III

A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the students of constitutional law. Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-9) has had ever since its first publication an authority such as Coke only before possessed. "He it is," said Bentham, "who, first of all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the Scholar and the Gentleman." Certainly, as Professor Dicey has remarked, "the book contains much real learning about our system of government." We are less concerned here with Blackstone as an antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy. Here his purpose seems obvious enough. The English constitution raised him from humble means through a Professorship at Oxford to a judgeship in the Court of Common Pleas. He had been a member of Parliament and refused the office of Solicitor-General. He had thus no reason to be dissatisfied with the conditions of his time; and the first book of the 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 kinds—of nature, of God, and of the civil state. Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is "a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong." It is, he tells us, "called a rule to distinguish it from a compact or agreement." It derives from the sovereign power, of which the chief character is the making of laws. Society is based upon the "wants and fears" of men; and it is coeval with their origin. The idea of a state of nature "is too wild to be seriously admitted," besides being contrary to historical knowledge. Society implies government, and whatever its origins or its forms there "must be in all of them a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summa imperii, or rights of sovereignty reside." The forms of government are classified in the usual way; and the British constitution is noted as a happy mixture of them all. "The legislature of the Kingdom," Blackstone writes, "is entrusted to three powers entirely independent of each other; first the King, secondly the lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical assembly of persons, chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour or their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy; and as this aggregate body, actuated by different springs and attentive to different interests, composes the British Parliament and has the supreme disposal of everything; there can be no inconvenience attempted by either of the three branches, but will be withstood by one of the other two; each branch being armed with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous." It is in the king in Parliament that British sovereignty resides. Eschewing the notion of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the implications of it are secured. "The constitutional government of this island," he says, "is so admirably tempered and compounded, that nothing can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the equilibrium of power between one branch of the legislature and the rest."

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 nobility," such is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, "is also more peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded constitution, in order to support the rights of both the Crown and people, by forming a barrier to withstand the encroachments of both ... if they were confounded with the mass of the people, and like them had only a vote in electing representatives, their privileges would soon be borne down and overwhelmed by the popular torrent, which would effectually level all distinctions." "The Commons," he says further, "consist of all such men of property in the kingdom as have not seats in the House of Lords." The legal irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. "He is not only incapable of doing wrong," says Blackstone, "but even of thinking wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or weakness," though he points out that the constitution "has allowed a latitude of supposing the contrary." The powers of the King are described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of 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 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 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. His picture of the royal prerogative was a portrait against every detail of which what was best in England had struggled in the preceding century and a half. He has nothing to say of the cabinet, nothing of ministerial responsibility, nothing of the party system. What he did was to produce the defence of a non-existent system which acted as a barrier to all legal, and much political, progress in the next half-century. He gave men material without cause for satisfaction.

As a description of the existing government there is thus hardly an element of Blackstone's work which could stand the test of critical inquiry. But even worse was its philosophy. As Bentham pointed out, he was unaware of the distinction between society and government. The state of nature exists, or fails to exist, with startling inconsistency. Blackstone, in fact, was a Lockian who knows that Hume and Montesquieu have cut the ground from under his master's feet, and yet cannot understand how, without him, a foundation is to be supplied. Locke, indeed, seems to him, as a natural conservative, to go too far, and he rejects the original contract as without basis in history; yet contractual notions are present at every fundamental stage of his argument. The sovereign power, so we are told, is irresistible; and then because Blackstone is uncertain what right is to mean, we hear of moral limitations upon its exercise. He speaks continually of representation without any effort to examine into the notions it conveys. The members of society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify existent inequalities. "The natural foundations of sovereignty," he writes, "are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and power." Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have been taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the actual exertion of authority. Nor has he clear notions of the way in which property is to be founded. Communism, he writes in seventeenth century fashion, is the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the earth to men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions. This is pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are utterly remote from the logical result of his own premises.

The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these questions, only the most confused sort of notions. He had to preface his work with some sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded it. The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to the great sceptic's speculations. So that he was driven back upon notions he felt to be false, without a proper realization of their falsity. His use of Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a great idea can be in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than the fertility it contained. The merit of Blackstone is his learning, which was substantial, his realization that the powers of law demand some classification, his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is right alike in searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying the historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions of his time to question its assumptions.

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 Constitution of England in 1775, after a twelve months' visit to shores sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to die in obscurity and want. His book, as he tells us in his preface, was no mean success, though he derived no profit from it. Like Blackstone, he was impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty. The attitude was not unnatural in one who, with his head full of Montesquieu, was a witness of the struggle between Junius and the King. He has, of course, the limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of government in purely mechanical terms. "It is upon the passions of mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the action of the various parts of a state depends. The machine may vary as to its dimensions; but its movement and acting springs still remain intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks of government as "a great ballet or dance in which ... everything depends upon the disposition of the figures." He does not deal, that is to say, with men as men, but only as inert adjuncts of a machine by which they are controlled. Such an attitude is bound to suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction. It regards historic forces as distinct from the men related to them. Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to unstability. The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal power against the popular. The King's interest is safeguarded by the division of Parliament into two Houses, each of which rejects the encroachment of the other upon the executive. His power is limited by parliamentary privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and so forth. The theory was not true; though it represented with some accuracy the ideals of the time.

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 actual term—while it provides room for men's ambitions at the same time prevents the equation of ambition with indispensability. "Woe to him," says De Lolme, "... who should endeavor to make the people believe that their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single citizen." He sees the paramount value of freedom of the press. This, as he says, with the necessity that members should be re-elected, "has delivered into the hands of the people at large the exercise of the censorial power." He has no doubt but that resistance is the remedy whereby governmental encroachment can be prevented; "resistance," he says, "is the ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of power." He points out how real is the guarantee of liberty where the onus of proof in criminal cases is thrown upon the government. He regards with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military arm, and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding to the royal power. Nor can he fail to admire the insight which organizes "the agitation of the popular mind," not as "the forerunner of violent commotions" but to "animate all parts of the state." Therein De Lolme had grasped the real essence of party government.

It was, of course, no more than symptomatic of his time that cabinet and prime minister should have escaped his notice. A more serious defect was his inability, with the Wilkes contest prominently in his notice, to see that the people had assumed a new importance. For the masses, indeed, De Lolme had no enthusiasm. "A passive share," he thought, "was the only one that could, with safety to the state, be trusted" to the humble man. "The greater part," he wrote, "of those who compose this multitude, taken up with the care of providing for their subsistence, have neither sufficient leisure, nor even, in consequence of their imperfect education, the degree of information, requisite for functions of this kind." Such an attitude blinded him to the significance of the American conflict, which he saw unattended by its moral implications. He trusted too emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George III could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a sense of its own power. The real social forces of the time found there no channels of activity; and the difference between De Lolme and Bagehot is the latter's power to go behind the screen of statute to the inner sources of power.



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 familiar; and what was needed for the appreciation of its teaching was less a renaissance than discontent. So soon as men are dissatisfied with the traditional foundations of the State, a gospel of natural rights is certain to make its appearance. And, once the design of George III had been made familiar by his treatment of Chatham and Wilkes, the discontent did not fail to show itself. Indeed, in the year before the publication of Rousseau's book, Robert Wallace, a Scottish chaplain royal, had written in his Various Prospects (1761) a series of essays which are at once an anticipation of the main thesis of Malthus and a plea for the integration of social forces by which alone the mass of men could be raised from misery. In the light of later experience it is difficult not to be impressed by the modernist flavour of Wallace's attack. He insists upon the capacity of men and the disproportion between their potential achievement and that which is secured by actual society. Men are in the mass condemned to ignorance and toil; and the lust of power sets man against his neighbor to the profit of the rich. Wallace traces these evils to private property and the individualistic organization of work, and he sees no remedy save community of possessions and a renovated educational system. Yet he does not conceal from himself that it is to the interest of the governing class to prevent a revolution which, beneficent to the masses, would be fatal to themselves; nor does he conceive it possible until the fertility of men has been reduced to the capacity of the soil. He speculates upon the chances of a new spirit among men, of an all-wise legislator, and of the beneficent example of colonies upon the later Owenite model. But his book is contemporaneous with our own ideas rather than with the thoughts of his generation. Nor does it seem to have excited any general attention.

It is five years after Rousseau that we see the first clear signs of his influence. Naturally enough the men amongst whom the new spirit spread abroad were the Nonconformists. For more than seventy years they had been allowed existence without recognition. None had more faithfully supported the new dynasty than they; none had been paid less for their allegiance. Their utmost effort could secure only a sparing mitigation of the Test Act. All of them were Whigs, and the doctrines of Locke suited exactly their temper and their wants. There were amongst them able men in every walk of life, and they were apt to publication. Joseph Priestley, in particular, gave up with willingness to mankind what was obviously meant for chemical science. A few years previously Brown of the Estimate had submitted a scheme for national education, in which the essential principle was Church control. Priestley had answered him, and was encouraged by friends to expand his argument into a general treatise. His Essay on the First Principles of Government appeared in 1768; and, if for nothing else, it would be noteworthy because it was therein that the significance of the "greatest happiness principle" first flashed across Bentham's mind. But the book shows more than this. "I had placed," says Priestley with due modesty, "the foundation of some of the most valuable interests of mankind on a broader and firmer basis than Mr. Locke"; and the breadth and firmness are Rousseau's contribution.

Certainly we herein meet new elements. On the very threshold of the book we meet the dogma of the perfectibility of man. "Whatever," Priestley rhapsodizes, "was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisaical, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive." "The instrument of this progress ... towards this glorious state" is government; though a little later we are to find that the main business of government is noninterference. Men are all equal, and their natural rights are indefeasible. Government must be restrained in the interests of liberty. No man can be governed without his consent; for government is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in exchange for a power to share in public decisions. It thus follows that the people must be sovereign, and interference with their natural rights will justify resistance. Every government, he says, is "in its original principles, and antecedent to its present form an equal republic"; wherefore, of course, it follows that we must restore to men the equality they have lost. And, equally, of course, this would bestow upon the Nonconformists their full citizenship; for Warburton's Alliance, to attack which Priestley exhausts all the resources of his ingenuity, has been one of the main instruments in their degradation. "Unbounded liberty in matters of religion," which means the abolition of the Establishment, promises to be "very favorable to the best interests of mankind."

So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for English Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import. It can never be forgotten in the history of political ideas that the alliance of Church and State made Nonconformists suspicious of government interference. Their original desire to be left unimpeded was soon exalted into a definite theory; and since political conditions had confined them so largely to trade none felt as they did the hampering influence of State-restrictions. The result has been a great difficulty in making liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the organic nature of the State. It remains for them almost entirely a police institution which, once it aims at the realization of right, usurps a function far better performed by individuals. There is no sense of the community; all that exists is a sum of private sentiments. "Civil liberty," says Priestley, "has been greatly impaired by an abuse of the maxim that the joint understanding of all the members of a State, properly collected, must be preferable to that of individuals; and consequently that the more the cases are in which mankind are governed by this united reason of the whole community, so much the better; whereas, in truth, the greater part of human actions are of such a nature, that more inconvenience would follow from their being fixed by laws than from their being left to every man's arbitrary will." If my neighbor assaults me, he suggests, I may usefully call in the police; but where the object is the discovery of truth, the means of education, the method of religious belief, individual initiative is superior to State action. The latter produces an uniform result "incompatible with the spirit of discovery." Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just to posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future. Men are too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all action.

Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past tradition; and the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered broadcast over his pages. Nevertheless the basis upon which he defended his ideas was a utilitarianism hardly less complete than that which Bentham made the instrument of revolution. "Regard to the general good," he says, "is the main method by which natural rights are to be defended." "The good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be determined." In substance, that is to say, if not completely in theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to those of expediency. His chief attack upon religious legislation is similarly based upon considerations of policy. His view of the individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual energy. Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar fashion to Adam Smith and his followers. Priestley, of course, was inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that government has the future in its hands than that government action may well be decisive for good or evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all doors. That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the previous age.

It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley exerted; certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small. Dr. Richard Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he might have had has been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents. His sinking-fund scheme was taken up by the younger Pitt, and proved, though the latter believed in it to the last, to be founded upon an arithmetical fallacy which did not sit well upon a fellow of the Royal Society. His sermon on the French Revolution provoked the Reflections of Burke; and, though much of the right was on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he survived Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day, and he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb optimism; for the rigid 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 luxury was the seed of English degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential to the general thesis he had to make.

Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to print by the American 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 Observations (1777), presents a perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their ancestry concealed. They represent the tradition of Locke, modified by the importations of Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume, and he takes sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has little or nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument is upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government, and self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator. Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to its last consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public services"; laws are "particular provisions or regulations established by Common Consent for gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are "trustees or deputies for carrying these regulations into execution." And almost in the words of Rousseau, Price goes on to admit that liberty, "in its most perfect degree, can be enjoyed only in small states where every independent agent is capable of giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen into public offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though he thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize the sacrifice of liberty involved.

But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized. "Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust; and all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects the theory of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with self-government; if the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its life, it would betray its constituents and dissolve itself. "If omnipotence," he writes, "can with any sense be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all legislative authority originates; that is, in the People." Such a system is alone compatible with the ends of government, since it cannot be supposed that men "combine into communities and institute government" for self-enslavement. Nor is any other political system "consistent with the natural equality of mankind"; by which Price means that no man "is constituted by the author of nature the vassal or subject of another, or has any right to give law to him, or, without his consent, to take away any part of his property or to abridge him of his liberty." From all of which it is concluded that liberty is inalienable; and a people which has lost it "must have a right to emancipate themselves as soon as they can." The aptness of the argument to the American situation is obvious enough; and nowhere is Price more happy or more formidable than when he applies his precepts to phrases like "the unity of the empire" and the "honor of the kingdom" which were so freely used to cover up the inevitable results of George's obstinacy.

The Essay on the Right of Property in Land (1781) of William Ogilvie deserves at least a passing notice. The author, who published his book anonymously, was a Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen and an agriculturist of some success. His own career was distinctly honorable. The teacher of Sir James Mackintosh, he had a high reputation as a classical scholar and deserves to be remembered for his effort to reform a college which had practically ceased to perform its proper academic functions. His book is virtually an essay upon the natural right of men to the soil. He does not doubt that the distress of the times is due to the land monopoly. The earth being given to men in common, its invasion by private ownership is a dangerous perversion. Men have the right to the full product of their labor; but the privileges of the landowner prevent the enjoyment of that right. The primary duty of every State is the increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation is that which has the greatest number of free and independent cultivators. But governments attend rather to the interest of the higher classes, even while they hold out the protection of the common people as the main pretext of their authority. The result is their maintenance of land-monopoly even though it affects the prime material of all essential industries, prevents the growth of population, and makes the rich wealthier at the expense of the poor. It breeds oppression and ignorance, and poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative. He points out how a nation is dominated by its landlords, and how they have consistently evaded the fiscal burdens they should bear. Only in a return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source of an increase in happiness.

Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to speak of actual changes, he had little more to propose than a system of peasant proprietorship. What is striking in the book is its sense of great, impending changes, its thorough grasp of the principle of utility, its realization of the immense agricultural improvement that is possible if the landed system can be so changed as to bring into play the impulses of humble men. He sees clearly enough that wealth dominates the State; and his interpretation of history is throughout economic. Ogilvie is one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who, chiefly through Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special current of their own in the great tide of protest against the unjust situation of labor. Like them, he builds his system upon natural rights; though, unlike them, his natural rights are defended by expediency and in a style that is always clear and logical. The book itself has rather a curious history. At its appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind. Mackintosh knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against the amiable delusion that its excellence would persuade the British government to force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the East India Company. Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby, it was intended to instruct the Chartists in the secret of their oppression; and therein it may well have contributed to the tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus O'Connor. In 1891 the problem of the land was again eagerly debated under the stimulus of Mr. Henry George; and a patriotic Scotchman published the book with biographical notes that constitute one of the most amazing curiosities in English political literature.



V

Against the school of Rousseau's English disciples it is comparatively easy to multiply criticisms. They lacked any historic sense. Government, for them, was simply an instrument which was made and unmade at the volition of men. How complex were its psychological foundations they had no conception; with the single factor of consent they could explain the most marvellous edifice of any time. They were buried beneath a mountain of metaphysical right which they never related to legal facts or to political possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led. They overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy themselves with political affairs. They made no proper allowance for the protective armour each social system must acquire by the mere force of prescription. Nor is there sufficient allowance in their attitude for those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman must of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to say, so completely with 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 privileged class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from the minds of most men engaged in its direction. The loss of America, the heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most to the fact that principle is a vital part of policy. The revolutionists recalled men to the need of explaining, no less than carrying on, the government of the Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid intrigues of the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated, unconvinced. It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes of Europe and America before they would give serious heed; and even then they met antagonism with nothing save oppression and hate. Yet the doctrines remained; for thought, after all, is killed by reasoned answer alone. And when the first gusts of war and revolution had passed, the cause for which they stood was found to have permeated all classes save that which had all to lose by learning.

We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and Priestley as representing more than an important segment of opinion. The opposition to their theories was not less articulate than their own defence of them. Some, like Burke, desired a purification of the existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had no sort of sympathy with new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least, deserves some mention less for the inherent value of what he had to say, than for the nature of the opinions he expounded. Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a reputation alike in political and economic enquiry. He represents the sturdy nationalism of Arbuthnot's John Bull, the unreasoned prejudice against all foreigners, the hatred of all metaphysics as inconsistent with common sense, the desire to let things be on the ground that the effort after change is worse than the evil of which men complain. His Treatise on Civil Government (1781) is in many ways a delightful book, bluff, hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that is all its own. He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the first place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the second, to explode the new bubble of Rousseau's followers. The second point takes the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as Tucker shrewdly saw, the theories of the school may trace their ancestry. He analyses the theory of consent in such fashion as to show that if its adherents could be persuaded to be logical, they would have to admit themselves anarchists. He has no sympathy with the state of nature; the noble savage, on investigation, turns out to be a barbaric creature with a club and scalping knife. Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or, as he prefers, somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that does not mean that the actual governors can be dismissed when any eccentric happens to take exception to their views. He has no sympathy with parliamentary reform. Give the mob an increase of power, he says, and nothing is to be expected but outrage and violence. He thinks the constitution very well as it is, and those who preach the evils of corruption ought to prove their charges instead of blasphemously asserting that the voice of the people is the voice of God.

Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own. He does not doubt that the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered upon them. Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as ever George III himself could have desired. But not for one moment would he fight them to compel their return to British allegiance. If the American colonies want to go, let them by all means cut adrift. They are only a useless source of expenditure. The trade they represent does not depend upon allegiance but upon wants that England can supply if she keeps shop in the proper way, if, that is, she makes it to their interest to buy in her market. Indeed, colonies of all kinds seem to him quite useless. They ever are, he says, and ever were, "a drain to and an incumbrance on the Mother-country, requiring perpetual and expensive nursing in their infancy, and becoming headstrong and ungovernable in proportion as they grow up." All wise relations depend upon self-interest, and that needs no compulsion. If Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up, the result would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and contracts effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal industry encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-century before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean crustily explaining his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had just rejected Edmund Burke for advocating free trade with Ireland.

No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr. Johnson. Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of gloomy prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of the source from which they come. He 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 esteemed highly. "I am a friend to subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he seems to have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as the worst of sins. He did not believe in the honesty of republicans; they levelled down, but were never inclined to level up. Men, he felt, had a part to act in society, and their business was to fulfil their allotted station. Rousseau was a very bad man: "I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years." Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth while was freedom in private concerns. He blessed the government in the case of general warrants and thought the power of the Crown too small. Toleration he considered due to an inapt distinction between freedom to think and freedom to talk, and any magistrate "while he thinks himself right ... ought to enforce what he thinks." The American revolt he ascribed to selfish faction; and in his Taxation 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 acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the Idler as one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular. There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no age are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's attitude would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution.



CHAPTER VI

BURKE



I

It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the king stands outside the categories of political conflict. He is the dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory, is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once more the balance of power. Nor was the effort defeated without a struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.

And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost much credit during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power. A generation of corrupt practice and the final defeat of Stuart hopes had already deprived the Whigs of any special hold on their past ideals. They were divided already into factions the purpose of which was no more than the avid pursuit of place and pension. Government by connection proved itself irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also that once corruption was centralized there was no limit to its influence, granted only the absence of great questions. When George III transferred that organization from the office of the minister to his own court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his success. For more than forty years the Tories had been excluded from office; and they were more than eager to sell their support. The Church had become the creature of the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was towards benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and a reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's first book can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor was it obvious that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the great Whig families.

What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of the king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined somewhat to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was excessively ignorant and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no one but himself, and he totally misunderstood the true nature of his office. There is no question which arose in the first forty years of his reign in which he was not upon the wrong side and proud of his error. He was wrong about Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about France. He demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked every measure for the purification of the political system. He supported the Slave trade and he opposed the repeal of the Test Act. He prevented the grant of Catholic emancipation at the one moment when it might have genuinely healed the wounds of Ireland. He destroyed by his perverse creations the value of the House of Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly determined to make his will the criterion of policy; and his design might have succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to its greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in politics. The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the court upon a broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as the event proved, could be as subservient to the king as to his minister.

Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with characteristic stupidity, the king did not know the proper instruments for his purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the suspicion of the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder Pitt. In the Wilkes affair he threw the clearest light of the century upon the true nature of the House of Commons. His own system of proscription restored to the Whig party not a little of the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to supply them with a philosophy. Chatham remained the idol of the people despite his hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of representative government and of personal liberty. He lost America and it was not his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had made him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt was to compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George's effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature of things, survive that analysis.

Not, of course, that George ever lacked defenders. As early as 1761, the old rival of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage 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 illegal claims of factious oligarchy." Government had become the private possession of a few powerful men. The king was but a puppet in leading strings. The basis of government should be widened, for every honest man was aware that distinctions of party were now merely nominal. The Tories should be admitted to place. They were now friendly to the accession and they no longer boasted their hostility to dissent. They knew that Toleration and the Establishment were of the essence of the Constitution. Were once the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would cease and Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom. "The ministers," he said, "will depend on the Crown not the Crown on ministers" if George but showed "his resolution to break all factitious connections and confederacies." The tone is Bolingbroke's, and it was the lesson George had insistently heard from early youth. How sinister was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in political exile, with Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants threatening the whole basis of past liberties.

The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the meaning of the new synthesis was Junius. That his anonymity concealed the malignant talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now beyond denial. Junius, indeed, can hardly claim a place in the history of political ideas. His genius lay not in the discussion of principle but the dissection of personality. His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled him to inform the general public of facts which were the private possession of the inner political circle. His mind was narrow and pedantic. He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He was never generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness the nature of the issue and he was a powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king. He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover, appearing as they did in the daily journals gave the press a significance in politics which it has never lost. He made the significance of George's effort known to the mass of men at a time when no other means of information was at hand. The opposition was divided; the king's friends were in a vast majority; the publication of debates was all but impossible. English government was a secret conflict in which the entrance of spectators was forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate. It was the glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. Not even the combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord Mansfield's doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of his vituperation and Wilkes' courage. Bad men have sometimes been the instruments of noble destiny; and there are few more curious episodes in English history than the result of this alliance between revengeful hate and insolent ambition.



II

Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was the ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict its real place in philosophy. There is no immortality save in ideas; and it was Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in which he was the liberal protagonist. His career is illustrative at once of the merits and defects of English politics in the eighteenth century. The son of an Irish Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, he served, after learning what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to politics in the upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied, along with Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal; though the Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) shows his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub Street that he appears to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge which made him without equal in the House of Commons. His earliest production was a Vindication of Natural Society (1756), written in the manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the basis of Godwin's Political 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, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom all England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a place at the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.

For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a singularly lovable figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said Johnson; and Goldsmith has told us how he wound his way into a subject like a serpent. Macaulay thought him the greatest man since Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest master of civil wisdom in our tongue." "No English writer," says Sir Leslie Stephen, "has received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics." Even when the last criticism has been made, detraction from these estimates is impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent was his temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe. His alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics, unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public welfare. No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to the service of the nation with less regard for personal advancement. No English statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a mass of details to the principle they involve.

He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no influence to whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics, indeed, bear upon their face the preoccupation with the immediate problems of the House of Commons. Yet through them all the principles that emerge form a consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw it with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the maxims of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London out to India and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian ryot's wrongs as for the iniquities of English policy to Ireland. With less width of mind than Hume and less intensity of gaze than Adam Smith, he yet had a width and intensity which, fused with his own imaginative sympathy, gave him more insight than either. He had an unerring eye for the eternal principles of politics. He knew that ideals must be harnessed to an Act of Parliament if they are not to cease their influence. Admitting while he did that politics must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find good reason why expediency should be identified with what he saw as right. It is a stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English politics to whom a greater immediate influence may be ascribed, just as in political philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of Hobbes and Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and speculation his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like him before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his practical insight was far less profound. Hamilton had Burke's full grasp of political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation. So that he remains a figure of uniqueness. He may, as Goldsmith said, have expended upon his party talents that should have illuminated the universal aspect of the State. Yet there is no question with which he dealt that he did not leave the richer for his enquiry.



III

The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he was at every point upon the side of the future. Where constitutional reform was in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy; though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid conservatism. In the last decade of his life he encountered the greatest cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the Reformation, and it is not too much to say that at every point he missed the essence of its meaning. Yet even upon France and the English Constitution he was full of practical sagacity. Had his warning been uttered without the fury of hate that accompanied it, he might well have guided the forces of the Revolution into channels that would have left no space for the military dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real evils of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently inveighed, forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch of wise and continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he was ready to praise. What impressed him was less the evils of the constitution than its possibilities, could the defects quite alien from its nature but be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a deeper vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke's conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was too much the apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles involved in the overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense of a Divine Providence taking thought for the welfare of men to interfere with violence in his handiwork. The tinge of caution is never absent, even from his most liberal moments; and he was willing to endure great evil if it seemed dangerous to estimate the cost of change.

His American speeches are the true text-book for colonial administration. He put aside the empty plea of right which satisfied legal pedants like George Grenville. What moved him was the tragic fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom. He never concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the maintenance of English liberties. "Armies," he said many years later, "first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself." He had firm hold of that insidious danger which belittles freedom itself in the interest of curtailing some special desire. "In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties," he said in the famous 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 character of the American contest. His own receipt was sounder. In the Speech on American Taxation (1774) he had riddled the view that the fiscal methods of Lord North were likely to succeed. The true method was to find a way of peace. "Nobody shall persuade me," he told a hostile House of Commons, "when a whole people are concerned that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation." "Magnanimity in politics," he said in the next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." He did not know, in the most superb of all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment against a whole people. He would win the colonies by binding them to England with the ties of freedom. "The question with me," he said, "is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy." The problem, in fact, was one not of abstract right but of expediency; and nothing could be lost by satisfying American desire. Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was apparent to every first-class mind in England. But the obstinate king prevailed; and Burke's great protest remained no more than material for the legislation of the future. Yet it was something that ninety years after his speech the British North America Act should have given his dreams full substance.

Ireland had always a place apart in Burke's affections, and when he first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in his thoughts was the desire to assist its freedom. He saw that here, as in America, no man will be argued into slavery. A government which defied the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster. How could it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its subjects? Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan? The system of Protestant control, he said in the Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792), was "well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself." The Catholics paid their taxes; they served with glory in the army and navy. Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth. "Common sense," he said, "and common justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a people for their slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for great, general and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress them. "No man will assert seriously," he said, "that when people are of a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them with something to complain of." The advantages of subjects were, as he urged, their right; and a wise government would regard "all their reasonable wishes as so many claims." To neglect them was to have a nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.

There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research may well have shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there maintained. He was the first English statesman fully to understand the moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an eternal challenge to their malignant complacency. He did not ask the abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the wisdom of its conquest. All that he insisted upon was this, that in imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code. A lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white. The European must respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by law to respect them in his own State. "If we are not able," he said, "to contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that country to our constitution." England must be in India for India's benefit or not at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as the East India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was the antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a magnificent passage, "before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting." Sympathy with the native, regard for his habits and wants, the Company's servants failed to display. "The English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for the excesses of their premature power. The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds to be blown about in every breaking up of the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean." More than a century was to pass before the wisest of Burke's interpreters attempted the translation of his maxims into statute. But there has never, in any language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in imperial adventure. "The situation of man," said Burke, "is the preceptor of his duty." He saw how a nation might become corrupted by the spoils of other lands. He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of a later cruelty at home. Men will complain of their wrongdoing in the remoter empire; and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield. He denied that the government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction. Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit. He abhorred the politics of prestige. He knew the difficulties involved in administering distant territories, the ignorance and apathy of the public, the consequent erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong will fail of discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let us do what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national reputation." That is a general truth not less in Africa and China than in India itself. The main thought in Burke's mind was the danger lest colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of arbitrary ideas. That his own safeguards were inadequate is clear enough at the present time. He knew that the need was good government. He did not nor could he realize how intimately that ideal was connected with self-government. Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final outcome 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 problems and the French Revolution that Burke most clearly showed the real trend of his thought. That trend is unmistakable. Burke was a utilitarian who was convinced that what was old was valuable by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity. The State appeared to him an organic compound that came but slowly to its full splendour. It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible. Political philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty. While he did not belittle the value of reason, he was always impressed by the immense part played by prejudice in the determination of policy. He had no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates. Nor must we miss the religious aspect of his philosophy. He never doubted that religion was the foundation of the English State. "Englishmen," he said in the 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 explanation of social facts. Nothing was more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. The only safeguard he could find was in empiricism.

This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his earliest publication; but it remained with him to the end. He would not discuss America in terms of right. "I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions," he said in the Speech on American Taxation, "I hate the very sound of them." "One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state," he wrote in the Reflections, "is the propensity of the people to resort to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a Speech on the Duration of Parliament, "when men are driven to search into the foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of a social contract he declared "at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles," and he found no sense in the doctrine of popular sovereignty. "The lines of morality," he said in the 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 modifications. These exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious conclusion. "This," he said, "is the true touchstone of all theories which regard man and the affairs of men—does it suit his nature in general, does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?"

Of the truth of this general attitude it is difficult to make denial. But when Burke came to apply it to the British Constitution the "rules of prudence" he was willing to admit are narrow enough to cause surprised enquiry. He did not doubt that the true end of a legislature was "to give a direction, a form, a technical dress ... to the general sense of the community"; he admitted that popular revolt is so much the outcome of suffering that in any dispute between government and people, the presumption is at least equal in the latter's favor. He urged the acceptance of Grenville's bill for improving the method of decision upon disputed elections. He made a magnificent defence of the popular cause in the Middlesex election. He was in favor of the publication of parliamentary debates and of the voting lists in divisions. He supported almost with passion the ending of that iniquitous system by which the enfranchisement of revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir of electoral support. His Speech on Economical Reform (1780) was the prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack upon the waste of the Civil list.

Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go. He was against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible. He opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature. He would not, as in the great speech at Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather than a representative of his own convictions. "Government and legislation," he said, "are matters of reason and of judgment"; and once the private member had honorably arrived at a decision which he thought was for the interest of the whole community, his duty was done. All this, in itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke's admirable grasp of the practical application of attractive theories to the event. But it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic constitutional change which is more dubious. He had no sympathy with the Radicals. "The bane of the Whigs," he said, "has been the admission among them of the corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by persuading many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers." "If the nation at large," he wrote in another letter, "has disposition enough to oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of government is, in my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the general disposition be against a virtuous and manly line of public conduct, there is no form into which it can be thrown that will improve its nature or add to its energy"; and in the same letter he foreshadows a possible retirement from the House of Commons as a protest against the growth of radical opinion in his party. He resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage qualification. He had no sympathy with the effort either to add to the county representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs. The framework of the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent. He deplored all criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials. "Our representation," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the 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 suggestiveness of his very errors makes examination of their ground important. Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the name of expediency. His opponents argued that, since men are by nature equal, it must follow that they have an equal right to self-government. To Burke, the admission of this principle would have meant the overthrow of the British constitution. Its implication was that every institution not of immediate popular origin should be destroyed. To secure their ends, he thought, the radicals were compelled to preach the injustice of those institutions and thus to injure that affection for government upon which peace and security depend. Here was an effort to bring all institutions to the test of logic which he thought highly dangerous. "No rational man ever did govern himself," he said, "by abstractions and universals." The question for him was not the abstract rightness of the system upon some set of a priori principles but whether, on the whole, that system worked for the happiness of the community. He did not doubt that it did; and to overthrow a structure so nobly tested by the pressure of events in favor of some theories outside historic experience seemed to him ruinous to society. Government, for him, was the general harmony of diverse interests; and the continual adjustments and exquisite modifications of which it stood in need were admirably discovered in the existing system. Principles were thus unimportant compared to the problem of their application. "The major," he said of all political premises, "makes a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory depends upon the little minor of circumstances."

To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription. The presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change, we act at our peril. "Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but to what is to secure that property, to government." Because he saw the State organically he was impressed by the smallness both of the present moment and the individual's thought. It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had the opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a reason; and that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So the prescriptive title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution. So, too, his main attack on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be discussed." He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a past experience which built according to the general need. Nor does he doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth," he said, "may be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of the virtues."

Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must always govern the immediate decision. "When the reason of old establishments is gone," he said in his Speech on Economical Reform, "it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them." "A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve," he wrote in the Reflections on the French Revolution, "taken together would be my standard of a statesman." But that "ability to improve" conceals two principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold. "All the reformations we have hitherto made," he said, "have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity"; and the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, which is the most elaborate exposition of his general attitude, proceeds upon the general basis that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future. Nor is this all. "If I cannot reform with equity," said Burke, "I will not reform at all"; and equity seems here to mean a sacrifice of the present and its passionate demands to the selfish errors of past policy.

Burke, indeed, was never a democrat, and that is the real root of his philosophy. He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the necessity of some degree of popular representation. But he was entirely satisfied with current Whig principles, could they but be purged of their grosser deformities. He knew too well how little reason is wont to enter into the formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice of innovation to its power. He saw so much of virtue in the old order, that he insisted upon the equation of virtue with quintessence. Men of great property and position using their influence as a public trust, delicate in their sense of honor, and acting only from motives of right—these seemed to him the men who should with justice exercise political power. He did not doubt that "there is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom ... wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport to heaven"; but he is careful to dissociate the possibility that they can be found in those who practice the mechanical arts. He did not mean that his aristocracy should govern without response to popular demand. He had no objection to criticism, nor to the public exercise of government. There was no reason even for agreement, so long as each party was guided by an honorable sense of the public good. This, so he urged, was the system which underlay the temporary evils of the British Constitution. An aristocracy delegated to do its work by the mass of men was the best form of government his imagination could conceive. It meant that property must be dominant in the system of government, that, while office should be open to all, it should be out of the reach of most. "The characteristic essence of property," he wrote in the 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 maintain, and it must be put out of the reach of popular temptation. "Our constitution," 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 leaning towards one side, there may be a danger towards oversething it on the other." In straining, that is to say, after too large a purification, we may end with destruction. And Burke, of course, was emphatic upon the need that property should be undisturbed. It was always, he thought, at a great disadvantage in any struggle with ability; and there are many 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 unduly reform. The true idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness; and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance, we should disturb beyond repair the intricate equilibrium of countless ages. The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present is thus the true guide to our policy. "We ought," he said in a famous sentence, "to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend."

It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the destiny which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious edifice. He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than the English Parliament. Privileges were scattered to the winds in a single night. Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred. The doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect justification. On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves. In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not unnatural thing. But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.