Part 4 (1/2)

CHAPTER V

SIGNS OF CHANGE

I

From Hume until the publication of Burke's _Present Discontents_ (1770) there is no work on English politics of the first importance. Walpole had fallen in 1742; but for the next fifteen years his methods dominated the parliamentary scene. It was only with the advent of the elder Pitt to power that a new temper may be observed, a temper quickened by what followed on the accession of George III. Henceforward, it is not untrue to say that the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it was no longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight, though collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for men to grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to victory. Something of the exhilaration of these years we can still catch in the letters which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to turn off with easy laughter his deep sense of pride. In the House of Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show that a new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent.

So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single source, the French influence is the effective cause of change. Voltaire and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole's administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw.

Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution, and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience. Yet when he came, in 1762, to publish the _Contrat Social_ it was obvious that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real meaning of their work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English inst.i.tutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing--less admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a _Habeas Corpus_ and a _lettre de cachet_, the regular succession of Parliaments, all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a magnificent achievement. The English const.i.tution revealed to France an immense and unused reservoir of philosophic ill.u.s.tration. Even to Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was a generalization from its significance at a special crisis. Hume had partial glimpses of its inner substance. But for most it had become a discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs. Its a.n.a.lysis as a connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was more significant was the realization of Montesquieu's import simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence.

Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers.

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

It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which underlies the _Esprit des Lois_ (1748). It is a commonplace now that Montesquieu is to be regarded as the founder of the historical method. The present is to be explained by its ancestry. Laws, governments, customs are not truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin and the country from which they derive. It would be inaccurate, with Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in the most complete unreality, are to be found in G.o.dwin's _Political Justice_; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly saw--the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past wisdom. He was, said Burke, ”the greatest genius which has enlightened this age”; and Burke had every reason to utter that n.o.ble panegyric. But Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in his inaugural lecture as Vinerian professor. He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent utterance both in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention, and in the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What, perhaps, is most immediately significant is his famous praise of the British Const.i.tution--the secret of which he entirely misapprehended--and his discovery of its essence in the separation of powers. The short sixth chapter of his eleventh book is the real keynote of Blackstone and De Lolme. It led them to investigate, on principles of at least doubtful validity, an edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth antiquarianism of c.o.ke's Second Inst.i.tute to the neatly reticulated structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That it was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been made. The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines have been more noxious in their consequence than this theory of checks and balances. But Blackstone's _Commentaries_ (1765-9) produced Bentham's _Fragment on Government_ (1776), and with that book we enter upon the realistic study of the British Const.i.tution.

Rousseau is in an ant.i.thetic tradition; but just as he drew from English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power of government which Locke had proposed. It is a removal at every point conditioned by the interest of the people. For Rousseau declared that the existing distribution of power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and he made the people sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their achievement in the shape of sinister interest. The powers of the people thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for innovation. It is easy enough then to understand why such a philosophy should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager sympathy for humble men, his optimistic faith in the immediate prospect of popular power were to Burke the symptoms of insane delusion and their author ”the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England.”

But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's influence was the success of the American Revolution; and no one had done more than Burke himself to promote its cause and justify its principles. That revolution established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the soberness with which it checked the supposed weakness of the sovereign people. America made herself independent while what was best in Europe combined in enthusiastic applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of Rousseau had been taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of power could remove what deliberation was impotent to secure. Here Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage denied. Nor, at the moment, was it influential except in the general impetus it gave to thought. But from the moment of its appearance it is an undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its metaphysical form it failed to command acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its results were victorious. Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the conclusions he recommends so much as in the language in which he clothes them. Either make a final end of the optimism of men like Hume and Blackstone, or the veneration for the past which is at the root of Burke's own teaching.

It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the stimulus it did. Montesquieu came to praise the British const.i.tution at a time when good men were aghast at its perversion. There was no room in many years for revolution, but at least there was place for hearty discontent and a seeking after new methods. Of that temper two men so different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are the political symbols. The former's rise to power upon the floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant nothing so much as a protest against the cynical corruption of the previous generation. Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly awaking to a sense of its own power. The French creed was too purely logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden shoes played not a little part in its rejection. The rights of man made only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was involved in that rejection; and then it was too late. But no one could feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly pa.s.ses.

The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose pa.s.sion is attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would have been a supreme achievement.

II

The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757. John Brown's _Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_ is largely forgotten now; though it went through seven editions in a year and was at once translated into French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in the vast Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of comment upon the _Characteristics_ of Shaftesbury. His book is too evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with reverence, to make us doubt its derivation. There is the same reliance upon Livy and Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking generalization; though the argument upon which Brown's conclusions are based is seldom given, perhaps because his geometric clarity of statement impressed him as self-demonstrative. Brown's volumes are an essay upon the depravity of the times. He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the universities out of hand, in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would not have rejected. He deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men trifle with Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would, appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper cla.s.s; the officers of the army devote themselves to fas.h.i.+on; 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 cla.s.s, and the legal and medical professions, Brown specifically exempts from this indictment. But he emphasizes his belief that this is unimportant. ”The manners and principles of those who lead,” he says, ”... not of those who are governed ... will ever determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the continuance or dissolution of a state.”

This profligacy Brown compares to the languid vice which preceded the fall of Carthage and of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great Britain at the hands of France, unless it can be cured. So far as he has an explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the decay of religious sentiment. His remedy is only Bolingbroke's Patriot King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen to the height of power. What mainly stirred Englishmen was the prophecy of defeat on the morrow of the disastrous convention of Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe and Clive repaired that royal humiliation Brown seems to have died a natural death. What is more interesting than his prophecies was the evidence of a close reading of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is the product of the climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and sullen temper. Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation.

Brown has no pa.s.sion, and his book reads rather like Mr. Galsworthy's _Island Pharisees_ sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of attention to the evils of his time. It describes undoubted facts, and it shows that the era of content has gone. But its careful periods and strangely far-off air lack the eagerness for truth which Rousseau put into his questions. Brown can neither explain nor can he proffer remedy. He sees that Pitt is somehow significant; but when he rules out the popular voice as devoid of all importance, he deprives himself of the means whereby to grasp the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted. Nothing could prove more strongly the exact.i.tude of Burke's _Present Discontents_. Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of Junius.

Hume was the friend of Montesquieu, though twenty years his junior; and the _Esprit des Lois_ travelled rapidly to Scotland. There it caught the eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a treatise on refinement, and by the influence of Hume and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular in his time, and certainly he has a skill for polished phrase, and a genial paraphrase of other men's ideas. His _Essay on the History of Civil Society_ (1767), which in a quarter of a century went through six editions, was thought by Helvetius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the investigation of savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government. He sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature. He insists, probably after conversation with Adam Smith, upon the social value of the division of functions. He does not doubt the original equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his age has reached the limit of its useful growth. Property he traces back to a parental desire to make a better provision for children ”than is found under the promiscuous management of many copartners.” Climate has the new importance upon which Montesquieu has insisted; or, at least, as it ”ripens the pineapple and the tamarina,” so it ”inspires a degree of mildness that can even a.s.suage the rigours of despotical government.”

The priesthood--this is Hume--becomes a separate influence under the sway of superst.i.tion. Liberty, he says, ”is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in behalf of equitable government.” The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is certainly not here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in the obscurity into which he has fallen. The _Esprit des Lois_ took twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of men like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped. Facile popularisers of this sort may have mollified the drawing-room; but they did not add to political ideas.

III

A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the students of const.i.tutional law. Blackstone's _Commentaries on the Laws of England_ (1765-9) has had ever since its first publication an authority such as c.o.ke only before possessed. ”He it is,” said Bentham, ”who, first of all inst.i.tutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the Scholar and the Gentleman.” Certainly, as Professor Dicey has remarked, ”the book contains much real learning about our system of government.” We are less concerned here with Blackstone as an antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy. Here his purpose seems obvious enough. The English const.i.tution raised him from humble means through a Professors.h.i.+p at Oxford to a judges.h.i.+p 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 const.i.tutional law is a miracle of wisdom.

Const.i.tutional law, as such, indeed, found no place in Blackstone's book. It creeps in under the rights of persons, where he deals with the power of king and Parliament. His treatment implies a whole philosophy.

Laws are of three kinds--of nature, of G.o.d, and of the civil state.

Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is ”a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong.” It is, he tells us, ”called a rule to distinguish it from a compact or agreement.” It derives from the sovereign power, of which the chief character is the making of laws.

Society is based upon the ”wants and fears” of men; and it is coeval with their origin. The idea of a state of nature ”is too wild to be seriously admitted,” besides being contrary to historical knowledge.

Society implies government, and whatever its origins or its forms there ”must be in all of them a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which the _jura summa imperii_, or rights of sovereignty reside.” The forms of government are cla.s.sified in the usual way; and the British const.i.tution is noted as a happy mixture of them all. ”The legislature of the Kingdom,” Blackstone writes, ”is entrusted to three powers entirely independent of each other; first the King, secondly the lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical a.s.sembly of persons, chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour or their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy; and as this aggregate body, actuated by different springs and attentive to different interests, composes the British Parliament and has the supreme disposal of everything; there can be no inconvenience attempted by either of the three branches, but will be withstood by one of the other two; each branch being armed with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous.” It is in the king in Parliament that British sovereignty resides. Eschewing the notion of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the implications of it are secured. ”The const.i.tutional government of this island,” he says, ”is so admirably tempered and compounded, that nothing can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the equilibrium of power between one branch of the legislature and the rest.”

All this is not enough; though, as Bentham was to show in his _Fragment on Government_, it is already far too much. ”A body of n.o.bility,” such is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, ”is also more peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded const.i.tution, in order to support the rights of both the Crown and people, by forming a barrier to withstand the encroachments of both ... if they were confounded with the ma.s.s of the people, and like them had only a vote in electing representatives, their privileges would soon be borne down and overwhelmed by the popular torrent, which would effectually level all distinctions.” ”The Commons,” he says further, ”consist of all such men of property in the kingdom as have not seats in the House of Lords.” The legal irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. ”He is not only incapable of doing wrong,” says Blackstone, ”but even of thinking wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or weakness,” though he points out that the const.i.tution ”has allowed a lat.i.tude of supposing the contrary.” The powers of the King are described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of William the Norman than to the backstairs corruption of George III. The right of revolution is noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals rather than of law.

”Its true defect,” says Professor Dicey of the _Commentaries_, ”is the hopeless confusion both of language and of thought introduced into the whole subject of const.i.tutional law by Blackstone's habit--common to all the lawyers of his time--of applying old and inapplicable terms to new inst.i.tutions.” This is severe enough; yet Blackstone's sins are deeper than the criticism would suggest. He introduced into English political philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of substance upon which the whole vicious theory of checks and balances was erected. He made no distinction between the unlimited sovereignty of law and the very obviously limited sovereignty of reality. He must have known that to talk of the independence of the branches of the legislature was simple nonsense at a time when King and peers competed for the control of elections to the House of Commons. His idealization of a peerage whose typical spiritual member was Archbishop Cornwallis and whose temporal embodiment was the Duke of Bedford would not have deceived a schoolboy had it not provided a bulwark against improvement. It was ridiculous to describe the Commons as representative of property so long as places like Manchester and Sheffield were virtually disfranchised.