Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

ure of their effort in 1715 showed how feeble was their hold on English opinion. Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably recorded in Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the reign of Georg

ritain (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought. Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole governed. It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the keynote of the time. An able speaker, without being a great orator, a superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from office

nd place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the King's mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to political place. His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance between the Tories and malcontent Whigs for Walpole's overthrow. The alliance succeeded, though too late for Bolingbroke to enjoy the fruits of success; but in effecting the purgation of the Tory party from its taint of Jacobitism he rendered no inconsiderable service. His foundation, moreover, of the Craftsman-the first official journal of a political party

in that easy elegance of style which was the delight of the eighteenth century; and he is consistently happy in his choice of adjectives. But his work is at every point embellished with that affectation of classical learning which was the curse of his age. He sought no general truths, and he is free from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any enthusiasm save that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his political writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize

t. He acknowledges that the past in some degree unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks upon the evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger aspect than their immediate environment. But his history is intended less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy of citation. Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration. He is willing, indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the reign of James I; though he

ritish constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual independency. But what the powers are, and how their independence is preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his sincerity. The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no differe

ent with the liberties of the people; for such restraints will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil propensities of a bad king. What is needed is a patriot king who will destroy corruption and awaken the spirit of liberty. His effective government will synchronize with the commencement of his reign; and he will at once dismiss the old and cunning ministers, to replace them by servants who are wise. He will not stand upon party, but upon the State. He will unite the forces of good counsel into a single scheme. Complaints will be answered, the evildoers punished. Commerc

on, the spirited foreign policy-all these have the earmarks of a platform rather than of a philosophy. Attacks on corruption hardly read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the one solid evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger of finance in politics. For none of the Tories save Barnard, who owed his party influence thereto, understood the financial schemes of Walpole; and since they were his schemes obviously they represented the triumph of devilish ingenuity. The return of landed men to power would mean the return of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country squires, the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a régime which already faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power. The pamphlet was the cornerstone in the education of Frederick's son; and when George III came to the throne he proceeded to give such heed to

the inner current of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of Walpole, though he sees the chaos in its result. "A republican spirit," he says, "has strangely arisen"; and he goes on to tell how the electors of London and Westminster were now regarding their members as delegates to whom instructions might be issued. "A new party of malcontents" had arisen, "assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People." They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ... and endeavor in effect to animate the

obably written

ume was thirty-one years of age when he published (1742) the first series of his essays; and his Treatise of Human Nature which had fallen "dead-born from the press" was in some sort compensated by the success of the new work. The second part, entitled Political Discourses, was published in 175

to preach," he remarks, "in most parts of the world that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary consent, or on a mutual promise, the magistrate would soon imprison you as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience; if your friends did not before shut you up as delirious for advancing such absurdities." The original contract could not be produced, and, even if it were, it would suppose the "consent of the fathers to bind the children even to the most remote generations." The real truth, as he

h he would have replied by denying the fall. His whole attitude is simply an insistence that utility is the touchstone of institutions, and he may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its application to the whole field of political science. He knows that opinion is the sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie at the base of the thoughts which get accepted. He does not, indeed, deny that fear and consent enter i

be the system of property; but the ethical substance of these questions he leaves undetermined. Politics, he thinks, may one day be a science; though he considers the world still too young for general truths therein. The maxims he suggests as of permanent value, "that a hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their representatives form the best monarchy, autocracy and democracy"; that "free governments ... are the most ruinou

nstrated by the failure of George III. "In all governments," as he says, "there is a perpetual intestinal struggle, open or secret," between Authority and Liberty; though his judgment that neither "can ever absolutely prevail," shows us rather that we are on the threshold of laissez-faire than that Hume really understood the problem of freedom. He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular government. He saw the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency to persist in terms of men instead of principles. He was convinced of the necessity of liberty

estlessness; and this led to the purgation of Whig doctrines from his writings, and their consistent replacement by a cynical conservatism. He was always afraid that popular government would mean mob-rule; and absolute government is accordingly recommended as the euthanasia of the British constitution. Not even the example of Sweden convinced him that a standing army might exist without civil liberty being endangered; and he has all the noxious fallacies of his time upon the balance of power. Above all, it is striking to see his helplessness before the problem of national character. Mainly he ascri

e supposed antagonism between commerce and agriculture he disposes of in a half-dozen effective sentences. He sees the place of time and distance in the discussion of economic want. He sees the value of a general level of economic equality, even while he is sceptical of its attainment. He insists upon the economic value of high wages, though he somewhat belittles the importance of wealth in the achievement of happiness. Before Bentham, who on this point converted Adam Smith, he knew that the rate of interest depends upon the supply of and demand for loans. He insists that commerce demands a fre

civilization to the humbler class of men. He gives large space in his discussion to the power of will; and, indeed, one of the main advantages he ascribed to government was the compulsion it puts upon us to allow the categories of time and space a part in our calculations. He does not, being in his own life entirely free from avarice, regard the appetite for riches as man's main motive to existence; though no one was more urgent in his insistence that "the avidity of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends is ... destructive of society" unless balanced by considerations of justice. And what he therein intended may be gathered from the liberal notions of equality he manifested. "Every person," he wrote in a famous passage, "if possible ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life. No

of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism. He first showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He brings to an end what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical school." After him we are done with the abuse of history to bolster up Divine Right and social contract; for there is clearly present in his use of facts a true sense of historical method. He put an end also to the confusion which resulted from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong

imer's Institutes of Nations (1872) how fully the Sco

is no more than general opinion of utility constructs, in briefer form, the later arguments of Bentham, Paley and the Mills, nor can their mode of statement claim superiority to Hume's. So that on either side of his work he foreshadows the advent of the two great schools of modern political thought. His utilitarianism is the real path by which radical opinion at last found means of acceptance. His use of history is, through Burke, the ancestor of that specialized conservatism begotten of the historical method. If there is thus so much, it is, of course, tempting to ask why there is not more. If Hume has the materials why did he fail to build up a system from them? The answer