Part 11 (1/2)
A deferential community, even though its lowest cla.s.ses are not intelligent, is far more suited to a Cabinet government than any kind of democratic country, because it is more suited to political excellence. The highest cla.s.ses can rule in it; and the highest cla.s.ses must, as such, have more political ability than the lower cla.s.ses. A life of labour, an incomplete education, a monotonous occupation, a career in which the hands are used much and the judgment is used little, cannot create as much flexible thought, as much applicable intelligence, as a life of leisure, a long culture, a varied experience, an existence by which the judgment is incessantly exercised, and by which it may be incessantly improved. A country of respectful poor, though far less happy than where there are no poor to be respectful, is nevertheless far more fitted for the best government.
You can use the best cla.s.ses of the respectful country; you can only use the worst where every man thinks he is as good as every other.
It is evident that no difficulty can be greater than that of founding a deferential nation. Respect is traditional; it is given not to what is proved to be good, but to what is known to be old. Certain cla.s.ses in certain nations retain by common acceptance a marked political preference, because they have always possessed it, and because they inherit a sort of pomp which seems to make them worthy of it. But in a new colony, in a community where merit MAY be equal, and where there CANNOT be traditional marks of merit and fitness, it is obvious that a political deference can be yielded to higher culture only upon proof, first of its existence, and next of its political value. But it is nearly impossible to give such a proof so as to satisfy persons of less culture. In a future and better age of the world it may be effected; but in this age the requisite premises scarcely exist; if the discussion be effectually open, if the debate be fairly begun, it is hardly possible to obtain a rational, an argumentative acquiescence in the rule of the cultivated few. As yet the few rule by their hold, not over the reason of the mult.i.tude, but over their imaginations, and their habits; over their fancies as to distant things they do not know at all, over their customs as to near things which they know very well.
A deferential community in which the bulk of the people are ignorant, is therefore in a state of what is called in mechanics unstable equilibrium. If the equilibrium is once disturbed there is no tendency to return to it, but rather to depart from it. A cone balanced on its point is in unstable equilibrium, for if you push it ever so little it will depart farther and farther from its position and fall to the earth. So in communities where the ma.s.ses are ignorant but respectful, if you once permit the ignorant cla.s.s to begin to rule you may bid farewell to deference for ever. Their demagogues will inculcate, their newspapers will recount, that the rule of the existing dynasty (the people) is better than the rule of the fallen dynasty (the aristocracy). A people very rarely hears two sides of a subject in which it is much interested; the popular organs take up the side which is acceptable, and none but the popular organs in fact reach the people. A people NEVER hears censure of itself. No one will tell it that the educated minority whom it dethroned governed better or more wisely than it governs. A democracy will never, save after an awful catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some almost unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced.
NO. IX.
ITS HISTORY, AND THE EFFECTS OF THAT HISTORY.--CONCLUSION.
A volume might seem wanted to say anything worth saying[12] on the History of the English Const.i.tution, and a great and new volume might still be written on it, if a competent writer took it in hand. The subject has never been treated by any one combining the lights of the newest research and the lights of the most matured philosophy. Since the masterly book of Hallam was written, both political thought and historical knowledge have gained much, and we might have a treatise applying our strengthened calculus to our augmented facts. I do not pretend that I could write such a book, but there are a few salient particulars which may be fitly brought together, both because of their past interest and of their present importance.
[12] Since the first edition of this book was published several valuable works have appeared, which, on many points, throw much light on our early const.i.tutional history, especially Mr. Stubbs' Select Charters and other Ill.u.s.trations of English Const.i.tutional History, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, Mr. Freeman's lecture on ”The Growth of the English Const.i.tution,” and the chapter on the Anglo-Saxon Const.i.tution in his History of the Norman Conquest: but we have not yet a great and authoritative work on the whole subject such as I wished for when I wrote the pa.s.sage in the text, and as it is most desirable that we should have.
There is a certain common polity, or germ of polity, which we find in all the rude nations that have attained civilisation. These nations seem to begin in what I may call a consultative and tentative absolutism. The king of early days, in vigorous nations, was not absolute as despots now are; there was then no standing army to repress rebellion, no organised ESPIONAGE to spy out discontent, no skilled bureaucracy to smooth the ruts of obedient life. The early king was indeed consecrated by a religious sanction; he was essentially a man apart, a man above others, divinely anointed or even G.o.d-begotten. But in nations capable of freedom this religious domination was never despotic. There was indeed no legal limit; the very words could not be translated into the dialect of those times. The notion of law as we have it--of a rule imposed by human authority, capable of being altered by that authority, when it likes, and in fact, so altered habitually--could not be conveyed to early nations, who regarded law half as an invincible prescription, and half as a Divine revelation.
Law ”came out of the king's mouth”; he gave it as Solomon gave judgment--embedded in the particular case, and upon the authority of Heaven as well as his own. A Divine limit to the Divine revealer was impossible, and there was no other source of law. But though there was no legal limit, there was a practical limit to subjection in (what may be called) the pagan part of human nature--the inseparable obstinacy of freemen. They NEVER would do exactly what they were told.
To early royalty, as Homer describes it in Greece and as we may well imagine it elsewhere, there were always two adjuncts: one the ”old men,” the men of weight, the council, the _boule_, of which the king asked advice, from the debates in which the king tried to learn what he could do and what he ought to do. Besides this there was the _agora_, the purely listening a.s.sembly, as some have called it, but the TENTATIVE a.s.sembly, as I think it might best be called. The king came down to his a.s.sembled people in form to announce his will, but in reality, speaking in very modern words, to ”feel his way”. He was sacred, no doubt; and popular, very likely; still he was half like a popular Premier speaking to a high-spirited chamber; there were limits to his authority and power--limits which he would discover by trying whether eager cheers received his mandate, or only hollow murmurs and a thinking silence.
This polity is a good one for its era and its place, but there is a fatal defect in it. The reverential a.s.sociations upon which the government is built are transmitted according to one law, and the capacity needful to work the government is transmitted according to another law. The popular homage clings to the line of G.o.d-descended kings; it is transmitted by inheritance. But very soon that line comes to a child or an idiot, or one by some defect or other incapable. Then we find everywhere the truth of the old saying, that liberty thrives under weak princes; then the listening a.s.sembly begins not only to murmur, but to speak; then the grave council begins not so much to suggest as to inculcate, not so much to advise as to enjoin.
Mr. Grote has told at length how out of these appendages of the original kingdom the free States of Greece derived their origin, and how they gradually grew--the oligarchical States expanding the council, and the democratical expanding the a.s.sembly. The history has as many varieties in detail as there were Greek cities, but the essence is the same everywhere. The political characteristic of the early Greeks, and of the early Romans, too, is that out of the tentacula of a monarchy they developed the organs of a republic.
English history has been in substance the same, though its form is different, and its growth far slower and longer. The scale was larger, and the elements more various. A Greek city soon got rid of its kings, for the political sacredness of the monarch would not bear the daily inspection and constant criticism of an eager and talking mult.i.tude.
Everywhere in Greece the slave population--the most ignorant, and therefore the most unsusceptible of intellectual influences--was struck out of the account. But England began as a kingdom of considerable size, inhabited by distinct races, none of them fit for prosaic criticism, and all subject to the superst.i.tion of royalty. In early England, too, royalty was much more than a superst.i.tion. A very strong executive was needed to keep down a divided, an armed, and an impatient country; and therefore the problem of political development was delicate. A formed free government in a h.o.m.ogeneous nation may have a strong executive; but during the transition state, while the republic is in course of development and the monarchy in course of decay, the executive is of necessity weak. The polity is divided, and its action feeble and failing. The different orders of English people have progressed, too, at different rates. The change in the state of the higher cla.s.ses since the Middle Ages is enormous, and it is all improvement; but the lower have varied little, and many argue that in some important respects they have got worse, even if in others they have got better. The development of the English Const.i.tution was of necessity slow, because a quick one would have destroyed the executive and killed the State, and because the most numerous cla.s.ses, who changed very little, were not prepared for any catastrophic change in our inst.i.tutions.
I cannot presume to speak of the time before the Conquest, and the exact nature even of all Anglo-Norman inst.i.tutions is perhaps dubious: at least, in nearly all cases there have been many controversies.
Political zeal, whether Whig or Tory, has wanted to find a model in the past; and the whole state of society being confused, the precedents altering with the caprice of men and the chance of events, ingenious advocacy has had a happy field. But all that I need speak of is quite plain. There was a great ”council” of the realm, to which the king summoned the most considerable persons in England, the persons he most wanted to advise him, and the persons whose tempers he was most anxious to ascertain. Exactly who came to it at first is obscure and unimportant. I need not distinguish between the ”magnum concilium in Parliament” and the ”magnum concilium out of Parliament”. Gradually the princ.i.p.al a.s.semblies summoned by the English sovereign took the precise and definite form of Lords and Commons, as in their outside we now see them. But their real nature was very different. The Parliament of to-day is a ruling body; the mediaeval Parliament was, if I may so say, an EXPRESSIVE body. Its function was to tell the executive--the king--what the nation wished he should do; to some extent, to guide him by new wisdom, and, to a very great extent, to guide him by new facts.
These facts were their own feelings, which were the feelings of the people, because they were part and parcel of the people. From thence the king learned, or had the means to learn, what the nation would endure, and what it would not endure;--what he might do, and what he might not do. If he much mistook this, there was a rebellion.
There are, as is well known, three great periods in the English Const.i.tution. The first of these is the ante-Tudor period. The English Parliament then seemed to be gaining extraordinary strength and power.
The t.i.tle to the Crown was uncertain; some monarchs were imbecile. Many ambitious men wanted to ”take the people into partners.h.i.+p”. Certain precedents of that time were cited with grave authority centuries after, when the time of freedom had really arrived. But the causes of this rapid growth soon produced an even more sudden decline. Confusion fostered it, and confusion destroyed it. The structure of society then was feudal; the towns were only an adjunct and a make-weight. The princ.i.p.al popular force was an aristocratic force, acting with the co-operation of the gentry and yeomanry, and resting on the loyal fealty of sworn retainers. The head of this force, on whom its efficiency depended, was the high n.o.bility. But the high n.o.bility killed itself out. The great barons who adhered to the ”Red Rose” or the ”White Rose,” or who fluctuated from one to the other, became poorer, fewer, and less potent every year. When the great struggle ended at Bosworth, a large part of the greatest combatants were gone.
The restless, aspiring, rich barons, who made the civil war, were broken by it. Henry VII. attained a kingdom in which there was a Parliament to advise, but scarcely a Parliament to control.
The consultative government of the ante-Tudor period had little resemblance to some of the modern governments which French philosophers call by that name. The French Empire, I believe, calls itself so. But its a.s.semblies are symmetrical ”shams”. They are elected by a universal suffrage, by the ballot, and in districts once marked out with an eye to equality, and still retaining a look of equality. But our English Parliaments were UNsymmetrical realities. They were elected anyhow; the sheriff had a considerable licence in sending writs to boroughs, that is, he could in part pick its const.i.tuencies; and in each borough there was a rush and scramble for the franchise, so that the strongest local party got it, whether few or many. But in England at that time there was a great and distinct desire to know the opinion of the nation, because there was a real and close necessity. The nation was wanted to do something--to a.s.sist the sovereign in some war, to pay some old debt, to contribute its force and aid in the critical conjuncture of the time. It would not have suited the ante-Tudor kings to have had a fict.i.tious a.s.sembly; they would have lost their sole FEELER, their only instrument for discovering national opinion. Nor could they have manufactured such an a.s.sembly if they wished. The instrument in that behalf is the centralised executive, and there was then no 'prefet' by whom the opinion of a rural locality could be made to order, and adjusted to suit the wishes of the capital. Looking at the mode of election a theorist would say that these Parliaments were but ”chance”
collections of influential Englishmen. There would be many corrections and limitations to add to that statement if it were wanted to make it accurate, but the statement itself hits exactly the princ.i.p.al excellence of those Parliaments. If not ”chance” collections of Englishmen, they were ”undesigned” collections; no administrations made them or could make them. They were bona-fide counsellors, whose opinion might be wise or unwise, but was anyhow of paramount importance, because their co-operation was wanted for what was in hand.
Legislation as a positive power was very secondary in those old Parliaments. I believe no statute at all, as far as we know, was pa.s.sed in the reign of Richard I., and all the ante-Tudor acts together would look meagre enough to a modern Parliamentary agent who had to live by them. But the negative action of Parliament upon the law was essential to its whole idea, and ran through every part of its use. That the king could not change what was then the almost sacred datum of the common law, without seeing whether his nation liked it or not, was an essential part of the ”tentative” system. The king had to feel his way in this exceptional, singular act, as those ages deemed original legislation, as well as in lesser acts. The legislation was his at last; he enacted after consulting his Lords and Commons; his was the sacred mouth which gave holy firmness to the enactment; but he only dared alter the rule regulating the common life of his people after consulting those people; he would not have been obeyed if he had not, by a rude age which did not fear civil war as we fear it now. Many most important enactments of that period (and the fact is most characteristic) are declaratory acts. They do not profess to enjoin by inherent authority what the law shall in future be, but to state and mark what the law is; they are declarations of immemorial custom, not precepts of new duties. Even in the ”Great Charter” the notion of new enactments was secondary, it was a great mixture of old and new; it was a sort of compact defining what was doubtful in floating custom, and was re-enacted over and over again, as boundaries are perambulated once a year, and rights and claims tending to desuetude thereby made patent and cleared of new obstructions. In truth, such great ”charters” were rather treaties between different orders and factions, confirming ancient rights, or what claimed to be such, than laws in our ordinary sense. They were the ”deeds of arrangement” of mediaeval society affirmed and re-affirmed from time to time, and the princ.i.p.al controversy was, of course, between the king and nation--the king trying to see how far the nation would let him go, and the nation murmuring and recalcitrating, and seeing how many acts of administration they could prevent, and how many of its claims they could resist.
Sir James Mackintosh says that Magna Charta ”converted the right of taxation into the s.h.i.+eld of liberty,” but it did nothing of the sort.