Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

t partially filled until Hume and Burke supplied the outlines of a new philosophy. For the observer of this age can hardly fail, as he notes its relative barrenness of abstract ideas, t

ps given to the eighteenth century an urbaneness from which its predecessor was largely free. Sermons are perhaps the best test of such a change; and it is a relief to move from the addresses bristling with Suarez and Bellarmine to the noble exhortations of Bishop Butler. Not until the French Revolution were ultimate dogmas again called into question; and it is about them only that political speculation provokes deep feeling. The urbanity, indeed, is not entirely new. The R

ling; but it gave to the principle of consent a permanent place in English politics. It is the age which saw the crystallization of the party-system, and therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called the vital principle of representative government. Few discussions of the sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite its dullness, so carefull

y rationalism. Locke regarded his Human Understanding as the preliminary to an ethical enquiry; and Hume seems to have considered his Principles of Morals the most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have been represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no one will be inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the spiritual idealism of the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson and the Wesleyan revival will make us generalize with caution. But the truth was that theological ethics had become empty and inadequate, and the problem was therefore urgent. That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith-to take only

y for the substance of political truths. The American colonies took alike their methods and their arguments from English ancestors; and Burke provided them with the main elements of justification. The very quietness, indeed, of the time was the natural outcome of a century of storm; and England surely had some right to be contented when her political system was compared with the governments of France and Germany. Not, indeed, that the full fruit of the Revolution was gathered. The principle of consent came, in practice and till 1760, to mean the gov

t would require; and Hume and Adam Smith were to explain that commerce might grow with small danger to agricultural prosperity. Beneath the apparent calm of Walpole's rule new forces were fast stirring. That can be seen on every side. The sturdy morality of Johnson, the new literary forms of Richardson and Fielding, the theatre which Garrick founded upon the ruins produced by Collier's indignation, the revival of which Law and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the stagnation was sleep rather than death. The needed events of shock were close at hand. The people of England would never have discovered the real meaning of 1688 if George III had not denied its principles. When he enforce

statesman's art. Adam Smith discussed in what fashion the prosperity of peoples could be best advanced. From Locke, that is to say, the subject of discussion is rather politik than staatslehre. The great debate inaugurated by the Reformation ceased when Locke had outlined an intelligible basis for parliamentary government. Hume, Bolingbroke, Burke, are all of them concerned with the detail of political arrangement in a fashion which presupposes the acceptance of a basis

as still a mighty influence. The power of the aristocracy was hardly broken until the Reform Bill of 1867. The Church continued to dominate the political aspect of English religious life until, after 1832, new elements alien from her ideals were introduced into the House of Commo

of the reverence he felt in the presence of the king. Divine Right and non-resistance were dead, but they had not died without a struggle. Freedom of the press and legal equality may have been obtained; but it was not until the passage of Fox's Libel Act that the first became secure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have recently illumined for us the inward meaning of the second. The populace might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons. Such outbursts are yet the exception to the prevailing temper. The deliberations of Parliament were still, at least technically, a secret; and membership therein, save for one or two anomalies like Westminster and Bristol, was still the private possession of a privileged class. The Revolution, in f

m which the government is derived, and the consistent inertia of those over whom it rules. There is curiously little controversy over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most men acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament. What balance of forces is necessary to its most perfect equilibrium may arouse dissension when George III forgets the result of half a century's evolution. Junius may have to explain in invective what Burke magistr

he persistent necessities of two generations, and the noble determination of William III; but the place of the Church in the Revolution State and the nature of that State were still undetermined. Hoadly had one solution, Law another; and the genial rationalism of the time, coupled with the political affiliations of the High Church party, combined to give Hoadly the victory; but his opponents, and Law especially, remained to be the parents of a movement for ecclesiastical freedom of which it has been the good fortune of Oxford to supply in each succeeding century the leaders. America presented again the problem of consent in the special perspective of the imperial relation; and the decision which grew out of the blundering obscurantism of the King enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the principles of 1688. Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster empire; and the industrial system whic