Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

least, it was no longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight, though collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for men to grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to v

lly enough, there was a vast difference between the simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing-less admirable than they accounted it-the difference between a Habeas Corpus and a lettre de cachet, the regular succession of Parliaments, all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a magnificent achievement. The English constitution revealed to France an immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration. Even to Englishmen itself that meaning was

he sense of law as the voice of past wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in his inaugural lecture as Vinerian professor. He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent utterance both in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention, and in the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What, perhaps, is most immediately significant is his famous praise of the British Constit

to understand why such a philosophy should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager sympathy for humble men, his optimistic faith in the immediate prospect of popular power were to Burke the symptoms of insane delusion and their author "the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England." But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's influence was the success of the American Revolution; and no one had done more than Burke himself to promote its cause and justify its principles. That revolution established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the soberness with which it checked the supposed weakness of the sovereign people. America made herself independent while what was bes

the cynical corruption of the previous generation. Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly awaking to a sense of its own power. The French creed was too purely logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden shoes played not a little part in its rejection. The rights of man made only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was involved in that rejection; and then it was too late. But no one cou

onstrative. Brown's volumes are an essay upon the depravity of the times. He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the universities out of hand, in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would not have rejected. He deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men trifle with Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would, appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a ha

have died a natural death. What is more interesting than his prophecies was the evidence of a close reading of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is the product of the climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and sullen temper. Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation. Brown has no passion, and his book reads rather like Mr. Galsworthy's Island Pharisees sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of a

ntesquieu to make some fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the investigation of savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government. He sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature. He insists, probably after conversation with Adam Smith, upon the social value of the division of functions. He does not doubt the original equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his age has reached the limit of its useful growth. Property he traces back to a parental desire to make a better provision for children "than is found under the promiscuous management of many copartners." Climate has the new importance upon which Montesquieu has insisted; or, at least, as it "ripens the pineapple and the tamarina," so it

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e 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

rical 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 aggr

eople, 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

inction 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 r

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, goodne

eat 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, h

, 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 th

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 poi

umble 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 tru

tten 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 organiza

ited 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 trea

ights 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";

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 a

, 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 actio

hmetical 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, ind

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 s

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

ot 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 pe

rst 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 excellen

r 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

o 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, th

t 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 admi

ut 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 Gibr

y." 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; th

n 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 funda