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 ma-
terials why did he fail to build up a sys-
tem from them? The answer seems two-
fold. In part it is the man himself . His
genius, as his metaphysics show, lay es-
sentially 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 Himie was born a generation too
early. Had he written when George III
attempted the destruction of the system of
the Revolution, and when America and
France combined to raise again the basic
questions of politics, he might have done
therein what Adam Smith effected in his
own field. But the time had not yet come ;
and it was left to Burke and Bentham to
reap where he had sown.

CHAPTER V

SIGNS OF CHANGE

From Hume until the publication of
IBurke's Present Discontents (1770) there
is no work on English politics of the first
importance. Walpole had fallen in 1742;
but for the next fifteen years his methods
dominated the parliamentary scene. It
was only with the advent of the elder Pitt j
to power that a new temper may be ob-
served, a temper quickened by what fol-
lowed 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 per-
suade his countrymen into that grim satis-
faction 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

150

160 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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, in-
deed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes
case, to show that a new age has come. It
is in the novels of Richardson and Field-
ing, the first shy hints of the romantic
temper in Gray and Collins, above all in
the awakening of political science, that
novelty is apparent.

So far as a new current of thought can
\j ever be referred to a single source, the
N 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 experi-

SIGNS OF CHANGE 161

ence. Yet when he came, in 1762, to pub-
lish the Contrat Social it was obvious that
he had drunk deeply of English thought.
The real meaning of their work to Eng-
lishmen lay in the perspective they gave to
English institutions. Naturally enough,
there was a vast difference between the
simplicity of a government where sov-
ereignty 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 gen-
erous equality of English judicial pro-
cedure. The liberty of unlicensed print-
ing — less admirable than they accounted
it — the difference between a Habeas
Corpus and a lettre de cachet ^ the regular
succession of Parliaments, all these im-
pressed them, who knew the meaning of
their absence, as a magnificent achieve-
ment. The English constitution revealed
to France an immense and unused reser-
voir 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. Himie had partial glimpses
of its inner substance. But for most it

162 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 im-
port simultaneously with the effort of

I /George III to revive crown influence.

y Montesquieu thus became the prophet of

*" a new race of thinkers. Rousseau's time
was not yet; though within a score of
years it was possible to see him as the rival
to Burke's conservatism.

It is worth while to linger for a moment
upon the thesis which underlies the Esprit

, des Lois (1748). It is a commonplace
now that Montesquieu is to be regarded as
the founder of the historical method. The
present is to be explained by its ancestry.
Laws, governments, customs are not
truths absolute and universal, but relative
to the time of their origin and the coimtry
from which they derive. It would be in-
accurate, 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 com-

SIGNS OF CHANGE 163

plete unreality, are to be found in God-
win's Political Justice; but it is not be-
yond the mark to affirm that after his time
such abstract systems were on the defen-
sive. Therein, with all his faults, he had
given Burke the clue to those truths he so )
profoundly saw — the sense of the State )
as more than a mechanical contrivance,
the high regard for prescription, the sense '
of law as the voice of past wisdom. He ■^'
was, said Burke, "the greatest genius
which has enlightened this age"; and
Burke had every reason to utter that noble
panegyric. But Montesquieu was more
than this. He emphasized legislation as
the main mechanism of social change ; and
therein he is the parent of that decisive
reversal of past methods of which
Bentham first revealed the true signifi-
cance. 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 lec-
ture as Vinerian professor. He insisted,
too, on the danger of perversion to \<^hich
political principle lies open; a feeling
which found consistent utterance both in

V

164 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

the debates of the Philadelphia Conven-
tion, and in the writings of Bentham and
^ James Mill. What, perhaps, is most im-
I mediately significant is his famous praise
of the British Constitution — the secret
--Qf which he entirely misapprehended —
and his discovery of its essence in the
separation of powers. The short sixth
chapter of his eleventh book is the real
keynote of Blackstone and De Lolme. It
led them to investigate, on principles of
at least doubtful validity, an edifice never
before described in detail. It is, when the
last criticism has been made, an immense
step forward from the uncouth antiquari-
anism of Coke's Second Institute to the
neatly reticulated structure erected upon
the foundations of Montesquieu's hint.
That it was wrong was less important
than that the attempt should have been
made. The evil that men do lives after
them; and few doctrines have been more
noxious in their consequence than this
theory of checks and balances. But
Blackstone's Commentaries (1765—9)
produced Bentham's Fragment on Gov-
ernment (1776), and with that book we
enter upon the realistic study of the
British Constitution.

SIGNS OF CHANGE 165

Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition;
but just as he drew from English thinkers
so did he exercise upon the next genera-
tion an influence the more logical because
the inferences he drew were those that his
masters, with the English love of com-
promise, had sought to avoid. Rousseau
is the disciple of Locke; and the real dif-
ference 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 Rous-
seau declared that the existing distribu-
tion 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 in-
terest. The powers of the people thus
became their rights and herein was an un-
limited 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 imd their author "the great pro-

166 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

f essor and founder of the philosophy of
vanity in England." But Burke forgot
that the real secret of Rousseau's influ-
ence 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 revolu-
tion 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 inde-
pendent 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 se-
cm-e. Here Rousseau had a message for
Great Britain which Burke at every stage
denied. Nor, at the moment, was it in-
fluential 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 meta-

SIGNS OF CHANGE 167

physical form it failed to command ac-
ceptance, in the hands of Bentham its
results were victorious. Bentham differs
from Rousseau not in the conclusions he
recommends so much as in the language in
which he clothes them. Either make a
final end of the optimism of men like
Hume and Blackstone, or the veneration
for the past which is at the root of Burke's
own teaching.

It is easy to see why thought such as
this should have given the stimulus it did.
Montesquieu came to praise the British
constitution at a time when good men were
aghast at its perversion. There was no
room in many years for revolution, but
at least there was place for hearty discon-
tent 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 gener-
ation. Wilkes was a sign that the popu-
lace was slowly awaking to a sense of its
own power. The French creed was too
purely logical, too obviously the outcome

168 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

of alien conditions, to fit in its entirety
the English facts; and, it must be ad-
mitted, 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 ques-
tions, even if they proved unanswerable,
were stuff for thought. The work of the
I forty years before the French Revolution
Ij is nothing so much as a preparation for
ii 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 obso-
lete and ugly. If the French thinkers had
conferred no other benefit, that, at least,
would have been a supreme achievement.

II

The first book to show the signs of

change came in 1757. John Brown's Es-

^ timate of the Manners and Principles of

the Tinted is largely forgotten now;

SIGNS OF CHANGE 169

though it went through seven editions in
a year and was at once translated into
French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor
planet in the vast Warburtonian system,
who had already published a volume of
comment upon the Characteristics of
Shaftesbury. His book is too evidently
modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he
mentions with reverence, to make us doubt
its derivation. There is the same reliance
upon Livy and Machiavelli, the same at-
tempt at striking generalization; though
the argimient upon which Brown's con-
clusions are based is seldom given, per-
haps because his geometric clarity of
statement impressed him as self-demon-
strative. 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 noth-
ing 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 learn-
ing. Men trifle with Hume's gay im-
pieties, and could not, if they would.

170 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

appreciate the great works of Bishop
Warburton. Politics has become nothing
save a means of promoting selfish in-
terests. 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 cow-
ardly. Gambling penetrates every nook
and cranny of the upper class ; the oiBcers
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 prin-
ciples of those who lead," he says, "...
not of those who are governed . . . will
ever determine the strength or weakness,
and therefore the continuance or dissolu-
tion of a state."
V This profligacy Brown compares to the

SIGNS OF CHANGE 171

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.
^Vhat 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 in-
teresting than his prophecies was the evi-
dence 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 inev-
itably decay, and the commercial grandeur
of England is the symptom of old age ; it
means a final departure from the sim-
plicity of nature and breeds the luxury
which kills by enervation. Brown has no
passion, and his book reads rather like Mr.
Galsworthy's Island Pharisees sufiiciently

172 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

expurgated to be declaimed by a well-bred
clergyman in search of preferment on the
gromid of attention to the evils of his
time. It describes midoubted 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 profiFer
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 Pres-
ent Discontents. Nothing could better
justify the savage indignation of Junius,
Hume was the friend of Montesquieu,
though twenty years his junior; and the
Esprit des Lois travelled rapidly to Scot-
land. There it caught the eye of Adam
Ferguson, the author of a treatise on re-
finement, and by the influence of Hume
and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Edin-
burgh. Ferguson seems to have been im-
mensely pop\3ar in his time, and certainly

SIGNS OP CHANGE 173

he has a skill for polished phrase, and a
genial paraphrase of other men's ideas.
His Essay on the History of Civil So-
ciety (1767), which in a quarter of a cen-
tury went through six editions, was
thought by Helvetius superior to Mon-
tesquieu, 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 gen-
eralizing easily upon the state of'naturie.
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 manage-
ment of many copartners." Climate has
the new importance upon which Montes-
quieu has insisted; or, at least, as it
"ripens the pineapple and the tamarina/'

174 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

so it "inspires a degree of mildness that
can even assuage the rigours of despotieal
government." The priesthood — this is
Hume — becomes a separate influence
under the sway of superstition. Liberty,
he says, "is maintained by the continued
differences and oppositions of numbers,
not by their concurring zeal in behalf of
equitable government." The hand that
can bend Ulysses' bow is certainly not
here ; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can
best be left in the obsciu'ity into which he
has fallen. The Esprit des Lois took
twenty years in writing ; and it needed the
immense researches of men like Savigny
before its significance could fully be
grasped. Facile popularisers of this sort
may have mollified the drawing-room;
but they did not add to political ideas.

Ill

A more fertile source of inquiry was to
be found among the students of constitu-
tional law. Blackstone's Commentaries
on the Laws of England (1765-9) has
had ever since its first publication an au-
thority such as Coke only before pos-

SIGNS OP CHANGE 176

sessed. "He it is," said Bentham, "who,
first of all institutional writers, has taught
jurisprudence to speak the language of
the Scholar and the Gentleman." Cer-
tainly, 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 con-
stitution raised him from humble means
through a Professorship at Oxford to a
judgeship in the Court of Common Pleas.
He had been a member of Parliament and
refused the office of Solicitor-General.
He had thus no reason to be dissatisfied
with the conditions of his time ; and the
first book of the Commentaries is nothing
so much as an attempt to explain why
English constitutional law is a miracle of
wisdom.

Constitutional law, as such, indeed, ^
found no place in Blackstone's book. It
creeps in under the rights of persons,
where he deals with the power of king and
Parliament. His treatment implies a
whole philosophy. Laws are of three ^ y

176 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

kinds — of nature, of God, and of the civil
^^jstate. Civil law, with which alone he is
concerned, is "a rule of civil conduct pre-
scribed 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 sov-
ereign 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 seri-
ously 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, uncon-
trolled authority, in which the jura summa
imperii, or rights of sovereignty reside."
The forms of government are classified in
' the usual way; and the British constitu-
tion 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 aris-

SIGNS OF CHANGE 177

tocratical 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 in-
terests, composes the British Parliament
and has the supreme disposal of every-
thing; there can be no inconvenience at-
tempted by either of the three branches,
but will be withstood by one of the other
two ; each branch being armed with a nega-
tive power, sufficient to repel any innova-
tion which it shall think inexpedient or
dangerous." It is in the king in Parlia- y
ment that British sovereignty resides.
Eschewing the notion of an original con-
tract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the
implications of it are secured. "The con-
stitutional government of this island," he
says, "is so admirably tempered and com-
pounded, that nothing can endanger or
hurt it, but destroying the equilibrium of
power between one branch of the legisla-
ture and the rest."
All this is not enough; though, as

SIGNS OF CHANGE 179

William the Norman than to the back-
stairs corruption of George III. The
right of revolution is noted, with justice,
as belonging to the sphere of morals
rather than of law.

"Its true defect,*' says Professor Dicey
of the Commentaries, "is the hopeless
confusion both of language and of
thought introduced into the whole subject
of constitutional law by Blackstone's
habit — common to all the lawyers of his
time — of applying old and inapplicable
terms to new institutions." This is severe
enough ; yet Blackstone's sins are deeper y
than the criticism would suggest. He in-
troduced 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 un-
limited 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 legis-
lature 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

l^

/

180 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

typical spiritual member was Archbishop
Cornwallis and whose temporal embodi-
ment was the Duke of Bedford would not
have deceived a schoolboy had it not pro-
vided 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 pre-
ceding 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 pro-
duce the defence of a non-existent system
which acted as a barrier to all legal, and
much political, progress in the next half-
century. He gave men material without
cause for satisfaction.

As a description of the existing govern-
ment 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 be-
tween society and government. The state

SIGNS OF CHANGE 181

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, in-
deed, seems to him, as a natural conserva-
tive, to go too far, and he rejects the orig-
inal 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 ir-
resistible; and then because Blackstone is
imcertain what right is to mean, we hear
of moral limitations upon its exercise. He
speaks continually of representation with-
out 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 I'equisites
... 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

182 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

clear notions of the way in which property
is to be founded. Communism, he writes
in seventeenth century fashion, is the in-
stitution of the all-beneficent Creator who
gave the earth to men; property comes
when men occupy some special portion
of the soil continuously or mix their
labor with movable possessions. This is
pure Locke ; though the conclusions drawn
by Blackstone are utterly remote from the
logical result of his own premises.

The truth surely is that Blackstone had,
upon all these questions, only the most
confused sort of notions. He had to pref-
ace his work with some sort of philo-
sophic 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 in-
competent to understand it, than the fer-
tility it contained. The merit of Black-

SIGNS OF CHANGE 183

stone is his learning, which was substan-
tial, 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 opti-
mistic trifler, too content with the condi-
tions of his time to question iti^
assumptions.

De Lolme is a more interesting figure ;
and though, as with Blackstone, what he
failed to see was even more remarkable
than what he did perceive, his book has ^
real ability and merit. De Lolme was a
citizen of Geneva, who published his Con-
stitution of England in 1775, after a J\
twelve months' visit to shores sufficiently
inhospitable to leave him to die in ob-
scurity 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 ne-
cessity of obtaining a constitutional equi-
librium, wherein he finds the secret of
liberty. The attitude was not unnatural

in one who^ with bis head full of Montes-

184 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

quieu, was a witness of the struggle be-
tween Junius and the King. He has, of
course, the limitation common to all
writers before Burke of thinking of gov-
ernment in purely mechanical terms. "It
is upon the passions of mankind," he says,
"that is, upon causes which are unalter-
able, 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 gov-
ernment 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 atti-
tude is bound to suffer from the patent
vices of all abstraction. It regards his-
toric forces as distinct from the men re-
lated 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

SIGNS OF CHANGE 185

which rejects the encroachment of the
other upon the executive. His power is
limited by parliamentary privilege, free-
dom of the press, the right of taxation and
so forth. The theory was not true ; though
it represented with some accuracy the
ideals of the time.

Nor must we belittle what insight De
Lolme possessed. He saw that the early
concentration of power in the royal
hands prevented the continental type of
feudalism from developing in England;
with the result that while French nobles
were massacring each other, the English
people could unite to wrest privileges
from the superior power. He understood
that one of the mainsprings of the system
was the independence of the judges. He
realized that the party-system — he never
used the ac|;ual term — while it provides
room for men's ambitions at the same time
prevents the equation of ambition with in-
dispensability. "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

186 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

he says, with the necessity that members
should be re-elected, "has delivered into
the hands of the people at large the ex-
ercise 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 eases is
thrown upon the government. He re-
gards with admiration the supremacy of
the civil over the military arm, and the
skillful way in which, contrary to French
experience, it has been found possible to
maintain a standing army without adding
to the royal power. Nor can he fail to
admire the insight which organizes "the
agitation of the popular mind," not as
"the forerunner of violent commotions
but to "animate all parts of the state.
Therein De Lolme had grasped the real
essence of party government.

It was, of course, no more than symp-
tomatic of his time that cabinet and prime
minister should have escaped his notice.
I A more serious defect was his inability.

99

SIGNS OF CHANGE 187

with the Wilkes contest prominently in
his notice, to see that the people had as-
sumed 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 con-
sequence of their imperfect education, the
degree of information, requisite for func-
tions of this kind." Such an attitude
blinded him to the significance of the
American conflict, which he saw im-
attended 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 satisfac-
tory 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
Ijolme and Bagehot is the latter's power
to go behind the screen of statute to the
inner sources of power.

\

188 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

IV

The basis of revolutionary doctrine was
already present in England when, in 1762,
Rousseau published his Contrat Social.
With its fundamental doctrines Locke
had already made his countrymen fa-
miliar; and what was needed for the ap-
preciation of its teaching was less a renais-
sance than discontent. So soon as men are
dissatisfied with the traditional founda-
tions of the State, a gospel of nat-
ural rights is certain to make its ap-
pearance. And, once the design of
George III had been made familiar by
his treatment of Chatham and Wilkes,
the discontent did not fail to show itself.
Indeed, in the year before the publication
of Rousseau's book, Robert Wallace, a
Scottish chaplain royal, had written in his
Various Prospects (1761) a series of es-
says 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 experi-
ence it is difficult not to be impressed by
the modernist flavour of Wallace's attack.

SIGNS OF CHANGE 189

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 con- /
demned 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 legis-
lator, and of the beneficent example of
colonies upon the later Owenite model.
But his book is contemporaneous with our
own ideas rather than with the thoughts of
his generation. Nor does it seem to have
excited any general attention.

It is five years after Rousseau that we
see the first dear signs of his influence.

190 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

r~ KatuFally enough the men amongst whom
1 Ihe? new spirit spread abroad were the
^VjNi6iieoBf ormists. For more than seventy
years: they had been allowed existence
Wiittioutreoognition. None had more faith-
fully: -supported the new dynasty than
tbfty!) hfcJne had been paid less for their al-
legiauee. Their utinost effort could secure
only a Sparing mitigation of the Test Act.
I J^l of ttiem were Whigs, and the doctrines
^. X4bcke 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,
inf {Particular, gave up with willingness to
mankind what was obviously meant for
chi^mical science. A few years previously
Brown of the Estimate had submitted a
scheme for national education, in which
the essential principle was Church con-
, troL ^Priestley had answered him, and
was encouraged by friends to expand his
V argvmient into a general treatise. His
^ Essay on the First Principles of Govern-
ment appeared in 1768; and, if for
nothing else, it would be noteworthy be-
cause it was therein that the significance
of the "greatest happiness principle" first

SIGNS OF CHANGE 191

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 valu-
able interests of mankind on a broader and
firmer basis than Mr. Locke"; and the
breadth and firmness are Rousseau's con-
tribution.

Certainly we herein meet new elements.
On the very threshold of the book we meet
thfe dogma qf 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 govern-
ment ; 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. Gov-
ernment must be restrained in the in-
terests of liberty. No man can be gov-
erned 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 sov-

192 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

j ereign, and interference with their natural
V rights will justify resistance. Every gov-
' emment, he says, is "in its original prin-
ciples, 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

I course, this would bestow upon the Non-
conformists their full citizenship ; for
/ Warburton's Alliance, to attack which
\ Priestley exhausts all the resoiu'ces of his
ingenuity, has been one of the main in-
struments in their degradation. "Un-
bounded liberty in matters of religion,"
which means the abolition of the Estab-
lishment, promises to be "very favorable
to the best interests of mankind."

So far the book might well be called an
edition of Rousseau for English Non-
conformists; 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 Nonconform-
ists 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

SIGNS OF CHANGE 193

did the hampering influence of State-
restrictions. The result has been a great
difiiculty in making liberal doctrines in
England realize, until after 1870, the or-
ganic 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 per-
formed 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 prefer-
able to that of individuals ; and conse-
quently 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 ar-
bitrary will." If my neighbor assaults
me, he suggests, I may usefully call in the
police; but where the object is the dis-
covery of truth, the means of education,

\

194. ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

the method of religious belief, individual
initiative is superior to State action. The
latter produces an uniform result "incom-
patible 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 ig-
norant to fix their own ideas as the basis
of all action.

Priestley could not escape entirely the
bondage of past tradition; and the meta-
physics which Bentham abhorred are
scattered broadcast over his pages.
Nevertheless the basis upon which he de-
fended his ideas was a utilitarianism
hardly less complete than that which
Bentham made the instrument of revolu-
tion. "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

SIGNS OF CHANGE 195

attack upon religious legislation is simi-
larly based upon considerations of policy.
His view of the individual as a never-end-
ing source of fruitful innovation antici-
pates 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 in-
strument 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 Ben-
thamism 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 un-
bounded good. Even if it be said that
Priestley has all the vices of that rational-
ism which, as with Bentham, over-
simplifies every problem it encounters, it
is yet adequate to retort that a confidence

196 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

in the energies of men was better than the
complacent stagnation of the previous
age.

It is difficult to measure the precise in-
fluence 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 im-
fortunate incidents. His sinking-fimd
scheme was taken up by the younger Pitt,
and proved, though the latter believed in
it to the last, to be founded upon an arith-
metical fallacy which did not sit well upon
af ellow of the Royal Society. His sermon
on the French Revolution provoked the
He flections 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 Eng-
lish revolutionary temper. He has not,
indeed, Priestley's superb optimism; for
the rigid a priori morality of which he was
the somewhat muddled defender was less
favorable to a confidence in reason. He
had a good deal of John Brown's fear that

SIGNS OF CHANGE 197

luxury was the seed of English degenera-
tion ; the proof of which he saw in the de-
cline of the population. His figures, in
fact, were false ; but they were unessential
to the general thesis he had to make.

Price, like Priestley a leading Noncon-
formist, was stirred to print by the Ameri-
can Revolution ; and if his views were not
widely popular, his Observations on the
Nature of Civil Liberty (1776) attained
its eighth edition within a decade. This,
with its supplement Additional Observa-
tions ( 1777 ) , presents a perfectly coherent
theory. Nor is their ancestry concealed.
They represent the tradition of Lockcy
modified by the importations of Rousseau.
Price owes much to Priestley and to
Hume, and he takes sentences from Mon-
tesquieu where they aid him. But he has I
little or nothing of Priestley's utilitari-
anism 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 con-
sequence. Taxes become "free gifts for
public services" ; laws are "particular pro-

198 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

visions 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 in-
volved.

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 parhamentary sovereignty as incom-
patible 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

SIGNS OF CHANGE 199

the People." Such a system is alone com-
patible with the ends of government, since
it cannot be supposed that men "combine
into communities and institute govern-
ment" 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 sub-
ject 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 in-
alienable; and a people which has lost it
"must have a right to emancipate them-
selves 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 re-
sults of George's obstinacy.

The Essay on the Right of Property in
Land (1781) of William Ogilvie deserves
at least a passing notice. The author, who

200 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 re-
membered for his effort to reform, a col-
lege 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 in-
vasion by private ownership is a danger-
ous 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 pub-
lic 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.

SIGNS OF CHANGE 201

The result is their maintenance of land-
monopoly even though it affects the prime
material of all essential industries, pre-
vents the growth of population, and
makes the rich wealthier at the expense of
the poor. It breeds oppression and ig-
norance, and poisons improvement by
preventing individual initiative. He
points out how a nation is dominated by
its landlords, and how they have consis-
tently evaded the fiscal burdens they
should bear. Only in a return to a nation
of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real
source of an increase in happiness.

Such criticism is revolutionary enough,
though when he comes to speak of actual
changes, he had little more to propose
than a system of peasant proprietorship.
What is striking in the book is its sense of I
great, impending changes, its thorough!
grasp of the principle of utility, its reali-j v
zation of the immense agricultural im-'
provement 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 domi-
nates the State; and his interpretation of
history is throughout economic. Ogilvie

202 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

^ is one of the first of those agrarian So-
cialists who, chiefly through Spence and
Paine, are responsible for a special cur-
rent of their own in the great tide of pro-
test 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 curi-
ous 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 per-
suade 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 in-
tended to instruct the Chartists in the
secret of their oppression; and therein it
may well have contributed to the tragi-
comic 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 Scotch-
man published the book with biographical
notes that constitute one of the most

SIGNS OF CHANGE 203

amazing curiosities in English political
literature.

Against the school of Rousseau's Eng-
lish disciples it is comparatively easy to
multiply criticisms. They lacked any his-
toric sense. Government, for them, was
simply an instrument which was made and
unmade at the volition of men. How com-
plex 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 meta-
physical right which they never related to
legal facts or to political possibihty. They
pursued relentlessly the logical conclu-
sions of the doctrines they abhorred with-
out 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 them-
selves 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

204. ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

there sufficient allowance in their attitude
for those limiting conditions of circum-
stance of which every statesman must of
necessity take account. They occupy
themselves, that is to say, so completely
with staatslehre that they do not admit the
mollifying influence of politik. They
search for principles of universal right,
without the perception that a right which
is to be universal must necessarily be so
general in character as to be useless in its
application.

Yet such defects must not blind us to
the general rightness of their insight.
They were protesting against a system
strongly upheld on grounds which now
appear to have been simply indefensible.
The business of government had been
made the private possession of a privi-
leged class; and eagerness for desirable
change was, in the mass, absent from the
minds of most men engaged in its direc-
tion. 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 in-
stance of the king, had blinded the eyes of

206 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

the fortunes of Europe and America be-
fore 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 revo-
lution had passed, the cause for which they
stood was found to have permeated all
classes save that which had all to lose by
learning.

We must not, however, commit the

j error of thinking of Price and Priestley as
representing more than an important seg-
ment 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 sys-
tem ; 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 rep-
resents the sturdy nationalism of Arbuth-
not's John Bull, the unreasoned preju-

SIGNS OF CHANGE 207

dice 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 com- .
plain. His Treatise on Civil Government \f
( 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 fol-
lowers. 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 an-
alyses 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 an-
archists. He has no sympathy with the
state of nature; the noble savage, on in-
vestigation, 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

208 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

that the actual governors can be dismissed
when any eccentric happens to take ex-
ception to their views. He has no sym-
pathy with parliamentary reform. Give
Ithe mob an increase of power, he says, and
nothing is to be expected but outrage and
violence. He thinks the constitution very
well as it is, and those who preach the evils
of corruption ought to prove their charges
instead of blasphemously asserting that
the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Upon America Tucker has doctrines all
his own. He does not doubt that the
Americans deserve the worst epithets that
can be showered upon them. Their right
to self-government he denied as stoutly as
ever George III himself could have de-
sired. But not for one moment would he
fight them to compel their return to
British allegiance. If the American col-
onies 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

SIGNS OF CHANGE 209

seem to him quite useless. They ever are,
he says, and ever were, "a drain to and an
incumbrance on the Mother-country, re-
quiring perpetual and expensive nursing
in their infancy, and becoming headstrong
and ungovernable in proportion as thej?-
grow up." All wise relations depend upon
self-interest, and that needs no compul-
sion. If Gibraltar and Port Mahon and
the rest were given up, the result would
be "multitudes of places . . . abolished,
jobs and contracts effectually pre-
vented, millions of money saved, universal
industry encouraged, and the influence of
the Crown reduced to that mediocrity it
ought to have." Here is pure Manches-
terism 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 Ire-
land.

No word on Toryism would be com-
plete without mention of Dr. Johnson, y
Here, indeed, we meet less witlTopihion
than with a set of gloomy prejudices, ac-
ceptable only because of the stout honesty
of the source from which they come. He

210 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

thought life a poor thing at the best and
took a low view of human nature. "The
notion of liberty," he told the faithful
Boswell, "amuses the people of England
and helps to keep off the tedium vitae/^
The idea of a society properly organized
into ranks and societies he always es-
teemed highly. "I am a friend to sub-
ordination," 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 "nega-
tion 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 lib-
erty 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

SIGNS OF CHANGE 211

of the Crown too small. Toleration he
considered due to an inapt distinction be-
tween 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 as-
cribed to selfish faction ; and in his Tcuva- \^
Hon no Tyranny (1775) he defended the
British government root and branch upon
his favorite ground of the necessity of
subordination. He was willing, he said,
to love all mankind except an American.
Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of
Burke, and he found pleasure in an ac-
quaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his
admiration for rank and fortune, is there
a single element of meanness. The man
who wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield
need never fear the charge of abasement.
He knew that there was* "a remedy in
human nature that will keep us safe under
every form of government." He defined
a courtier in the Idler as one "whose busi-
ness 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

212 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

the talk of degeneracy that men such as
Brown had made popular. There is, in-
deed, in all his political observations a
V strong sense of the virtue of order, and a
I 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. Rous-
seau 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 com-
plex world; and it was because the age
refused to look it in the face that it in-
vited the approach of revolution.

CHAPTER VI

BURKE

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 or-
ganized quarrel which, at least in theory,
is due to the clash of antagonistic prin-
ciple. The merit, indeed, is largely acci-
dental ; 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 wid-
owhood of Queen Victoria, these rather
than deliberate foresight have secured the
elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet
the first twenty-five years of George Ill's
reign represent the deliberate effort of an
obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty
years and secure once more the balance of

214 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

power. Nor was the effort defeated with-
out a struggle which went to the root of
constitutional principle.

And George III attempted the realiza-
tion of his ambition at a time highly favor-
able to its success. Party government had
lost much credit during Walpole's admin-
istration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret
and the elder Pitt were all of them dis-
satisfied with a system which depended for
its existence upon the exclusion of able
men from power. A generation of cor-
rupt 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 influ-
ence, 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 al-
ready a tolerable certainty of his success.
For more than forty years the Tories had

BtFRKE 215

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 des-
potism. The narrow, obstinate and un-
generous mind of George had been fed on
high notions of the power he might exert.
He had been taught the kingship of Bo-
lingbroke's glowing picture ; and a reading
in manuscript of the seventh chapter of
Blackstone's first book can only have con-
firmed the ideals he found there. Nor
was it obvious that a genuine kingship
would have been worse than the oligarchy
of the great Whig families.

What made it worse, and finally im-
possible, 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 ex-
cessively ignorant and as obstinate as ar- /
bitrary. He trusted no one but himself,
and he totally misunderstood the true na-
ture 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*

\

216 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

wrong about Wilkes, wrong about
America, wrong about Ireland, wrong
about France. He demanded servants in-
stead of ministers. He attacked every
measure for the purification of the po-
litical 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 great-
ness. It was not likely that the mass of
men would have seen with regret the de-
struction of the aristocratic monopoly in
politics. The elder Pitt might well have
based a ministry of the court upon a broad
bottom of popularity. The House of
Commons, as the event proved, could be
as subservient to the king as to his
minister.

Yet the design failed; and it failed be-
cause, with characteristic stupidity, the

BURKE 217

king did not know the proper instruments xy
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 proscrip-
tion 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 iddj of the people
despite his hatred. He raised Wilkes to
be the champion of representative govern-
ment and of personal liberty. He lost
America and it was not his fault that Ire-
land was retained. The early popularity
he received he never recovered imtil in-
creasing years and madness had made him
too pathetic for dislike. The real result
of his attempt was to compel attention
once again to the foundations of politics; -
and George's effort, in the light of his
immense failures, could not, in the nature
of things, survive that analysis.

Not, of course, that George ever lacked
defenders. As early as 1761, the old rival
of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage

218 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

had condemned to obsolescence, published
his Seasonable Hints from an Honest
Man on the new Reign. Pulteney urged
the sovereign no longer to be content with
the "shadow of royalty." He should use
his "legal prerogatives" to check "the il-
legal claims of factious oligarchy." Gov-
ernment had become the private posses-
sion 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 ^ware that dis-
tinctions of party were now merely nom-
inal. 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 Tol-
eration and the Establishment were of the
essence of the Constitution. Were once
the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corrup-
tion 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 con-
federacies." The tone is Bolingbroke's,
and it was the lesson George had. insist-

BURKE 219

ently heard from early youth. How sin-
ister was the advice, men did not see imtil
the elder Pitt was in political exile, with
Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants
threatenmg the whole basis of past lib-
erties.

The first writer who pointed out in im-
mistakable terms the meaning of the new
synthesis was Junius. That his anonym-
ity concealed the malignant talent of Sir
Philip Francis seems now beyond denial.
Jimius, indeed, can hardly claim a place
in the history of political ideas. His
genius lay not in the discussion of prin-
ciple but the dissection of personality.
His power lay in his style and the knowl-
edge that enabled him to inform the gen-
eral 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 taxa-
tion; and he maintained without perceiv-
ing what it meant that a nomination
borough was a freehold beyond 'the com-
petence 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

I

\l

220 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

the nature of the issue and he was a power-
ful instrument in the discomfiture of the
king. He won a new audience for po-
litical conflict and that audience was the
|imenfranchised 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 impos-
sible. English government was a secret
conflict in which the entrance of spec-
tators 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 vituper-
ation 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 revenge-
ful hate and insolent ambition.

BURKE 221

II

Yet, in the long run, the real weapon ^
which defeated George was the ideas of
Edmund Burke; for he gave to the po- j \/
litical conflict its real place in philosophy.
There is no immortality save in ideas ; and
it was Burke who gave a permanent form
to the debate in which he was the liberal
protagonist. His career is illustrative at
once of the merits and defects of English
politics in the eighteenth century. The
son of an Irish Protestant lawyer and a
Catholic mother, he served, after learning
what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer
him, a long apprenticeship to politics in
the upper part of Grub Street. The story
that he applied, along with Hume, for
Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems
apocryphal; though the Dissertation on
the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756)
shows his singular fitness for the studies
that Hutcheson had made the special pos-
session of the Scottish school. It was in
Grub Street that he appears to have at-
tained that amazing amount of varied yet
profound knowledge which made him
without equal in the House of Commons.

222 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

His earliest production was a Vindication
of Natural Society (1756) , written in the
manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and suc-
cessful enough in its imitative satire not
only to deceive its immediate public, but
also to become the basis of Godwin's Po-
litical Justice. After a vain attempt to
serve in Ireland with "Single- Speech"
Hamilton, he became the private secretary
to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the
one section of the Whig party to which an
honorable record still remained. That
connection secured for him a seat in
Parliament at the comparatively late age
of thirty-six; and henceforward, until his
death in 1797, he was among its leading
members. His intellectual pre-eminence,
indeed, seems from the very outset to have
been recognized on all hands; though he
was still, in the eyes of the system, enough
of an outsider to be given, in the short
months during which he held office, the
minor office of Paymaster-General, with-
out 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

BURKE 223

and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quo-
tations, Burke has endured as the perma-
nent manual of political wisdom without ^
which statesmen are as sailors on an un-
charted sea.

For it has been the singular good for-
tune of Burke not merely to obtain ac-
ceptance as the apostle of philosophic f
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, detrac-
tion 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 al-
lowed the spirit of party to cloud his judg-
ment. His relations with Lord Chatham
give lamentable proof of the violence of

224 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

his personal antipathies. As an orator,
his speeches are often turgid, wanting in
self-control, and full of those ample di-
gressions in which Mr. Gladstone de-
lighted 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, un-
married, 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
thev involve.

He was a member of' no school of
thought, and there is no influence to whom
his outlook can be directly traced. His
politics, indeed, bear upon their face the
preoccupation with the immediate prob-
lems of the House of Commons. Yet
through them all the principles that

BURKE 225

emerge form a consistent whole. Nor is
this all. He hated oppression with all the
passion of a generous moral natm*e. He
eared 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 Ire-
land. With less width of mind than
Hume and less intensity of gaze than
Adam Smith, he yet had a width and in-
tensity which, fused with his own imagina-
tive 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 ^ stainless and a
splendid record. There are men in Eng-
lish politics to whom a greater immediate

t\

226 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

influence may be ascribed, just as in po-
litical philosophy he cannot claim the per-
sistent inspiration of Hobbes and Locke.
But in that middle ground between the
facts and speculation his supremacy is un-
; approached. There had been nothing like
him before in English politics ; and in con-
tinental politics Royer CoUard alone has
something of his moral fibre, though his
practical insight was far less profound.
Hamilton had Burke's full grasp of po-
litical 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 as-
pect of the State. Yet there is no ques-
tion with which he dealt that he did not
leave the richer for his enquiry.

Ill

The liberalism of Burke is most ap-
parent 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 con-
stitutional reform was in debate no man

BURKE 227

saw more clearly than he the evils that
needed remedy ; though, to a later genera-
tion, his own schemes bear the mark of
timid conservatism. In the last decade of
his life he encomitered the greatest cata-
clysm unloosed upon Europe since the
Reformation, and it is not too much to
say that at every point he missed the es-
sence 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 inyeighed,
forty barren years might well have been a
fruitful epoch of wise and continuous re-
form. 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

228 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

be primed away. Moments, indeed, there
are of a deeper vision, and it is not untrue
to say that the best answer to Burke's con-
servatism is to be found in his own pages.
But he was too much the apostle of order
to watch with cahn the struggles involved
in the overthrow of privilege. He had
too much the sense of a Divine Providence
^ taking thought for the welfare of men to
interfere with violence in his handiwork.
The tinge of caution is never absent, even
from his most liberal moments; and he
was willing to endure great evil if it
seemed dangerous to estimate the cost of
change.

His American speeches are the true
text-book for colonial administration. He
put aside the empty plea of right which
satisfied legal pedants like George Gren-
ville. What moved him was the tragic
fashion in which men clung to the shadow
of a power they could not maintain in-
stead of searching for the roots of free-
dom. He never concealed from himself
that the success of America was bound up
with the maintenance of English liberties.
"Armies," he said manv vears later, "first
victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict

BURKE 229

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 lib-
erties of England itself." He had firm
hold of that insidious danger which be-
littles freedom itself in the interest of cur-
tailing some special desire. "In order to
prove that the Americans have no right to
their liberties," he said in the famous
Speech on Conciliation with America
(1775) , "we are every day endeavoring to
subvert the maxims which preserve the
whole spirit of our own." The way for
the later despotism of the younger Pitt,
was, as Burke saw, prepared by those who
persuaded Englishmen of the paltry char-
acter of the American contest. His own
receipt was sounder. In the Speech on
American T oration (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. "No-
body 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/' "Mag-

230 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

nanimity 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 in-
terest to make them happy." The prob-
lem, 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 ap-
parent to every first-class mind in Eng-
land. But the obstinate king prevailed;
and Burke's great protest remained no
more than material for the legislation of
the future. Yet it was something that
ninety years after his speech the British
North America Act should have given his
dreams full substance.

Ireland had always a place apart in
Burke's affections, and when he first en-
tered the House of Commons he admitted
that uppermost in his thoughts was the

BURKE 231

desire to assist its freedom. He saw that
here, as in America, no man will be argued
into slavery. A government which defied
the fmidamental 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 Protes-
tant control, he said in the Letter to Sir
Hercules Langrishe (1792), was "well
fitted for the oppression, impoverishment
and degradation of a people, and the de-
basement in them of himian nature itself.'*
The Catholics paid their taxes; they
served with glory in the army and navy.
Yet they were denied a share in the com-
monwealth. "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 pro-
scriptive exclusions ; sooner or later it will
destroy them, or they will destroy the con-
stitution." The argument that the body
of Catholics was prone to sedition was no
reason to oppress them. "No man will '

232 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 theip reasonable wishes
as so many claims." To neglect them was
to have a nation full of uneasiness ; and the
end was bound to be disaster.

There is nothing more noble in Burke's
career than his long attempt to mitigate
the evils of Company rule in India. Re-
search 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 main-
tained. He was the first English states-
man fully to understand the moral import
of the problem of subject races; and if he
did not make impossible the Joseph Sed-
leys of the future, at least he flung an
eternal challenge to their malignant com-
placency. He did not ask the abandon-
ment 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 con-

BURKE 233

quering race must abide by a moral code.
A lie was a lie whether its victim be black
or white. The Em-opean 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 govern-
ing India well whicb will not of necessity
become the means of governing Great
Britain ill, a ground is laid for their
eternal separation, but none for sacriiScing
the people of that country to our consti-
tution." 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 instru-
ments 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 pros-
pect of new flights of birds of prey and
passage, with appetites continually renew-
ing 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

234 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

India drink the intoxicating draught of
authority and dominion before their heads
are able to bear it, and as they are full
gi'own 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 peni-
tence 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

BURKE 235

their wrcmgdoing 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 ab-
horred the politics of prestige. He knew
the difficulties involved in administering
distant territories, the ignorance and
apathy of the public, the consequent ero-
sion of responsibility, the chance that
wrong will fail of discovery. But he did
jiot 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 gen-
eral 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

I

236 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

connected with self-government.' Yet the
latest lesson is no more than the final out-
come of his teaching.

IV

A background so consistent as this in
the inflexible determination to moralize
political action resulted in a noble edifice.
Yet, through it all, the principles of policy
are rather implied than admitted. It was
when he came to deal with domestic prob-
lems and the French Revolution that
Burke most clearly showed the real trend
of his thought. That trend is unmistak-
able. Burke was a utilitarian who wq^
convinced that what was old was valuable
by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity.
The State appeared to him an organic com-
pound that came but slowly to its full
splendour. It was easy to destroy ; crea-
tion was impossible. Political philosophy
was nothing for him but accurate general-
ization 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 determi-

BURKE 237

nation of policy. He had no doubt that p'
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 phil- --^
o$ophy. He never doubted that religion
was the foundation of the English State. ^^
"Englishmen," he said in the Reflections
on the French Revolution ( 1790) , "know,
and what is better, we feel inwardly, that
religion is the basis of civil society and the
source of all good and of all comfort."
The utterance is characteristic, not merely
in its depreciation of reason, but in its
ultimate reliance upon a mystic explana-
tion of social facts. Nothing was more
alien from Burke's temper than deductive
thinking in politics. The only safeguard
he could find was in empiricism.

This hatred of abstraction is, of course,
the basis of his earliest publication; but it
remained with him to the end. He would
not discuss America in terms of right. "I
do not enter into these metaphysical dis-
tinctions," he said in the Speech on
American Tctxation, "I hate the very
sound of them." "One sure symptom of
an ill-conducted state," he wrote in the

238 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

Reflections, "is the propensity of the
^ people to resort to theories." "It is al-
ways to be lamented," he said in a Speech
on the Duration of Parliament, "when
men are driven to search into the founda-
tions 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 mor-
ality," he said in the Appeal from the
New to the Old Whigs (1791), "are not
like ideal lines of mathematics. They are
broad and deep as well as long. They
admit of exceptions; they demand modi-
fications. These exceptions and modifi-
cations are made, not by the process of
V logic but by the rules of prudence. Pru-
dence is not only first in rank of the
virtues political and moral, but she is the
director, the regulator, the standard of
them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw
the obvious conclusion. "This," he said,
"is the true touchstone of all theories
which regard man and the affairs of men
— does it suit his nature in general, does
it suit his nature as modified by his
habits?"

BURKE 239

Of the truth of this general attitude it
is difficult to make denial. But when
Burke came to apply it to the British Con-
stitution 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 com-
munity" ; he admitted that popular revolt
is so much the outcome of suflPering that
in any dispute between government and
people, the presumption is at least equal
in the latter's favor. He urged the ac-
ceptance of Grenville's bill for improving
the method of decision upon disputed
elections. He made a magnificent de-
fence of the popular cause in the Middle- .
sex election. He was in favor of the
publication of parliamentary debates and
of the voting lists in divisions. He sup-
ported almost with passion the ending of
that iniquitous system by which the en-
franchisement of revenue officers gave
government a corrupt reservoir of elec-
toral support. His Speech on Eco-
nomical Reform (1780) was the prelude
to a nobly-planned and successful attack
upon the waste of the Civil list.

240 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

, 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 in-
terest 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 unexcep-
tionable; and it shows Burke's admirable
grasp of the practical application of at-
tractive theories to the event. But it is to
be read in conjunction with a general hos-
tility 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

BURKE 241

among them of the corps of schemers
, . . who do us infinite mischief by per-
suading many sober and well-meaning
people that we have designs inconsistent
with the Constitution left us by our fore-
fathers." "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 vir-
tuous 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 frame-
work of the parliamentary system seemed
to him excellent. He deplored all criti-
cism of Parliament, and even the discus-
sion of its essentials. "Our representa-
tion," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the

242 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

necessary imperfections of human affairs
and of human creatures will suffer it to
be." It was in the same temper that he
resisted all effort at the political relief of
the Protestant dissenters. "The machine
itself," he had said, "is well enough to
answer any good purpose, provided the
materials were sound"; and he never
moved from that opinion.

Burke's attitude was obsolete even
while he wrote ; yet the suggesti veness of
his very errors makes examination of their
ground important. Broadly, he was .pro-
testing against natural right in the name
of„ expediency:4^„ 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 ad-
mission of this principle would have
meant the overthrow of the British con-
stitution. 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 affec-
tion for government upon which peace
and security depend. Here was an effort

v/

BURKE 243

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 imiversals."
The question for him was not the abstract
rightness of the system upon some set of
a priori principles but whether, on the
whole, that system worked for the happi-
ness 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 so-
ciety. Government, for him, was the gen-^
eral 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 unimpor-
tant compared to the problem of their ap-
plication. "The major," he said of all
political premises, "makes a ponipous
figure in the battle, but the victory de-
pends upon the little minor of circum-
stances."

To abstract natural right he therefore ^
opposed prescription. The presumption
of wisdom is on the side of the past, and

244 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

when we change, we act at our peril.
"Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the
most solid of all titles, not only to prop-
erty, but to what is to secure that prop-
erty, 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 opportimity to accumulate this
rightness our disposition should be to pre-
serve 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 de-
formities of the British Constitution. So,
too, his main attack on atheism is its im-
plication that "everything is to be dis-

BURKE 245

cussed." He does not say that all which
isjhia^ ri^tness in it; butat least he^urges * ' ,

^ ^atto doubt it is to doubt the construction \/
of a past experience which built according »
Jo 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 hun the highest
good. "Truth," he said, "may be far

nSettef . . . but as we have scarcely ever
that certainty in the one that we have in
the other, I would, unless the truth were
evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which
has in her company charity, the highest of
the virtues."

Such, a philosophy, indeed, so barely
stated, would seem a defence of political
immobility; but Burke attempted safe-

"^giiafds against that danger. His insis-
tence upon the superior value of past ex-
perience was balanced by a general ad-
mission that particular circumstances
must alwayjs govern the immediate de-
cision, "^Vhen the reason of old estab-
lishments is gone," he said in his Speech
on Economical Reform, "it is absurd to
preserve nothing but the burden of them."
"A disposition to preserve and an ability

\

J

246 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

to improve/' he wrote in the Reflections
on the French Revolution^ "taken to-
gether would be my standard of a states-
man." But that "ability to improve"
conceals two principles of which Burke
never relaxed his hold. "All the refor-
mations we have hitherto made," he said,
"have proceeded upon the principle of
reference to antiquity"; and the Appeal
from the New to the Old Whigs, which is
the most elaborate exposition of his gen-
eral 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.

j 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 prin-
ciples, could they but be purged of their
grosser deformities. He knew too well
how little reason is wont to enter into the

BURKE 247

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 influ-
ence as a public trust, delicate in their
sense of honor, and acting only from mo-
tives of right — these seemed to him the
men who should with justice exercise po-
litical 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 aris-

248 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

tocracy delegated to do its work by the
mass of men was the best form of govern-
ment 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 charac-
teristic essence of property," he wrote in
the Reflections, " . . . is to be unequal" ;
and he thought the perpetuation of that
inequality by inheritance "that which
tends most to the perpetuation of society
itself." The system was difficult to main-
tain, and it must be put out of the reach
of popular temptation, "Our constitu-
tion," he said in the Present Discontents,
"stands on a nice equipoise, with sharp
precipices and deep waters on all sides of
it. In removing it from a dangerous lean-
ing 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 \yith ability ; and there are many

BURKE 249

passages in which he urges the consequent
special representation which the adequate
defence of property requires.

The argument, at bottom, is common to
all thinkers over-impressed by the sanctity
of past experience. Hegel and Savigny
in Germany, Taine and Renan in France,
Sir Henry Maine and Lecky in England,
have all urged what is in effect a similar
plea. We must not break what Bagehot
called the cake of custom, for men have
been trained to its digestion, and new food
breeds trouble. Laws are the offspring of
the original genius of a people, and while
we may renovate, we must not imduly re-
form. The true idea of national develop-
ment 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 institu-
tions the fabric of society would be dis-
solved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon
the performance of actions defined in pre-
conceived channels; and if we obeyed
those novel impulses of right which seem,
at times, to contradict our inheritance, we

250 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

should disturb beyond repair the intricate
equilibrium of countless ages. The ex-
perience of the past rather than the desires
of the present is thus the true guide to
our policy. "We ought," he said in a
famous sentence, "to venerate where we
are unable presently to comprehend.''

It is easy to see why a mind so attuned
recoiled from horror at the French Revo-
lution. There is something almost sinister
in the destiny which confronted Burke
with the one great spectacle of the eigh-
teenth century which he was certain not
merely to misunderstand but also to hate.
He could not endure the most fragmen-
tary 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 represen-
tation; 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 jus-
tice which he most deeply abhorred. The

^^ BURKE 251

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 con-
vinced lay at the root of good gave way
before a general scepticism which, from
the outset of his life, he had declared in-
compatible 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 con-
vinced that theirs was a specific of uni-
versal application. Their disciples in
England seemed in the same diabolic
frenzy with themselves. In a moment of
time, the England which had been the ex-
ample to Europe of ordered popular lib-
erty became, for these enthusiasts, only

252 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 Revolu-
tion.

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 move-
ment 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

BURKE 253

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 imderlies the constitutional
experiments of the next few years he ex-
posed in a sentence which has in it the
essence of political wisdom. "The nature
of man is intricate" ; he wrote in the Be-
flections, "the objects of society are of the
greatest possible complexity; and there-
fore no simple disposition or direction of
power can be suitable either to man's na-
ture or to the quality of his affairs." The
note recurs in substance throughout his
criticism. Much of its application, in-
deed, will not stand for one moment the
test of inquiry; as when, for instance, he
correlates the monarchical government of
France with the English constitutional
system and extols the perpetual virtues of
1688. The French made every effort to
find the secret of English principles, but
the roots were absent from their national
experience.

A year after the publication of the
Me flections he himself perceived the nar-

254 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

rowness of that judgment. In the
Thoughts on French Affairs (1791) he
saw that the essence of the Revolution was
its foundation in theoretic dogma. It was
like nothing else in the history of the world
except the Reformation ; which last event
it especially resembles in its genius for
self -propagation. Herein he has already
envisaged the importance of that ^^patrie
intellectuelle^' which Tocqueville empha-
sized as born of the Revolution. That led
Burke once again to insist upon the pe-
culiar 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 na-
ture from their political equation; for
general ideas can find embodiment in in-
stitutional forms only after they have been
moulded by a thousand varieties of cir-
cumstance. The French created an uni-
versal 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

BURKE 255

that, despite themselves, they came rather
to destroy than to fulfil. Napoleon, as
Burke prophesied, reaped the harvest of
their failure.

Nor was he less right in his denuncia-
tion of that distrust of the past which
played so large a part in the revolution-
ary consciousness. "We are afraid," he
wrote in the Reflections, "to put men to
live and trade each on his own private
stock of reason, because we suspect that
this stock in each man is small, and that
the individuals would do better to avail
themselves of the general bank and cap-
ital of nations and of ages." Of Sieyes'
building constitutions overnight, this is no
imfair picture; but it points a \ more gen-
eral truth never long absent from Burke's
mind. Man is for him so much the crea-
ture 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.

256 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

That which they had conceived in the gray
abstractness of their speculations was too
little related to what the average French-
man knew and desired to be enduring.
Burke looks with sober admiration at the
way in which the English revolution re-
lated 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 mo-
tives which underlie all human effort are,
he thought, sufficiently constant to compel
regard. That upon which they feed sub-
mits to change; but the effort is slow and
the disappointments many. The Revolu-
tion taught the populace the thirst for
power. But it failed to remember that
sense of continuity in human effort with-
out which new constructions are built on
sand. The power it exercised lacked that
horizon of the past through which alone it
suffers limitation to right ends.

The later part of Burke's attack upon
the Revolution does not belong to political
philosophy. No man is more responsible
than he for the temper which drew Eng-
land into war. He came to write rather
with the zeal of a fanatic waging a holy

BURKE 257

war than in the temper of a statesman
confronted with new ideas. Yet even the
Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) have
flashes of the old, incomparable insight;
and they show that even in the midst of
his excesses he did not war for love of it.
So that it is permissible to think he did
not lightly pen those sentences on peace
which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert
of extravagant rlietoric. "War never
leaves where it fomid 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.

258 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

V

Criticism of Burke's theories can be
made from at least two angles. It is easy
to show that his picture of the British Con-
stitution was remote from the facts even
when he wrote. Every change that he op-
posed 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.jij)nce
i| of his omissions and of the underlying a&r
sumptions of what he wrote. Burke came
to his maturity upon the eve of the Indus-
trial 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 signifi-
cance. The vast agrarian changes of the
time contained, as it appears, no special
moment even for him who burdened him-
self unduly to restore the Beaconsfield es-
tate. No man was more eager than he
that the public should be admitted to the

BURKE 259

mysteries of political debate ; yet he stead-
fastly refused to draw the obvious infer-
ence 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 profoimdly distrusted
was itself the offspring of that contemp-
tible worship of expediency which Black-
stone generalized into a legalistic jargon.
Men never move to the adumbration of
general right until the conquest of po-
litical 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 ad-
mit 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 him-
self explained why the Whig oligarchy
was obsolete ; yet nothing would induce him
ever to realize that the alternative to aris-
tocratic government is democracy and
that its absence was the cause of that dis-
quiet of which he realized that Wilkes was
but the symptom.

260 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 in-
sisted, the immediate offspring of meta-
physic fancy, but the result of a
determination to end the malignant wrong
of centuries. A power that knew no re-
sponsibility, war and intolerance that
derived only from the accidental caprice
of the court, arrest that bore no relation
to offence, taxation inversely proportion-
ate to the ability to pay, these were the
prescriptive privileges that Burke invited
his generation to accept as part of the ac-
cumulated 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.

BURKE 261

the same is true of England. The con-
stitution 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 ex-
crescences of a noble ideal, were for them
its inner essence ; and where they could not
reform they were willing to destroy.

The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as
much the product of the past as the very
fesfitutions it came to condemn. The in-
novations 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 ad-
mit the uses to which his doctrine of pre-

262 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

scription was bound to be put in the hands
of selfish and unscrupulous mai. No one
will object to privilege for a Chatham;
but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a
different thing, and Burke's doctrine safe-
guards 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 re-
ligious 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 ad-
mirable if all statesmen were so wise as
Burke; but in the hands of lesser men it
becomes no more than the protective ar-
mour of vested interests into the ethics of
which it refuses us leave to examine.

That suspicion of thought is integral to
Burke's philosophy, and it deserves more
examination than it has received. In part
it is a rejection of the Benthamite position
that man is a reasoning animal. It puts
its trust in habit as the chief source of
human action ; and it thus is distrustful of
thought as leading into channels to which
the nature of man is not adapted. Nov-

BURKE 263

elty, 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 mate^'tts venture into the
imtried places to -wluqh 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 in-
adequate. If thought is simply a reserve
power in society, its strength must obvi-
ously depend upon common acceptance;
and that can only come when some routine
has failed to satisfy the impulses of men.
But we may urge a difficulty that is even
more decisive. No system of habits can
ever hope to endure long in a world where
the cumulative power of memory enables
change to be so swift ; and no system of
habits can endure at all unless its under-
lying 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

264 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

the sponsor would here deprive the mass
of men of virtue. Yet in modem civiliza-
tion the whole strength of any custom
depends upon exactly that consciousness
of right which Burke restricted to his aris-
tocracy. Our real need is less the auto-
matic 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 ac-
ceptance. 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 de-
stroys the finer side of civilized life. It
may leave a stratum to whom its riches
have been discovered; but it leaves the
mass of men soulless automata without
spontaneous response to the chords struck
by another hand.

BURKE 266

Burke's answer would, of course, have
been that he was not a democrat. He did
not trust the people and he rated their
capacity as low. He thought of the people
— it was obviously a generalization from
his time — as consistently prone to dis-
order and checked only by the force of
ancient habit. Yet he has himself sup-
plied the answer to that attitude. "My
observation," he said in his Speech on the
East India Bill, "has furnished me with
nothing that is to be foimd in any habits
of life or education which tends wholly to
disqualify men for the functions of gov-
ernment." 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 rep-
resentation. Indeed, if proof were hel'e
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

266 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

too intimate to permit with safety the ex-
clusion 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 agree-
ment that great sentence of Sully's which
traces popular violence to popular suffer-
ing. No one can watch the economic
struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries or calculate the pain they have
involved to humble men, without admit-
ting that they represent the final protest
of an outraged mind against oppression
too intolerable to be borne. Burke him-
self, 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 ex-
clusion 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.

BURKE 267

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 some-
thing 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 pic-
tured for them. The answer to a morally
bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the
overwhelming effort required in its puri-
fication when the plaintiff is the people;
for the mere fact that the people is the
plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness

268 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

for power. Burke gave no hint of how
the level of his governing class could be
maintained. He said nothing of what ed-
ucation might accomplish for the people.
He did not examine the obvious conse-
quences 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 advo-
cates . . . stewards of petty local ju-
risdictions . . . the fomenters and
conductors of the petty war of village vex-
ation" legislated, out of their inexperience,
for the world. Their resolution, their
constancy, their high sense of the national
need, were precisely the qualities Burke
demanded in his governing class; and the
States-General did not move from the
straight path he laid down until they met
with intrigue from those of whom Burke
became the licensed champion.
. Nor is it in the least clear that his em-
phasis 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

BURKE 269

clear avowal of. the metaphysic it implied.
Nothing is more-greatly wanted in polit-
ical inquiry than discovery of that "intu-
ition 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
imiversal formulae. It needed to state the
rights demanded in terms of the social in-
terests they involved rather than in the
abstract ethic they implied. But the de-
mands 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 philo-
sophic form to a political strategy where-
in, 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 meta-

270 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

physics, to the Reflections, without feeling
that Burke failed to move them from theu-
main position. Expediency may be ad-
mirable 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 elim-
ination than their index; and we must
penetrate within their recesses before we
have the full materials for judgment.

Considered in this fashion, the case for
natural rights is surely unanswerable.
The things that men desire correspond, in
some rough fashion, to the things they
need. Natural rights are nothing more
than the armour evolved to protect their
vital interests. Upon the narrow basis of
legal history it is, of course, impossible to
protect them. History is rather the record
of the thwarting of human desire than of
its achievement. But upon the value of
certain things there is a sufficient and con-
stant opinion to give us assurance that
repression will ultimately involve disorder.
Nor is there any difference between the

BURKE 271

classes of men in this regard. Forms, in-
deed, 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 experi-
ence. They come, of course, mainly from
men who have been excluded from inti-
mate contact with the fruits of power.
Nonconformists in religion, workers with-
out 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 in-
adequacy in the substance of the state, in-
adequacy neglect of which has led to the
cataclysms of historic experience. The
unwillingness of Burke to examine into
their foundation reveals his lack of moral
insight into the problem he confronted.

That lack of insight must, of course, be
given some explanation; and its cause
seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic out-

272 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

look. He was prof ound]^ jreli^ous ; and

he did not doubt that the order oi the urn-

■•>•'••■ ■-■■■--"■-■»•" ■■>-''^' "» > '"' '* '" * ' """f^ III,

verse was the command of God. It was,
as a consequence. Benefi cent; and to de ny '*
its validity was, for him, to doubt the wis-
dom 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 sacri-
fice 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 re-
ward. What we are is thus the expression
of his goodness; and there is a real sense
in which Burke may be said to have main-
tained the inherent rightness of the exist-
ing 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 op-
posed to truth is surely part of the same
attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect
this backgroimd with his antagonism to
the French Revolution. What there was

BURKE 273

most distressing to him was the over-
throwal of the Church, and he did not hesi-
tate, in very striking fashion, to connect
revolutionary opinion with infidehty. In-
deed Burke, like Locke, seems to have
been convinced that a social sense was im-
possible in an atheist; and his Letters on
a Regicide Peace have a good deal of that
relentless illogic which made de Maistre
connect the first sign of dissent from ul-
tramontanism with the road to a denial of
all faith. Nothing is more difficult than
to deal with a thinker who has had a reve-
lation ; and this sense that the universe was
a divine mystery not to be too nearly
scrutinized by man grew greatly upon
Burke in his later years. It was not an
attitude which reason could overthrow;
for its first principle was an awe in the
presence of facts to which reason is a
stranger.

There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic
idealism which made him, like later
thinkers of the school, regard existing
difficulties with something akin to com-
placent benevolence. What interested
him was the idea of the English State;
and whatever, as he thought, deformed it.

274 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 phil-
osophy that it should come to the exami-
nation of facts in so optimistic a temper.
It never sufficiently realizes that in the
transition from theoretic purpose to prac-
tical realization a significant transforma-
tion 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 benef-
icent 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 de-
fects do not at any point impair the ulti-
mate integrity of the social bond.

Yet it is surely evident that in the heat
and stress of social life, we cannot afford
so long a period as the basis for our judg-
ment. We may well enough regard the

BURKE 276

corruption of the monarchy under the
later Hanoverians as the necessary pre-
lude to its purification under Victoria ; but
that does not make it any the less cor-
rupt. We may even see how a monistic
view of society is possible to one who, like
Burke, is uniquely occupied with the pub-
lic good. But the men who, like Muir and
Hardy in the treason trials of the Revolu-
tion, think rather in terms of the existing
disharmonies than the beauty of the pur-
pose upon which they rest, are only human
if they think those disharmonies more real
than the purpose they do not meet. They
were surely to be pardoned if, reading the
Reflections of Burke, they regarded class
distinctions as more vital than their har-
mony of interest, when they saw the
tenacity with which privileges they did
not share were defended. It is even pos-
sible to imderstand 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 discon-
tinuity was vital. They could not but ask
for happiness in their own individual lives

276 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 ac-
tive participation in power, such happi-
ness must go unfulfilled. The State, in
fact, may have the noblest piu-pose; but
its object is attempted by agents who are
also mortal men. The basis of theh-
scrutiny became at once pragmatic. The
test of allegiance to established institu-
tions 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.*

VI

No man was more deeply hostile to the
early politics of the romantic movement,
to the Contrat Social of Rousseau and the
Political Justice of Godwin, than was

1 Cf. my Authority in the Modern State, pp. fi5-9-

BURKE 277

Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the
romantics that Burke's fundamental in-
fluence 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 di-
rected 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 ad-
mirable corrective in historical politics
thatv.the contrast they afford.

It is easy to praise Burke and easier
still to miss the greatness of his effort.
Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless
to live rather as the author of some

278 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 con-
tempt for the results of reasonable inquiry
is a ceaseless lesson in the virtue of con-
sistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His
disregard of popular desire suggests the
fatal ease with which we neglect the
opinion of those who . stand outside the
active centre of political conflict. Above
all, his hostility to the Revolution should
at least make later generations beware lest
novelty of outlook be unduly confounded
with erroneous doctrine.

Yet even when such deduction has been
made, there is hardly a greater figure in
the history of political thought in Eng-
land. 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

BURKE 279

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 states-
man has ever possessed. His flashes of
insight are things that go, as few men have
ever gone, into the hidden deeps of po-
litical 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 imjust to
the argument and motives of his op-
ponent. Yet, when the last word of criti-
cism 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 im-
pression 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 in-
consistent 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

280 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

upon its virtues that its victory must be
attributed. Institutional change is likely
to be more rapid than in his generation;
for we seem to have reached that moment
when, as he foresaw, ''they who persist in
opposing that mighty current will appear
rather to resist the decrees of Providence
itself than the mere designs of men." The
principles upon which we proceed are
doubtless different from those that he
commended; yet his very challenge to
their wisdom only gives to his warning a
deeper inspiration for our effort.

CHAPTER VII

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC
LIBERALISM

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
gi'cat movements, did not originate at any
given moment. There was no sudden in-
vention which made the hampering system
of government-control seem incompatible
with industrial advance. The mercan-
tilism 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 con-
cealed than because he represented the

881

282 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

culmination of certain principles which,
under various aspects, were common to his
time. The movement for religious tolera-
tion is not only paralleled in the next cen-
tury 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 econo-
mists 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 re-
ligious freedom had been secured, it was
easy for them to transfer their argument
to the secular sphere.

Nothing, indeed, is more important in
the history of English political philosophy
than to realize that from Stuart times the
\^ Nonconformists were deeply bitten with
distrust of government. Its courts of
special instance hampered industrial life
at every turn in the interest of religious
conformity. Their heavy fines and irri-
tating restrictions upon foreign workmen
were nothing so much as a tax upon indus-
trial progress. What the Nonconformists

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 283

wanted was to be left alone; and Dave-
nant explained the root of their desire
when he tells of the gaols crowded with
substantial tradesmen whose imprison-
ment spelt imemployment for thousands
of workmen. Sir William Temple, in his
description of Holland, represents eco-
nomic 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. Free-
dom in economic matters, like freedom in
religion, came rapidly to mean permission
that diversity shall exist; and economic
diversity soon came to mean free compe-
tition. The latter easily became imbued
with religious significance. English puri-
tanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, in-
sisted 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 busi- /
ness, indeed, became for, many a test of J

284 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

religious grace, and poverty the proof of
God's disfavor. Books like Steele's Re-
ligious Tradesman (1684) show clearly
how close is the connection. The hostility
of the English landowners to the com-
mercial classes in the eighteenth century
is at bottom the inheritance of religious
antagonism. The typical qualities of dis-
sent became a certain pushful exertion by
which the external criteria of salvation
could be secured.

Much of the contemporary philosophy,
moreover, fits in with this attitude. From
the time of Bacon, the main object of
speculation was to disrupt the scholastic
teleology. In the result the State becomes
dissolved into a discrete mass of individ-
uals, 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 po-
litical life for the benefits that accrue
therefrom. The cynicism of Mandeville,
the utilitarianism of Hume, are only by-
paths 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

286 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 insis-
tence that the balance of trade must be
preserved. Partly it was doubtless de-
rived from the methods of the old political
arithmetic of men like Petty and Dave-
nant ; the individual seeks a balance at the
end of his year's accounting and so, too,
the State must have a balance. "A King-
dom," 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 compe-

FOUNDATIONS OP LIBERALISM 287

tition meant national weakness. They
could not conceive a commercial bargain
which was profitable to both sides. Na-
tions grow prosperous at each other's ex-
pense; wherefore a woolen trade in
Ireland necessarily spells English unem-
ployment. Even Davenant, who was in
many respects on the high road to free
trade, was in this problem adamant. Pro-
tection was essential in the colonial
market; for unless the trade of the col-
onies was directed through England they
might be dangerous rivals. So Ireland
and America were sacrificed to the fear of
British merchants, with the inevitable re-
sult that repression brought from both the
obvious search for remedy.

Herein it might appear that Adam
Smith had novelty to contribute; yet
nothing is more certain than that his full
sense of the world as the only true unit of
marketing was fully grasped before him.
In 1691 Sir Dudley North published his
Discourses upon Trade. Therein he
clearly sees that commercial barriers be-
tween Great Britain and France are ba-
sically as senseless as would be commercial
barriers between Yorkshire and Middle-

288 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

sex. Indeed, in one sense, North goes
even further than Adam Smith, for he
argues against the usury laws in terms
Bentham would hardly have disowned.
Ten years later an anonymous writer in a
tract entitled Considerations on the East
India Trade (1701) has no illusions about
the evil of monopoly. He sees with strik-
ing clarity that the real problem is not at
any cost to maintain the industries a na-
tion actually possesses, but to have the
national capital applied in the most effi-
cient channels. So, too, Hume dismissed
the Mercantile theory with the contemp-
tuous 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 percep-
tion to his acquaintance with Quesnay and
Turgot ; but they may well have confirmed

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 289

him in it, and they show that the older
philosophy was attacked on every side.

Nor must we miss the general atmos-
phere of the time. On the whole his age
was a conservative one, convinced, with-
out due reason, that happiness was inde-
pendent of birth or wealth and that
natural law somehow could be made to
justify existing institutions. The poets,
like Pope, were singing of the small part
of life which kings and laws may hope to
cure; and that attitude is written in the
general absence of economic legislation
during the period. Religiously, the
Church exalted the status quo; and where,
as with Wesley, there was revolt, its im-
petus directed the mind to the source of
salvation in the individual act. It may,
indeed, be generally argued that the re-
ligious 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 inno-
cent persons ... to so intolerable
slavery" was, in truth, a justification of

290 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

the existing order. The social question
which, in the previous century, men like
Sellers 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 resist-
ance was unlikely to make itself heard
once the resources of the Industrial Revo-
lution were brought into play. Men dis-
covered 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 Wilber-
f orce, be countered by the assertion that it
was revolt against the will of God.

II

Few lives represent more splendidly
vrthan that of Adam Smith the speculative
ideal of a dispassionate study of phil-
osophy. He was fortunate in his teachers
and his friends. At Glasgow he was the

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 291

pupil of Francis Hutcheson; and even if
he was taught nothing at Oxford, at least
six years of leisure gave him ample op-
portunity to learn. His professorship at
Glasgow not only brought him into con-
tact with men like Hume, but also ad-
mitted him to intercourse with a group of
business men whose liberal sentiments on
commerce undoubtedly strengthened, if
they did not originate, his own liberal j
views. At Glasgow, too, in 1759, he pub-
lished his Theory of Moral Sentiments,
written with sufficient power of style to
obscure its inner poverty of thought. The
book brought him immediately a distin-
guished reputation from a public which
exalted elegance of diction beyond all lit-
erary virtues. The volatile Charles
Townshend made him tutor to the Duke
of Buccleuch, through whom Smith not
only secured comparative affluence for the
rest of his days, but also a French tour in
which he met at its best the most brilliant
society in Europe. The germ of his
Wealth of Nations already lay hidden in
those Glasgow lectures which Mr. Can-
nan has so happily recovered for us; and
it was in a moment of leisure in France

292 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

that he set to work to put them together in
systematic fashion. Not, indeed, that the
Frenchmen whom he met, Turgot, Ques-
nay 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 com-
petence ten years of constant labor were
necessary before the Wealth of Nations
was complete. After its publication, in
1776, Adam Smith did little save attend
to the administrative duties of a minor,
but lucrative office in the Customs. Until
the end, indeed, he never quite gave up
the hope, foreshadowed first in the Moral
Sentiments of completing a gigantic sur-
vey of civilized institutions. But he was a
slow worker, and his health was never
robust. It was enough that he should have
written his book and cherished friendships
such as it is given to few men to possess.
Hume and Burke, Millar the jurist,
James Watt, Foulis the printer, Black the
chemist and Hutton of geological fame —
it is an enviable circle. He had known
Turgot on intimate terms and visited Vol-
taire on Lake Geneva. Hume had told
him that his book had ''depth and solidity

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 293

and acuteness"; the younger Pitt had con-
sulted him on public affairs. Few men
have moved amid such happy peace within
the very centre of what was most illustri-
ous in their age.

We are less concerned here with the
specific economic details of the Wealth of
Nations than with its general attitude to
the State. But here a limitation upon
criticism must be noted. The man of
whom Smith writes is man in search of
wealth ; by definition the economic motive
dominates his actions. Such abuse, there-
fore, 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 unre-
strained by counter-tendencies, to secure
the happiness of men. "That order of
things which necessity imposes in gen-
eral," he writes, " . • . is, in every par-
ticular 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, there-

^l

294 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT ,

fore, 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 in-
terest in his own way. . . . The sover-
eign 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 su-
perintending the industry of private
people and of directing it towards the em-
ployments most suitable to the interests of
the society."

r The State, in this conception has but
/ three functions — defence, justice and

J "the duty of erecting and maintaining
certain public works and certain public in-
stitutions which it can never be for the
interest of any inidvidual, or small
number of individuals, to erect and main-
tain." The State, in fact, is simply to pro-
vide the atmosphere in which production
is possible. Nor does Smith conceal his
thought that the main function of justice

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 295

is the protection of property. "The af-
fluence 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 at-
titude, indeed, is intensified by his con-
stant 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 ed-
ucation and the prevention of disease,
this is rather for the general benefit they
confer and the doubt that private enter-
prise would find them profitable than as
the expression of a general rule. Collec-
tive effort of every kind awakened in him
a deep distrust. Trade regulations such
as the limitation of apprenticeship he con-
demned as "manifest encroachment upon
the just liberty of the workman and of
those who may be disposed to employ
him/' Even educational establishments

296 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

are suspect on the ground — not unnat-
ural after his own experience of Oxford
— that their possibihties of comfort may
enervate the natural energies of men.

The key to this attitude is clear enough.
The improvement of society is due, he
thinks not to the calculations of govern-
ment but to the natural instincts of eco-
nomic 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 continir-
ally 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 poli-
tician 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.

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 297

"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 dis-
cover the means most apt to progress.

Nor was he greatly troubled by differ-
ences 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

298 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

character he ascribes to the various occu-
pations implied in the division of labor.
Each man, therefore, as he follows his
self-interest promotes the general happi-
ness of society. That principle is inherent
in the social order. "Every man," he
wrote in the Moral Sentiments^ "is by na-
ture first and principally recommended to
his own care", and therein he is "led by an
invisible hand to promote an end which
was no part of his intention." The State,
that is to say, is the sum of individual
goods; whereby to better ourselves is
clearly to its benefit. And that desire
"which comes with us from the womb and
never leaves us till we go to the grave" is
the more efficacious the less it is restrained
by governmental artifice. For we know
so well what makes us happy that none
can hope to help us so much as we help
ourselves.

Enlightened selfishness is thus the root
of prosperity; but we must not fall into
the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf
to the plaint of the poor. He urged the
employer to have regard to the health and
welfare of the worker, a regard which was
the voice of reason and humanity. Where

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 299

there was conflict between love of the
status quo and a social good which Revo-
lution alone could achieve, he did not, at
least in the Moral Sentiments, hesitate to
choose the latter. Order was, for the most
part, indispensable ; but "the greatest and
noblest of all characters" he made the re-
former of the State. Yet he is too im-
pressed 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 com-
bine 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 submis-
sive do servants become so that scarcity is
naturally regarded as more favorable to
industry.

Obviously enough, the inner hinge of
all this argument is Smith's conception of
nature. Nor can there be much doubt of
what he thought its inner substance. Fac-
ile distinctions such as the effort of
Buckle to show that while in the Moral

800 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

Sentiments Adam Smith was dealing with
the unselfish side of man's nature, in the
Wealth of Nations he was dealing with a
group of facts which required the abstrac-
tion of such altruistic elements, are really
beside the point. Nature for Smith is
I 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 argu-
ment is an assumption that the facts can
be made to show the relative powerlessness
of institutions in the face of economic laws
grounded in human psychology. The
psychology itself is relatively simple, and,
at least in the Wealth of Nations not
greatly different from the avowed as-
sumptions of utilitarianism. He empha-
sizes the strength of reason in the eco-
nomic 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.

FOUNDATIONS OP LIBERALISM 301

The order they represent is the natural
order ; and whatever hinders its full opera-
tion is an unwise check upon the things for
which men strive.

Obviously enough, this attitude runs
the grave risk of seeming to abstract a
single motive — the desire for wealth —
from the confused welter of human im-
pulses and to make it dominant at the ex-
pense of human nature itself. A hasty
reading of Adam Smith would, indeed,
confirm t*hat impression; and that is per-
haps why he seemed to Ruskin to blas-
pheme human nature. But a more careful
survey, particularly when the Moral Sen-
timents is borne in mind suggests a dif-
ferent 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 in--
stitutional modifications are able to de-j
stroy the pdwer of that motive to labor/
There is too much history in the Wealth
of Nations to make tenable the hypothesis
of complete abstraction. And there is
even clear a sense of a nature behind his
custona when he speaks of a "sacred re-

302 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

gard" 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 con-
text 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.

Ill

It would be tedious to praise the
Wealth of Nations. It may be doubtful

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 303

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 perspec-
tive in which its main teaching was set.
He wrote in the midst of the first signifi-
cant beginnings of the Industrial Revo-
lution; and his emphatic approval of
Watt's experiments suggests that he was
not imalive to its importance. Yet it can-
not in any full sense be said that the In-
dustrial Revolution has a large part in his
book. The picture of industrial organi-
zation and its possibilities is too simple to
suggest that he had caught any far reach-
ing glimpse into the future. Industry,
for him, is still in the last stage of handi-
craft; it is a matter of skillful workman-
ship and not of mechanical appliance.
Capital is still the laborious result of par-
simony. Credit is spoken of rather in the
tones of one who sees it less as a new in-
strument of finance than a dangerous at-
tempt by the aspiring needy to scale the
heights of wealth. Profits are always a
justified return for productive labor; in-

304 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

terest the payment for the use of the
owner's past parsimony. Business is still
the middleman distributing to the con-
sumer 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 funda-
mental dogmas.

Therein, of course, may be found the
main secret of his omissions. The prob-
jlem of labor finds no place in his book.
/' The things that the poor have absent from
their lives, that concept of a national min-
imum 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

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 305

the way in which the logical outcome of
the system he describes may well be the
attaimnent of great wealth at a price in
human cost that is beyond its worth.
Therein, it is clear, all individualistic the-
ories 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 Ri-
cardo 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 po-
litical economist; and I am not only justi-
fied in omitting, but am perhaps bound to
omit, all considerations which have no
influence upon wealth."

In such an aspect, it was natural for the
balance of investigation to swing towards
the study of the technique of production;
and with the growing importance of cap-
ital, as machinery was introduced, the

306 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

worker, without difficulty, became an ad-
junct, easily replaced, to the machine.
What was remembered then was the side
of Adam Smith which looked upon en-
lightened 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 in-
dustrial 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 hope-
less despair of labor. That men can or-
ganize 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
Tightness of the equation. The literature

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 307

of protest, men like Hall and Thompson,
Hodgskin and Bray, exerted no influence
upon the legislation of the tiihe; and
Robert Owen was deemed an amiable ec-
centric rather than the prophet of a new
hope. The men who succeeded, as Wil-
berf orce, carried out to the letter the im-
stated assumptions of Puritan economics.
The poor were consigned to a God whose
dictates were by definition beneficent;
and if they failed to understand the curi-
ous incidence of his rewards that was be-
cause 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, in-
deed, but deriving its ultimate meaning
from the misery incident to it. The
tragedy is excused because the export-
trade increases in its volume. The iron
law of wages, the assumed transition of
every energetic worker to the ranks of
wealth, the danger lest the natural ability
of the worker to better his condition be
sapped by giving to him that which his
self-respect can better win —these be-
came the unconscious assumptions of all
economic discussion.

308 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

In all this, as in the foundation with
which Adam Smith provided it, we must
not miss the element of truth that it con-
tains. No poison is more subtly de-
structive of the democratic State than
paternalism; and the release of the crea-
tive 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 eco-
nomic 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 at-
titude 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 in-
quire into the dominant conception of the
good life, the number of those upon whom
it is intended that good shall be conferred.

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 309

In the light of this conception it is ob-
vious enough that Smith's view is impos-
sible. No mere conflict of private
interests, however pure in motive, seems
able to achieve a harmony of interest be-
tween the members of the State. Liberty,
in the sense of a positive and equal op-
portunity for self-realization, is impos-
sible save upon the basis of the acceptance
of certain minimal standards which can
get accepted only through collective ef-
fort. 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 gov-
ernment. 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 ac-
ceptance 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 be-
low certain standards of subsistence the

310 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 legis-
lation, 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 pur-
pose of the State will mean for most not
merely hardship but degradation of all
that makes life worthy. Upon those
stunted existences, indeed, a wealthy
civilization may easily be builded. Yet it
will be a civilization of slaves rather than
of men.

The individualism, that is to say, for
which Adam Smith was zealous demands
a different institutional expression from
that which he gave it. We must not as-
sume an a priori justification for the
forces of the past. The customs of men
may represent the thwarting of the im-
pulses of the many at the expense of the
few not less easily than they may embody
a general desire; and it is surely a mis-
taken usage to dignify as natural what-

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 311

ever 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, in-
deed, is the starting-point of modern ef-
fort. 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 col-
lective 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 in-
terests 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 insti-
tutional 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 un-
enviable record of bad metaphysics used

312 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

to defend obsolete systems. It took al-
most a century after the publication of
the Wealth of Nations for men to realize
that its axioms represented the experience
of a definite time. Smith thought of free-
dom in the terms most suitable to his gen-
eration and stated them with a largeness
of view which remains impressive even at
a century's distance.

But nothing is more certain in the his-
tory of political philosophy than that the
problem of freedom changes with each
age. The nineteenth century sought re-
lease 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 imless
they are liberalized by history ; and a state
which failed to see itself as a mosaic of
ancestral institutions would build its

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERAEISM 313

novelties upon foundations of sand. Sus-
picions of collective effort in the eigh-
teenth 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 acci-
dental phases of the history of property
with the philosophic basis of property it-
self. From such an error it is the task of
history above all to free us. For it records
the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as a
perennial challenge to the coming time.

The rightness of this attitude admits of
proof in terms of the double tradition to
which Adam Smith gave birth. On the
one hand he is the founder of the classic
political economy. With Ricardo, the
elder Mill and Nassau Senior, the main
preoccupation is the production of wealth
without regard to its moral environment;
and the state for them is merely an en-
gine 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

314 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 percep-
tion obviously required training if they
were to be applied to a complex world.
Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense,
passed away because it failed to build
a State wherein a channel of expression
might be found for the creative energies
of humble men.

It is only within the last two decades
that we have begun to understand the
inner significance of the protest against
this economic liberalism. Adam Smith
had declared the source of value to lie in

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM 316

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, un-
important 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 eco-
nomically profitable, but whether it was
ethically right. No one can read the his-
tory of these years and fail to understand
their uncompromising denial of its right-
ness. 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 hy-
pothesis of modem politics. It was a de-
liberate effort, upon the basis of Adam
Smith's ideas, to create a commonwealth
in the interests of the masses. Wealth, in

316 ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

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 con-
ception of co-operative effort might find
a new expression. Those who trod in his
footsteps may have repudiated the ideal
for which he stood, but they made possible
a larger hope in which he would have been
proud and glad to share.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography makes no pretence to completeness.
It attempts only to enumerate the more obvious sources
that an interested reader would care to examine.

GENERAL

Leslie Stephen. History of English Thought in the
Eighteenth Century. 1876. Vol. II, Chapters IX
and X.

W. E. H. Lecky. History of England in the Eighteenth
Century,

A. L. Smitu. Political Philosophy in England in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Cam-
bridge Modern History, Vol. VI, Chapter XXIII.

J. BoxAR. Philosophy and Political Economy, Chapters
V-IX,

F. W. Maitland. An Historical Sketch of Liberty and
Equality in Collected Papers, Vol. I.

CHAPTER II

John Locke. Works (Eleventh Edition), 10 volumes.

London, 1812.
H. R. Fox-Bourne. Life of John Locke, London, 1876. ^
T. H. Green. The Principles of Political Obligation in

Collected Works. Vol. II. London, 1908.
Peter, Lord Kino. The Life and Letters of John Locke,

London, 1868.
Sir F. Pollock. Locke's Theory of the State in Proc,

Brit. Acad. Vol. I. London, 1904.
S. P. Lamprecht. The Moral and Political Philosophy

of Locke. New York, 1918.
A. A. Seaton. The Theory of Toleration under the

Later Stuarts, Cambridge, 1911.
J. N. Figgis. The Divine Right of Kings, Cambridge,

1914.

317

318 BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER III
Jeremy Coixiee. The History of Passive Obedience,

London, 1689. t

WiLUAM Sherlock. The Case of Resistance. London,

1684.
Chari^s Leslie. The Case of the Regale (Collected
Works). Vol. Ill, p. 291.
The Rehearsal.
The New Association.
Cassandra.

The Finishing Stroke.

Obedience to Civil Government Clearly Stated.
The Best Answer.
The Best of All.
Samuel Grascom. A Brief Answer.
E. Shellingfleet. A Vindication of their Majesties

Authoritie.
B. Shower. A Letter to a Convocation Man.
W. Wake. The Authority of Christian Princes.

The State of the Church (1703).
Frakcis Atterbury. Rights, Powers and Privileges of

an English Convocation (1701).
Benjamin Hoadly. Origins of Cixnl Oovemment
(1710).
Preservative Against Nonjurors (1716).
Works, 3 vols. London (1773).
William Law. A Defence of Church Principles (ed.

Gore). Edinburgh, 1904.
W. Warburton. Alliance between Church and State

(1736).
J. H. Overton. The Nonjurors. New York, 1903.
T. Lathbury. History of Convocation. London, 1842.

CHAPTER IV

Berkeley. Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of

Great Britain (1721).
H. St. John (Viscount Bolingbroke). Works. 5 vols.

London, 1754.
Lord Eomont. Faction detected by the Evidence of

Facts (1742).
David Hume. Inquiry Concerning the Principles of

Morals (1762).

t.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 319

Essays, (1742-1762) ed. Green & Grose. Lon-
don, 1876.
W. SiCHEL. Life of Bolinghroke, 2 vols. 1900-4.
J. Chubtok Collixs. Bolinghroke and Voltaire in Eng^

land,
J. Hnx BuBTOX. Life of Hume,

CHAPTER V

Montesquieu. L*E sprit des Lois (1748).

J. J. Rousseau. Du Contrat Social (1762). See ed. by

Vaughan, 1918.
JoHx Brown. Estimate of the Manners and Principles

of the Times (1767).
Adam Ferguson. Essay on the History of Civil Society

(1767).
William Blackstone. Commentaries (1766-9).
Jeremy Bentham. A Fragment on Government (1776).

Ed. F. C. Montague, 1891.
J. De Lolme. The Constitution of England (1776).
Robert Wallace. Various Prospects (1761).
Joseph Priestley. Essay on the First Principles of

Government (1768).
Richard Price. Observations on Civil Liberty (1776).

Additional Obserddtions (1777).
William Ogilvie. The Right of Property in Land

(1781). Ed. Macdonald, 1891.
JosiAH Tucker. Treatise on Cixnl Government (1781).
Samuel Johnson. Taxation No Tyranny (1776).
M. Beer. History of British Socialism (1919).
James Boswell. lAfe of Samuel Johnson (1791).

CHAPTER VI

Edmund Burke. Collected Works, London, 1808.
John Morley. Edmund Burke (1867).

Life of Burke (1887).
J. MacCunn. The Political Philosophy of Burke

(1908).
Junius. Letters (1769-72). London, 1812.
Thomas Paine. The Rights of Man (1791-2).
James Mackintosh. Vendicice Gallicw (1791).

820 BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER VII

Chasues Davekaitt. Works. Londcniy 1771.
SiE DuDLBT North. A Discourse upon Trade (1691).
Adam Smith. Theory of Moral Sentknents (1759).
Wealth of Nations (1776).

Lectures on Justice and PoUce. (Ed. Cannan,
1896).
W. R. Scott. Life of Frauds Hutcheson (1900).
JoHK Rae. Life of Adam Smith (1895).
W. Baobhot. Adam Smith as a Person in Coll, Works,

Vol. VII.
F. W. Hnurr. Adam Smith (1904).
W. Habbach. Untersuchungen Uber Adam Smith (1891).
J. BoNAS. A Catalogue of Adam Smith's Library

(1894).
T. Cliffe Leslie. Adam Smith in Essays in Mofal and

PoUtioal Philosophy (1879).
E. Troeltsch. Die SoeiaUehren der ChristUchen Kirchen

(1912).

INDEX

Addison, 69
Andrewes, 83
Ashley, 33-4
Atterbury, 102
Austin, 62

Bagehot, 9, 249
Barbeyrac, 68
Barrow, 84
Bellarmine, 83, 121
Bentham, 23, 62, 72, 151,

167, 175, 194
Berkeley, 10, 129
Blackstone, 163-4, 174f
Bolingbroke, 69, 131f
Bonald, 277
Bonar, 300
Bonwicke, 82
Boswell, 209
Bray, 307, 315
Brown (J.), 168
Brown (R.), 52
Burke, 7, 8, 16, 30, 157, 159,

166, 221f, 286
Burnet, 80, 87, 93
Busher, 52

Cartwright, 97

Chatham, 132, 167, 188, 262

ChUlingworth, 52

Chubb, 128

Coleridge, 277

Collier, 84n

Cowper, 20

Crabbe, 20

Dalrymple, 8
Darwin, 67
Davenant, 283, 287
Defoe, 8, 128, 132
Dicey, 175, 179
DisraeU, 132
Divine Right, 7, 30
Dodwell, 82
Dupont de Nemours, 292

Egmont, 142
Eldon, 159

Ferguson, 172-4
Fielding, 160
Fihner, 7, 38

Galsworthy, 171-2
George III, 13, 15, 158,

188 213f
Godw'in, 10, 163, 222, 276
Goldsmith, 19, 223
Goodman, 57
Grascom, 86
Gray, 160
Green (T. H.), 61, 279

Haldane, 126

Hales, 52

Halifax, 8, 27

HaU, 17, 307

Hamilton (J. L. & B.)» 19

Harrington, 147

Hegel, 249, 277, 212-3

Hickes, 83

321

91, 278, 284
Hodgakin, 17, 30T
Holctips (O. W.). S3a, 269
Hult, H
Hooker, 44
Hotman, ST, 68
Hume, 8, 11, 71, 92, 143f,

278,284,297
Hutcheeon, II, 153, US,

Jackson, 84
James II, 24f, OS
Johnson (Dr.), IS, 210f,

Keble, 82
Kerr, 82
Knox, fiT, 83, 07

Lassalle, 818
Laud, 2Sa

Law, 22, loer

LesUe, 80, 8ff, 88, 90, 97,

104, 182
Locke, 7, 11, 21, 29-76, 79,

197, 207, 273, 287
de Ixilme, 10, 183r

Mackintosh, 269
Madison, 63
Maine, 66, 249
Maistre, 91, 2C3, 273
Malthus, 806
MandcTlIIe, 129, 284
Mariana, 57
Martin, 69
Marx, 312, 815
Melville, 121
Mill, 167

Milton, 62
Mtdyneux, 68
Montesquieu, 12, 68, 16<tf,

178, 188
Morley, 182, 228

Newton, 37
Newman, 81, 122, 135
North, 287

(^Uvie, 199r
Owen, 17, 807
Oxford Movement, 81

P^ne, 202, 269
Paley, 1H7
PattisoD, 10
Penn, 58
Place, 806
Pope, 69, 128, 182
Price, 196f
Priestley, 72, 190(
Proast, 64
Prynne, 8, 65
Pufendorf, 68
Pulteney, 217

Quesnay, 288, 292

lUnan, 249
Ricardo, 305
Richardson, 160
Richardson (S.), 52
Rousseau, 8, 74, 162f, I8&

197, 276
Royer-Coilard, 220
Ruskin, 298, 801

Sanderson, 81

Savlgny, 249, 277

Seeiey, 312

Selden, 9

Senior, 804

Separation of Powers, 68f

Shaftesbury, 11, 128, ISS

INDEX

323

Sherlock (T.), 108

Sherlock (W.), 87

Shower, 99

Sidney, 7, 57

Smith (Adam), 9, 16, 152,

195, 258, 281f
Smith (A. L.), HO
Snape, 108
Social Contract, 57
Spelm'an, 9
Spence, 202
Stammler, 60
Steele, 284
Stephen (F.), 65
Stephen (L.), 108, 223
StiUingfleet, 37, 87, 93
Suarez, 57

Taylor, 52, 57
Temple, 283

Thompson, 807, 216
Tindal, 123
TocqueviUe, 254
Toleration, 52, 64
Tucker, 71, 206f, 288
Turgot, 288, 292

Voltaire, 12, 132, 160

Wake, 80, lOOf
WaUace, 188
Walpole, 13, 21, 128-30
Warburton, 69, 118f, 192
Wilberforce, 290
Wilkes, 167, 188, 220
WiUiam III, 25f
Williams (Roger), 52
Woolston, 128
Wordsworth, 277

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