Part 33 (1/2)

Bryce's cheery indulgence for folly and error. But when the British author refuses to devote six months to the files of Californian journalism, he leaves the German master of his allotted field.

The actual predominates so much with Mr. Bryce that he has hardly a word on that extraordinary aspect of democracy, the union in time of war; and gives no more than a pa.s.sing glance at the confederate scheme of government, of which a northern writer said: ”The invaluable reforms enumerated should be adopted by the United States, with or without a reunion of the seceded States, and as soon as possible.” There are points on which some additional light could be drawn from the roaring loom of time. In the chapter on Spoils it is not stated that the idea belongs to the ministers of George III. Hamilton's argument against removals is mentioned, but not the New York edition of _The Federalist_ with the marginal note that ”Mr. H. had changed his view of the const.i.tution on that point.” The French wars of speculation and plunder are spoken of; but, to give honour where honour is due, it should be added that they were an American suggestion. In May 1790, Morris wrote to two of his friends at Paris: ”I see no means of extricating you from your troubles, but that which most men would consider as the means of plunging you into greater--I mean a war. And you should make it to yourselves a war of men, to your neighbours a war of money.... I hear you cry out that the finances are in a deplorable situation. This should be no obstacle. I think that they may be restored during war better than in peace. You want also something to turn men's attention from their present discontents.” There is a long and impartial inquiry into parliamentary corruption as practised now; but one wishes to hear so good a judge on the report that money prevailed at some of the turning-points of American history; on the imputations cast by the younger Adams upon his ablest contemporaries; on the story told by another president, of 223 representatives who received accommodation from the bank, at the rate of a thousand pounds apiece, during its struggle with Jackson.

America as known to the man in the cars, and America observed in the roll of the ages, do not always give the same totals. We learn that the best capacity of the country is withheld from politics, that there is what Emerson calls a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organisation, so that the representatives approach the level of the const.i.tuents. Yet it is in political science only that America occupies the first rank. There are six Americans on a level with the foremost Europeans, with Smith and Turgot, Mill and Humboldt. Five of these were secretaries of state, and one was secretary of the treasury.

We are told also that the American of to-day regards the national inst.i.tutions with a confidence sometimes grotesque. But this is a sentiment which comes down, not from Was.h.i.+ngton and Jefferson, but from Grant and Sherman. The ill.u.s.trious founders were not proud of their accomplished work; and men like Clay and Adams persisted in desponding to the second and third generation. We have to distinguish what the nation owes to Madison and Marshall, and what to the army of the Potomac; for men's minds misgave them as to the const.i.tution until it was cemented by the ordeal and the sacrifice of civil war. Even the claim put forward for Americans as the providers of humour for mankind seems to me subject to the same limitation. People used to know how often, or how seldom, Was.h.i.+ngton laughed during the war; but who has numbered the jokes of Lincoln?

Although Mr. Bryce has too much tact to speak as freely as the Americans themselves in the criticism of their government, he insists that there is one defect which they insufficiently acknowledge. By law or custom no man can represent any district but the one he resides in. If ten statesmen live in the same street, nine will be thrown out of work. It is worth while to point out (though this may not be the right place for a purely political problem) that even in that piece of censure in which he believes himself unsupported by his friends in the States, Mr. Bryce says no more than intelligent Americans have said before him. It chances that several of them have discussed this matter with me. One was governor of his State, and another is among the compurgators cited in the preface. Both were strongly persuaded that the usage in question is an urgent evil; others, I am bound to add, judged differently, deeming it valuable as a security against Boulangism--an object which can be attained by restricting the number of const.i.tuencies to be addressed by the same candidate. The two American presidents who agreed in saying that Whig and Tory belong to natural history, proposed a dilemma which Mr. Bryce wishes to elude. He prefers to stand half-way between the two, and to resolve general principles into questions of expediency, probability, and degree: ”The wisest statesman is he who best holds the balance between liberty and order.” The sentiment is nearly that of Croker and De Quincey, and it is plain that the author would discard the vulgar definition that liberty is the end of government, and that in politics things are to be valued as they minister to its security. He writes in the spirit of John Adams when he said that the French and the American Revolution had nothing in common, and of that eulogy of 1688 as the true Restoration, on which Burke and Macaulay spent their finest prose. A sentence which he takes from Judge Cooley contains the brief abstract of his book: ”America is not so much an example in her liberty as in the covenanted and enduring securities which are intended to prevent liberty degenerating into licence, and to establish a feeling of trust and repose under a beneficent government, whose excellence, so obvious in its freedom, is still more conspicuous in its careful provision for permanence and stability.” Mr. Bryce declares his own point of view in the following significant terms: ”The spirit of 1787 was an English spirit, and therefore a conservative spirit.... The American const.i.tution is no exception to the rule that everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly every inst.i.tution has grown, so much the more enduring is it likely to prove.... There is a hearty puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787.... No men were less revolutionary in spirit than the heroes of the American Revolution. They made a revolution in the name of Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights.” I descry a bewildered Whig emerging from the third volume with a reverent appreciation of ancestral wisdom, Burke's _Reflections_, and the eighteen Canons of Dort, and a growing belief in the function of ghosts to make laws for the quick.

When the last Valois consulted his dying mother, she advised him that anybody can cut off, but that the sewing on is an acquired art. Mr.

Bryce feels strongly for the men who practised what Catharine thought so difficult, and he stops for a moment in the midst of his very impersonal treatise to deliver a panegyric on Alexander Hamilton. _Tanto nomini nullum par elogium._ His merits can hardly be overstated. Talleyrand a.s.sured Ticknor that he had never known his equal; Seward calls him ”the ablest and most effective statesman engaged in organising and establis.h.i.+ng the union”; Macmaster, the iconoclast, and Holst, poorly endowed with the gift of praise, unite in saying that he was the foremost genius among public men in the new world; Guizot told Rush that _The Federalist_ was the greatest work known to him, in the application of elementary principles of government to practical administration; his paradox in support of political corruption, so hard to reconcile with the character of an honest man, was repeated to the letter by Niebuhr.

In estimating Hamilton we have to remember that he was in no sense the author of the const.i.tution. In the convention he was isolated, and his plan was rejected. In _The Federalist_, written before he was thirty, he pleaded for a form of government which he distrusted and disliked. He was out of sympathy with the spirit that prevailed, and was not the true representative of the cause, like Madison, who said of him, ”If his theory of government deviated from the republican standard, he had the candour to avow it, and the greater merit of co-operating faithfully in maturing and supporting a system which was not his choice.” The development of the const.i.tution, so far as it continued on his lines, was the work of Marshall, barely known to us by the extracts in late editions of the _Commentaries_. ”_The Federalist_,” says Story, ”could do little more than state the objects and general bearing of these powers and functions. The masterly reasoning of the chief-justice has followed them out to their ultimate results and boundaries with a precision and clearness approaching, as near as may be, to mathematical demonstration.” Morris, who was as strong as Hamilton on the side of federalism, testifies heavily against him as a leader: ”More a theoretic than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system may be good in itself, and bad in relation to particular circ.u.mstances.

He well knew that his favourite form was inadmissible, unless as the result of civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an approaching crisis arose from a conviction that the kind of government most suitable, in his opinion, to this extensive country, could be established in no other way.... He trusted, moreover, that in the changes and chances of time we should be involved in some war, which might strengthen our union and nerve the executive. He was of all men the most indiscreet. He knew that a limited monarchy, even if established, could not preserve itself in this country.... He never failed, on every occasion, to advocate the excellence of, and avow his attachment to, monarchical government.... Thus, meaning very well, he acted very ill, and approached the evils he apprehended by his very solicitude to keep them at a distance.” The language of Adams is more severe; but Adams was an enemy. It has been justly said that ”he wished good men, as he termed them, to rule; meaning the wealthy, the well-born, the socially eminent.” The federalists have suffered somewhat from this imputation; for a prejudice against any group claiming to serve under that flag is among the bequests of the French Revolution.

”Les honnetes gens ont toujours peur: c'est leur nature,” is a maxim of Chateaubriand. A man most divergent and unlike him, Menou, had drawn the same conclusion: ”En revolution il ne faut jamais se mettre du cote des honnetes gens: ils sont toujours balayes.” And Royer Collard, with the candour one shows in describing friends, said: ”C'est le parti des honnetes gens qui est le moins honnete de tous les partis. Tout le monde, meme dans ses erreurs, etait honnete a l'a.s.semblee const.i.tuante, excepte le cote droit.” Hamilton stands higher as a political philosopher than as an American partisan. Europeans are generally liberal for the sake of something that is not liberty, and conservative for an object to be conserved; and in a jungle of other motives besides the reason of state we cannot often eliminate unadulterated or disinterested conservatism. We think of land and capital, tradition and custom, the aristocracy and the services, the crown and the altar. It is the singular superiority of Hamilton that he is really anxious about nothing but the exceeding difficulty of quelling the centrifugal forces, and that no kindred and coequal powers divide his attachment or intercept his view. Therefore he is the most scientific of conservative thinkers, and there is not one in whom the doctrine that prefers the s.h.i.+p to the crew can be so profitably studied.

In his scruple to do justice to conservative doctrine Mr. Bryce extracts a pa.s.sage from a letter of Canning to Croker which, by itself, does not adequately represent that minister's views. ”Am I to understand, then, that you consider the king as completely in the hands of the Tory aristocracy as his father, or rather as George II. was in the hands of the Whigs? If so, George III. reigned, and Mr. Pitt (both father and son) administered the government, in vain. I have a better opinion of the real vigour of the crown when it chooses to put forth its own strength, and I am not without some reliance on the body of the people.”

The finest mind reared by many generations of English conservatism was not always so faithful to monarchical traditions, and in addressing the incessant polemist of Toryism Canning made himself out a trifle better than he really was. His intercourse with Marcellus in 1823 exhibits a diluted orthodoxy: ”Le systeme britannique n'est que le butin des longues victoires remportees par les sujets contre le monarque.

Oubliez-vous que les rois ne doivent pas donner des inst.i.tutions, mais que les inst.i.tutions seules doivent donner des rois?... Connaissez-vous un roi qui merite d'etre libre, dans le sens implicite du mot?... Et George IV., croyez-vous que je serais son ministre, s'il avait ete libre de choisir?... Quand un roi denie au peuple les inst.i.tutions dont le peuple a besoin, quel est le procede de l'Angleterre? Elle expulse ce roi, et met a sa place un roi d'une famille alliee sans doute, mais qui se trouve ainsi, non plus un fils de la royaute, confiant dans le droit de ses ancetres, mais le fils des inst.i.tutions nationales, tirant tous ses droits de cette seule origine.... Le gouvernement representatif est encore bon a une chose que sa majeste a oubliee. Il fait que des ministres essuient sans repliquer les epigrammes d'un roi qui cherche a se venger ainsi de son impuissance.”

Mr. Bryce's work has received a hearty welcome in its proper hemisphere, and I know not that any critic has doubted whether the pious founder, with the dogma of unbroken continuity, strikes the just note or covers all the ground. At another angle, the origin of the greatest power and the grandest polity in the annals of mankind emits a different ray. It was a favourite doctrine with Webster and Tocqueville that the beliefs of the pilgrims inspired the Revolution, which others deem a triumph of pelagianism; while J.Q. Adams affirms that ”not one of the motives which stimulated the puritans of 1643 had the slightest influence in actuating the confederacy of 1774.” The Dutch statesman Hogendorp, returning from the United States in 1784, had the following dialogue with the stadtholder: ”La religion, monseigneur, a moins d'influence que jamais sur les esprits.... Il y a toute une province de quakers?... Depuis la revolution il semble que ces sortes de differences s'evanouissent....

Les Bostoniens ne sont-ils pas fort devots?... Ils l'etaient, monseigneur, mais a lire les descriptions faites il y a vingt ou meme dix ans, on ne les reconnait pas de ce cote-la.” It is an old story that the federal const.i.tution, unlike that of Herault de Sech.e.l.les, makes no allusion to the Deity; that there is none in the president's oath; and that in 1796 it was stated officially that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. No three men had more to do with the new order than Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson. Franklin's irreligious tone was such that his ma.n.u.scripts, like Bentham's, were suppressed, to the present year. Adams called the Christian faith a horrid blasphemy. Of Jefferson we are a.s.sured that, if not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence; and he hoped that the French arms ”would bring at length kings, n.o.bles, and priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with human blood.” If Calvin prompted the Revolution, it was after he had suffered from contact with Tom Paine; and we must make room for other influences which, in that generation, swayed the world from the rising to the setting sun. It was an age of faith in the secular sense described by Guizot: ”C'etait un siecle ardent et sincere, un siecle plein de foi et d'enthousiasme. Il a eu foi dans la verite, car il lui a reconnu le droit de regner.”

In point both of principle and policy, Mr. Bryce does well to load the scale that is not his own, and to let the jurist within him sometimes mask the philosophic politician. I have to speak of him not as a political reasoner or as an observer of life in motion, but only in the character which he a.s.siduously lays aside. If he had guarded less against his own historic faculty, and had allowed s.p.a.ce to take up neglected threads, he would have had to expose the boundless innovation, the unfathomed gulf produced by American independence, and there would be no opening to back the Jeffersonian shears against the darning-needle of the great chief-justice. My misgiving lies in the line of thought of Riehl and the elder Cherbuliez. The first of those eminent conservatives writes: ”Die Extreme, nicht deren Vermittelungen und Abschwachungen, deuten die Zukunft vor.” The Genevese has just the same remark: ”Les idees n'ont jamais plus de puissance que sous leur forme la plus abstraite. Les idees abstraites ont plus remue le monde, elles ont cause plus de revolutions et laisse plus de traces durables que les idees pratiques.” La.s.salle says, ”Kein Einzelner denkt mit der Consequenz eines Volksgeistes.” Sch.e.l.ling may help us over the parting ways: ”Der erzeugte Gedanke ist eine unabhangige Macht, fur sich fortwirkend, ja, in der menschlichen Seele, so anwachsend, da.s.s er seine eigene Mutter bezwingt und unterwirft.” After the philosopher, let us conclude with a divine: ”C'est de revolte en revolte, si l'on veut employer ce mot, que les societes se perfectionnent, que la civilisation s'etablit, que la justice regne, que la verite fleurit.”

The anti-revolutionary temper of the Revolution belongs to 1787, not to 1776. Another element was at work, and it is the other element that is new, effective, characteristic, and added permanently to the experience of the world. The story of the revolted colonies impresses us first and most distinctly as the supreme manifestation of the law of resistance, as the abstract revolution in its purest and most perfect shape. No people was so free as the insurgents; no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew. Those who deem Was.h.i.+ngton and Hamilton honest can apply the term to few European statesmen. Their example presents a thorn, not a cus.h.i.+on, and threatens all existing political forms, with the doubtful exception of the federal const.i.tution of 1874. It teaches that men ought to be in arms even against a remote and constructive danger to their freedom; that even if the cloud is no bigger than a man's hand, it is their right and duty to stake the national existence, to sacrifice lives and fortunes, to cover the country with a lake of blood, to shatter crowns and sceptres and fling parliaments into the sea. On this principle of subversion they erected their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its...o...b..t and a.s.signed a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason cutting as clean as Atropos. The wisest philosopher of the old world instructs us to take things as they are, and to adore G.o.d in the event: ”Il faut toujours etre content de l'ordre du pa.s.se, parce qu'il est conforme a la volonte de Dieu absolue, qu'on connoit par l'evenement.”

The contrary is the text of Emerson: ”Inst.i.tutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born. They are not superior to the citizen. Every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case. We may make as good; we may make better.” More to the present point is the language of Seward: ”The rights a.s.serted by our forefathers were not peculiar to themselves, they were the common rights of mankind.

The basis of the const.i.tution was laid broader by far than the superstructure which the conflicting interests and prejudices of the day suffered to be erected. The const.i.tution and laws of the federal government did not practically extend those principles throughout the new system of government; but they were plainly promulgated in the declaration of independence. Their complete development and reduction to practical operation const.i.tute the progress which all liberal statesmen desire to promote, and the end of that progress will be complete political equality among ourselves, and the extension and perfection of inst.i.tutions similar to our own throughout the world.” A pa.s.sage which Hamilton's editor selects as the keynote of his system expresses well enough the spirit of the Revolution: ”The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power. I consider civil liberty, in a genuine, unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am convinced that the whole human race is ent.i.tled to it, and that it can be wrested from no part of them without the blackest and most aggravated guilt.” Those were the days when a philosopher divided governments into two kinds, the bad and the good, that is, those which exist and those which do not exist; and when Burke, in the fervour of early liberalism, proclaimed that a revolution was the only thing that could do the world any good: ”Nothing less than a convulsion that will shake the globe to its centre can ever restore the European nations to that liberty by which they were once so much distinguished.”

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 402: _English Historical Review_, 1889.]

XVII

HISTORICAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE AND FRENCH BELGIUM AND SWITZERLAND.

By ROBERT FLINT[403]

When Dr. Flint's former work appeared, a critic, who, it is true, was also a rival, objected that it was diffusely written. What then occupied three hundred and thirty pages has now expanded to seven hundred, and suggests a doubt as to the use of criticism. It must at once be said that the increase is nearly all material gain. The author does not cling to his main topic, and, as he insists that the science he is adumbrating flourishes on the study of facts only, and not on speculative ideas, he bestows some needless attention on historians who professed no philosophy, or who, like Daniel and Velly, were not the best of their kind. Here and there, as in the account of Condorcet, there may be an unprofitable or superfluous sentence. But on the whole the enlarged treatment of the philosophy of history in France is accomplished not by expansion, but by solid and essential addition. Many writers are included whom the earlier volume pa.s.sed over, and Cousin occupies fewer pages now than in 1874, by the aid of smaller type and the omission of a pa.s.sage injurious to Sch.e.l.ling. Many necessary corrections and improvements have been made, such as the transfer of Ballanche from theocracy to the liberal Catholicism of which he is supposed to be the founder.

Dr. Flint's unchallenged superiority consists alike in his familiarity with obscure, but not irrelevant authors, whom he has brought into line, and in his scrupulous fairness towards all whose attempted systems he has a.n.a.lysed. He is hearty in appreciating talent of every kind, but he is discriminating in his judgment of ideas, and rarely sympathetic.

Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so clever. Without transfiguration the effect might be attained by sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original.

Excepting one unduly favoured compet.i.tor, who fills two pages with untranslated French, there is little direct quotation. Cournot is one of those who, having been overlooked at first, are here raised to prominence. He is urgently, and justly, recommended to the attention of students. ”They will find that every page bears the impress of patient, independent, and sagacious thought. I believe I have not met with a more genuine thinker in the course of my investigations. He was a man of the finest intellectual qualities, of a powerful and absolutely truthful mind.” But then we are warned that Cournot never wrote a line for the general reader, and accordingly he is not permitted to speak for himself. Yet it was this thoughtful Frenchman who said: ”Aucune idee parmi celles qui se referent a l'ordre des faits naturels ne tient de plus pres a la famille des idees religieuses que l'idee du progres, et n'est plus propre a devenir le principe d'une sorte de foi religieuse pour ceux qui n'en ont pas d'autres. Elle a, comme la foi religieuse, la vertu de relever les ames et les caracteres.”

The successive theories gain neither in clearness nor in contrast by the order in which they stand. As other countries are reserved for other volumes, Cousin precedes Hegel, who was his master, whilst Quetelet is barely mentioned in his own place, and has to wait for Buckle, if not for Oettingen and Rumelin, before he comes on for discussion. The finer threads, the underground currents, are not carefully traced. The connection between the _juste milieu_ in politics and eclecticism in philosophy was already stated by the chief eclectic; but the subtler link between the Catholic legitimists and democracy seems to have escaped the author's notice. He says that the republic proclaimed universal suffrage in 1848, and he considers it a triumph for the party of Lafayette. In fact, it was the triumph of an opposite school--of those legitimists who appealed from the narrow franchise which sustained the Orleans dynasty to the nation behind it. The chairman of the const.i.tutional committee was a legitimist, and he, inspired by the abbe de Genoude, of the _Gazette de France_, and opposed by Odilon Barrot, insisted on the pure logic of absolute democracy.

It is an old story now that the true history of philosophy is the true evolution of philosophy, and that when we have eliminated whatever has been damaged by contemporary criticism or by subsequent advance, and have a.s.similated all that has survived through the ages, we shall find in our possession not only a record of growth, but the full-grown fruit itself. This is not the way in which Dr. Flint understands the building up of his department of knowledge. Instead of showing how far France has made a way towards the untrodden crest, he describes the many flowery paths, discovered by the French, which lead elsewhere, and I expect that in coming volumes it will appear that Hegel and Buckle, Vico and Ferrari, are scarcely better guides than Laurent or Littre. Fatalism and retribution, race and nationality, the test of success and of duration, heredity and the reign of the invincible dead, the widening circle, the emanc.i.p.ation of the individual, the gradual triumph of the soul over the body, of mind over matter, reason over will, knowledge over ignorance, truth over error, right over might, liberty over authority, the law of progress and perfectibility, the constant intervention of providence, the sovereignty of the developed conscience--neither these nor other alluring theories are accepted as more than illusions or half-truths.