The Project Gutenberg EBook ofPolitical Thought in England fromLocke toBentham, by Harold J. Laski

This eBook is for the use of anyoneanywhere at no cost and withalmost no restrictions whatsoever.You may copy it, give it away orre-use it under the terms of theProject Gutenberg License includedwith this eBook or online at

www.gutenberg.net

Title: Political Thought in Englandfrom Locke to Bentham

Author: Harold J. Laski

Release Date: January 19, 2005[EBook #14735]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECTGUTENBERG EBOOKPOLITICAL THOUGHT INENGLAND ***

Produced by David King and theOnline Distributed ProofreadingTeam

HOMEUNIVERSITY

LIBRARYOF MODERN

KNOWLEDGE

No. 103

Editors:

HERBERT FISHER,M.A., F.B.A.

PROF. GILBERTMURRAY, LITT.D.LL.D., F.B.A.PROF. J. ARTHURTHOMSON, M.A.PROF. WILLIAM T.BREWSTER, M.A.

POLITICALTHOUGHT IN

ENGLAND

FROMLOCKE TOBENTHAM

BY

HAROLD J. LASKI

SOMETIMEEXHIBITIONER OFNEW COLLEGE,OXFORD, OF THEDEPARTMENT OFHISTORY INHARVARDUNIVERSITY,AUTHOR OF STUDIESIN THE PROBLEM OFSOVEREIGNTY ANDAUTHORITY IN

THE MODERN STATE

NEW YORKHENRY HOLT AND

COMPANYLONDON

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

1920

NOTE

It is impossible for me topublish this book without someexpression of the debt it owesto Leslie Stephen's History ofthe English Thought in theEighteenth Century. It isalmost insolent to praise suchwork; but I may be permittedto say that no one can fullyappreciate either its wisdomor its knowledge who has nothad to dig among the original

texts.

Were so small a volumeworthy to bear a dedication, Ishould associate it with thename of my friend WalterLippmann. He and I have sooften discussed the substanceof its problems that I amcertain a good deal of what Ifeel to be my own is, where ithas merit, really his. Thisvolume is thus in great part atribute to him; though there is

little that can repay suchfriendship as he gives.

H.J.L.

HARVARDUNIVERSITY

Sept. 15, 1919

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGEI. INTRODUCTION 7

II. THE PRINCIPLES OFTHE REVOLUTION 24

III. CHURCH AND STATE 77

IV. THE ERA OFSTAGNATION 127

V. SIGNS OF CHANGE 159VI. BURKE 213

VII. THE FOUNDATIONSOF ECONOMICLIBERALISM

281

BIBLIOGRAPHY 317

INDEX 321

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The eighteenth century may besaid to begin with the Revolution of1688; for, with its completion, thedogma of Divine Right disappearedfor ever from English politics. Itsplace was but partially filled untilHume and Burke supplied theoutlines of a new philosophy. Forthe observer of this age can hardlyfail, as he notes its relative

barrenness of abstract ideas, to beimpressed by the large part DivineRight must have played in thepolitics of the succeeding century.Its very absoluteness made for keenpartisanship on the one side and theother. It could produce at once thelongwinded rhapsodies of Filmerand, by repulsion, the wearisomereiterations of Algernon Sidney.Once the foundations of DivineRight had been destroyed by Locke,the basis of passionate controversywas absent. The theory of a social

contract never produced in Englandthe enthusiasm it evoked in France,for the simple reason that the mainobjective of Rousseau and hisdisciples had already been securedthere by other weapons. And thishas perhaps given to the eighteenthcentury an urbaneness from whichits predecessor was largely free.Sermons are perhaps the best test ofsuch a change; and it is a relief tomove from the addresses bristlingwith Suarez and Bellarmine to thenoble exhortations of Bishop Butler.

Not until the French Revolutionwere ultimate dogmas again calledinto question; and it is about themonly that political speculationprovokes deep feeling. Theurbanity, indeed, is not entirelynew. The Restoration had heraldedits coming, and the tone of Halifaxhas more in common withBolingbroke and Hume than withHobbes and Filmer. Nor has theeighteenth century an historicalprofundity to compare with that ofthe zealous pamphleteers in the

seventeenth. Heroic archivists likePrynne find very differentsubstitutes in brilliant journalistslike Defoe, and if Dalrymple andBlackstone are respectable, theybear no comparison with masterslike Selden and Sir Henry Spelman.

Yet urbanity must not deceive us.The eighteenth century has animportance in English politicswhich the comparative absence ofsystematic speculation can notconceal. If its large constitutional

outlines had been traced by apreceding age, its administrativedetail had still to be secured. Theprocess was very gradual; and theattempt of George III to arrest itproduced the splendid effort ofEdmund Burke. Locke's work mayhave been not seldom confused andstumbling; but it gave to theprinciple of consent a permanentplace in English politics. It is theage which saw the crystallization ofthe party-system, and therein it mayperhaps lay claim to have

recognized what Bagehot called thevital principle of representativegovernment. Few discussions of thesphere of government have been soproductive as that in which AdamSmith gave a new basis to economicscience. Few controversies have,despite its dullness, so carefullyinvestigated the eternal problem ofChurch and State as that to whichHoadly's bishopric contributed itsname. De Lolme is the real parentof that interpretative analysis whichhas, in Bagehot's hands, become not

the least fruitful type of politicalmethod. Blackstone, in a real sense,may be called the ancestor ofProfessor Dicey. The very calmnessof the atmosphere only the moresurely paved the way for thesurprising novelties of Godwin andthe revolutionists.

Nor must we neglect the relationbetween its ethics and its politics.The eighteenth century school ofBritish moralists has sufferedsomewhat beside the greater glories

of Berkeley and Hume. Yet it was agreat work to which they bent theireffort, and they knew its greatness.The deistic controversy involved afresh investigation of the basis ofmorals; and it is to the credit of theinvestigators that they attempted toprovide it in social terms. It is,indeed, one of the primarycharacteristics of the British mindto be interested in problems ofconduct rather than of thought. Theseventeenth century had, for themost part, been interested in

theology and government; and itspreoccupation, in both domains,with supernatural sanctions, madeits conclusions unfitted for a perioddominated by rationalism. Lockeregarded his HumanUnderstanding as the preliminaryto an ethical enquiry; and Humeseems to have considered hisPrinciples of Morals the most vitalof his works. It may be true, as themordant insight of Mark Pattisonsuggested, that "those periods inwhich morals have been

represented as the proper study ofman, and his only business, havebeen periods of spiritual abasementand poverty." Certainly no one willbe inclined to claim for theeighteenth century the spiritualidealism of the seventeenth, thoughLaw and Bishop Wilson and theWesleyan revival will make usgeneralize with caution. But thetruth was that theological ethics hadbecome empty and inadequate, andthe problem was therefore urgent.That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson,

Hume and Adam Smith—to takeonly men of the first eminence—were thinking not less for politicsthan for ethics when they sought tojustify the ways of man to man. Forall of them saw that a theory ofsociety is impossible without theprovision of psychologicalfoundations; and those must, aboveall, result in a theory of conduct ifthe social bond is to be maintained.That sure insight is, of course, onecurrent only in a greater Englishstream which reaches back to

Hobbes at its source and forward toT.H. Green at perhaps its fullest. Itsvalue is its denial of politics as ascience distinct from other humanrelations; and that is why AdamSmith can write of moral sentimentsno less than of the wealth of nations.The eighteenth century saw clearlythat each aspect of social life mustfind its place in the politicalequation.

Yet it is undoubtedly an age ofmethods rather than of principles;

and, as such its peaceful prosperitywas well suited to its questions.Problems of technique, such as thecabinet and the Bank of Englandrequired the absence of passionatedebate if they were in any fruitfulfashion to be solved. Nor must theachievement of the age in politicsbe minimized. It was, of course, acomplacent time; but we ought tonote that foreigners of distinctiondid not wonder at its complacency.Voltaire and Montesquieu look backto England in the eighteenth century

for the substance of political truths.The American colonies took aliketheir methods and their argumentsfrom English ancestors; and Burkeprovided them with the mainelements of justification. The veryquietness, indeed, of the time wasthe natural outcome of a century ofstorm; and England surely had someright to be contented when herpolitical system was compared withthe governments of France andGermany. Not, indeed, that the fullfruit of the Revolution was

gathered. The principle of consentcame, in practice and till 1760, tomean the government of the WhigOligarchy; and the ExtraordinaryBlack Book remains to tell us whathappened when George III gave theTory party a new lease of power.There is throughout the time anover-emphasis upon the value oforder, and a not unnatural tendencyto confound the private good of thegoverning class with the generalwelfare of the state. It became thefixed policy of Walpole to make

prosperity the mask for politicalstagnation. He turned politicaldebate from principles topersonalities, and a sterilegeneration was the outcome of hiscunning.

Not that this barrenness iswithout its compensations. Thetheories of the Revolution hadexhausted their fruitfulness within ageneration. The constitutional ideasof the seventeenth century had nosubstance for an England where

Anglicanism and agriculture werebeginning to lose the rigid outlinesof overwhelming predominance.What was needed was the assuranceof safety for the Church that hervirtue might be tested in the light ofnonconformist practice on the onehand, and the new rationalism onthe other. What was needed alsowas the expansion of Englishcommerce into the new channelsopened for it by the victories ofChatham. Mr. Chief Justice Holthad given it the legal categories it

would require; and Hume and AdamSmith were to explain thatcommerce might grow with smalldanger to agricultural prosperity.Beneath the apparent calm ofWalpole's rule new forces were faststirring. That can be seen on everyside. The sturdy morality ofJohnson, the new literary forms ofRichardson and Fielding, the theatrewhich Garrick founded upon theruins produced by Collier'sindignation, the revival of whichLaw and Wesley are the great

symbols, show that the stagnationwas sleep rather than death. Theneeded events of shock were closeat hand. The people of Englandwould never have discovered thereal meaning of 1688 if George IIIhad not denied its principles. Whenhe enforced the resignation of theelder Pitt the theories at once ofEdmund Burke and Englishradicalism were born; for thePresent Discontents and theSociety for the Support of the Billof Rights are the dawn of a

splendid recovery. And they madepossible the speculative fermentwhich showed that England was atlast awake to the meaning ofMontesquieu and Rousseau. Just asthe shock of the Lancastrian warsproduced the Tudor despotism, sodid the turmoil of civil strifeproduce the complacency of theeighteenth century. But the peace ofthe Tudors was the death-bed of theStuarts; and it was the stagnantoptimism of the early eighteenthcentury which made possible the

birth of democratic England.

The atmosphere of the time, infact, is deep-rooted in theconditions of the past. Locke couldnot have written had not Hobbesand Filmer defended in set terms theideal of despotic government. Heannounced the advent of the modernsystem of parliamentarygovernment; and from his time thedebate has been rather of theconditions under which it is towork, than of the foundations upon

which it is based. Burke, forexample, wrote what constitutes thesupreme analysis of the statesman'sart. Adam Smith discussed in whatfashion the prosperity of peoplescould be best advanced. FromLocke, that is to say, the subject ofdiscussion is rather politik thanstaatslehre. The great debateinaugurated by the Reformationceased when Locke had outlined anintelligible basis for parliamentarygovernment. Hume, Bolingbroke,Burke, are all of them concerned

with the detail of politicalarrangement in a fashion whichpresupposes the acceptance of abasis previously known. Burke,indeed, toward the latter part of hislife, awoke to the realization thatmen were dissatisfied with thetraditional substance of the State.But he met the new desires withhate instead of understanding, andthe Napoleonic wars drove thecurrent of democratic opinionunderground. Hall and Owen andHodgskin inherited the thoughts of

Ogilvie and Spence and Paine; andif they did not give them substance,at least they gave them form for alater time.

Nor is the reason for thispreoccupation far to seek. Theadvance of English politics in thepreceding two centuries was mainlyan advance of structure; yet relativeat least to continental fact, itappeared liberal enough to hide thedisharmonies of its inner content.The King was still a mighty

influence. The power of thearistocracy was hardly broken untilthe Reform Bill of 1867. TheChurch continued to dominate thepolitical aspect of English religiouslife until, after 1832, new elementsalien from her ideals wereintroduced into the House ofCommons. The conditions of changelay implicit in the IndustrialRevolution, when a new class ofmen attained control of the nation'seconomic power. Only then was arealignment of political forces

essential. Only then, that is to say,had the time arrived for a newtheory of the State.

The political ideas of theeighteenth century are thus in somesort a comment upon the systemestablished by the Revolution; andthat is, in its turn, the product of thestruggle between Parliament andCrown in the preceding age. But wecannot understand the eighteenthcentury, or its theories, unless werealize that its temper was still

dominantly aristocratic. From noaccusation were its statesmen moreanxious to be free than from that ofa belief in democratic government.Whether Whigs or Tories were inpower, it was always the greatfamilies who ruled. For them theChurch, at least in its higherbranches, existed; and thedifference between nobleman andcommoner at Oxford is as strikingas it is hideous to this generation.For them also literature and thetheatre made their display; and if

Dr. Johnson could heap an immortalcontumely upon the name of patron,we all know of the reverence he feltin the presence of the king. DivineRight and non-resistance weredead, but they had not died withouta struggle. Freedom of the press andlegal equality may have beenobtained; but it was not until thepassage of Fox's Libel Act that thefirst became secure, and Mr. andMrs. Hammond have recentlyillumined for us the inward meaningof the second. The populace might,

on occasion, be strong enough toforce the elder Pitt upon anunwilling king, or to shout forWilkes and liberty against theunconstitutional usurpation of themonarch-ridden House ofCommons. Such outbursts are yetthe exception to the prevailingtemper. The deliberations ofParliament were still, at leasttechnically, a secret; andmembership therein, save for one ortwo anomalies like Westminster andBristol, was still the private

possession of a privileged class.The Revolution, in fact, meant lessan abstract and general freedom,than a special release from thearbitrary will of a stupid monarchwho aroused against himself everydeep-seated prejudice of hisgeneration. The England which sentJames II upon his travels may be, asHume pointed out, reduced to apathetic fragment even of itselectorate. The masses wereunknown and undiscovered, or,where they emerged, it was either to

protest against some wise reformlike Walpole's Excise Scheme, or tobecome, as in Goldsmith andCowper and Crabbe, the object ofhalf-pitying poetic sentiment. Howdeep-rooted was the notion ofaristocratic control was to beshown when France turned intosubstantial fact Rousseau's demandfor freedom. The protest of Burkeagainst its supposed anarchy sweptEngland like a flame; and only acourageous handful could be foundto protest against Pitt's prostitution

of her freedom.

Such an age could make but littlepretence to discovery; and, indeed,it is most largely absent from itsspeculation. In its political ideasthis is necessarily and especiallythe case. For the State is at no timean unchanging organization; itreflects with singular exactness thedominating ideas of its environment.That division into government andsubjects which is its maincharacteristic is here noteworthy for

the narrowness of the class fromwhich the government is derived,and the consistent inertia of thoseover whom it rules. There iscuriously little controversy over theseat of sovereign power. That iswith most men acknowledged toreside in the king in Parliament.What balance of forces is necessaryto its most perfect equilibrium mayarouse dissension when George IIIforgets the result of half a century'sevolution. Junius may have toexplain in invective what Burke

magistrally demonstrated in termsof political philosophy. But thedeeper problems of the state layhidden until Bentham and therevolutionists came to insist upontheir presence. That did not meanthat the eighteenth century was asoulless failure. Rather did it meanthat a period of transition had beensuccessfully bridged. The stage wasset for a new effort simply becausethe theories of the older philosophyno longer represented the facts atissue.

It was thus Locke only in thisperiod who confronted the generalproblems of the modern State. Otherthinkers assumed his structure anddealt with the details he leftundetermined. The main problems,the Church apart, arose when aforeigner occupied the Englishthrone and left the methods ofgovernment to those who wereacquainted with them. That mosthappy of all the happy accidents inEnglish history made Walpole the

fundamental statesman of the time.He used his opportunity to the full.Inheriting the possibilities of thecabinet system he gave it its modernexpression by creating the office ofPrime Minister. The party-systemwas already inevitable; and with hisadvent to full power in 1727 wehave the characteristic outlines ofEnglish representative government.Thenceforward, there are, on thewhole, but three large questionswith which the age concerned itself.Toleration had already been won by

the persistent necessities of twogenerations, and the nobledetermination of William III; but theplace of the Church in theRevolution State and the nature ofthat State were still undetermined.Hoadly had one solution, Lawanother; and the genial rationalismof the time, coupled with thepolitical affiliations of the HighChurch party, combined to giveHoadly the victory; but hisopponents, and Law especially,remained to be the parents of a

movement for ecclesiasticalfreedom of which it has been thegood fortune of Oxford to supply ineach succeeding century the leaders.America presented again theproblem of consent in the specialperspective of the imperial relation;and the decision which grew out ofthe blundering obscurantism of theKing enabled Burke nobly to restateand amply to revivify the principlesof 1688. Chatham meanwhile hadstumbled upon a vaster empire; andthe industrial system which his

effort quickened could not liveunder an economic régime whichstill bore traces of the narrownationalism of the Tudors. No manwas so emphatically representativeof his epoch as Adam Smith; and nothinker has ever stated in suchgenerous terms the answer of histime to the most vital of itsquestions. The answer, indeed, likeall good answers, revealed ratherthe difficulty of the problem than theprospect of its solution; thoughnothing so clearly heralded the new

age that was coming than hisrepudiation of the past in terms of areal appreciation of it. TheAmerican War and the two greatrevolutions brought a new race ofthinkers into being. The French seedat last produced its harvest.Bentham absorbed the purpose ofRousseau even while he rejectedhis methods. For a time, indeed, theheat and dust of war obscured theissue that Bentham raised. But thecertainties of the future lay on hisside.

CHAPTER II

THE PRINCIPLES OFTHE REVOLUTION

I

The English Revolution was inthe main a protest against theattempt of James II to establish adespotism in alliance with Franceand Rome. It was almost entirely amovement of the aristocracy, and,

for the most part, it was aristocraticopposition that it encountered. Whatit did was to make for everimpossible the thought of reunionwith Rome and the theory that thethrone could be established on anyother basis than the consent ofParliament. For no one couldpretend that William of Orangeruled by Divine Right. Thescrupulous shrank from proclaimingthe deposition of James; and thefiction that he had abdicated wasnot calculated to deceive even the

warmest of William's adherents. Anunconstitutional Parliamentthereupon declared the thronevacant; and after much negotiationWilliam and Mary were invited tooccupy it. To William the invitationwas irresistible. It gave him theassistance of the first maritimepower in Europe against theimperialism of Louis XIV. Itensured the survival ofProtestantism against theencroachments of an enemy whonever slumbered. Nor did England

find the new régime unwelcome.Every widespread conviction of herpeople had been wantonly outragedby the blundering stupidity ofJames. If a large fraction of theEnglish Church held aloof from thenew order on technical grounds, thecommercial classes gave it theirwarm support; and many whodoubted in theory submitted inpractice. All at least wereconscious that a new era haddawned.

For William had come over witha definite purpose in view. Jameshad wrought havoc with what theCivil Wars had made the essence ofthe English constitution; and it hadbecome important to define in setterms the conditions upon which thelife of kings must in the future beregulated. The reign of William isnothing so much as the period ofthat definition; and the fortunatediscovery was made of themechanisms whereby its translationinto practice might be secured. The

Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act ofSettlement (1701) are thefoundation-stones of the modernconstitutional system.

What, broadly, was establishedwas the dependence of the crownupon Parliament. Finance and thearmy were brought underParliamentary control by the simpleexpedient of making its annualsummons essential. The right ofpetition was re-affirmed; and theindependence of the judges and

ministerial responsibility weresecured by the same act whichforever excluded the legitimateheirs from their royal inheritance. Itis difficult not to be amazed at thealmost casual fashion in which sostriking a revolution was effected.Not, indeed, that the solutionworked easily at the outset. Williamremained to the end a foreigner,who could not understand theinwardness of English politics. Itwas the necessities of foreignpolicy which drove him to admit the

immense possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his ownbest safeguard in the foundation ofthe Bank of England. The Cabinet,towards the close of his reign, hadalready become the fundamentaladministrative instrument.Originally a committee of the PrivyCouncil, it had no party basis untilthe ingenious Sunderland atoned fora score of dishonesties by insistingthat the root of its efficiency wouldbe found in its selection from asingle party. William acquiesced

but doubtfully; for, until the end ofhis life, he never understood whyhis ministers should not be a groupof able counsellors chosen withoutreference to their politicalaffiliations. Sunderland knew betterfor the simple reason that hebelonged to that period when theWhigs and Tories had gambledagainst each other for their heads.He knew that no council-boardcould with comfort contain bothhimself and Halifax; just as Williamhimself was to learn quite early that

neither honor nor confidence couldwin unswerving support from JohnChurchill. There is a certainfeverishness in the atmosphere ofthe reign which shows how manykept an anxious eye on St. Germaineven while they attended themorning levee at Whitehall.

What secured the permanence ofthe settlement was less the policy ofWilliam than the blunder of theFrench monarch. Patience, foresightand generosity had not availed to

win for William more than agrudging recognition of hiskingship. He had received only ahalf-hearted support for his foreignpolicy. The army, despite hisprotests, had been reduced; and theenforced return of his own DutchGuards to Holland was deliberatelyconceived to cause him pain. But atthe very moment when his strengthseemed weakest James II died; andLouis XIV, despite writtenobligation, sought to comfort thelast moments of his tragic exile by

the falsely chivalrous recognition ofthe Old Pretender as the rightfulEnglish king. It was a terriblemistake. It did for William what noaction of his own could ever haveachieved. It suggested that Englandmust receive its ruler at the hands ofa foreign sovereign. The nationalpride of the people rallied to thecause for which William stood. Hewas king—so, at least in contrast toLouis' decision, it appeared—bytheir deliberate choice and thesettlement of which he was the

symbol would be maintained.Parliament granted to William allthat his foreign policy could havedemanded. His own death was onlythe prelude to the victories ofMarlborough. Those victoriesseemed to seal the solution of 1688.A moment came when sentiment andintrigue combined to throw injeopardy the Act of Settlement. ButDeath held the stakes against thegambler's throw of Bolingbroke;and the accession of George Iassured the permanence of

Revolution principles.

II

The theorist of the Revolution isLocke; and it was his consciouseffort to justify the innovations of1688. He sought, as he said, "toestablish the throne of our greatRestorer, our present King William,and make good his title in theconsent of the people." In the debatewhich followed his argument

remained unanswered, for thesufficient reason that it had thecommon sense of the generation onhis side. Yet Locke has suffered nota little at the hands of succeedingthinkers. Though his influence uponhis own time was immense; thoughMontesquieu owed to him theacutest of his insights; though theprinciples of the AmericanRevolution are in large part anacknowledged adoption of his own;he has become one of the politicalclassics who are taken for granted

rather than read. It is a profound andregrettable error. Locke may notpossess the clarity and ruthlesslogic of Hobbes, or the genius forcompressing into a phrase theexperience of a lifetime whichmakes Burke the first of Englishpolitical thinkers. He yet statedmore clearly than either the generalproblem of the modern State.Hobbes, after all, worked with animpossible psychology and soughtno more than the prescriptionagainst disorder. Burke wrote rather

a text-book for the cautiousadministrator than a guide for theliberal statesman. But Locke sawthat the main problem of the State isthe conquest of freedom and it wasfor its definition in terms ofindividual good that he above allstrove.

Much, doubtless, of his neglect isdue to the medium in which heworked. He wrote at a time whenthe social contract seemed the onlypossible retort to the theory of

Divine Right. He so emphasized theprinciple of consent that whencontractualism came in its turn to bediscarded, it was discovered thatLocke suffered far more thanHobbes by the change so made. ForHobbes cared nothing for thecontract so long as stronggovernment could be shown to beimplicit in the natural badness ofmen, while Locke assumed theirgoodness and made his contractessential to their opportunity formoral expression. Nor did he, like

Rousseau, seize upon the organicnature of the State. To him the Statewas always a mere aggregate, andthe convenient simplicity ofmajority-rule solved, for him, thevital political problems. ButRousseau was translated into thecomplex dialectic of Hegel andlived to become the parent oftheories he would have doubtlessbeen the first to disown. Nor wasLocke aided by his philosophicoutlook. Few great thinkers have solittle perceived the psychological

foundations of politics. What he didwas rather to fasten upon the greatinstitutional necessity of his time—the provision of channels of assent—and emphasize its importance tothe exclusion of all other factors.The problem is in fact morecomplex; and the solution heindicated became so natural a partof the political fabric that the valueof his emphasis upon its import waslargely forgotten when men againtook up the study of foundations.

John Locke was born at Wringtonin Somerset on the 29th of August,1632. His father was clerk to thecounty justices and acted as acaptain in a cavalry regiment duringthe Civil War. Though he sufferedheavy losses, he was able to givehis son as good an education as thetime afforded. Westminster underDr. Busby may not have been thegentlest of academies, but at least itprovided Locke with an admirabletraining in the classics. He himself,indeed, in the Thoughts on

Education doubted the value ofsuch exercises; nor does he seem tohave conceived any affection forOxford whither he proceeded in1652 as a junior student of ChristChurch. The university was thenunder the Puritan control of Dr.John Owen; but not even his effortto redeem the university from itsreputation for intellectual laxityrescued it from the "wrangling andostentation" of the peripateticphilosophy. Yet it was at Oxfordthat he encountered the work of

Descartes which first attracted himto metaphysics. There, too, he metPocock, the Arabic scholar, andWallis the mathematician, who mustat least have commanded hisrespect. In 1659 he accepted aSenior Studentship of his college,which he retained until he wasdeemed politically undesirable in1684. After toying with his father'sdesire that he should enter theChurch, he began the study ofmedicine. Scientific interest wonfor him the friendship of Boyle; and

while he was administering physicto the patients of Dr. Thomas, hewas making the observationsrecorded in Boyle's History of theAir which Locke himself editedafter the death of his friend.

Meanwhile accident had turnedhis life into far different paths. Anappointment as secretary to aspecial ambassador opened up tohim a diplomatic career; but hissturdy commonsense showed himhis unfitness for such labors. After

his visit to Prussia he returned toOxford, and there, in 1667, in thecourse of his medical work, he metAnthony Ashley, the later LordShaftesbury and the Ahitophel ofDryden's great satire. The two menwere warmly attracted to eachother, and Locke accepted anappointment as physician to LordAshley's household. But he wasalso much more than this. The tutorof Ashley's philosophic grandson,he became also his patron'sconfidential counsellor. In 1663 he

became part author of aconstitutional scheme for Carolinawhich is noteworthy for itsemphasis, thus early, upon theimportance of religious toleration.In 1672, when Ashley became LordChancellor, he became Secretary ofPresentations and, until 1675,Secretary to the Council of Tradeand Foreign Plantations. Meanwhilehe carried on his medical work andmust have obtained some reputationin it; for he is honorably mentionedby Sydenham, in his Method of

Curing Fevers (1676), and hadbeen elected to the Royal Society in1668. But his real genius lay inother directions.

Locke himself has told us how afew friends began to meet at hischamber for the discussions ofquestions which soon passed intometaphysical enquiry; and a pagefrom a commonplace book of 1671is the first beginning of hissystematic work. Relieved of hisadministrative duties in 1675, he

spent the next four years in France,mainly occupied with medicalobservation. He returned to Englandin 1679 to assist Lord Shaftesburyin the passionate debates upon theExclusion Bill. Locke followed hispatron into exile, remaining abroadfrom 1683 until the Revolution.Deprived of his fellowship in 1684through the malice of Charles II, hewould have been without means ofsupport had not Shaftesburybequeathed him a pension. As itwas, he had no easy time. His

extradition was demanded by JamesII after the Monmouth rebellion; andthough he was later pardoned herefused to return to England untilWilliam of Orange had procured hisfreedom. A year after his return hemade his appearance as a writer.T h e Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding and the TwoTreatises of Government were bothpublished in 1690. Five yearsearlier the Letter ConcerningToleration was published in itsLatin dress; and four years

afterwards an English translationappeared. This last, however,perhaps on grounds of expediency,Locke never acknowledged until hiswill was published; for the timewas not yet suited to such generousspeculations. Locke was thus in hisfifty-eighth year when his firstadmitted work appeared. But therough attempts at the essay datefrom 1671, and hints towards theLetter on Toleration can be foundin fragments of various datesbetween the twenty-eighth and

thirty-fifth years of his life. Of theTwo Treatises the first seems tohave been written between 1680and 1685, the second in the last yearof his Dutch exile.[1]

[1] On the evidence for thesedates see the convincingargument of Mr. Fox-Bourne inhis Life of Locke, Vol. II, pp.165-7.

The remaining fourteen years ofLocke's life were passed in semi-retirement in East Anglia. Though

he held public office, first asCommissioner of Appeals, and laterof Trade, for twelve years, he couldnot stand the pressure of Londonwriters, and his public work wasonly intermittent. His counsel,nevertheless, was highly valued;and he seems to have won no smallconfidence from William indiplomatic matters. Somers andCharles Montagu held him in highrespect, and he had the warmfriendship of Sir Isaac Newton. Hepublished some short discussions

on economic matters, and in 1695gave valuable assistance in thedestruction of the censorship of thepress. Two years earlier he hadpublished his Thoughts onEducation, in which the observantreader may find the germ of most ofEmile's ideas. He did not fail torevise the Essay from time to time;and his Reasonableness ofChristianity, which, throughToland, provoked a reply fromStillingfleet and showed Locke inretort a master of the controversial

art, was in some sort the foundationof the deistic debate in the nextepoch. But his chief work hadalready been done, and he spent hisenergies in rewarding the affectionof his friends. Locke died onOctober 28, 1704, amidcircumstances of singular majesty.He had lived a full life, and fewhave so completely realized themedieval ideal of specializing inomniscience. He left warm friendsbehind him; and Lady Masham hassaid of him that beyond which no

man may dare to aspire.[2]

[2] Fox-Bourne, op. cit. Letterfrom Lady Masham to Jean leClerc.

III

L o c k e ' s Two Treatises ofGovernment are different both inobject and in value. The first is adetailed and tiresome response tothe historic imagination of SirRobert Filmer. In his Patriarcha,

which first saw the light in 1680,though it had been written longbefore, the latter had sought to reachthe ultimate conclusion of Hobbeswithout the element of contract uponwhich the great thinker depended. "Iconsent with him," said Filmer ofHobbes, "about the Rights ofexercising Government, but I cannotagree to his means of acquiring it."That power must be absolute,Filmer, like Hobbes, has no mannerof doubt; but his method of proof isto derive the title of Charles I from

Adam. Little difficulties like theorigin of primogeniture, or whence,as Locke points out, the universalmonarchy of Shem can be derived,the good Sir Robert does notsatisfactorily determine. Locketakes him up point by point, andthere is little enough left, save asense that history is the root ofinstitutions, when he has done. Whattroubles us is rather why Lockeshould have wasted the resources ofhis intelligence upon so feeble anopponent. The book of Hobbes lay

ready to his hand; yet he almostostentatiously refused to grapplewith it. The answer doubtless liesin Hobbes' unsavory fame. The manwho made the Church a meredepartment of the State and justifiednot less the title of Cromwell thanof the Stuarts was not the opponentfor one who had a very practicalproblem in hand. And Locke couldanswer that he was answeringHobbes implicitly in the secondTreatise. And though Filmer mightnever have been known had not

Locke thus honored him by retort,he doubtless symbolized what manya nobleman's chaplain preached tohis master's dependents at familyprayers.

The Second Treatise goes to theroot of the matter. Why doespolitical power, "a Right of makingLaws and Penalties of Death andconsequently all less Penalties,"exist? It can only be for the publicbenefit, and our enquiry is thus astudy of the grounds of political

obedience. Locke thus traverses theground Hobbes had covered in hisLeviathan though he rejects everypremise of the earlier thinker. ToHobbes the state of nature whichprecedes political organization hadbeen a state of war. Neither peacenor reason could prevail whereevery man was his neighbor'senemy; and the establishment ofabsolute power, with theconsequent surrender by men of alltheir natural liberties, was the onlymeans of escape from so brutal a

régime. That the state of nature wasso distinguished Locke at the outsetdenies. The state of nature isgoverned by the law of nature. Thelaw of nature is not, as Hobbes hadmade it, the antithesis of real law,but rather its condition antecedent.It is a body of rules which governs,at all times and all places, theconduct of men. Its arbiter is reasonand, in the natural state, reasonshows us that men are equal. Fromthis equality are born men's naturalrights which Locke, like the

Independents in the PuritanRevolution, identifies with life,liberty and property. Obviouslyenough, as Hobbes had alsogranted, the instinct to self-preservation is the deepest ofhuman impulses. By liberty Lockemeans the right of the individual tofollow his own bent granted onlyhis observance of the law of nature.Law, in such an aspect, is clearly ameans to the realization of freedomin the same way that the rule of theroad will, by its common

acceptance, save its observers fromaccident. It promotes the initiativeof men by defining in terms whichby their very statement obtainacknowledgment the conditionsupon which individual caprice mayhave its play. Property Lockederives from a primitivecommunism which becomestransmuted into individualownership whenever a man hasmingled his labor with some object.This labor theory of ownershiplived, it may be remarked, to

become, in the hands of Hodgskinand Thompson, the parent ofmodern socialism.

The state of nature is thus, incontrast to the argument of Hobbes,pre-eminently social in character.There may be war or violence; butthat is only when men haveabandoned the rule of reason whichis integral to their character. But thestate of nature is not a civil State.There is no common superior toenforce the law of nature. Each

man, as best he may, works out hisown interpretation of it. Butbecause the intelligences of men aredifferent there is an inconvenientvariety in the conceptions of justice.The result is uncertainty and chaos;and means of escape must be foundfrom a condition which theweakness of men must ultimatelymake intolerable. It is here that thesocial contract emerges. But just asLocke's natural state implies anatural man utterly distinct fromHobbes' gloomy picture, so does

Locke's social contract representrather the triumph of reason than ofhard necessity. It is a contract ofeach with all, a surrender by theindividual of his personal right tofulfil the commands of the law ofnature in return for the guaranteethat his rights as nature ordains them—life and liberty and property—will be preserved. The contract isthus not general as with Hobbes butlimited and specific in character.Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, theresignation of power into the hands

of some single man or group. On thecontrary, it is a contract with thecommunity as a whole which thusbecomes that common politicalsuperior—the State—which is toenforce the law of nature and punishinfractions of it. Nor is Locke'sstate a sovereign State: the veryword "sovereignty" does not occur,significantly enough, throughout thetreatise. The State has power onlyfor the protection of natural law. Itsprovince ends when it passesbeyond those boundaries.

Such a contract, in Locke's view,involves the pre-eminent necessityof majority-rule. Unless theminority is content to be bound bythe will of superior numbers thelaw of nature has no moreprotection than it had before theinstitution of political society. Andit is further to be assumed that theindividual has surrendered to thecommunity his individual right ofcarrying out the judgment involvedin natural law. Whether Locke

conceived the contract soformulated to be historical, it is noeasy matter to determine. That noevidence of its early existence canbe adduced he ascribes to its originin the infancy of the race; and thehistories of Rome and Sparta andVenice seem to him proof that thetheory is somehow demonstrable byfacts. More important than origins,he seems to deem its implications.He has placed consent in theforeground of the argument; and hewas anxious to establish the

grounds for its continuance. Can themakers of the original contract, thatis to say, bind their successors? Iflegitimate government is basedupon the consent of its subjects, maythey withdraw their consent? Andwhat of a child born into thecommunity? Locke is at leastlogical in his consent. The contractof obedience must be free or else,as Hooker had previously insisted,it is not a contract. Yet Locke urgedthat the primitive members of aState are bound to its perpetuation

simply because unless the majorityhad power to enforce obediencegovernment, in any satisfactorysense, would be impossible. Withchildren the case is different. Theyare born subjects of no governmentor country; and their consent to itslaws must either be derived fromexpress acknowledgment, or by thetacit implication of the fact that theprotection of the State has beenaccepted. But no one is bound untilhe has shown by the rule of hismature conduct that he considers

himself a common subject with hisfellows. Consent implies an act ofwill and we must have evidence toinfer its presence before the rule ofsubjection can be applied.

We have thus the State, though themethod of its organization is not yetoutlined. For Locke there is adifference, though he did notexplicitly describe its nature,between State and Government.Indeed he sometimes approximates,without ever formally adopting, the

attitude of Pufendorf, his greatGerman contemporary, wheregovernment is derived from asecondary contract dependent uponthe original institution of civilsociety. The distinction is made inthe light of what is to follow. ForLocke was above all anxious toleave supreme power in acommunity whose single will, asmanifested by majority-verdict,could not be challenged by anylesser organ than itself. Governmentthere must be if political society is

to endure; but its form andsubstance are dependent uponpopular institution.

Locke follows in the greatAristotelian tradition of dividing thetypes of government into three.Where the power of making laws isin a single hand we have amonarchy; where it is exercised bya few or all we have alternativelyoligarchy and democracy. Thedisposition of the legislative poweris the fundamental test of type; for

executive and judiciary are clearlydependent on it. Nor, as Hobbesargued, is the form of governmentpermanent in character; the supremecommunity is as capable of makingtemporary as of registeringirrevocable decisions. And thoughLocke admits that monarchy, fromits likeness to the family, is the mostprimitive type of government, hedenies Hobbes' assertion that it isthe best. It seems, in his view,always to degenerate into the handsof lesser men who betray the

contract they were appointed toobserve. Nor is oligarchy muchbetter off since it emphasizes theinterest of a group against thesuperior interest of the communityas a whole. Democracy aloneproffers adequate safeguards of anenduring good rule; a democracy,that is to say, which is in the handsof delegates controlled by popularelection. Not that Locke is anxiousfor the abolition of kingship. Hisletters show that he disliked theCromwellian system and the

republicanism which Harringtonand Milton had based upon it. Hewas content to have a kingshipdivested of legislative power solong as hereditary succession wasacknowledged to be dependent uponpopular consent. The main thingwas to be rid of the Divine Right ofkings.

We have thus an organ for theinterpretation of natural law freefrom the shifting variety ofindividual judgment. We have a

means for securing impartial justicebetween members of civil society,and to that means the force of menhas been surrendered. Theformulation of the rules by whichlife, liberty and property are to besecured is legislation and this, fromthe terms of the original contract, isthe supreme function of the State.But, in Locke's view, two otherfunctions still remain. Law has notonly to be declared. It must beenforced; and the business of theexecutive is to secure obedience to

the command of law. But Lockehere makes a third distinction. TheState must live with other States,both as regards its individualmembers, and as a collective body;and the power which deals with thisaspect of its relationships, Locketermed "federative." This lastdistinction, indeed, has no specialvalue; and its author's own defenceof it is far from clear. Moreimportant, especially, for futurehistory, was his emphasis of thedistinction between legislature and

executive. The making of laws isfor Locke a relatively simple andrapid task; the legislature may do itswork and be gone. But those whoattend to their execution must beceaseless in their vigilance. It isbetter, therefore, to separate the twoboth as to powers and persons.Otherwise legislators "may exemptthemselves from obedience to thelaws they make, and suit the law,both in its making and its execution,to their own private wish, andthereby come to have a distinct

interest from the rest of thecommunity, contrary to the end ofsociety and government." Thelegislator must therefore be boundby his own laws; and he must bechosen in such fashion that therepresentative assembly may fairlyrepresent its constituencies. It wasthe patent anomalies of the existentscheme of distribution which madeLocke here proffer his famoussuggestion that the rotten boroughsshould be abolished by executiveact. One hundred and forty years

were still to pass before this wisesuggestion was translated intostatute.

Though Locke thus insisted uponthe separation of powers, herealized that emergencies are theparent of special need; and herecognized that not only may theexecutive, as in England, share inthe task of legislation, but also mayissue ordinances when thelegislature is not in session, or actcontrary to law in case of grave

danger. Nor can the executive beforced to summon the legislature.Here, clearly enough, Locke isgeneralizing from the Englishconstitution; and its sense ofcompromise is implicit in hisremarks. Nor is his surrender hereof consent sufficient to beinconsistent with his generaloutlook. For at the back of eachgovernmental act, there is, in hisown mind, an active citizen bodyoccupied in judging it with single-minded reference to the law of

nature and their own natural rights.There is thus a standard of right andwrong superior to all powers withinthe State. "A government," as hesays, "is not free to do as it pleases... the law of nature stands as aneternal rule to all men, legislatorsas well as others." The socialcontract is secreted in theinterstices of public statutes.

Its corollary is the right ofrevolution. It is interesting that heshould have adopted this position;

for in 1676 he had uttered thethought that not even the demands ofconscience[3] can justify rebellion.That was, however, before thetyranny of Charles had driven himinto exile with his patron, andbefore James had attempted thesubversion of all constitutionalgovernment. To deny the right ofrevolution was to justify the worstdemands of James, and it is in itsfavor that he exerts his ablestcontroversial power. "The trueremedy," he says, "of force without

authority is to oppose force to it."Let the sovereign but step outsidethe powers derived from the socialcontract and resistance becomes anatural right. But how define suchinvasion of powers? The instancesLocke chose show how closely,here at least, he was following theevents of 1688. The substitution ofarbitrary will for law, thecorruption of Parliament by packingit with the prince's instruments,betrayal to a foreign prince,prevention of the due assemblage of

Parliament—all these are aperversion of the trust imposed andoperate to effect the dissolution ofthe contract. The state of natureagain supervenes, and a newcontract may be made with onemore fitted to observe it. Here,also, Locke takes occasion to denythe central position of Hobbes'thesis. Power, the latter had argued,must be absolute and there cannot,therefore, be usurpation. But Lockeretorts that an absolute governmentis no government at all since it

proceeds by caprice instead ofreason; and it is comparable only toa state of war since it implies theabsence of judgment upon thecharacter of power. It lacks theessential element of consent withoutwhich the binding force of law isabsent. All government is a moraltrust, and the idea of limitation istherein implied. But a limitationwithout the means of enforcementwould be worthless, and revolutionremains as the reserve power insociety. The only hindrance to its

exertion that Locke suggests is thatof number. Revolution should not,he urges, be the act of a minority;for the contract is the action of themajor portion of the people and itsconsent should likewise obtain tothe dissolution of the covenant.

[3] King, Life of Locke, pp.62, 63.

The problem of Church and Statedemanded a separate discussion;and it is difficult not to feel that thegreat Letter on Toleration is the

noblest of all his utterances. It cameas the climax to a long evolution ofopinion; and, in the light ofWilliam's own conviction, it may besaid to have marked a decisiveepoch of thought. Already in thesixteenth century Robert Brown andWilliam the Silent had denouncedthe persecution of sincere belief.Early Baptists like Busher andRichardson had finely denied itsvalidity. Roger Williams inAmerica, Milton in England hadattacked its moral rightness and

political adequacy; whilechurchmen like Hales and Taylorand the noble Chillingworth hadshown the incompatibility betweena religion of love and a spirit ofhate. Nor had example beenwanting. The religious freedom ofHolland was narrow, as Spinozahad found, but it was still freedom.Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, SouthCarolina and Massachusetts had allembarked upon admirableexperiment; and Penn himself hadaptly said that a man may go to

chapel instead of church, evenwhile he remains a good constable.And in 1687, in the preface to histranslation of Lactantius, Burnet hadnot merely attacked the moralviciousness of persecution, but haddrawn a distinction between thespheres of Church and State whichis a remarkable anticipation ofLocke's own theory.

Locke himself covers the wholeground; and since his opinions onthe problem were at least twenty

years old, it is clear that he wasconsistent in a worthy outlook. Heproceeds by a denial that anyelement of theocratic governmentcan claim political validity. Themagistrate is concerned only withthe preservation of social peace anddoes not deal with the problem ofmen's souls. Where, indeed,opinions destructive of the State areentertained or a party subversive ofpeace makes its appearance, themagistrate has the right ofsuppression; though in the latter

case force is the worst and last ofremedies. In the English situation, itfollows that all men are to betolerated save Catholics,Mahomedans and atheists. The firstare themselves deniers of the rightsthey would seek, and they find thecentre of their political allegiancein a foreign power. Mahomedanmorals are incompatible withEuropean civil systems; and thecentral factor in atheism is theabsence of the only ultimatelysatisfactory sanction of good

conduct. Though Church and Stateare thus distinct, they act for areciprocal benefit; and it is thusimportant to see why Locke insistson the invalidity of persecution. Forsuch an end as the cure of souls, heargues, the magistrate has no divinelegation. He cannot, on othergrounds, use force for the simplereason that it does not produceinternal conviction. But even if thatwere possible, force would still bemistaken; for the majority of theworld is not Christian, yet it would

have the right to persecute in thebelief that it was possessed of truth.Nor can the implication that themagistrate has the keys of heaven beaccepted. "No religion," says Lockefinely, "which I believe not to betrue can be either true or profitableto me." He thus makes of the Churchan institution radically differentfrom the ruling conceptions of histime. It becomes merely a voluntarysociety, which can exert no powersave over its members. It may useits own ceremonies, but it cannot

impose them on the unwilling; andsince persecution is alien from thespirit of Christ, exclusion frommembership must be the limit ofecclesiastical disciplinary power.Nor must we forget the advantagesof toleration. Its eldest child ischarity, and without it there can beno honesty of opinion. Latercontroversy did not make himmodify these principles; and theylived, in Macaulay's hands, to be avital weapon in the political methodof the nineteenth century.

IV

Any survey of earlier politicaltheory would show how little ofnovelty there is in the specificelements of Locke's generaldoctrine. He is at all points theoffspring of a great and unbrokentradition; and that not the least whenhe seems unconscious of it. Definiteteachers, indeed, he can hardly besaid to have had; no one can read

his book without perceiving howmuch of it is rooted in the problemsof his own day. He himself hasexpressed his sense of Hooker'sgreatness, and he elsewhere hadrecommended the works of Grotiusand Pufendorf as an essentialelement in education. But his was anature which learned more frommen than books; and he more thanonce insisted that his philosophywas woven of his own "coarsethoughts." What, doubtless, hetherein meant was to emphasize the

freshness of his contact withcontemporary fact in contrast withthe technical jargon of the earlierthinkers. At least his work is freefrom the mountains of allusionwhich Prynne rolled into the bottomof his pages; and if the first Whigwas the devil, he is singularly freefrom the irritating pedantry ofbiblical citation. Yet even withthese novelties, no estimate of hiswork would be complete whichfailed to take account of thefoundations upon which he builded.

Herein, perhaps, the danger islest we exaggerate Locke'sdependence upon the earlier currentof thought. The social contract is atleast as old as when Glaucondebated with Socrates in themarket-place at Athens. The theoryof a state of nature, with the rightstherein implied, is the contribution,through Stoicism, of the Romanlawyers, and the great medievalcontrast to Aristotle'sexperimentalism. To the latter, also,

may be traced the separation ofpowers; and it was then but littlemore than a hundred years sinceBodin had been taken to make thedoctrine an integral part ofscientific politics. Nor is the theoryof a right to revolution in any sensehis specific creation. So soon as theReformation had given a newperspective to the problem ofChurch and State every element ofLocke's doctrine had become acommonplace of debate. Goodmanand Knox among Presbyterians,

Suarez and Mariana amongCatholics, the author of theVindiciæ and Francis Hotmanamong the Huguenots, had all ofthem emphasized the concept ofpublic power as a trust; with, ofcourse, the necessary corollary thatits abuse entails resistance.Algernon Sydney was at least hisacquaintance; and he must havebeen acquainted with the tradition,even if tragedy spared him thedetails, of the Discourses onGovernment. Even his theory of

toleration had in every detail beenanticipated by one or other of ahundred controversialists; and hisargument can hardly claim either thelofty eloquence of Jeremy Taylor orthe cogent simplicity of WilliamPenn.

What differentiates Locke fromall his predecessors is the mannerof his writing on the one hand, andthe fact of the Revolution on theother. Every previous thinker saveSydney—the latter's work was not

published until 1689—was writingwith the Church hardly less in mindthan the purely political problemsof the State; even the secularHobbes had devoted much thoughtand space to that "kingdom ofdarkness" which is Rome. And,Sydney apart, the resistance theyhad justified was always resistanceto a religious tyrant; and Cartwrightwas as careful to exclude politicaloppression from the grounds ofrevolution as Locke was to insistupon it as the fundamental excuse.

Locke is, in fact, the first of Englishthinkers the basis of whoseargument is mainly secular. Not,indeed, that he can wholly escapethe trammels of ecclesiasticism; notuntil the sceptical intelligence ofHume was such freedom possible.But it is clear enough that Lockewas shifting to very different groundfrom that which arrested theattention of his predecessors. He isattempting, that is to say, aseparation between Church andState not merely in that Scoto-Jesuit

sense which aimed at ecclesiasticalindependence, but in order to assertthe pre-eminence of the State assuch. The central problem is withhim political, and all otherquestions are subsidiary to it.Therein we have a sense, less clearin any previous writer saveMachiavelli, of the real result of thedecay of medieval ideals. Churchand State have become transposedin their significance. The way, as aconsequence, lies open to newdogmas.

The historical research of thenineteenth century has long sincemade an end of the social contractas an explanation of state-origins;and with it, of necessity, has gonethe conception of natural rights asanterior to organized society. Theproblem, as we now know, is farmore complex than the olderthinkers imagined. Yet Locke'sinsistence on consent and naturalrights has received new meaningfrom each critical period of history

since he wrote. The theory ofconsent is vital because without theprovision of channels for itsadministrative expression, men tendto become the creatures of a powerignorant at once and careless oftheir will. Active consent on thepart of the mass of men emphasizesthe contingent nature of all powerand is essential to the fullrealization of freedom; and thepurpose of the State, in any sensesave the mere satisfaction ofmaterial appetite, remains, without

it, unfulfilled. The concept ofnatural right is most closely relatedto this position. For so long as weregard rights as no more than thecreatures of law, there is at no pointadequate safeguard against theirusurpation. A merely legal theory ofthe State can never, therefore,exhaust the problems of politicalphilosophy.

No thinker has seen this fact moreclearly than Locke; and if his effortto make rights something more than

interests under juridical protectioncan not be accepted in the form hemade it, the underlying purposeremains. A State, that is to say,which aims at giving to men the fullcapacity their trained initiativewould permit is compelled toregard certain things as beyond theaction of an ordinary legislature.What Stammler calls a "natural lawwith changing content"[4]—acontent which changes with ourincreasing power to satisfy demand—is essential if the state is to live

the life of law. For here was thehead and centre of Locke's enquiry."What he was really concernedabout," said T.H. Green, "was todispute 'the right divine of kings togovern wrong.'" The method, as heconceived, by which this could beaccomplished was the limitation ofpower. This he effected by twodistinct methods, the one external,the other internal, in character.

[4] Cf. my Authority in theModern State, p. 64., and the

references there cited.

The external method has, atbottom, two sides. It is, in the firstplace, achieved by a narrowdefinition of the purpose of thestate. To Locke the State is littlemore than a negative institution, akind of gigantic limited liabilitycompany; and if we are inclined tocavil at such restraint, we mayperhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like Green andBosanquet this negative sense is

rarely absent, in the interest ofindividual exertion. But for Lockethe real guarantee of right lies inanother direction. What his wholework amounts to in substance—it isa significant anticipation ofRousseau—is a denial thatsovereignty can exist anywheresave in the community as a whole.A common political superior theredoubtless must be; but governmentis an organ to which omnipotence iswanting. So far as there is asovereign at all in Locke's book, it

is the will of that majority whichRousseau tried to disguise under thename of the general will; butobviously the conception lacksprecision enough to give the notionof sovereignty the means ofoperation. The denial is naturalenough to a man who had seen,under three sovereigns, the evils ofunlimited power; and if there islacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof thatan unlimited sovereign isunavoidable, it is well to remember

that the shift of opinion is, in ourown time, more and more in thedirection of Locke's attitude. Thatomnicompetence of Parliamentwhich Bentham and Austincrystallized into the retort to Lockeadmits, in later hands, of exactly theamelioration he had in mind; and itsethical inadequacy becomes themore obvious the more closely it isstudied.[5]

[5] Cf. my Problem ofSovereignty, Chap. I.

The internal limitation Lockesuggested is of more doubtful value.Government, he says, in substance,is a trustee and trustees abuse theirpower; let us therefore divide it asto parts and persons that thetemptation to usurp may bediminished. There is a long historyto this doctrine in its more obviousform, and it is a lamentable history.It tied men down to a tyrannousclassification which had no root inthe material it was supposed todistinguish. Montesquieu took it for

the root of liberty; Blackstone, whoshould have known better, repeatedthe pious phrases of the Frenchman;and they went in company toAmerica to persuade Madison andthe Supreme Court of the UnitedStates that only the separation ofpowers can prevent the approach oftyranny. The facts do not bear outsuch assumption. The division ofpowers means in the event not lessthan their confusion. None candifferentiate between the judge'sdeclaration of law and his making

of it.[6] Every governmentdepartment is compelled tolegislate, and, often enough, toundertake judicial functions. TheAmerican history of the separationof powers has most largely been anattempt to bridge them; and all thathas been gained is to drive the besttalent, save on rare occasion, fromits public life. In France theseparation of powers meant, untilrecent times, the excessivesubordination of the judiciary to thecabinet. Nor must we forget, as

Locke should have remembered, theplain lesson of the Cromwellianconstitutional experiments. That thedispersion of power is one of thegreat needs of the modern State atno point justifies the rigidcategories into which Locke soughtits division.[7]

[6] Cf. Mr. Justice Holmes'remarks in Jensen v. SouthernPacific, 244 U.S. 221.

[7] Cf. my Authority in the

Modern State, pp. 70 f.

Nor must we belittle thecriticism, in its clearest form thework of Fitz James Stephen,[8] thathas been levelled at Locke's theoryof toleration. For the larger part ofthe modern world, his argument isacceptable enough; and itsingenious compromises have madeit especially representative of theEnglish temper. Yet much of ithardly meets the argument that someof his opponents, as Proast for

example, had made. His conceptionof the visible church as no part ofthe essence of religion could win noassent from even a moderateAnglican; and, once the visiblechurch is admitted, Locke's faciledistinction between Church andState falls to the ground. Nor can itbe doubted that he underestimatedthe power of coercion to produceassent; the policy of Louis XIV tothe Huguenots may have beenbrutal, but its efficacy must beunquestionable. And it is at least

doubtful whether his theory has anyvalidity for a man who held, asRoman Catholics of his generationwere bound to hold, that thecommunication of his particularbrand of truth outweighed in valueall other questions. "Every Church,"he wrote, "is orthodox to itself; toothers, erroneous or heretical"; butto any earnest believer this wouldapproximate to blasphemy. Norcould any serious Christian acceptthe view that "under the gospel'...there is no such thing as a

Christian commonwealth'"; toCatholics and Presbyterians thismust have appeared the meresttravesty of their faith.

[8] Cf. also Coleridge's aptremark. Table Talk, Jan. 3,1834.

Here, indeed, as elsewhereLocke is the true progenitor ofBenthamism, and his work canhardly be understood save in thiscontext. Just as in his ethicalenquiries it was always the

happiness of the individual that hesought, so in his politics it was thehappiness of the subject he had inview. In each case it was toimmediate experience that he madehis appeal; and this perhapsexplains the clear sense of acontempt for past tradition whichpervades all his work. "That whichis for the public welfare," he said,"is God's will"; and therein wehave the root of that utilitarianismwhich, as Maine pointed out, is thereal parent of all nineteenth century

change. And with Locke, as with theBenthamites, his clear sense of whatutilitarianism demanded led to anover-emphasis of humanrationalism. No one can read theSecond Treatise without perceivingthat Locke looked upon the State asa machine which can be built andtaken to pieces in very simplefashion. Herein, undoubtedly, heover-simplified the problem; andthat made him miss some of thecardinal points a true psychology ofthe State must seize. His very

contractualism, indeed, is part ofthis affection for the rational. Itresulted in his failure to perceivehow complex is the mass of motivesimbedded in the political act. Thesignificance of herd instinct and thevast primitive deeps of theunconscious were alike hidden fromhim. All this is of defect; and yetexcusably. For it needed thedemonstration by Darwin of thekinship of man and beast for us tosee the real substance of Aristotle'svision that man is embedded in

political society.

V

Once Locke's work had becomeknown, its reputation was secure.Not, indeed, that it was entirelywelcome to his generation. Menwere not wanting who shrank fromhis thoroughgoing rationalism andfelt that anything but reason must bethe test of truth. Those who stood bythe ancient ways found it easy to

discover republicanism and theroots of atheistic doctrine in hiswork; and even the theories ofFilmer could find defenders againsthim in the Indian summer ofprerogative under Queen Anne.John Hutton informed a friend thathe was not less dangerous thanSpinoza; and the opinion found anecho from the nonjuring sect. Butthese, after all, were but the eddiesof a stream fast burying itself in thesands. For most, the Revolution wasa final settlement, and Locke was

welcome as a writer who haddiscovered the true source ofpolitical comfort. So it was thatWilliam Molyneux could embodythe ideas of the "incomparabletreatise" in his demand for Irishfreedom; a book which, even inthose days, occasioned somecontroversy. Nor is it uninterestingto discover that the translation ofHotman' s Franco-Gallia shouldhave been embellished with apreface from one who, as Molyneuxwrote to Locke,[9] never met the

Irish writer without conversing oftheir common master. How rapidlythe doctrine spread we learn from aletter of Bayle's in which, as earlyas 1693, Locke has already became"the gospel of the Protestants." Norwas his immediate influenceconfined to England. FrenchHuguenots and the Dutch drewnaturally upon so happy a defender;and Barbeyrac, in the translation ofPufendorf which he published in1706, cites no writer so often asLocke. The speeches for the

prosecution in the trial ofSacheverell were almost wholesaleadaptations of his teaching; andeven the accused counsel admittedthe legality of James' deposition inhis speech for the defence.

[9] Locke, Works (ed. of1812), IX. 435.

More valuable testimony is notwanting. In the Spectator, on sixseparate occasions, Addison speaksof him as one whose possession is anational glory. Defoe in his

Original Power of the People ofEngland made Locke the commonpossession of the average man, andoffered his acknowledgments to hismaster. Even the malignant geniusof Swift softened his hate to find theepithet "judicious" for one in whosedoctrines he can have found nocomfort. Pope summarized histeaching in the form thatBolingbroke chose to give it.Hoadly, in his Original andInstitution of Civil Government,not only dismisses Filmer in a first

part each page of which is modelledupon Locke, but adds a secondsection in which a defence ofHooker serves rather clumsily toconceal the care with which theSecond Treatise had also beenpillaged. Even Warburton ceasedfor a moment his habit of belittlingall rivals in the field he consideredhis own to call him, in that DivineLegation which he considered hismasterpiece, "the honor of this ageand the instructor of the future"; butsince Warburton's attack on the

High Church theory is at every pointLocke's argument, he may haveconsidered this self-eulogy insteadof tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis, on theeve of English Radicalism,published a noble edition of hisbook. And there is perhaps a certainhumor in the remembrance that itwas to Locke's economic tracts thatBolingbroke went for the argumentswith which, in the Craftsman, heattacked the excise scheme ofWalpole. That is irrefutableevidence of the position he had

attained.

Yet the tide was already on theebb, and for cogent reasons. Therestill remained the tribute to be paidby Montesquieu when he madeLocke's separation of powers thekeystone of his own more splendidarch. The most splendid of allsciolists was still to use his bookfor the outline of a social contractmore daring even than his own. Theauthors of the Declaration ofIndependence had still, in words

taken from Locke, to reassert thestate of nature and his rights; andMr. Martin of North Carolina wasto find him quotable in the debatesof the Philadelphia Convention. YetLocke's own weapons were beingturned against him and what waspermanent in his work was beingcast into the new form required bythe time. A few sentences of Humewere sufficient to make the socialcontract as worthless as the DivineRight of kings, and when Blackstonecame to sum up the result of the

Revolution, if he wrote incontractual terms it was with a fulladmission that he was making use offiction so far as he went behind thesettlement of 1688. Nor is the workof Dean Tucker withoutsignificance. The failure of Englandin the American war was alreadyevident; and it was not withoutjustice that he looked to Locke asthe author of their principles. "TheAmericans," he wrote, "have madethe maxims of Locke the ground ofthe present war"; and in his

Treatise Concerning CivilGovernment and his Four Lettershe declares himself unable tounderstand on what Locke'sreputation was based. Meanwhilethe English disciples of Rousseau inthe persons of Price and Priestleysuggested to him that Locke, "theidol of the levellers of England,"was the parent also of Frenchdestructiveness. Burke took up thework thus begun; and after he haddealt with the contract theory itceased to influence political

speculation in England. Its placewas taken by the utilitarian doctrinewhich Hume had outlined; and onceBentham's Fragment had begun tomake its way, a new epoch openedin the history of political ideas.

Locke might, indeed, claim thathe had a part in this renaissance;but, once the influence of Burke hadpassed, it was to other gods menturned. For Bentham made an end ofnatural rights; and his contempt forthe past was even more unsparing

than Locke's own. It is moreinstructive to compare his workwith Hobbes and Rousseau thanwith later thinkers; for after HumeEnglish speculation works in amedium Locke would not haveunderstood. Clearly enough, he hasnothing of the relentless logic whichmade Hobbes' mind the clearestinstrument in the history of Englishphilosophy. Nor has he Hobbes'sense of style or pungent grasp ofthe grimness of facts about him. Yethe need not fear the comparison

with the earlier thinker. If Hobbes'theory of sovereignty is today oneof the commonplaces ofjurisprudence, ethically andpolitically we occupy ourselveswith erecting about it a system oflimitations each one of which is insome sort due to Locke'sperception. If we reject Locke'sview of the natural goodness ofmen, Hobbes' sense of their evilcharacter is not less remote fromour speculations. Nor can weaccept Hobbes' Erastianism.

Locke's view of Church and Statebecame, indeed, a kind of stepchildto it in the stagnant days of the laterGeorges; but Wesleyanism, on theone hand, and the Oxford movementon the other, pointed the inevitablemoral of even an approximation tothe Hobbesian view. And anyonewho surveys the history of Churchand State in America will betempted to assert that in the lasthundred years the separateness forwhich Locke contended is notwithout its justification. Locke's

theory is a means of preserving thehumanity of men; Hobbes makestheir reason and conscience thesubjects of a power he forbids themto judge. Locke saw that vigilanceis the sister of liberty, whereHobbes dismissed the one asfaction and the other as disorder. Atevery point, that is to say, whereHobbes and Locke are at variance,the future has been on Locke's side.He may have defended his causeless splendidly than his rival; but itwill at least be admitted by most

that he had a more splendid cause todefend.

With Rousseau there is nocontrast, for the simple reason thathis teaching is only a broadening ofthe channel dug by Locke. Noelement integral to the TwoTreatises is absent from the SocialContract. Rousseau, indeed, inmany aspects saw deeper than hispredecessor. The form into whichhe threw his questions gave them aneternal significance Locke can

perhaps hardly claim. Heunderstood the organic character ofthe State, where Locke was stilltrammelled by the bonds of hisnarrow individualism. It is yetdifficult to see that the contributionupon which Rousseau's fame hasmainly rested is at any point a realadvance upon Locke. The generalwill, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms, really means thewelfare of the community as awhole; and when we enquire howthat general will is to be known, we

come, after much shuffling, upon thewill of that majority in which Lockealso put his trust. Rousseau'sgeneral will, indeed, is at bottom nomore than an assertion that right andtruth should prevail; and for thisalso Locke was anxious. But he didnot think an infallible criterionexisted for its detection; and he wassatisfied with the convenience of asimple numerical test. Nor would itbe difficult to show that Locke'sstate has more real room forindividuality than Rousseau's. The

latter made much show of animpartible and inalienablesovereignty eternally vested in thepeople; but in practice its exerciseis impossible outside the confinesof a city-state. Once, that is to say,we deal with modern problems ourreal enquiry is still the question ofLocke—what limits shall we placeupon the power of government?Rousseau has only emphasized theurgency of the debate.

Wherein, perhaps, the most

profound distinction betweenLocke's teaching and our own timemay be discovered is in our senseof the impossibility that a finalanswer can be found to politicalquestions. Each age has newmaterials at its command; and,today, a static philosophy wouldcondemn itself before completion.We do not build Utopias; and theattempt to discover the eternalprinciples of political right invitesdisaster at the outset. Yet that doesnot render useless, even for our

own day, the kind of work Lockedid. In the largest sense, hisquestions are still our own. In thelargest sense, also, we are nearenough to his time to profit at eachstep of our own efforts by the hintshe proffers. The point at which hestood in English history bears not alittle resemblance to our own. Theemphasis, now as then, is upon theproblem of freedom. The problem,now as then, was its translation intoinstitutional terms. It is the glory ofLocke that he brought a generous

patience and a searching wisdom tothe solution he proffered to hisgeneration.

CHAPTER III

CHURCH AND STATE INTHE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY

I

The Revolution of 1688 drew itsmain source of strength from thetraditional dislike of Rome, and theeager desire to place the Church ofEngland beyond the reach of James'

aggression. Yet it was not until ageneration had passed that the linesof ecclesiastical settlement were, inany full sense clear. The difficultiesinvolved were mostlygovernmental, and it can hardlyeven yet be said that they have beensolved. The nature of the relationbetween Church and State, theaffiliation between the Church andNonconformist bodies, the characterof its internal government—allthese had still to be defined. Norwas this all. The problem of

definition was made more complexby schism and disloyalty. Animportant fraction of the Churchcould not accept at all the fact ofWilliam's kingship; and if the largerpart submitted, it cannot be said tohave been enthusiastic.

Nor did the Church make easy thesituation of the Nonconformists.Toleration of some kind wasrapidly becoming inevitable; andwith a Calvinist upon the thronepersecution of, at any rate, the

Presbyterians became finallyimpossible. Yet the definition ofwhat limits were to be set totoleration was far from easy. TheChurch seemed like a fortressbeleaguered when Nonjurors,Deists, Nonconformists, all alikeassaulted her foundations. Toloosen her hold upon politicalprivilege seemed to be akin to self-destruction. And, after all, if Churchand State were to stand in someconnection, the former must havesome benefit from the alliance. Did

such partnership imply exclusionfrom its privilege for all who couldnot accept the special brand ofreligious doctrine? Locke, at least,denied the assumption, and arguedthat since Churches are voluntarysocieties, they cannot and ought notto have reciprocal relation with theState. But Locke's theory was meattoo strong for the digestion of histime; and no statesman would thenhave argued that a governmentcould forego the advantage ofreligious support. And William,

after all, had come to free thechurch from her oppressor.Freedom implied protection, andprotection in that age involvedestablishment. It was thus taken forgranted by most members of theChurch of England that her adoptionby the State meant her superiority toevery other form of religiousorganization. Superiority is, by itsnature exclusive, the moreespecially when it is united to acertainty of truth and a kinship withthe dominant political interest of the

time. Long years were thus to passbefore the real meaning of theToleration Act secured translationinto more generous statutes.

The problem of the Church'sgovernment was hardly lesscomplex. The very acerbity withwhich it was discussed proclaimsthat we are in an age of settlement.Much of the dispute, indeed, isdoubtless due to the dislike of allHigh Churchmen for William; withtheir consequent unwillingness to

admit the full meaning of hisecclesiastical supremacy. Muchalso is due to the fact that the benchof bishops, despite great figureslike Tillotson and Wake, wasnecessarily chosen for politicalaptitude rather than for religiousvalue. Nor did men like Burnet andHoadly, for all their learning, makeeasy the path for brethren of moretender consciences. The Church,moreover, must have felt its powersthe more valuable from the verystrength of the assault to which she

was subjected. And the directinterference with her governanceimplied by the Oaths of Allegianceand of Abjuration raised questionswe have not yet solved. It suggestedthe subordination of Church toState; and men like Hickes andLeslie were quick to point out theErastianism of the age. It is a factinevitable in the situation of theEnglish Church that the charge ofsubjection to the State should rousea deep and quick resentment. Shecannot be a church unless she is a

societas perfecta; she cannot havewithin herself the elements ofperfect fellowship if what seem theplain commands of Christ are to beat the mercy of the king inParliament. That is the difficultywhich lies at the bottom of thedebate with Wake in one age andwith Hoadly in the next. In somesort, it is the problem of sovereigntythat is here at issue; and it is in thissense that the problems of theRevolution are linked with theOxford Movement. But Newman

and his followers are theunconscious sponsors of a debatewhich grows in volume; and todiscuss the thoughts of Wake andHoadly and Law is thus, in a vitalaspect, the study of contemporaryideas.

We are not here concerned withthe wisdom of those of William'sadvisers who exacted an oath ofallegiance from the clergy. It raisedin acute form the validity of adoctrine which had, for more than a

century, been the main foundation ofthe alliance between throne andaltar in England. The demandprecipitated a schism whichlingered on, though fitfully, until thethreshold of the nineteenth century.The men who could not take theoath were, many of them, among themost distinguished churchmen of thetime. Great ecclesiastics likeSancroft, the archbishop ofCanterbury and one of the sevenwho had gained immortality by hisresistance to James, saints like Ken,

the bishop of Bath and Wells,scholars like George Hickes andHenry Dodwell, men like CharlesLeslie, born with a genius forrecrimination; much, it is clear, ofwhat was best in the Church ofEngland was to be found amongstthem. There is not a little of beauty,and much of pathos in their history.Most, after their deprivation, werecondemned to poverty; few of themrecanted. The lives of men likeSancroft and Ken and the youngerAmbrose Bonwicke are part of the

great Anglican tradition of earnestsimplicity which later John Keblewas to illustrate for the nineteenthcentury. The Nonjurors, as theywere called, were not free frombitterness; and the history of theireffort, after the consecration ofHilkiah Bedford and Ralph Taylor,to perpetuate the schism is alamentable one. Not, indeed, thatthe history even of their decline iswithout its interest; and the study,alike of their liturgy and theirattempt at reunion with the Eastern

Church, must always possess asingular interest for students ofecclesiastical history.

Yet the real interest of theNonjuring schism was politicalrather than religious; and its rootsgo out to vital events of the past. Atthe bottom it is the obverse side ofthe Divine Right of kings that theyrepresent. That theory, which wasthe main weapon of the earlysecular state against the pretensionsof Rome, must naturally have

commanded the allegiance ofmembers of a church which James I,its main exponent, had declared ofvital import to his very existence.Its main opponents, moreover, wereCatholics and Dissenters; so thatmen like Andrewes must have feltthat when they answered Bellarminethey were in substance alsodefenders of their Church. After thegreat controversy of James I's reignresistance as a duty had come to beregarded as a main element in Jesuitand Nonconformist teaching; with

the result that its antithesis became,as a consequence of the politicalsituation, no less integral a part ofChurch of England doctrine. For itwas upon the monarchy that theChurch had come to depend for itsexistence; and if resistance to theking were made, as Knox andBellarmine had in substance madeit, the main weapon of thedissenting churches there was littlehope that it would continue to existonce the monarchy was overthrown.And it is this, unquestionably,

which explains why stoutecclesiastics like Barrow andJackson can write in what seems soErastian a temper. When they urgethe sovereignty of the State, theirthesis is in truth the sovereignty ofthe Church; and that means thetriumph of men who looked withcontemptuous hatred uponNonconformists of every sect. TheChurch of England taught non-resistance as the condition of itsown survival.

How deep-rooted this doctrinehad become in the course of theseventeenth century the writings ofmen like Mainwaring andSanderson sufficiently show; yetnothing so completely demonstratesits widespread acceptance as theresult of the Revolution. Fourhundred clergy abandoned theirpreferment because James ruled byDivine Right; and they could not inconscience resist even hisiniquities. An able tract of 1689[10]had collected much material to

show how integral the doctrine wasto the beliefs of the Church. HadWilliam's government, indeed,refrained from the imposition of theoath, it is possible that there mighthave been no schism at all; for theearly Nonjurors at least—perhapsHickes and Turner are exceptions—would probably have welcomedanything which enabled theavoidance of schism. Once,however, the oath was imposedthree vital questions were raised.Deprivation obviously involved the

problem of the power of the Stateover the Church. If the act of aconvention whose own legality wasat best doubtful could deprive theconsecrated of their position, wasthe Church a Church at all, or was itthe mere creature of the secularpower? And what, moreover, ofconscience? It could not be aninherent part of the Church's beliefthat men should betray their faith forthe sake of peace. Later thinkersadded the purely secular argumentthat resistance in one case made for

resistance in all. Admit, it wasargued by Leslie, the right todisobey, and the fabric of society isat a stroke dissolved. The attitude ischaracteristic of that ablecontroversialist; and it shows howhardly the earlier notions of DivineRight were to die.

[10] The History of PassiveObedience. Its author wasJeremy Collier.

These theories merit a furtherexamination. Williams, later the

Bishop of Chichester, had arguedthat separation on the basis of theoath was unreasonable. "All that thecivil power here pretends to," hewrote "is to secure itself against thepractices of dissatisfied persons."The Nonjurors, in this view, weremaking an ecclesiastical matter of apurely secular issue. He wasanswered, among others, by SamuelGrascom, in an argument whichfound high favor among the stricterof his sect. "The matter andsubstance of these Oaths," he said,

"is put into the prayers of theChurch, and so far it becomes amatter of communion. What peopleare enjoined in the solemn worshipto pray for, is made a matter ofcommunion; and if it be simple, willnot only justify, but require aseparation." Here is the pith of thematter. For if the form andsubstance of Church affairs is thusto be left to governmental will, thenthose who obey have left the Churchand it is the faithful remnant onlywho constitute the true fellowship.

The schism, in this view, was thefault of those who remained subjectto William's dominion. TheNonjurors had not changed; and theywere preserving the Church in itsintegrity from men who strove tobetray it to the civil power.

This matter of integrity isimportant. The glamour ofMacaulay has somewhat softenedthe situation of those who took theoaths; and in his pages theNonjurors appear as stupid men

unworthily defending a dead cause.It is worth while to note that this isthe merest travesty. Tillotson, whosucceeded Sancroft on the latter'sdeprivation, and Burnet himself hadurged passive resistance upon LordWilliam Russell as essential tosalvation; Tenison had donelikewise at the execution ofMonmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick,White Kennett, had all written in itsfavor; and to William Sherlockbelongs the privilege of havingdefended and attacked it in two

pamphlets each of which challengesthe pithy brilliance of the other.Clearly, so far as consistency is inquestion, the Nonjurors might withjustice contend that they had right ontheir side. And even if it is said thatthe policy of James introduced anew situation the answer surely isthat Divine Right and non-resistancecan, by their very nature, make noallowance for novelty.

The root, then, of thisecclesiastical contention is the

argument later advanced by Lesliein his "Case of the Regale and thePontificate" in which hesummarized the Convocationdispute. The State, he argues, has nopower over bishops whoserelationship to their flock is purelyspiritual and derived from Christ.The Church is independent of allcivil institution, and must havetherefore within herself the powersnecessary to her life as a society.Leslie repudiates Erastianism in thestrongest terms. Not only is it, for

him, an encroachment upon therights of Christ, but it leads todeism in the gentry and to dissentamong the common people. TheChurch of England comes to beregarded as no more than thecreature of Parliamentaryenactment; and thus to leave it as thecreature of human votes, is todestroy its divinity.

It is easy enough to see that menwho felt in this fashion could hardlyhave decided otherwise than as they

did. The matter of conscience,indeed, was fundamental to theirposition. "I think," said the Bishopof Worcester on his death-bed, "Icould suffer at a stake rather thantake this oath." That, indeed,represents the general temper. Manyof them did not doubt that James haddone grievous wrong; but they hadtaken the oath of allegiance to him,and they saw in their conscience nomeans of escape from their vow."Their Majesties," writes the authorof the account of Bishop Lake's

death, "are the two persons in theworld whose reign over them, theirinterest and inclination oblige themmost to desire, and nothing butconscience could restrain them frombeing as forward as any in allexpressions of loyalty." In such anaspect, even those who believetheir attitude to have been wrong,can hardly doubt that they actedrightly in their expression of it. For,after all, experience has shown thatthe State is built upon theconsciences of men. And the protest

they made stands out in the nextgeneration in vivid contrast to aworldly-minded and politically-corrupt Church which only internalrevolution could awaken from itsslumbers.

No one represents so admirablyas Charles Leslie the politicalargument of the case. At bottom it isan argument against anarchy that heconstructs, and much of what hesaid is medieval enough in tone tosuggest de Maistre's great defence

of papalism as the secret of world-order. He stands four square upondivine right and passive obedience."What man is he who can by hisown natural authority bend theconscience of another? That wouldbe far more than the power of life,liberty or prosperity. Therefore theysaw the necessity of a divineoriginal." Such a foundation, heargued elsewhere, is necessary toorder, for "if the last resort be in thepeople, there is no end ofcontroversy at all, but endless and

unremediable confusion." Nor hadhe sympathy for the Whig attack onmonarchy. "The reasons againstKings," he wrote, "are as strongagainst all powers, for men of anytitles are subject to err, andnumbers more than fewer." Andnothing can unloose the chain."Obedience," he said in the Best ofAll, "is due to commonwealths bytheir subjects even for conscience'sake, where the princes from whomthey have revolted have given uptheir claim."

The argument has a wider historythan its controversial statementmight seem to warrant. At bottom,clearly enough, it is an attack uponthe new tradition which Locke hadbrought into being. What seems toimpress it most is the impossibilityof founding society upon other thana divine origin. Anything less willnot command the assent of mensufficiently to be immune from theirevil passions. Let their minds butonce turn to resistance, and the

bonds of social order will bebroken. Complete submission is theonly safeguard against anarchy. So,a century later, de Maistre couldargue that unless the whole worldbecame the subject of Rome, thecomplete dissolution of Christiansociety must follow. So, too, fiftyyears before, Hobbes had arguedfor an absolute dominion lest theambitions and desires of men breakthrough the fragile boundaries of thesocial estate.

The answer is clear enough; and,indeed, the case against theNonjurors is nowhere so strong ason its political side. Men cannot beconfined within the limits of sonarrow a logic. They will not, withBishop Ken, rejoice in suffering asa doctrine of the Cross. Rather willoppression in its turn arouse a senseof wrong and that be parent of aconscience which provokes toaction. Here was the root of Locke'sdoctrine of consent; for unless thegovernment, as Hume was later to

point out, has on its side the opinionof men, it cannot hope to endure.The fall of James was caused, notas the Nonjurors were tempted tothink, by popular disregard ofDivine personality, but by his ownmisunderstanding of the limits towhich misgovernment may go. Heretheir opponents had a strong case topresent; for, as Stillingfleetremarked, if William had not comeover there might have been noChurch of England for theNonjurors to preserve. And other

ingenious compromises weresuggested. Non-resistance, it wasargued by Sherlock, applied togovernment in general; and the oath,as a passage in the ConvocationBook of Overall seemed to suggest,might be taken not less to a de factomonarch than to one de jure. Few,indeed would have taken the groundof Bishop Burnet, and allotted thethrone to William and Mary asconquerors of the Kingdom; at leastthe pamphlet in which thisuncomfortable doctrine was put

forward the House of Commons hadburned by the common hangman.

What really defeated theNonjurors' claims wascommonsense. Much the ablestattack upon their position wasStillingfleet's defence of the policyemployed in filling up the seesvacated by deprivation; and it isremarkable that the theory heemploys is to insist that unless thelawfulness of what had been done isadmitted, the Nonjuror's position is

inevitable. "If it be unlawful tosucceed a deprived bishop," hewrote,[11] "then he is the bishop ofthe diocese still: and then the lawthat deprives him is no law, andconsequently the king andParliament that made that law noking and Parliament: and how canthis be reconciled with the Oath ofAllegiance, unless the Doctor canswear allegiance to him who is noKing and hath no authority togovern." All this the Nonjurorswould have admitted, and the mere

fact that it could be used asargument against them is proof thatthey were out of touch with thenational temper. What they wantedwas a legal revolution which is inthe nature of things impossible. Wemay regret that the oath was deemedessential, and feel that it might nothave been so stoutly pressed. Butthe leaders of a revolution "tread apath of fire"; and the fault lay less atthe door of the civil governmentthan in the fact that this was an agewhen men acted on their principles.

William and his advisers, with thecondition of Ireland and Scotland acause for agitation, with Francehostile, with treason and plot notabsent from the episcopate itself,had no easy task; what, in thetemper of the time, gives most causefor consideration, is the moderatespirit in which they accomplishedit.

[11] A Vindication of theirMajesties' Authority to fill theSees of the Deprived Bishops

(1691).

III

The Nonjuring schism was by nomeans the only difficulty which theChurch of England had to confrontin these troubled years. Thedefinition of her relationship withState and nation, if at the moment itaroused less bitterness, was in thelong run more intricate in its nature.That some sort of toleration wasinevitable few, save a group of

prejudiced irreconcilables, wouldhave denied. But greater thingswere in the air, and there were stillmany who dreamed of a grandscheme of Comprehension, bywhich all save the more extremeDissenters would have beenadmitted to the Church. It is thiswhich explains the acrimoniousdebates of the next two years. Thehatred of the Church for dissent canonly be understood by those whostudy with care the insults heapedupon her by the sectaries during the

Civil Wars. That men who hadstriven for her dissolution should beadmitted to her privileges seemedto Churchmen as tragic as ironical.Nor must we miss the politicalaspect of the matter. William hadreceived an eager, if natural,support from Nonconformists; andsince the vast majority of them wasWhig in temper, the greater thedegree of toleration, the greaterlikelihood there was of an attackupon the Church. Exclusion thusbecame a fundamental article of the

Tory creed; and it was the morevalued because it enabled them tostrike at their opponents through aninstitution which at the trial ofSacheverell, in 1710, still showedan overwhelming hold upon themass of the people.

The attitude of mind hereinimplied is in large part the reactionfrom the Erastian temper of thegovernment. Under William, thattemper is intelligible enough; forunless he held the Church in strict

control, he must have felt that hewas giving a large handle to hisenemies. Under Anne, the essenceof the situation remained unchanged,even though her eager sympathywith the Church was beyond allquestion. William had relievedNonconformists from the burden ofpenal statute; the OccasionalConformity Act of 1713 broadlycontinued the exclusion of all savethe more yielding of them frompolitical office. When theHanoverians succeeded they were

willing to repeal its more rigidintolerance; but the Test Actremained as evidence that theDissenters were not yet regarded asin a full sense part of the nationallife.

The reasons for the hatred ofdissent go back in part to the CivilWar and in part also to the feelingof common ground between thedissenting interest and Rome whichwas born of the struggle underElizabeth and James. The pamphlets

are innumerable; and most of themdeserve the complete obliquity intowhich they have fallen. We are told,in the eighteenth as in theseventeenth century, that thePresbyterian theory of governmentis inconsistent with the existence ofthe civil power. "They claim," saidLeslie, "power to abrogate the lawsof the land touching ecclesiasticalmatters, if they judge them hurtful orunprofitable... They require thecivil magistrate to be subject totheir power." Of Knox or

Cartwright this is no unfair account;but of the later Presbyterians it isthe merest travesty. It supposes thatthey would be willing to push to theutmost limit the implications of thetheory of the two kingdoms—asupposition which their passivesubmission to the Act of 1712restoring lay patronage decisivelyrefutes. Bramhall had no doubt thattheir discipline was "the veryquintessence of refined popery,"and the argument is repeated by ahundred less learned pamphleteers.

Neither the grim irony of Defoe northe proven facts of the case couldwean either the majority ofChurchmen or the masses of thepeople from the belief that theRevolution endangered the veryexistence of the Church and thatconcession would be fatal. Sostoutly did the Church resist it thatthe accession of George I alone, inLecky's view, prevented the repealof the Toleration Act and thedestruction of the political benefitsof the Revolution.

But nowhere was the temper ofthe time more clearly displayed thanin the disputes over Convocation.To William's advisers, perhaps,more than to the Church itself theirprecipitation is due; for had theynot, at the outset of the reign,suggested large changes in theliturgy suspicions then arousedmight well have slumbered. As itwas, the question of the royalsupremacy immediately came intoview and the clergy spared no effort

to meet the issue so raised. And thisthey felt the more bitterly becausethe upper house of Convocation,two-thirds of which were William'snominees, naturally inclined to hisside. Both under William and Annethe dispute continued, and the lowerclergy shrank from no opportunityof conflict. They fought the king, thearchbishop, the upper house. Theyattacked the writings of Toland andBurnet, the latter's book sincerecognized as one of the greattreasures of Anglican literature. In

the main, of course, the struggle waspart of the perennial conflictbetween High Church doctrine andlatitudinarianism. But that was onlya fragment of the issue. What reallywas in question was the nature ofthe State's power over the Church.That could be left unanswered solong, as with James I and Charles,the two powers had but a singlethought. The situation changed onlywhen State and Church had differentpolicies to fulfil and differentmeans for their attainment.

The controversy had begun on thethreshold of William's accession;but its real commencement datesfrom 1697. In that year waspublished the Letter to aConvocation Man, probablywritten by Sir BartholomewShower, an able if unscrupulousJacobite lawyer, which maliciously,though with abounding skill, raisedevery question that peacefulchurchmen must have been anxiousto avoid. The Letter pointed out the

growth of infidelity and theincreasing suspicion that the Churchwas becoming tainted with Sociniandoctrine. Only the assembly ofConvocation could arrest theseevils. The author did not deny thatthe king's assent was necessary toits summons. But he argued thatonce the Convocation had met, itcould, like Parliament, debate allquestions relevant to its purpose."The one of these courts," saidShower, "is of the same power anduse with regard to the Church as the

other is in respect to the State," andhe insisted that the writ of summonscould not at any point confinedebate. And since the Convocationwas an ecclesiastical Parliament, itfollowed that it could legislate andthus make any canons "providedthey do not impugn common law,statutes, customs or prerogative.""To confer, debate and resolve,"said Shower, "without the king'slicense, is at common law theundoubted right of convocation."

Here was a clear challengewhich was at once answered, inThe Authority of Christian Princes,by William Wake, who was by farthe most learned of thelatitudinarian clergy, and thesuccessor of Tenison in the see ofCanterbury. His argument waspurely historical. He endeavored toshow that the right to summonecclesiastical synods was alwaysthe prerogative of the earlyChristian princes until theaggression of the popes had won

church independence. TheReformation resumed the primitivepractice; and the Act of Submissionof 1532 had made it legallyimpossible for the clergy to discussecclesiastical matters without royalpermission. Historically, theargument of Wake was irrefutable;but what mostly impressed theChurch was the uncompromisingErastianism of his tone. Princes, hesaid, "may make what laws orconstitutions they think fit for theChurch.... a canon is but as matter

prepared for the royal stamp." Inthis view, obviously, the Church ismore than a department of the State.But Wake went even farther, "Icannot see why the SupremeMagistrate," he wrote, "whoconfessedly has a power to confirmor reject their (Convocation's)decrees, may not also make suchother use of them as he pleases, andcorrect, improve, or otherwise altertheir resolutions, according to hisown liking, before he gives hisauthority to them."

So defined no Church couldclaim in any true sense the headshipof Christ; for it was clearly left atthe mercy of the governmental viewof expedient conduct. Wake'sanswer aroused a sensation almostas acute as the original Letter ofShower. But by far the ablestcriticism it provoked was that ofFrancis Atterbury, then a youngstudent of Christ Church and on thethreshold of his turbulent career.His Rights, Powers and Privileges

of an English Convocation Statedand Vindicated not only showed amasterly historic sense in its effortto traverse the unanswerableinduction of Wake, but challengedhis position more securely on theground of right. The historicalargument, indeed, was not a safeposition for the Church, and Wake'srejoinder in his State of the Church(1703) is generally conceded tohave proved his point, so far as theclaim of prescription is concerned.But when Atterbury moves to the

deeper problem of what is involvedin the nature of a church, he has apowerful plea to make. It isunnecessary now to deal with hiscontention that Wake's defence ofthe Royal Supremacy underminesthe rights of Parliament; for Wakecould clearly reply that the seat ofthat power had changed with theadvent of the Revolution. Where theavoidance of sympathy is difficult isin his insistence that no Church canlive without an assembly to debateits problems, and that no assembly

can be real which is subject toexternal control. "Their body," ashe remarks, "will be useless to theState and by consequencecontemptible"; for its opinions willnot be born of that free deliberationwhich can alone ensure respect.Like all High Churchmen, Atterburyhas a clear sense that Church andState can no longer be equated, andhe is anxious to preserve thepersonality of the Church from theinvasions of an alien body. To bereal, it must be independent, and to

be independent, it must have organsof self-expression. But neitherWilliam nor Anne could afford toforego the political capital involvedin ecclesiastical control andErastian principles proceeded totheir triumph.

Here, as elsewhere, it wasCharles Leslie who best summed upthe feeling of High Churchmen. HisCase of the Regale (1701) is by farthe ablest of his many ableperformances. He saw at the outset

that the real issue was defined bythe Church's claim to be a divinesociety, with rights thus consecratedby the conditions of its origin. If itwas divine, invasion did not touchits de jure rights. "How," he asked,"can rights that are divine be givenup? If they are divine, no humanauthority can either supersede orlimit them.... How can rights thatare inherent be given up? If they areinherent, they are inseparable. Theright to meet, to consult, to makerules or canons for the regulation of

the society, is essential to everysociety as such ... can she then partwith what is essential to her?" Norcould it be denied that "where thechoice of the governors of onesociety is in the hands of anothersociety, that society must bedependent and subject to the other."The Church, in the Latitudinarianview was thus either the creature ofthe state or an imperium in imperio;but Leslie would not admit thatfruitful stumbling block to thedebate. "The sacred and civil

powers were like two parallel lineswhich could never meet or interfere... the confusion arises ... when thecivil power will take upon them tocontrol or give laws to the Church,in the exercise of her spiritualauthority." He did not doubt that theChurch should give securities for itsloyalty to the king, and renounce anyeffort at the coercion of the civilmagistrate. But the Church wasentitled to a similar privilege, andkings should not "have theirbeneficence and protection to the

Church of Christ understood as abribe to her, to betray and deliverup into their hands the powerscommitted into her charge byChrist." Nor did he fail to point outthe suicidal nature of Erastianism.For the church's hold upon men isdependent upon their faith in theindependence of her principles."When they see bishops," he wrotewisely, "made by the Court, they areapt to imagine that they speak tothem the court language; and lay nofurther stress upon it than the charge

of a judge at an assizes, who hasreceived his instructions beforehandfrom the Court; and by this meansthe state has lost the greatestsecurity of her government."

The argument is powerfulenough; though it should be notedthat some of its implications remainundetermined. Leslie does not sayhow the spheres of Church and Stateare to be differentiated. He does notexplain the methods whereby anestablishment is to be made

compatible with freedom. For it isobvious that the partnership ofChurch and State must be uponconditions; and once the State hadpermitted the existence of creedsother than that of its officialadoption, it could not maintain theexclusive power for which theChurch contended. And when theChurch not only complained ofState-betrayal, but attempted the useof political means to enforceremedial measures it was inevitablethat statesmen would use the

weapons ready to their hand tocoerce it to their will. The realremedy for the High Churchmenwas not exclusiveness butdisestablishment.

That this is the meaning of thestruggle did not appear until thereign of George I. What is known asthe Bangorian controversy was dueto the posthumous publication, in1716, of the papers of GeorgeHickes, the most celebrated of theNonjurors in his generation. The

papers are of no special import; buttaken in connection with theJacobite rising of 1715 they seemedto imply a new attack upon theRevolution settlement. So, at least,they were interpreted by BenjaminHoadly, then Bishop of Bangor, anda stout upholder of theLatitudinarian school. The conflicttoday has turned to dust and ashes;and few who read the multitude ofpamphlets it evoked, or standamazed at their personal bitterness,can understand why more than a

hundred writers should have thoughtit necessary to inform the world oftheir opinions, or why the LondonStock Exchange should have felt sopassionate an interest in the debateas to cease for a day the hubbub ofits transactions. Nor can any onemake heroes from the personalitiesof its protagonists. Hoadly himselfwas a typical bishop of the politicalschool, who rose from humblecircumstances to the wealthybishopric of Winchester through aremarkable series of translations.

Before the debate of 1716, he waschiefly known by two politicaltracts in which he had rewritten, inless cogent form, and withoutadequate acknowledgment, the twotreatises of Locke. He clearlyrealized how worthless the dogmaof Divine Right had become,without being certain of theprinciples by which it was to bereplaced. Probably, as LeslieStephen has pointed out, histheorizing is the result of a cloudysense of the bearing of the Deist

controversy. If God is to bebanished from direct connectionwith earthly affairs, we must seek ahuman explanation of political facts.And he became convinced that thisattitude applies not less completelyto ecclesiastical than to secularpolitics. Of his opponents, by farthe ablest was William Law, theonly theologian whom Gibbon maybe said to have respected, and theparent, through his mysticalwritings, of the Wesleyanmovement. Snape, then Provost of

Eton, was always incisive; and hispamphlet went through seventeeneditions in a single year andprovoked seven replies within threemonths. Thomas Sherlock would notbe either himself or his father's son,were he not caustic, logical anddirect. But Hoadly and Lawbetween them exhaust thecontroversy, so far as it hasmeaning for our own day. The lessessential questions like Hoadly'schoice of friends, his attitude toprayer, the accuracy of the details in

his account of the Test Act, thecause of his refusal to answer Lawdirectly, are hardly now germane tothe substance of the debate.Hoadly's position is most fullystated in his Preservative againstthe Principles and Practice ofNonjurors which he published in1716 as a counterblast to the papersof Hickes; and they are brieflysummarized in the sermon preachedbefore the King on March 31, 1717,on the text "My Kingdom is not ofthis world," and published by royal

command. Amid a vast wildernessof quibbles and qualifications, somesimple points emerge. What he wasdoing was to deprive the priesthoodof claims to supernatural authoritythat he might vindicate for civilgovernment the right to preserveitself not less against persons inecclesiastical office than againstcivil assailants. To do so he isforced to deny that the miraculouspowers of Christ and the Apostlesdescended to their successors. Forif that assumption is made we grant

to fallible men privileges whichconfessedly belong to personsoutside the category of fallibility.And, exactly in the fashion of Lesliein the Regale he goes on to showthat if a Church is a supernaturalinstitution, it cannot surrender onejot or tittle of its prerogative. It is,in fact, an imperium in imperio andits conflict with the state isinevitable. But if the Church is not asupernatural institution, what is itsnature? Hoadly here attacks thedoctrine which lies at the basis of

all ecclesiastical debate. TheChurch, he claims, is not a visiblesociety, presided over by men whohave authority directly transmittedby Christ. There are not within it"viceregents who can be saidproperly to supply his place; nointerpreters upon whom his subjectsare absolutely to depend; no judgesover the conscience or religion ofhis people. For if this were so thatany such absolute viceregentauthority, either for the making ofnew laws, or interpreting old ones,

or judging his subjects, in religiousmatters, were lodged in any menupon earth, the consequence wouldbe that what still retains the name ofthe Church of Christ would not bethe kingdom of Christ, but thekingdom of those men invested withsuch authority. For whoever hathsuch an authority of making laws isso far a king, and whoever can addnew laws to those of Christ, equallyobligatory, is as truly a king asChrist himself. Nay, whosoeverhath an absolute authority to

interpret any written or spokenlaws, it is he who is truly thelawgiver to all intents andpurposes, and not the person whofirst wrote and spoke them."

The meaning is clear enough.What Hoadly is attacking is thetheory of a visible Church of Christon earth, with the immensesuperstructure of miracle andinfallibility erected thereon. Thetrue Church of Christ is in heaven;and the members of the earthly

society can but try in a human,blundering way, to act with decencyand justice. Apostolic succession,the power of excommunication, thedealing out of forgiveness for men'ssins, the determination of truedoctrine, insofar as the Churchclaims these powers, it is usurpingan authority that is not its own. Therelation of man to God is his privateaffair, and God will ask from himsincerity and honesty, rather thanjudge him for his possession ofsome special set of dogmas.

Clearly, therefore, if the Church isno more than this, it has nosupernatural pretensions to opposeto the human claims of the State.And since the State must havewithin itself all the means ofsufficient life, it has the right toresist the ecclesiastical onslaught asbased upon the usurpation of powerassumed without right. And in latertreatises Hoadly did for ceremonialexactly what he had done for churchgovernment. The eucharist became apiece of symbolism and

excommunication nothing more thanan announcement—"a mere externalthing"—that the rules of thefellowship have been broken. It atno point is related to the sinner'sopportunity of salvation.

In such an aspect, it wouldclearly follow that the Church hasno monopoly of truth. It can, indeed,judge its own beliefs; but reasonalone can demonstrate theinadequacy of other attitudes. Nordoes its judgment preclude the

individual duty to examine into thetruth of things. The real root of faithis not the possession of an infallibledogma, but the arriving honestly atthe dogma in which you happen tobelieve. For the magistrate, heurges, what is important is not thetable of your springs of action, butthe conduct itself which is basedupon that table; from which itfollows that things like the Test andCorporation Acts have no realpolitical validity. They have beenimposed upon the State by the

narrow interpretations of anusurping power; and theNonconformist claim to citizenshipwould thus seem as valid as that ofa member of the Church of England.

All this sounds sensible enough;though it is curious doctrine in themouth of a bishop of that church.And this, in fact, is the starting-point of Law's analysis of Hoadly.No one who reads the unsparingvigor of his criticism can doubt thatLaw must have been thoroughly

happy in the composition of hisdefence; and, indeed, his is the onlycontribution to the debate whichmay claim a permanent place inpolitical literature. In one sense,indeed, the whole of Law's answeris an ignoratio elenchi, for heassumes the truth of that whichHoadly sets out to examine, with theinevitable result that each writer is,for the most part, arguing fromdifferent premises. But on theassumption that Hoadly is aChristian, Law's argument is an

attack of great power. He showsconclusively that if the Church ofEngland is no more than Hoadlyimagines it to be, it cannot, in anyproper historic sense, be called theChurch of England at all. For everyone of the institutions which Hoadlycalls an usurpation, is believed byChurchmen to be integral to itsnature. And if sincerity alone is tocount as the test, then there cannot,for the existing world, be any suchthing as objective religious truth. Itsubverted not merely absolute

authority—which the Church ofEngland did not claim—but anyauthority in the Church. It impugnedthe authority of the Crown toenforce religious belief by civilpenalties. Hoadly's rejection ofauthority, moreover, is in Law'sview fatal to government of anykind. For all lawful authority mustaffect eternal salvation insofar as todisobey it is to sin. The authoritythe Church possesses is inherent inthe very nature of the Church; forthe obligation to a belief in

Christianity is the same thing as to abelief in that Church which can beshown to represent Christ'steaching.

From Law's own point of view,the logic of his position isundeniable; and in his third letter toHoadly, the real heart of his attack,he touches the centre of the latter'sargument. For if it is sinceritywhich is alone important it wouldfollow that things false and wrongare as acceptable to God as things

true and right, which is patentlyabsurd. Nor has Hoadly given usmeans for the detection of sincerity.He seemed to think that anyone wassincere who so thought himself; but,says Law, "it is also possible andas likely for a man to be mistaken inthose things which constitute truesincerity as in those things whichconstitute true religion." Clearly,sincerity cannot be the pith of thematter; for it may be mistaken anddirected to wrong ends. The State,in fact, may respect conscience, but

Hoadly is no more entitled toassume the infallibility of privatebelief than he is to deny theinfallibility of the Church'steaching. That way lies anarchy.

Here, indeed, the antagonistswere on common ground. Both haddenied the absolute character of anyauthority; but while Hoadlyvirtually postulates a Church whichlogically is no more than those whoaccept the moral law as Christdescribed it, Law restricts the

Church to that society which bearsthe traditional marks of the historicinstitution. On Hoadly's principles,there was no reason why anyone nothostile to the civil power should notenjoy political privilege; on Law'sthere was every reason simplybecause those who denied thedoctrines of the High Churchrefused a truth open for theiracceptance. Law, indeed, goes sofar as to argue that in the light of hisprinciples Hoadly should be aDeist; and there is ground for what,

in that age, was a valuable point tomake. The sum total of it all is thatfor the bishop the outward actionsof men alone concern the State;while Law insists that the root ofaction and the test of fitness iswhether men have seen a certainaspect of the truth and grasped it.

The result, to say the least, wascalamitous. In May of 1717,convocation met and the LowerHouse immediately adopted anunanimous report condemning the

"Preservative" and the sermon. ButHoadly had the government behindhim and the convocation wasprorogued before further actioncould be taken. Snape, Hare, Mosseand Sherlock, all of whom werechaplains royal, and had beendrawn into the conflict, weredismissed from their office; and formore than one hundred and thirty-five years convocation was notagain summoned. It was a strikingtriumph for Erastianism, though themore liberal principles of Hoadly

were less successful. RobertWalpole was on the threshold of hispower, and, as a manager ofSacheverell's impeachment, he hadseen the hold of the Church upon thecommon people, may even, indeed,have remembered that Hoadly'sown dwelling had been threatenedwith destruction in the popularexcitement. Quieta non movere washis motto; and he was not interestedin the niceties of ecclesiasticmetaphysic. So the Test Actremained immovable until 1828;

while the annual Act of Indemnityfor its infractions represented thatEnglish genius for illogicalmitigation which solves the deeperproblems of principle whileavoiding the consideration of theirsubstance.

In the hundred and twenty yearsw h i c h passed between theBangorian Controversy and theOxford Movement, there is only onevolume upon the problem of Churchand State which deserves more than

passing notice. Bishop Warburtonwas the Lord Brougham of his age;and as its self-constituted universalprovider of intellectual fare, hedeemed it his duty to settle this,amongst others of the eternalquestions. The effort excited onlythe contempt of Leslie Stephen—"the peculiar Warburtonmixture," he says "of sham logic andbluster." Yet that is hardly fair tothe total result of Warburton'sremarks. He tried to steer a middlepath between the logical result of

such Erastianism as that of theIndependent Whig, on the one hand,and the excessive claim of HighChurchmanship on the other.Naturally enough, or the writerwould not be Warburton, the bookis full of tawdry rhetoric and stupidquibbles. But the Alliance betweenChurch and State (1736) set thetemper of speculation until theadvent of Newman, and is thereforematerial for something more thancontempt. It acutely points out thatsocieties generate a personality

distinct from that of their membersin words reminiscent of an historiclegal pronouncement.[12] "Whenany number of men," he says, "formthemselves into a society, whethercivil or religious, this societybecomes a body different from thataggregate which the number ofindividuals composed before thesociety was formed.... But a bodymust have its proper personality andwill, which without these is nomore than a shadow or a name."

[12] Dicey, Law and Opinionin England (2nd edition), p.165.

And that is the root ofWarburton's pronouncement. TheChurch is a society distinct from theState, but lending to that body itsassistance because without thesanction of religion the fullachievement of the social purposeis impossible. There is thus analliance between them, each lendingits support to the other for their

common benefit. The two remaindistinct; the union between them isof a federal kind. But theyinterchange their powers, and this itis which explains at once the royalsupremacy and the right ofChurchmen to a share in thelegislature. This also it is whichexplains the existence of a Test Act,whereby those who might injure thatwhich the State has undertaken toprotect are deprived of their powerto evil. And, in return, the Churchengages to "apply its utmost

endeavors in the service of theState." It becomes attached to itsbenefactor from the privilege itreceives; and the dangers whichmight arise from its naturalindependence are thus obviated. Fora federal union precludes the graveproblem of an imperium in imperio,and the "mischiefs which soterrified Hobbes" are met by theterms upon which it is founded.

It is easy enough to discover theloopholes in the theory. The

contract does not exist, or, at least,it is placed by Warburton "in thesame archive with the famousoriginal compact between monarchand people" which has been theobject of vast but fruitless searches.Nor does the Act of Submissionbear upon its face the marks of thattender care of the protection of anindependent society whichWarburton declared a vital tenet ofthe Union. Yet such criticisms missthe real significance of the theory. Itis really the introduction into

English politics of that notion of thetwo societies which, a centurybefore, Melville and Bellarminehad made so fruitful. With neitherPresbyterian nor Jesuit was theseparation complete, for the simplereason that each had a secretconviction that the ecclesiasticalsociety was at bottom the superior.Yet the theory was the parent ofliberty, if only because it pointedthe way to a balance of powerbetween claims which, before, hadseemed mutually exclusive.

Until the Toleration Act, thetheory was worthless to the EnglishChurch because its temper, underthe ægis of Laudian views, had beenin substance theocratic. But after1692 it aptly expressed thecompromise the dominant party ofthe Church had then in mind. Theydid, indeed, mistake the power ofthe Church, or, rather, theysubmitted to the State so fully thatwhat they had intended for apartnership became an absorption.

So that the Erastianism of theeighteenth century goes deep enoughto make the Church no more than amoral police department of theState. Saints like Ken and preacherslike South are replaced byfashionable prelates likeCornwallis, who made LambethPalace an adjunct to RanelaghGardens, and self-seeking pluralistslike Bishop Watson. The Churchcould not even perceive themeaning of the Wesleyan revolt; andits charity was the irritating and

complacent patronage of theobstrusive Hannah More. Itslearning decayed, its intelligenceslumbered; and the main function itfulfilled until Newman's advent wasthe provision of rich preferment tothe younger sons of the nobility. It isa far cry from Lake of Chichesterand Bishop Ken to a church whichwas merely an annex to theiniquities of the civil list.

IV

No one can mistake thesignificance of this conflict. Theopponents of Erastianism had adeep sense of their corporateChurch, and it was a plea forecclesiastical freedom that theywere making. They saw that aChurch whose patronage anddiscipline and debates were underthe control of an alien body couldnot with honesty claim that Christwas in truth their head. If the Churchwas to be at the mercy of privatejudgment and political expediency,

the notion of a dogmatic basiswould have to be abandoned. Here,indeed, is the root of thecondemnation of Tindal and ofHoadly; for they made it, by theirteaching, impossible for the Churchto possess an ethos of her own. Itwas thus against the sovereignty ofthe State that they protested.Somewhere, a line must be drawnabout its functions that theindependence of the Church mightbe safeguarded. For its supporterscould not be true to their divine

mission if the accidental vote of asecular authority was by right toimpose its will upon the Church.The view of it as simply a religiousbody to which the State hadconceded certain rights anddignities, they repudiated withpassion. The life of the Church wasnot derived from the State; and forthe latter to attempt itscircumscription was to usurp anauthority not rightly its own.

The real difficulty of this attitude

lay in the establishment. For herethe Church was, at bottom,declaring that the State life must belived upon terms of her owndefinition. That was possible beforethe Reformation; but with the adventof Nonconformity and the growth ofrationalism the exclusive characterof the Church's solution had becomeunacceptable. If the Church was tobecome so intimately involved withthe State as an establishmentimplied, it had no right to complain,if statesmen with a genius for

expediency were willing tosacrifice it to the attainment of thatideal. For the real secret ofindependence is, after all, no morethan independence. The Churchsought it without being willing topay the price. And this it is whichenabled Hoadly to emergetriumphant from an ordeal wherelogically he should have failed. TheState, by definition is an absorptiveanimal; and the Church had no rightto complain if the price of itsprivileges was royal supremacy. A

century so self-satisfied as theeighteenth would not have faced thedifficulties involved in givingpolitical expression to the HighChurch theory.

Yet the protest remained, and itbore a noble fruit in the nextcentury. The Oxford movement isusually regarded as a return to theseventeenth century, to the ideals,that is to say, of Laud andAndrewes.[13] In fact, its realkinship is with Atterbury and Law.

Like them, it was searching thesecret of ecclesiasticalindependence, and like them itdiscovered that connection with theState means, in the end, the sacrificeof the church to the needs of eachpolitical situation. "The State hasdeserted us," wrote Newman; andthe words might have been writtenof the earlier time. The Oxfordmovement, indeed, like itspredecessor, built upon foundationsof sand; and when Lord Broughamtold the House of Lords that the idea

of the Church possessing "absoluteand unalienable rights" was a"gross and monstrous anomaly"because it would make impossiblethe supremacy of Parliament, hesimply announced the result of adoctrine which, implicit in the Actof Submission, was first completelydefined by Wake and Hoadly. Norhas the history of this controversyended. "Thoughtful men," theArchbishop of Canterbury has toldthe House of Lords,[14] "... see theabsolute need, if a Church is to be

strong and vigorous, for the Church,qua church, to be able to say what itcan do as a church." "The rule of thesovereign, the rule of Parliament,"replied Lord Haldane,[15] "extendas far as the rule of the Church.They are not to be distinguished ordifferentiated, and that was thecondition under whichecclesiastical power wastransmitted to the Church ofEngland." Today, that is to say, asin the past, antithetic theories of thenature of the State hinge, in essence,

upon the problem of its sovereignty."A free church in a free state," now,as then, may be our ideal; but westill seek the means wherewith tobuild it.

[13] Cf. my Problem ofSovereignty, Chapter III.

[14] Parliamentary Debates.Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p. 992(June 3, 1919).

[15] Parliamentary Debates.

Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p 1002.The quotation does not fullyrepresent Lord Haldane'sviews.

CHAPTER IV

THE ERA OFSTAGNATION

I

With the accession of George I,there ensued an era of unexampledcalm in English politics, whichlasted until the expulsion ofWalpole from power in 1742. Novital questions were debated, nor

did problems of principle forcethemselves into view; and if theJacobites remained in thebackground as an elementinvincibly hostile to absorption, thefailure of their effort in 1715showed how feeble was their holdon English opinion. Not, indeed,that the new dynasty was popular. Ithad nothing of that romanticglamour of a lost cause soimperishably recorded in Scott'spages. The first Georges wereheavy and foreign and meagre-

souled; but at least they wereProtestant, and, until the reign ofGeorge III, they were amenable tomanagement. In the result, anopposition in the classic sense washardly needed; for the only questionto be considered was thepersonalities who were to share inpower. The dominating temper ofWalpole decided that issue; and hegave thereby to the politicalstruggle the outlines in which it wasencased for a generation.

It is a dull period, butcomplacent; for it was not anunprosperous time. Agriculture andcommerce both were abundant; andthe increasing development oftowns shows us that the IndustrialRevolution loomed in the neardistance. The eager continuance ofthe deistic controversy suggests thatthere was something of noveltybeneath the calm; for Tindal andWoolston and Chubb struck at theroot of religious belief, andShaftesbury's exaltation of

Hellenism not only contributed tot h e Aufklarung in Scotland, butsuggested that Christian ideals werenot to go unchallenged. But theliterature of the time is summarizedin Pope; and the easy neatness of hisverses is quaintly representative ofthe Georgian peace. Defoe andSwift had both done their work; andthe latter had withdrawn to Irelandto die like a rat in a hole. BishopBerkeley, indeed, was convinced ofthe decadence of England; but hisEssay towards Preventing the Ruin

of Great Britain (1721) showsrather the effect of the speculativemania which culminated in theSouth Sea Bubble upon a noblemoral nature than a genius forpolitical thought. Certainly no onein that generation was likely toregard with seriousness proposalsfor the endowment of motherhoodand a tax upon the estate ofbachelors. The cynical sophistriesof Mandeville were, despite theindignation they aroused, moresuited to the age that Walpole

governed. It is, in fact, the characterof the minister which sets thekeynote of the time. An ablespeaker, without being a greatorator, a superb administrator,eager rather for power than forgood, rating men low by instinct andcorrupting them by intelligence,Walpole was not the man, either intype of mind or of temperament, tobring great questions to theforeground of debate. He wascontent to maintain his hold over therespect of the Crown, and to punish

able rivals by exclusion fromoffice. One by one, the younger menof talent, Carteret, Pulteney,Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven intohostility. He maintained himself inoffice by a corruption as efficientlyadministered as it was cynicallyconceived. An oppositiondeveloped less on principle than onthe belief that spoils are matterrather for distribution than forconcentration. The party so formedhad, indeed, little ground savepersonal animosity upon which to

fight; and its ablest exertions couldonly seize upon a doubtful insult toa braggart sea-captain as the pretextof the war it was Walpole'sambition no less than policy toavoid. From 1726 until 1735 theguiding spirit of the party wasBolingbroke; but in the latter yearhe quarrelled with Pulteney,nominally its leader, and retired inhigh dudgeon to France. But in theyears of his leadership he hadevolved a theory of politics thanwhich nothing so clearly displays

the intellectual bankruptcy of thetime.

To understand the argument ofBolingbroke it is necessary toremember the peculiar character ofhis career. He had attained to thehighest office under Anne at anexceptionally early age; and hisperiod of power had beendistinguished by the vehemencewith which he pursued the ideal of astrict division of parties and theexpulsion of all alien elements from

the government. But he had stakedall his fortunes upon a scheme hehad neither the resolution to plannor the courage to execute; and hisflight to France, on the Hanoverianaccession, had been followed by hisproscription. Walpole soonsucceeded alike to his reputationand place; and through an enormousbribe to the bottomless pocket of theKing's mistress St. John wasenabled to return from exile, thoughnot to political place. His restlessmind was dissatisfied with

exclusion from power, and heoccupied himself with creating analliance between the Tories andmalcontent Whigs for Walpole'soverthrow. The alliance succeeded,though too late for Bolingbroke toenjoy the fruits of success; but ineffecting the purgation of the Toryparty from its taint of Jacobitism herendered no inconsiderable service.His foundation, moreover, of theCraftsman—the first officialjournal of a political party inEngland—showed his appreciation

of the technique of politicalcontroversy. Most of it is dead now,and, indeed, no small part of itscontemporary success is due to themaking of comment in terms of theimmediate situation, as also by itsconsistent use of a personalreference which has, save in themass, no meaning for today.Though, doubtless, the idea of itsinception was derived fromjournals like Defoe's Review andLeslie's Rehearsal, which had wonsuccess, its intimate connection

with the party leadership was anovel element; and it may thereinclaim a special relation to theofficial periodicals of a latergeneration.

The reputation of Bolingbroke asa political philosopher is somethingthat our age can hardly understand."A solemn trifler," Lord Morley hascalled him; and it is difficult toknow why his easy declamationwas so long mistaken for profoundthought. Much, doubtless, is due to

that personal fascination whichmade him the inspiration of men sodifferent as Pope and Voltaire; andthe man who could supply ideas toChatham and Disraeli cannot bewholly devoid of merit. Certainlyhe wrote well, in that easy eleganceof style which was the delight of theeighteenth century; and he isconsistently happy in his choice ofadjectives. But his work is at everypoint embellished with thataffectation of classical learningwhich was the curse of his age. He

sought no general truths, and he isfree from the accusation ofsincerity. Nor has he any enthusiasmsave that of bitter partisanship. Hehated Walpole, and his politicalwritings are, at bottom, no morethan an attempt to generalize hisanimosity. The Dissertation onParties (1734) and the Idea of aPatriot King (1738) might havebetrayed us, taken alone, intoregarding their author as adisinterested observer watchingwith regret the development of a

fatal system; but taken inconjunction with the Letter to SirW. Windham (1717), which was notpublished until after his death, andis written with an acrid cynicismfatal to his claim to honesty, theyreveal the opinions as no more thana mask for ambition born of hate.

The whole, of course, must havesome sort of background; and theLetters on the Study of History(1735) was doubtless intended tosupply it. Experience is to be the

test of truth, since history isphilosophy teaching by example.But Bolingbroke's own argumentsupplies its refutation. His history isan arbitrary selection of instancesintended to illustrate the particularideas which happened to beuppermost in his mind. The Romanconsuls were chosen by annualelection; whence it is clear thatEngland should have, if not anannual, at least a triennialparliament. He acknowledges thatthe past in some degree unknown

determines the present. He has somenot unhappy remarks upon the evilsof an attitude which fails to lookupon events from a larger aspectthan their immediate environment.But his history is intended less toillustrate the working of principlethan to collect cases worthy ofcitation. Time and space do notexist as categories; he is as contentwith a Roman anecdote as with aStuart illustration. He is willing,indeed, to look for the causes of theRevolution as far back as the reign

of James I; though he shows his lackof true perception when he ascribesthe true inwardness of theReformation to the greed of themonarch for the spoils of the clergy.At bottom what mainly impresseshim is the immense influence ofpersonal accident upon events.Intrigue, a sudden dislike, somebackstairs piece of gossip, here isthe real root of great changes. Andwhen he expresses a "thoroughcontempt" for the kind of workscholars such as Scaliger and

Petavius had achieved, he showshis entire ignorance of the methodwhereby alone a knowledge ofgeneral principle can be attained.

A clear vision, of course, he has,and he was not beguiled by highnotions of prerogative or the like.The divine right of kings is toostupid to be worth the trouble ofrefutation; all that makes a kingimportant is the authority he exerts.So, too, with the Church; forBolingbroke, as a professed deist,

has no trouble with such matters asthe apostolic succession. He makesgreat show of his love of liberty,which is the true end of government;and we are informed with a vastsolemnity of the "perpetual danger"in which it always stands. So thatthe chief end of patriotism is itsmaintenance; though we are nevertold what liberty is, nor how it is tobe maintained. The social compactseems to win his approbation andwe learn that the secret of theBritish constitution is the balance of

powers and their mutualindependency. But what the powersare, and how their independence ispreserved we do not learn, save byan insistence that the safety ofEurope is to be found in playing offthe ambitions of France and Austriaagainst each other; an analogy therejection of which has been thesecret of English constitutionalsuccess. We learn of the evil ofstanding armies and the danger ofSeptennial Parliaments. We are toldthat parties are mainly moved by the

prospect of enjoying office and vastpatronage; and a great enough showis made of his hatred for corruptionas to convince at least some criticsof distinction of his sincerity. Theparties of the time had, as he sees,become divided by no differencesave that of interest; and herein, atleast, he shows us how completelythe principles of the Revolution hadbecome exhausted. He wants severepenalties upon electoral corruption.He would have disfranchised therotten boroughs and excluded

placemen from Parliament. Thepress was to be free; and there is atleast a degree of generous insight inhis plea for a wider commercialfreedom in colonial matters. Yetwhat, after all, does this mean savethat he is fighting a man with thepatronage at his disposal and amajority upon the committee for thesettlement of disputed elections?And what else can we see in hisdesire for liberty of the press save adesire to fight Walpole in the open,without fear of the penalties his

former treason had incurred?

His value can be tested in anotherway. His Idea of a Patriot King isthe remedy for the ills he hasdepicted. He was sixty years oldwhen it appeared, and he had thenbeen in active politics for thirty-five years, so that we are entitled toregard it as the fruit of his matureexperience. He was too convincedthat the constitution was "in thestrictest sense a bargain, aconditional contract between the

prince and the people" to attemptagain the erection of a system ofprerogative. Yet it is about theperson of the monarch that thetheory hinges. He is to have nopowers inconsistent with theliberties of the people; for suchrestraints will not shackle hisvirtues while they limit the evilpropensities of a bad king. What isneeded is a patriot king who willdestroy corruption and awaken thespirit of liberty. His effectivegovernment will synchronize with

the commencement of his reign; andhe will at once dismiss the old andcunning ministers, to replace themby servants who are wise. He willnot stand upon party, but upon theState. He will unite the forces ofgood counsel into a single scheme.Complaints will be answered, theevildoers punished. Commerce willflow on with uninterruptedprosperity, and the navy of Englandreceive its due meed of attention.His conduct must be dignified, andhe must acquire his influence not

apart from, but on account of, theaffection of his people. "Concord,"says Bolingbroke in rhapsodicalprospection, "will appear breedingpeace and prosperity on everyhand"; though he prudently hopesalso that men will look back withaffection upon one "who desiredlife for nothing so much as to see aKing of Great Britain the mostpowerful man in the country, and apatriot King at the head of a unitedpeople."

Bolingbroke himself has admittedthat such a monarch would be a"sort of standing miracle," andperhaps no other comment upon hissystem is required. A smile in Platoat the sight of his philosopher-Kingin such strange company might wellbe pardoned. It is only necessary topoint out that the person whomBolingbroke designates for this highfunction was Frederick, Prince ofWales, to us the most meagre of ameagre generation, but toBolingbroke, by whose grace he

was captivated, "the greatest andmost glorious of human beings."This exaltation of the monarch cameat a time when a variety ofcircumstances had combined toshow the decrease of monarchicalsentiment. It bears upon its everypage the marks of a personalantagonism. It is too obviously theprogramme of a party to be capableof serious interpretation as asystem. The minister who is to beimpeached, the wise servants whoare to gain office, the attack on

corruption, the spirited foreignpolicy—all these have the earmarksof a platform rather than of aphilosophy. Attacks on corruptionhardly read well in the mouth of adissolute gambler; and the one solidevidence of deep feeling is theremark on the danger of finance inpolitics. For none of the Toriessave Barnard, who owed his partyinfluence thereto, understood thefinancial schemes of Walpole; andsince they were his schemesobviously they represented the

triumph of devilish ingenuity. Thereturn of landed men to powerwould mean the return of simplicityto politics; and one can imagine thecountry squires, the last resort ofenthusiasm for Church and King,feeling that Bolingbroke had hereemphasized the dangers of a régimewhich already faintly foreshadowedtheir exclusion from power. Thepamphlet was the cornerstone in theeducation of Frederick's son; andwhen George III came to the thronehe proceeded to give such heed to

his master as the circumstancespermitted. It is perhaps, as Mr. A.L.Smith has argued, unfair to visitBolingbroke with George's versionof his ideal; yet they are sufficientlyconnected for the one to give themeaning to the other. Chatham,indeed, was later intrigued by thisideal of a national party; and beforeDisraeli discovered that Englanddoes not love coalitions heexpended much rhetoric upon thebeauties of a patriotic king. ButChatham was a wayward genius

who had nothing of that instinct forcommon counsel which is of theessence of party government; whileit is necessary to draw a firm linebetween Disraeli's genialdeclamation and his practice whenin office. It is sufficient to say thatthe one effort founded upon theprinciples of Bolingbroke ended indisaster; and that his own lastreflections express a bitterdisillusion at the result of the eventwhich he looked to as theinauguration of the golden age.

II

The fall of Walpole, indeed,released no energies for politicalthought; the system continued,though the men were different. Whatalone can be detected is the growthof a democratic opinion whichfound its sustenance outside theHouse of Commons, the opinion thestrength of which was later to forcethe elder Pitt upon an unwilling

king. An able pamphlet of the timeshows us the arrival of thisunlooked-for portent. Factiondetected by the Evidence of Facts( 1 7 4 2 ) was, though it isanonymous,[16] obviously writtenby one in touch with the innercurrent of affairs. The author hadhoped for the fall of Walpole,though he sees the chaos in itsresult. "A republican spirit," hesays, "has strangely arisen"; and hegoes on to tell how the electors ofLondon and Westminster were now

regarding their members asdelegates to whom instructionsmight be issued. "A new party ofmalcontents" had arisen, "assumingto themselves, though very falsely,the title of the People." They affect,he tells us, "superiority to the wholelegislature ... and endeavor in effectto animate the people to resume intotheir own hands that vague andloose authority which exists (unlessin theory) in the people of nocountry upon earth, and theinconvenience of which is so

obvious that it is the first step ofmankind, when formed into society,to divest themselves of it, and todelegate it forever fromthemselves." The writer clearlyforeshadows, even in his dislike,that temper which produced theWilkes affair, and made it possiblefor Cartwright and Horne Tookeand Sir Thomas Hollis to becomethe founders of English radicalism.

[16] It was probably writtenby Lord Egmont.

Yet the influence of that temperstill lay a generation ahead; and thenext piece of import comes from amind which, though perhaps themost powerful of all which haveapplied themselves to politicalphilosophy in England, was, fromits very scepticism, incapable ofconstructive effort. David Humewas thirty-one years of age when hepublished (1742) the first series of

his essays; and his Treatise ofHuman Nature which had fallen"dead-born from the press" was insome sort compensated by thesuccess of the new work. Thesecond part, entitled PoliticalDiscourses, was published in 1752,almost simultaneously with the"Inquiry concerning the Principlesof Morals." As in the case ofHume's metaphysical studies, theyconstitute the most powerfuldissolvent the century was to see.Yet nowhere was so clearly to be

demonstrated the euthanasia intowhich English politics had fallen.

Hume, of course, is alwayscritical and suggestive, and even ifhe had no distinctive contribution tomake, he gave a new turn tospeculation. There is somethingalmost of magic in the ease withwhich he demolishes divine rightand the social contract. The one isan inevitable deduction fromtheism, but it protects an usurper notless than an hereditary king, and

gives a "divine commission" aswell to a constable as to the mostmajestic prince. The proponents ofthe social contract are in no bettercase. "Were you to preach," heremarks, "in most parts of the worldthat political connections arefounded altogether on voluntaryconsent, or on a mutual promise, themagistrate would soon imprison youas seditious for loosening the ties ofobedience; if your friends did notbefore shut you up as delirious foradvancing such absurdities." The

original contract could not beproduced, and, even if it were, itwould suppose the "consent of thefathers to bind the children even tothe most remote generations." Thereal truth, as he remarks, is that"almost all the governments whichexist at present, or of which thereremains any record in story, havebeen founded originally onusurpation, or on conquest, or both,without any pretence of a fairconsent or voluntary subjection ofthe people." If we then ask why

obedience is possible, the sufficientanswer is that "it becomes sofamiliar that most men never makeany inquiry about its origin orcause, any more than about theprinciple of gravity, resistance, orthe most universal laws of nature."

Government, in short, isdependent upon the inescapablefacts of psychology. It might beunnecessary if all desires could beindividually fulfilled by makingthem, or if man showed to his

fellow-men the same tender regardhe has for himself. So happy acondition does not exist; andgovernment is the most useful wayof remedying the defects of oursituation. A theologian might saythat Hume derives government fromoriginal sin; to which he wouldhave replied by denying the fall.His whole attitude is simply aninsistence that utility is thetouchstone of institutions, and hemay claim to be the first thinkerwho attempted its application to the

whole field of political science. Heknows that opinion is the sovereignruler of mankind, and that ideas ofutility lie at the base of the thoughtswhich get accepted. He does not,indeed, deny that fear and consententer into the attitude of men; hesimply asserts that these also arefounded upon a judgment of utilityin the thing judged. We obeybecause otherwise "society couldnot subsist," and society subsists forits utility. "Men," he says "could notlive at all in society, at least in a

civilized society, without laws andmagistrates and judges, to preventthe encroachments of the strongupon the weak, of the violent uponthe just and equitable."

Utilitarianism is, of course,above all a method; and it is notunfair to say of Hume that he did notget very far beyond insistence onthat point. He sees that thesubjection of the many to the few isrooted in human impulse; but he hasno penetrating inquiry, such as that

of Locke or Hobbes, into thepurpose of such subjection. So, too,it is the sense of public interestwhich determines men's thoughts ongovernment, on who should rule,and what should be the system ofproperty; but the ethical substanceof these questions he leavesundetermined. Politics, he thinks,may one day be a science; though heconsiders the world still too youngfor general truths therein. Themaxims he suggests as of permanentvalue, "that a hereditary prince, a

nobility without vassals, and apeople voting by theirrepresentatives form the bestmonarchy, autocracy anddemocracy"; that "free governments... are the most ruinous andoppressive to their provinces"; thatrepublics are more favorable toscience, monarchies to art; that thedeath of a political body isinevitable; would none of them,probably, be accepted by mostthinkers at the present time. Andwhen he constructs an ideal

constitution, irrespective of timeand place, which is to be regardedas practical because it resemblesthat of Holland, it is obvious thatthe historical method had not yetcome fully into being.

Yet Hume is full of flashes ofdeep wisdom, and it would be anavoidance of justice not to note theextent of the spasmodic insight thathe had. He has a keen eye for theabsurdity of Pope's maxim thatadministration is all in all; nothing

can ever make the forms ofgovernment immaterial. He acceptsHarrington's dictum that thesubstance of governmentcorresponds to the distribution ofproperty, without making it, as laterthinkers have done, the foundationof all political forces. He sees thatthe Crown cannot influence themass of men, or withstand the newbalance of property in the State; aprophecy of which the accuracywas demonstrated by the failure ofGeorge III. "In all governments," as

he says, "there is a perpetualintestinal struggle, open or secret,"between Authority and Liberty;though his judgment that neither"can ever absolutely prevail,"shows us rather that we are on thethreshold of laissez-faire than thatHume really understood theproblem of freedom. He realizedthat the House of Commons hadbecome the pivot of the State;though he looked with dread uponthe onset of popular government. Hesaw the inevitability of parties, as

also their tendency to persist interms of men instead of principles.He was convinced of the necessityof liberty to the progress of the artsand sciences; and no one, saveAdam Smith, has more acutelyinsisted upon the evil effect oncommerce of an absolutegovernment. He emphasized thevalue of freedom of the press, inwhich he saw the secret wherebythe mixed government of Englandwas maintained. "It has also beenfound," he said in a happy phrase,

"... that the people are no suchdangerous monsters as they havebeen represented, and that it is inevery respect better to guide themlike rational creatures than to leador drive them like brute beasts."There is, in fact, hardly a page ofhis work in which some suchacuteness may not be found.

Not, indeed, that a curiousblindness is absent. Hume was atypical child of one aspect of theeighteenth century in his hatred of

enthusiasm, and the form in whichhe most abominates it is religious.Why people's religious opinionsshould lead to antagonism he couldno more understand than whypeople should refuse to pass oneanother on a road. Wars of religionthus seemed to him based upon amerely frivolous principle; and inhis ideal commonwealth he madethe Church a department of the Statelest it should get out of hand. Hewas, moreover, a staticphilosopher, disturbed by signs of

political restlessness; and this ledto the purgation of Whig doctrinesfrom his writings, and theirconsistent replacement by a cynicalconservatism. He was alwaysafraid that popular governmentwould mean mob-rule; and absolutegovernment is accordinglyrecommended as the euthanasia ofthe British constitution. Not eventhe example of Sweden convincedhim that a standing army might existwithout civil liberty beingendangered; and he has all the

noxious fallacies of his time uponthe balance of power. Above all, itis striking to see his helplessnessbefore the problem of nationalcharacter. Mainly he ascribes it tothe form of government, and that inturn to chance. Even the friend ofMontesquieu can see nosignificance in race or climate. Theidea, in fact, of evolution is entirelyabsent from his politicalspeculation. Political life, likehuman life, ends in death; and theproblem is to make our egress as

comfortable as we can, for theprime evil is disturbance. It isdifficult not to feel that there isalmost a physical basis in his owndisease for this love of quiet. Theman who put indolence among theprimary motives of humanhappiness was not likely to viewnovel theories with unruffledtemper.

Hume has an eminent placeamong economists, and for one towhom the study of such phenomena

was but a casual inquiry, it ismarvelous how much he saw. He isfree from the crude errors ofmercantilism; and twenty yearsbefore Adam Smith hopes, "as aBritish subject," for the prosperityof other countries. "Freecommunication and exchange"seems to him an ordinance ofnature; and he heaps contempt uponthose "numberless bars,obstructions and imposts which allnations of Europe, and none morethan England, have put upon trade."

Specie he places in its true light asmerely a medium of exchange. Thesupposed antagonism betweencommerce and agriculture hedisposes of in a half-dozen effectivesentences. He sees the place of timeand distance in the discussion ofeconomic want. He sees the valueof a general level of economicequality, even while he is scepticalof its attainment. He insists upon theeconomic value of high wages,though he somewhat belittles theimportance of wealth in the

achievement of happiness. BeforeBentham, who on this pointconverted Adam Smith, he knewthat the rate of interest dependsupon the supply of and demand forloans. He insists that commercedemands a free government for itsprogress, pointing out, doubtlessfrom his abundant Frenchexperience, that an absolutegovernment gives to the commercialclass an insufficient status of honor.He pointed out, doubtless withFrance again in his mind, the evils

of an arbitrary system of taxation."They are commonly converted," hesays with unwonted severity, "intopunishments on industry; and also,by their unavoidable inequality, aremore grievous, than by the realburden which they impose." And heemphasizes his belief that the besttaxes are those which, like taxesupon luxury, press least upon thepoor.

Such insight is extraordinaryenough in the pre-Adamite epoch;

but even more remarkable are hispsychological foundations. Thewealth of the State, he says, is thelabor of its subjects, and they workbecause the wants of man are not astated sum, but "multiply everymoment upon him." The desire forwealth comes from the idea ofpleasure; and in the Treatise onHuman Nature he discusses withsuperb clarity the way in which theidea of pleasure is related at onceto individual satisfaction and to thatsympathy for others which is one of

the roots of social existence. Hepoints out the need for happiness inwork. "The mind," he writes,"acquires new vigor, enlarges itspowers and faculties, and by anassiduity in honest industry bothsatisfies its own appetites andprevents growth of unnatural ones";though, like his predecessor,Francis Hutcheson, heoveremphasizes the delights openedby civilization to the humbler classof men. He gives large space in hisdiscussion to the power of will;

and, indeed, one of the mainadvantages he ascribed togovernment was the compulsion itputs upon us to allow the categoriesof time and space a part in ourcalculations. He does not, being inhis own life entirely free fromavarice, regard the appetite forriches as man's main motive toexistence; though no one was moreurgent in his insistence that "theavidity of acquiring goods andpossessions for ourselves and ournearest friends is ... destructive of

society" unless balanced byconsiderations of justice. And whathe therein intended may be gatheredfrom the liberal notions of equalityhe manifested. "Every person," hewrote in a famous passage, "ifpossible ought to enjoy the fruits ofhis labor in a full possession of allthe necessaries, and many of theconveniences of life. No one candoubt but such an equality is mostsuitable to human nature, anddiminishes much less the happinessof the rich than it adds to that of the

poor." It is clear that we havemoved far from the narrow confinesof the old political arithmetic. Thetheory of utility enables Hume tosee the scope of economics—theword itself he did not know—in amore generous perspective than atany previous time. It would be toomuch to say that his grasp of itspsychological foundation enabledhim entirely to move from thelimitations of the older concept of anational prosperity expressed onlyin terms of bullion to the view of

economics as a social science. Butat least he saw that economics isrooted in the nature of men andtherein he had the secret of its trueunderstanding. The Wealth ofNations would less easily havemade its way had not the insight ofHume prepared the road for itsreception.

What, then, and in general, is hisplace in the history of politicalthought? Clearly enough, he is notthe founder of a system; his work is

rather a series of pregnant hints thana consecutive account of politicalfacts. Nor must we belittle the debthe owes to his predecessors. Much,certainly, he owed to Locke, and thefull radiance of the Scottishenlightenment emerges into the daywith his teaching. FrancisHutcheson gave him no smallinspiration; and Hutcheson meansthat he was indebted to Shaftesbury.Indeed, there is much of the sturdycommonsense of the Scottish schoolabout him, particularly perhaps in

that interweaving of ethics, politicsand economics, which ischaracteristic of the school fromHutcheson in the middle seventeenthcentury, to the able, if neglected,Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He isentitled to be considered the realfounder of utilitarianism. He firstshowed how difficult it is inpolitics to draw a distinctionbetween ethical right and men'sopinion of what ought to be. Hebrings to an end what Coleridgehappily called the "metapolitical

school." After him we are donewith the abuse of history to bolsterup Divine Right and social contract;for there is clearly present in hisuse of facts a true sense ofhistorical method. He put an endalso to the confusion which resultedfrom the effort of thinkers to erectstandards of right and wrongindependent of all positive law. Hetook the facts as phenomena to beexplained rather than as illustrationsof some favorite thesis to bemaintained in part defiance of them.

Conventional Whiggism has nofoothold after he has done with itsanalysis. His utilitarianism was thefirst efficient substitute for thelabored metaphysics of the contractschool; and even if he was not thefirst to see through its pretensions—that is perhaps the claim ofShaftesbury—he was the first toshow the grounds of theiruselessness. He saw that history andpsychology together provide thematerials for a political philosophy.So that even if he could not himself

construct it the hints at least werethere.

[17] There are few bookswhich show so clearly asLorimer's Institutes of Nations(1872) how fully the Scottishschool was in the midstream ofEuropean thought.

His suggestiveness, indeed, maybe measured in another fashion. Themetaphysics of Burke, so far as onemay use a term he would himselfhave repudiated, are largely those

of Hume. The place of habit and ofsocial instinct alongside of consent,the perception that reason alonewill not explain political facts, theemphasis upon resistance as of lastresort, the denial that allegiance is amere contract to be presentlyexplained, the deep respect fororder—all these are, after all, thefabric from which the thought ofBurke was woven. Nor is there inBentham's defence of Utilitarianismargument in which he would haverecognized novelty. Herein, at least,

his proof that morality is no morethan general opinion of utilityconstructs, in briefer form, the laterarguments of Bentham, Paley andthe Mills, nor can their mode ofstatement claim superiority toHume's. So that on either side of hiswork he foreshadows the advent ofthe two great schools of modernpolitical thought. His utilitarianismis the real path by which radicalopinion at last found means ofacceptance. His use of history is,through Burke, the ancestor of that

specialized conservatism begottenof the historical method. If there isthus so much, it is, of course,tempting to ask why there is notmore. If Hume has the materialswhy did he fail to build up a systemfrom them? The answer seemstwofold. In part it is the manhimself. His genius, as hismetaphysics show, lay essentially inhis power of destruction; and theman who gave solipsism tophilosophy was not likely to effect anew creation in politics. In part,

also, the condition of the time gavelittle stimulus to novelty. HereinHume was born a generation tooearly. Had he written when GeorgeIII attempted the destruction of thesystem of the Revolution, and whenAmerica and France combined toraise again the basic questions ofpolitics, he might have done thereinwhat Adam Smith effected in hisown field. But the time had not yetcome; and it was left to Burke andBentham to reap where he hadsown.

CHAPTER V

SIGNS OF CHANGE

I

From Hume until the publicationof Burke's Present Discontents(1770) there is no work on Englishpolitics of the first importance.Walpole had fallen in 1742; but forthe next fifteen years his methodsdominated the parliamentary scene.It was only with the advent of the

elder Pitt to power that a newtemper may be observed, a temperquickened by what followed on theaccession of George III.Henceforward, it is not untrue tosay that the early complacency ofthe time was lost; or, at least, it wasno longer in the ascendant againuntil the excesses of the FrenchRevolution enabled Burke topersuade his countrymen into thatgrim satisfaction with their ownachievement of which Lord Eldon isthe standing model. The signs of

change are in each instance slight,though collectively they acquiresignificance. It was difficult for ment o grumble where, as underWalpole, each harvest brought themgreater prosperity, or where, asunder Chatham, they leaped fromvictory to victory. Something of theexhilaration of these years we canstill catch in the letters which showthe effort made by the jaded HoraceWalpole to turn off with easylaughter his deep sense of pride. Inthe House of Commons, indeed,

there is nothing, until the Wilkescase, to show that a new age hascome. It is in the novels ofRichardson and Fielding, the firstshy hints of the romantic temper inGray and Collins, above all in theawakening of political science, thatnovelty is apparent.

So far as a new current of thoughtcan ever be referred to a singlesource, the French influence is theeffective cause of change. Voltaireand Montesquieu had both visited

England in the period of Walpole'sadministration, and both had beengreatly influenced by what theysaw. Rousseau, indeed, came lateron that amazing voyage which thegood-natured Hume insisted wouldsave him from his dread ofpersecution, and there is evidenceenough that he did not relish hisexperience. Yet when he came, in1762, to publish the Contrat Socialit was obvious that he had drunkdeeply of English thought. The realmeaning of their work to

Englishmen lay in the perspectivethey gave to English institutions.Naturally enough, there was a vastdifference between the simplicity ofa government where sovereigntywas the monarch's will and one inwhich a complex distribution ofpowers was found to secure ageneral freedom. The Frenchmenwere amazed at the generousequality of English judicialprocedure. The liberty ofunlicensed printing—less admirablethan they accounted it—the

difference between a HabeasCorpus and a lettre de cachet, theregular succession of Parliaments,all these impressed them, who knewthe meaning of their absence, as amagnificent achievement. TheEnglish constitution revealed toFrance an immense and unusedreservoir of philosophicillustration. Even to Englishmenitself that meaning was but partlyknown. Locke's system was ageneralization from its significanceat a special crisis. Hume had partial

glimpses of its inner substance. Butfor most it had become a discreetseries of remedies for particularwrongs. Its analysis as a connectedwhole invigorated thought asnothing had done since the CivilWars had elaborated the theory ofparliamentary sovereignty. Whatwas more significant was therealization of Montesquieu's importsimultaneously with the effort ofGeorge III to revive crowninfluence. Montesquieu thus becamethe prophet of a new race of

thinkers. Rousseau's time was notyet; though within a score of years itwas possible to see him as the rivalto Burke's conservatism.

It is worth while to linger for amoment upon the thesis whichunderlies the Esprit des Lois(1748). It is a commonplace nowthat Montesquieu is to be regardedas the founder of the historicalmethod. The present is to beexplained by its ancestry. Laws,governments, customs are not truths

absolute and universal, but relativeto the time of their origin and thecountry from which they derive. Itwould be inaccurate, with Rousseauon the threshold, to say that hisinfluence demolished the systems ofpolitical abstraction which, at theirlogical best, and in the mostcomplete unreality, are to be foundin Godwin's Political Justice; but itis not beyond the mark to affirm thatafter his time such abstract systemswere on the defensive. Therein,with all his faults, he had given

Burke the clue to those truths he soprofoundly saw—the sense of theState as more than a mechanicalcontrivance, the high regard forprescription, the sense of law as thevoice of past wisdom. He was, saidBurke, "the greatest genius whichhas enlightened this age"; and Burkehad every reason to utter that noblepanegyric. But Montesquieu wasmore than this. He emphasizedlegislation as the main mechanismof social change; and therein he isthe parent of that decisive reversal

of past methods of which Benthamfirst revealed the true significance.Nor had any thinker before his timeso emphasized the importance ofliberty as the true end ofgovernment; even the placidBlackstone adopted the utterancefrom him in his inaugural lecture asVinerian professor. He insisted,too, on the danger of perversion towhich political principle lies open;a feeling which found consistentutterance both in the debates of thePhiladelphia Convention, and in the

writings of Bentham and JamesMill. What, perhaps, is mostimmediately significant is hisfamous praise of the BritishConstitution—the secret of whichhe entirely misapprehended—andhis discovery of its essence in theseparation of powers. The shortsixth chapter of his eleventh book isthe real keynote of Blackstone andDe Lolme. It led them to investigate,on principles of at least doubtfulvalidity, an edifice never beforedescribed in detail. It is, when the

last criticism has been made, animmense step forward from theuncouth antiquarianism of Coke'sSecond Institute to the neatlyreticulated structure erected uponthe foundations of Montesquieu'shint. That it was wrong was lessimportant than that the attemptshould have been made. The evilthat men do lives after them; andfew doctrines have been morenoxious in their consequence thanthis theory of checks and balances.But Blackstone's Commentaries

(1765-9) produced Bentham'sFragment on Government (1776),and with that book we enter uponthe realistic study of the BritishConstitution.

Rousseau is in an antithetictradition; but just as he drew fromEnglish thinkers so did he exerciseupon the next generation aninfluence the more logical becausethe inferences he drew were thosethat his masters, with the Englishlove of compromise, had sought to

avoid. Rousseau is the disciple ofLocke; and the real differencebetween them is no more than aremoval of the limitations upon thepower of government which Lockehad proposed. It is a removal atevery point conditioned by theinterest of the people. For Rousseaudeclared that the existingdistribution of power in Europewas a monstrous thing, and he madethe people sovereign that theremight be no hindrance to theirachievement in the shape of sinister

interest. The powers of the peoplethus became their rights and hereinwas an unlimited sanction forinnovation. It is easy enough then tounderstand why such a philosophyshould have been anathema toBurke. Rousseau's eager sympathyfor humble men, his optimistic faithin the immediate prospect ofpopular power were to Burke thesymptoms of insane delusion andtheir author "the great professor andfounder of the philosophy of vanityin England." But Burke forgot that

the real secret of Rousseau'sinfluence was the success of theAmerican Revolution; and no onehad done more than Burke himselfto promote its cause and justify itsprinciples. That revolutionestablished what Europe might wellconsider a democracy; and itsstatesmen were astonished not lessat the vigilance with which Americaguarded against the growth ofautocratic government, than at thesoberness with which it checked thesupposed weakness of the sovereign

people. America made herselfindependent while what was best inEurope combined in enthusiasticapplause; and it seemed as thoughthe maxims of Rousseau had beentaken to heart and that a single,vigorous exertion of power couldremove what deliberation wasimpotent to secure. Here Rousseauhad a message for Great Britainwhich Burke at every stage denied.Nor, at the moment, was itinfluential except in the generalimpetus it gave to thought. But from

the moment of its appearance it isan undercurrent of decisiveimportance; and while in itsmetaphysical form it failed tocommand acceptance, in the handsof Bentham its results werevictorious. Bentham differs fromRousseau not in the conclusions herecommends so much as in thelanguage in which he clothes them.Either make a final end of theoptimism of men like Hume andBlackstone, or the veneration for thepast which is at the root of Burke's

own teaching.

It is easy to see why thought suchas this should have given thestimulus it did. Montesquieu cameto praise the British constitution at atime when good men were aghast atits perversion. There was no roomin many years for revolution, but atleast there was place for heartydiscontent and a seeking after newmethods. Of that temper two men sodifferent as the elder Pitt andWilkes are the political symbols.

The former's rise to power upon thefloodtide of popular enthusiasmmeant nothing so much as a protestagainst the cynical corruption of theprevious generation. Wilkes was asign that the populace was slowlyawaking to a sense of its ownpower. The French creed was toopurely logical, too obviously theoutcome of alien conditions, to fit inits entirety the English facts; and, itmust be admitted, memories ofwooden shoes played not a littlepart in its rejection. The rights of

man made only a partial appealuntil the miseries of Pitt's warsshowed what was involved in thatrejection; and then it was too late.But no one could feel without beingstirred the illumination ofMontesquieu; and Rousseau'squestions, even if they provedunanswerable, were stuff forthought. The work of the forty yearsbefore the French Revolution isnothing so much as a preparation forBentham. The torpor slowly passes.The theorists build an edifice each

part of which a man whose passionis attuned to the English nature canshow to be obsolete and ugly. If theFrench thinkers had conferred noother benefit, that, at least, wouldhave been a supreme achievement.

II

The first book to show the signsof change came in 1757. JohnBrown's Estimate of the Mannersand Principles of the Times is

largely forgotten now; though itwent through seven editions in ayear and was at once translated intoFrench. Brown was a clergyman, aminor planet in the vastWarburtonian system, who hadalready published a volume ofcomment upon the Characteristicsof Shaftesbury. His book is tooevidently modelled uponMontesquieu, whom he mentionswith reverence, to make us doubt itsderivation. There is the samereliance upon Livy and

Machiavelli, the same attempt atstriking generalization; though theargument upon which Brown'sconclusions are based is seldomgiven, perhaps because hisgeometric clarity of statementimpressed him as self-demonstrative. Brown's volumesare an essay upon the depravity ofthe times. He does not deny ithumanitarianism, and a stilllingering sense of freedom, but it issteeped in corruption and displaysnothing so much as a luxurious and

selfish effeminacy. He condemnsthe universities out of hand, inphrases which Gibbon and AdamSmith would not have rejected. Hedeplores the decay of taste andlearning. Men trifle with Hume'sgay impieties, and could not, if theywould, appreciate the great worksof Bishop Warburton. Politics hasbecome nothing save a means ofpromoting selfish interests. Thechurch, the theatre, and the arts haveall of them lost their former virtues.The neurotic temper of the times is

known to all. The nation, as wasshown in 1745, when a handful ofHighlanders penetrated withoutopposition to the heart of thekingdom, has grown slack andcowardly. Gambling penetratesevery nook and cranny of the upperclass; the officers of the armydevote themselves to fashion; thenavy's main desire is for prizemoney. Even the domesticaffections are at a low ebb; and thegrand tour brings back a newspecies of Italianate Englishman.

The poor, indeed, the middle class,and the legal and medicalprofessions, Brown specificallyexempts from this indictment. But heemphasizes his belief that this isunimportant. "The manners andprinciples of those who lead," hesays, "... not of those who aregoverned ... will ever determine thestrength or weakness, and thereforethe continuance or dissolution of astate."

This profligacy Brown compares

to the languid vice which precededthe fall of Carthage and of Rome;and he sees the approaching ruin ofGreat Britain at the hands of France,unless it can be cured. So far as hehas an explanation to offer, it seemsto be the fault of Walpole, and thedecay of religious sentiment. Hisremedy is only Bolingbroke'sPatriot King, dressed up in the habitof the elder Pitt, now risen to theheight of power. What mainlystirred Englishmen was theprophecy of defeat on the morrow

of the disastrous convention ofKloster Seven; but when Wolfe andClive repaired that royalhumiliation Brown seems to havedied a natural death. What is moreinteresting than his prophecies wasthe evidence of a close reading ofMontesquieu. English liberty, hesays, is the product of the climate; akind of mixture, it appears, of fogand sullen temper. Nationsinevitably decay, and thecommercial grandeur of England isthe symptom of old age; it means a

final departure from the simplicityof nature and breeds the luxurywhich kills by enervation. Brownhas no passion, and his book readsrather like Mr. Galsworthy's IslandPharisees sufficiently expurgated tobe declaimed by a well-bredclergyman in search of prefermenton the ground of attention to theevils of his time. It describesundoubted facts, and it shows thatthe era of content has gone. But itscareful periods and strangely far-offair lack the eagerness for truth

which Rousseau put into hisquestions. Brown can neitherexplain nor can he proffer remedy.He sees that Pitt is somehowsignificant; but when he rules outthe popular voice as devoid of allimportance, he deprives himself ofthe means whereby to grasp themeaning of the power that Pittexerted. Nothing could prove morestrongly the exactitude of Burke'sPresent Discontents. Nothing couldbetter justify the savage indignationof Junius.

Hume was the friend ofMontesquieu, though twenty yearshis junior; and the Esprit des Loistravelled rapidly to Scotland. Thereit caught the eye of Adam Ferguson,the author of a treatise onrefinement, and by the influence ofHume and Adam Smith, Professorof Moral Philosophy in theUniversity of Edinburgh. Fergusonseems to have been immenselypopular in his time, and certainly hehas a skill for polished phrase, and

a genial paraphrase of other men'sideas. His Essay on the History ofCivil Society (1767), which in aquarter of a century went throughsix editions, was thought byHelvétius superior to Montesquieu,though Hume himself, as always theincarnation of kindness,recommended its suppression. Atleast Ferguson read enough ofMontesquieu to make some fluentgeneralities sound plausible. Heknows that the investigation ofsavage life will throw some light

upon the origins of government. Hesees the folly of generalizing easilyupon the state of nature. He insists,probably after conversation withAdam Smith, upon the social valueof the division of functions. He doesnot doubt the original equality ofmen. He thinks the luxury of his agehas reached the limit of its usefulgrowth. Property he traces back to aparental desire to make a betterprovision for children "than isfound under the promiscuousmanagement of many copartners."

Climate has the new importanceupon which Montesquieu hasinsisted; or, at least, as it "ripensthe pineapple and the tamarina," soit "inspires a degree of mildnessthat can even assuage the rigours ofdespotical government." Thepriesthood—this is Hume—becomes a separate influence underthe sway of superstition. Liberty, hesays, "is maintained by thecontinued differences andoppositions of numbers, not by theirconcurring zeal in behalf of

equitable government." The handthat can bend Ulysses' bow iscertainly not here; and thispinchbeck Montesquieu can best beleft in the obscurity into which hehas fallen. The Esprit des Lois tooktwenty years in writing; and itneeded the immense researches ofmen like Savigny before itssignificance could fully be grasped.Facile popularisers of this sort mayhave mollified the drawing-room;but they did not add to politicalideas.

III

A more fertile source of inquirywas to be found among the studentsof constitutional law. Blackstone'sCommentaries on the Laws ofEngland (1765-9) has had eversince its first publication anauthority such as Coke only beforepossessed. "He it is," said Bentham,"who, first of all institutionalwriters, has taught jurisprudence to

speak the language of the Scholarand the Gentleman." Certainly, asProfessor Dicey has remarked, "thebook contains much real learningabout our system of government."We are less concerned here withBlackstone as an antiquarian lawyerthan as a student of politicalphilosophy. Here his purpose seemsobvious enough. The Englishconstitution raised him from humblemeans through a Professorship atOxford to a judgeship in the Courtof Common Pleas. He had been a

member of Parliament and refusedthe office of Solicitor-General. Hehad thus no reason to be dissatisfiedwith the conditions of his time; andthe first book of the Commentariesis nothing so much as an attempt toexplain why English constitutionallaw is a miracle of wisdom.

Constitutional law, as such,indeed, found no place inBlackstone's book. It creeps inunder the rights of persons, wherehe deals with the power of king and

Parliament. His treatment implies awhole philosophy. Laws are ofthree kinds—of nature, of God, andof the civil state. Civil law, withwhich alone he is concerned, is "arule of civil conduct prescribed bythe supreme power in a state,commanding what is right andprohibiting what is wrong." It is, hetells us, "called a rule to distinguishit from a compact or agreement." Itderives from the sovereign power,of which the chief character is themaking 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 toowild to be seriously admitted,"besides being contrary to historicalknowledge. Society impliesgovernment, and whatever itsorigins or its forms there "must bein all of them a supreme,irresistible, absolute, uncontrolledauthority, in which the jura summaimperii, or rights of sovereigntyreside." The forms of governmentare classified in the usual way; and

the British constitution is noted as ahappy mixture of them all. "Thelegislature of the Kingdom,"Blackstone writes, "is entrusted tothree powers entirely independentof each other; first the King,secondly the lords spiritual andtemporal, which is an aristocraticalassembly of persons, chosen fortheir piety, their birth, theirwisdom, their valour or theirproperty; and, thirdly, the House ofCommons, freely chosen by thepeople from among themselves,

which makes it a kind ofdemocracy; and as this aggregatebody, actuated by different springsand attentive to different interests,composes the British Parliamentand has the supreme disposal ofeverything; there can be noinconvenience attempted by eitherof the three branches, but will bewithstood by one of the other two;each branch being armed with anegative power, sufficient to repelany innovation which it shall thinkinexpedient or dangerous." It is in

the king in Parliament that Britishsovereignty resides. Eschewing thenotion of an original contract,Blackstone yet thinks that all theimplications of it are secured. "Theconstitutional government of thisisland," he says, "is so admirablytempered and compounded, thatnothing can endanger or hurt it, butdestroying the equilibrium of powerbetween one branch of thelegislature and the rest."

All this is not enough; though, as

Bentham was to show in hisFragment on Government, it isalready far too much. "A body ofnobility," such is the philosophicinterpretation of the House ofLords, "is also more peculiarlynecessary in our mixed andcompounded constitution, in orderto support the rights of both theCrown and people, by forming abarrier to withstand theencroachments of both ... if theywere confounded with the mass ofthe people, and like them had only a

vote in electing representatives,their privileges would soon beborne down and overwhelmed bythe popular torrent, which wouldeffectually level all distinctions.""The Commons," he says further,"consist of all such men of propertyin the kingdom as have not seats inthe House of Lords." The legalirresponsibility of the King isemphasized. "He is not onlyincapable of doing wrong," saysBlackstone, "but even of thinkingwrong; he can never mean to do an

improper thing; in him is no folly orweakness," though he points out thatthe constitution "has allowed alatitude of supposing the contrary."The powers of the King aredescribed in terms more suitable tothe iron despotism of William theNorman than to the backstairscorruption of George III. The rightof revolution is noted, with justice,as belonging to the sphere of moralsrather than of law.

"Its true defect," says Professor

Dicey of the Commentaries, "is thehopeless confusion both of languageand of thought introduced into thewhole subject of constitutional lawby Blackstone's habit—common toall the lawyers of his time—ofapplying old and inapplicable termsto new institutions." This is severeenough; yet Blackstone's sins aredeeper than the criticism wouldsuggest. He introduced into Englishpolitical philosophy that systematicattention to forms instead ofsubstance upon which the whole

vicious theory of checks andbalances was erected. He made nodistinction between the unlimitedsovereignty of law and the veryobviously limited sovereignty ofreality. He must have known that totalk of the independence of thebranches of the legislature wassimple nonsense at a time whenKing and peers competed for thecontrol of elections to the House ofCommons. His idealization of apeerage whose typical spiritualmember was Archbishop

Cornwallis and whose temporalembodiment was the Duke ofBedford would not have deceived aschoolboy had it not provided abulwark against improvement. Itwas ridiculous to describe theCommons as representative ofproperty so long as places likeManchester and Sheffield werevirtually disfranchised. His pictureof the royal prerogative was aportrait against every detail ofwhich what was best in Englandhad struggled in the preceding

century and a half. He has nothing tosay of the cabinet, nothing ofministerial responsibility, nothingof the party system. What he didwas to produce the defence of anon-existent system which acted asa barrier to all legal, and muchpolitical, progress in the next half-century. He gave men materialwithout cause for satisfaction.

As a description of the existinggovernment there is thus hardly anelement of Blackstone's work which

could stand the test of criticalinquiry. But even worse was itsphilosophy. As Bentham pointedout, he was unaware of thedistinction between society andgovernment. The state of natureexists, or fails to exist, withstartling inconsistency. Blackstone,in fact, was a Lockian who knowsthat Hume and Montesquieu havecut the ground from under hismaster's feet, and yet cannotunderstand how, without him, afoundation is to be supplied. Locke,

indeed, seems to him, as a naturalconservative, to go too far, and herejects the original contract aswithout basis in history; yetcontractual notions are present atevery fundamental stage of hisargument. The sovereign power, sowe are told, is irresistible; and thenbecause Blackstone is uncertainwhat right is to mean, we hear ofmoral limitations upon its exercise.He speaks continually ofrepresentation without any effort toexamine into the notions it conveys.

The members of society are held tobe equal; and great pains are takento justify existent inequalities. "Thenatural foundations of sovereignty,"he writes, "are the three greatrequisites... of wisdom, goodnessand power." Yet there is nowhereany proof in his book that stepshave been taken in the BritishConstitution to associate these withthe actual exertion of authority. Norhas he clear notions of the way inwhich property is to be founded.Communism, he writes in

seventeenth century fashion, is theinstitution of the all-beneficentCreator who gave the earth to men;property comes when men occupysome special portion of the soilcontinuously or mix their labor withmovable possessions. This is pureLocke; though the conclusionsdrawn by Blackstone are utterlyremote from the logical result of hisown premises.

The truth surely is thatBlackstone had, upon all these

questions, only the most confusedsort of notions. He had to prefacehis work with some sort ofphilosophic theory because theconditions of the age demanded it.The one source of enlightenmentwhen he wrote was Hume; but forsome uncertain reason, perhaps hispiety, Blackstone makes noreference to the great sceptic'sspeculations. So that he was drivenback upon notions he felt to befalse, without a proper realizationof their falsity. His use of

Montesquieu shows rather howdangerous a weapon a great ideacan be in the hands of oneincompetent to understand it, thanthe fertility it contained. The meritof Blackstone is his learning, whichwas substantial, his realization thatthe powers of law demand someclassification, his dim yet constantsense that Montesquieu is right alikein searching for the roots of law incustom and in applying thehistorical method to hisexplanations. But as a thinker he

was little more than an optimistictrifler, too content with theconditions of his time to question itsassumptions.

De Lolme is a more interestingfigure; and though, as withBlackstone, what he failed to seewas even more remarkable thanwhat he did perceive, his book hasreal ability and merit. De Lolmewas a citizen of Geneva, whopublished his Constitution ofEngland in 1775, after a twelve

months' visit to shores sufficientlyinhospitable to leave him to die inobscurity and want. His book, as hetells us in his preface, was no meansuccess, though he derived no profitfrom it. Like Blackstone, he wasimpressed by the necessity ofobtaining a constitutionalequilibrium, wherein he finds thesecret of liberty. The attitude wasnot unnatural in one who, with hishead full of Montesquieu, was awitness of the struggle betweenJunius and the King. He has, of

course, the limitation common to allwriters before Burke of thinking ofgovernment in purely mechanicalterms. "It is upon the passions ofmankind," he says, "that is, uponcauses which are unalterable, thatthe action of the various parts of astate depends. The machine mayvary as to its dimensions; but itsmovement and acting springs stillremain intrinsically the same."Elsewhere he speaks of governmentas "a great ballet or dance in which... everything depends upon the

disposition of the figures." He doesnot deal, that is to say, with men asmen, but only as inert adjuncts of amachine by which they arecontrolled. Such an attitude isbound to suffer from the patentvices of all abstraction. It regardshistoric forces as distinct from themen related to them. Every mob, hesays, must have its Spartacus; everyrepublic will tend to unstability.The English avoid these dangers byplaying off the royal power againstthe popular. The King's interest is

safeguarded by the division ofParliament into two Houses, each ofwhich rejects the encroachment ofthe other upon the executive. Hispower is limited by parliamentaryprivilege, freedom of the press, theright of taxation and so forth. Thetheory was not true; though itrepresented with some accuracy theideals of the time.

Nor must we belittle what insightDe Lolme possessed. He saw thatthe early concentration of power in

the royal hands prevented thecontinental type of feudalism fromdeveloping in England; with theresult that while French nobleswere massacring each other, theEnglish people could unite to wrestprivileges from the superior power.He understood that one of themainsprings of the system was theindependence of the judges. Herealized that the party-system—henever used the actual term—while itprovides room for men's ambitionsat the same time prevents the

equation of ambition withindispensability. "Woe to him,"says De Lolme, "... who shouldendeavor to make the peoplebelieve that their fate depends onthe persevering virtue of a singlecitizen." He sees the paramountvalue of freedom of the press. This,as he says, with the necessity thatmembers should be re-elected, "hasdelivered into the hands of thepeople at large the exercise of thecensorial power." He has no doubtbut that resistance is the remedy

whereby governmentalencroachment can be prevented;"resistance," he says, "is theultimate and lawful resource againstthe violences of power." He pointsout how real is the guarantee ofliberty where the onus of proof incriminal cases is thrown upon thegovernment. He regards withadmiration the supremacy of thecivil over the military arm, and theskillful way in which, contrary toFrench experience, it has beenfound possible to maintain a

standing army without adding to theroyal power. Nor can he fail toadmire the insight which organizes"the agitation of the popular mind,"not as "the forerunner of violentcommotions" but to "animate allparts of the state." Therein DeLolme had grasped the real essenceof party government.

It was, of course, no more thansymptomatic of his time that cabinetand prime minister should haveescaped his notice. A more serious

defect was his inability, with theWilkes contest prominently in hisnotice, to see that the people hadassumed a new importance. For themasses, indeed, De Lolme had noenthusiasm. "A passive share," hethought, "was the only one thatcould, with safety to the state, betrusted" to the humble man. "Thegreater part," he wrote, "of thosewho compose this multitude, takenup with the care of providing fortheir subsistence, have neithersufficient leisure, nor even, in

consequence of their imperfecteducation, the degree ofinformation, requisite for functionsof this kind." Such an attitudeblinded him to the significance ofthe American conflict, which hesaw unattended by its moralimplications. He trusted tooemphatically to the power ofmechanisms to realize thatinstitutions which allowed of suchmanipulation as that of George IIIcould not be satisfactory once thepeople had awakened to a sense of

its own power. The real socialforces of the time found there nochannels of activity; and thedifference between De Lolme andBagehot is the latter's power to gobehind the screen of statute to theinner sources of power.

IV

The basis of revolutionarydoctrine was already present inEngland when, in 1762, Rousseau

published his Contrat Social. Withits fundamental doctrines Locke hadalready made his countrymenfamiliar; and what was needed forthe appreciation of its teaching wasless a renaissance than discontent.So soon as men are dissatisfiedwith the traditional foundations ofthe State, a gospel of natural rightsis certain to make its appearance.And, once the design of George IIIhad been made familiar by histreatment of Chatham and Wilkes,the discontent did not fail to show

itself. Indeed, in the year before thepublication of Rousseau's book,Robert Wallace, a Scottish chaplainroyal, had written in his VariousProspects (1761) a series of essayswhich are at once an anticipation ofthe main thesis of Malthus and aplea for the integration of socialforces by which alone the mass ofmen could be raised from misery. Inthe light of later experience it isdifficult not to be impressed by themodernist flavour of Wallace'sattack. He insists upon the capacity

of men and the disproportionbetween their potential achievementand that which is secured by actualsociety. Men are in the masscondemned to ignorance and toil;and the lust of power sets managainst his neighbor to the profit ofthe rich. Wallace traces these evilsto private property and theindividualistic organization ofwork, and he sees no remedy savecommunity of possessions and arenovated educational system. Yethe does not conceal from himself

that it is to the interest of thegoverning class to prevent arevolution which, beneficent to themasses, would be fatal tothemselves; nor does he conceive itpossible until the fertility of menhas been reduced to the capacity ofthe soil. He speculates upon thechances of a new spirit among men,of an all-wise legislator, and of thebeneficent example of coloniesupon the later Owenite model. Buthis book is contemporaneous withour own ideas rather than with the

thoughts of his generation. Nor doesit seem to have excited any generalattention.

It is five years after Rousseauthat we see the first clear signs ofhis influence. Naturally enough themen amongst whom the new spiritspread abroad were theNonconformists. For more thanseventy years they had beenallowed existence withoutrecognition. None had morefaithfully supported the new dynasty

than they; none had been paid lessfor their allegiance. Their utmosteffort could secure only a sparingmitigation of the Test Act. All ofthem were Whigs, and the doctrinesof Locke suited exactly their temperand their wants. There wereamongst them able men in everywalk of life, and they were apt topublication. Joseph Priestley, inparticular, gave up with willingnessto mankind what was obviouslymeant for chemical science. A fewyears previously Brown of the

Estimate had submitted a schemefor national education, in which theessential principle was Churchcontrol. Priestley had answeredhim, and was encouraged by friendsto expand his argument into ageneral treatise. His Essay on theFirst Principles of Governmentappeared in 1768; and, if fornothing else, it would benoteworthy because it was thereinthat the significance of the "greatesthappiness principle" first flashedacross Bentham's mind. But the

book shows more than this. "I hadplaced," says Priestley with duemodesty, "the foundation of some ofthe most valuable interests ofmankind on a broader and firmerbasis than Mr. Locke"; and thebreadth and firmness are Rousseau'scontribution.

Certainly we herein meet newelements. On the very threshold ofthe book we meet the dogma of theperfectibility of man. "Whatever,"Priestley rhapsodizes, "was the

beginning of this world, the endwill be glorious and paradisaical,beyond what our imaginations cannow conceive." "The instrument ofthis progress ... towards thisglorious state" is government;though a little later we are to findthat the main business ofgovernment is noninterference. Menare all equal, and their natural rightsare indefeasible. Government mustbe restrained in the interests ofliberty. No man can be governedwithout his consent; for government

is founded upon a contract by whichcivil liberty is surrendered inexchange for a power to share inpublic decisions. It thus follows thatthe people must be sovereign, andinterference with their natural rightswill justify resistance. Everygovernment, he says, is "in itsoriginal principles, and antecedentto its present form an equalrepublic"; wherefore, of course, itfollows that we must restore to menthe equality they have lost. And,equally, of course, this would

bestow upon the Nonconformiststheir full citizenship; forWarburton's Alliance, to attackwhich Priestley exhausts all theresources of his ingenuity, has beenone of the main instruments in theirdegradation. "Unbounded liberty inmatters of religion," which meansthe abolition of the Establishment,promises to be "very favorable tothe best interests of mankind."

So far the book might well becalled an edition of Rousseau for

English Nonconformists; but thereare divergences of import. It cannever be forgotten in the history ofpolitical ideas that the alliance ofChurch and State madeNonconformists suspicious ofgovernment interference. Theiroriginal desire to be left unimpededwas soon exalted into a definitetheory; and since politicalconditions had confined them solargely to trade none felt as they didthe hampering influence of State-restrictions. The result has been a

great difficulty in making liberaldoctrines in England realize, untilafter 1870, the organic nature of theState. It remains for them almostentirely a police institution which,once it aims at the realization ofright, usurps a function far betterperformed by individuals. There isno sense of the community; all thatexists is a sum of privatesentiments. "Civil liberty," saysPriestley, "has been greatlyimpaired by an abuse of the maximthat the joint understanding of all the

members of a State, properlycollected, must be preferable to thatof individuals; and consequentlythat the more the cases are in whichmankind are governed by this unitedreason of the whole community, somuch the better; whereas, in truth,the greater part of human actions areof such a nature, that moreinconvenience would follow fromtheir being fixed by laws than fromtheir being left to every man'sarbitrary will." If my neighborassaults me, he suggests, I may

usefully call in the police; butwhere the object is the discovery oftruth, the means of education, themethod of religious belief,individual initiative is superior toState action. The latter produces anuniform result "incompatible withthe spirit of discovery." Nor is suchattempt at uniform conditions just toposterity; men have no natural rightto judge for the future. Men are tooignorant to fix their own ideas asthe basis of all action.

Priestley could not escapeentirely the bondage of pasttradition; and the metaphysicswhich Bentham abhorred arescattered broadcast over his pages.Nevertheless the basis upon whichhe defended his ideas was autilitarianism hardly less completethan that which Bentham made theinstrument of revolution. "Regard tothe general good," he says, "is themain method by which natural rightsare to be defended." "The good andhappiness of the members, that is,

the majority of the members of anyState, is the great standard by whicheverything relating to that state mustfinally be determined." Insubstance, that is to say, if notcompletely in theory, we pass withPriestley from arguments of right tothose of expediency. His chiefattack upon religious legislation issimilarly based upon considerationsof policy. His view of theindividual as a never-ending sourceof fruitful innovation anticipates allthe later Benthamite arguments

about the well-spring of individualenergy. Interference and stagnationare equated in exactly similarfashion to Adam Smith and hisfollowers. Priestley, of course, wasinconsistent in urging at the outsetthat government is the chiefinstrument of progress; but what heseems to mean is less thatgovernment has the future in itshands than that government actionmay well be decisive for good orevil. Typical, too, of the laterBenthamism is his glorification of

reason as the great key which is tounlock all doors. That is, of course,natural in a scientist who hadhimself made discoveries of vitalimport; but it was characteristicalso of a school which scanned alimitless horizon with sereneconfidence in a future of unboundedgood. Even if it be said thatPriestley has all the vices of thatrationalism which, as withBentham, oversimplifies everyproblem it encounters, it is yetadequate to retort that a confidence

in the energies of men was betterthan the complacent stagnation ofthe previous age.

It is difficult to measure theprecise influence that Priestleyexerted; certainly amongNonconformists it cannot have beensmall. Dr. Richard Price is a lesserfigure; and much of the standing hemight have had has been obliteratedby two unfortunate incidents. Hissinking-fund scheme was taken upby the younger Pitt, and proved,

though the latter believed in it to thelast, to be founded upon anarithmetical fallacy which did notsit well upon a fellow of the RoyalSociety. His sermon on the FrenchRevolution provoked theReflections of Burke; and, thoughmuch of the right was on the side ofPrice, it can hardly be said that hesurvived Burke's onslaught. Yet hewas a considerable figure in hisday, and he shows, like Priestley,how deep-rooted was the Englishrevolutionary temper. He has not,

indeed, Priestley's superb optimism;for the rigid a priori morality ofwhich he was the somewhatmuddled defender was lessfavorable to a confidence in reason.He had a good deal of John Brown'sfear that luxury was the seed ofEnglish degeneration; the proof ofwhich he saw in the decline of thepopulation. His figures, in fact,were false; but they wereunessential to the general thesis hehad to make.

Price, like Priestley a leadingNonconformist, was stirred to printby the American Revolution; and ifhis views were not widely popular,his Observations on the Nature ofCivil Liberty (1776) attained itseighth edition within a decade.This, with its supplementAdditional Observations (1777),presents a perfectly coherent theory.Nor is their ancestry concealed.They represent the tradition ofLocke, modified by the importationsof Rousseau. Price owes much to

Priestley and to Hume, and he takessentences from Montesquieu wherethey aid him. But he has little ornothing of Priestley's utilitarianismand the whole argument is upon theabstract basis of right. Libertymeans self-government, and self-government means the right of everyman to be his own legislator. Price,with strict logic, follows out thisdoctrine to its last consequence.Taxes become "free gifts for publicservices"; laws are "particularprovisions or regulations

established by Common Consent forgaining protection and safety";magistrates are "trustees or deputiesfor carrying these regulations intoexecution." And almost in the wordsof Rousseau, Price goes on to admitthat liberty, "in its most perfectdegree, can be enjoyed only insmall states where everyindependent agent is capable ofgiving his suffrage in person and ofbeing chosen into public offices."He knows that large States areinevitable, though he thinks that

representation may be made soadequate as to minimize thesacrifice of liberty involved.

But the limitation upongovernment is everywhereemphasized. "Government," he says,"... is in the very nature of it a trust;and all its powers a Delegation forparticular ends." He rejects thetheory of parliamentary sovereigntyas incompatible with self-government; if the Parliament, forinstance, prolonged its life, it would

betray its constituents and dissolveitself. "If omnipotence," he writes,"can with any sense be ascribed to alegislature, it must be lodged whereall legislative authority originates;that is, in the People." Such asystem is alone compatible with theends of government, since it cannotbe supposed that men "combine intocommunities and institutegovernment" for self-enslavement.Nor is any other political system"consistent with the natural equalityof mankind"; by which Price means

that no man "is constituted by theauthor of nature the vassal orsubject of another, or has any rightto give law to him, or, without hisconsent, to take away any part of hisproperty or to abridge him of hisliberty." From all of which it isconcluded that liberty isinalienable; and a people which haslost it "must have a right toemancipate themselves as soon asthey can." The aptness of theargument to the American situationis obvious enough; and nowhere is

Price more happy or moreformidable than when he applies hisprecepts to phrases like "the unityof the empire" and the "honor of thekingdom" which were so freelyused to cover up the inevitableresults of George's obstinacy.

T h e Essay on the Right ofProperty in Land (1781) ofWilliam Ogilvie deserves at least apassing notice. The author, whopublished his book anonymously,was a Professor of Latin in the

University of Aberdeen and anagriculturist of some success. Hisown career was distinctlyhonorable. The teacher of Sir JamesMackintosh, he had a highreputation as a classical scholar anddeserves to be remembered for hiseffort to reform a college which hadpractically ceased to perform itsproper academic functions. Hisbook is virtually an essay upon thenatural right of men to the soil. Hedoes not doubt that the distress ofthe times is due to the land

monopoly. The earth being given tomen in common, its invasion byprivate ownership is a dangerousperversion. Men have the right tothe full product of their labor; butthe privileges of the landownerprevent the enjoyment of that right.The primary duty of every State isthe increase of public happiness;and the happiest nation is that whichhas the greatest number of free andindependent cultivators. Butgovernments attend rather to theinterest of the higher classes, even

while they hold out the protection ofthe common people as the mainpretext of their authority. The resultis their maintenance of land-monopoly even though it affects theprime material of all essentialindustries, prevents the growth ofpopulation, and makes the richwealthier at the expense of the poor.It breeds oppression and ignorance,and poisons improvement bypreventing individual initiative. Hepoints out how a nation isdominated by its landlords, and

how they have consistently evadedthe fiscal burdens they should bear.Only in a return to a nation offreeholders can Ogilvie see the realsource of an increase in happiness.

Such criticism is revolutionaryenough, though when he comes tospeak of actual changes, he hadlittle more to propose than a systemof peasant proprietorship. What isstriking in the book is its sense ofgreat, impending changes, itsthorough grasp of the principle of

utility, its realization of theimmense agricultural improvementthat is possible if the landed systemcan be so changed as to bring intoplay the impulses of humble men.He sees clearly enough that wealthdominates the State; and hisinterpretation of history isthroughout economic. Ogilvie is oneof the first of those agrarianSocialists who, chiefly throughSpence and Paine, are responsiblefor a special current of their own inthe great tide of protest against the

unjust situation of labor. Like them,he builds his system upon naturalrights; though, unlike them, hisnatural rights are defended byexpediency and in a style that isalways clear and logical. The bookitself has rather a curious history.At its appearance, it seems to haveexcited no notice of any kind.Mackintosh knew of its authorship;for he warned its author against theamiable delusion that its excellencewould persuade the Britishgovernment to force a system of

peasant proprietorship upon theEast India Company. Reprinted in1838 as the work of John Ogilby, itwas intended to instruct theChartists in the secret of theiroppression; and therein it may wellhave contributed to the tragicomicland-scheme of Feargus O'Connor.In 1891 the problem of the land wasagain eagerly debated under thestimulus of Mr. Henry George; anda patriotic Scotchman published thebook with biographical notes thatconstitute one of the most amazing

curiosities in English politicalliterature.

V

Against the school of Rousseau'sEnglish disciples it iscomparatively easy to multiplycriticisms. They lacked any historicsense. Government, for them, wassimply an instrument which wasmade and unmade at the volition ofmen. How complex were its

psychological foundations they hadno conception; with the single factorof consent they could explain themost marvellous edifice of anytime. They were buried beneath amountain of metaphysical rightwhich they never related to legalfacts or to political possibility.They pursued relentlessly thelogical conclusions of the doctrinesthey abhorred without being willingcarefully to investigate the results towhich their own doctrines in logicled. They overestimated the extent

to which men are willing to occupythemselves with political affairs.They made no proper allowance forthe protective armour each socialsystem must acquire by the mereforce of prescription. Nor is theresufficient allowance in their attitudefor those limiting conditions ofcircumstance of which everystatesman must of necessity takeaccount. They occupy themselves,that is to say, so completely withstaatslehre that they do not admitthe mollifying influence of politik.

They search for principles ofuniversal right, without theperception that a right which is tobe universal must necessarily be sogeneral in character as to be uselessin its application.

Yet such defects must not blindus to the general rightness of theirinsight. They were protestingagainst a system strongly upheld ongrounds which now appear to havebeen simply indefensible. Thebusiness of government had been

made the private possession of aprivileged class; and eagerness fordesirable change was, in the mass,absent from the minds of most menengaged in its direction. The loss ofAmerica, the heartless treatment ofIreland, the unconstitutionalpractices in the Wilkes affair, theheightening of corruptionundertaken by Henry Fox and Northat the direct instance of the king,had blinded the eyes of most to thefact that principle is a vital part ofpolicy. The revolutionists recalled

men to the need of explaining, noless than carrying on, thegovernment of the Crown. Theyrepresented the new sense of powerfelt by elements of which theimportance had been forgotten in thesordid intrigues of the previoushalf-century. Their emphasis upongovernment as in its nature a publictrust was at least accompanied by auseful reminder that, after all,ultimate power must rest upon theside of the governed. For twentyyears Whigs and Tories alike

carried on political controversy asthough no public opinion existedoutside the small circle of thearistocracy. The mob which madeWilkes its idol was, in a blind andunconscious way, enforcing thelesson that Price and Priestley hadin mind. For the moment, they wereunsuccessful. Cartwright, with hisConstitutional Societies, mightcapture the support of an eccentricpeer like the Duke of Richmond; butthe vast majority remained, ifirritated, unconvinced. It needed the

realization that the new doctrineswere part of a vaster synthesiswhich swept within its purview thefortunes of Europe and Americabefore they would give seriousheed; and even then they metantagonism with nothing saveoppression and hate. Yet thedoctrines remained; for thought,after all, is killed by reasonedanswer alone. And when the firstgusts of war and revolution hadpassed, the cause for which theystood was found to have permeated

all classes save that which had allto lose by learning.

We must not, however, committhe error of thinking of Price andPriestley as representing more thanan important segment of opinion.The opposition to their theories wasnot less articulate than their owndefence of them. Some, like Burke,desired a purification of the existingsystem; others, like Dr. Johnson,had no sort of sympathy with new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least,

deserves some mention less for theinherent value of what he had tosay, than for the nature of theopinions he expounded. JosiahTucker, the Dean of Gloucester, hasa reputation alike in political andeconomic enquiry. He representsthe sturdy nationalism ofA r b uthno t ' s John Bull, theunreasoned prejudice against allforeigners, the hatred of allmetaphysics as inconsistent withcommon sense, the desire to letthings be on the ground that the

effort after change is worse than theevil of which men complain. HisTreatise on Civil Government(1781) is in many ways a delightfulbook, bluff, hardy, full of commonsense, with, at times, a quaint humorthat is all its own. He had reallytwo objects in view; to deal, in thefirst place, faithfully with theAmerican problem, and, in thesecond, to explode the new bubbleof Rousseau's followers. Thesecond point takes the form of anexamination of Locke, to whom, as

Tucker shrewdly saw, the theoriesof the school may trace theirancestry. He analyses the theory ofconsent in such fashion as to showthat if its adherents could bepersuaded to be logical, they wouldhave to admit themselvesanarchists. He has no sympathy withthe state of nature; the noble savage,on investigation, turns out to be abarbaric creature with a club andscalping knife. Government, he doesnot doubt, is a trust, or, as heprefers, somewhat oddly, to call it,

a quasi-contract; but that does notmean that the actual governors canbe dismissed when any eccentrichappens to take exception to theirviews. He has no sympathy withparliamentary reform. Give the moban increase of power, he says, andnothing is to be expected butoutrage and violence. He thinks theconstitution very well as it is, andthose who preach the evils ofcorruption ought to prove theircharges instead of blasphemouslyasserting that the voice of the

people is the voice of God.

Upon America Tucker hasdoctrines all his own. He does notdoubt that the Americans deservethe worst epithets that can beshowered upon them. Their right toself-government he denied asstoutly as ever George III himselfcould have desired. But not for onemoment would he fight them tocompel their return to Britishallegiance. If the American colonieswant to go, let them by all means cut

adrift. They are only a uselesssource of expenditure. The tradethey represent does not depend uponallegiance but upon wants thatEngland can supply if she keepsshop in the proper way, if, that is,she makes it to their interest to buyin her market. Indeed, colonies ofall kinds seem to him quite useless.They ever are, he says, and everwere, "a drain to and anincumbrance on the Mother-country,requiring perpetual and expensivenursing in their infancy, and

becoming headstrong andungovernable in proportion as theygrow up." All wise relationsdepend upon self-interest, and thatneeds no compulsion. If Gibraltarand Port Mahon and the rest weregiven up, the result would be"multitudes of places ... abolished,jobs and contracts effectuallyprevented, millions of money saved,universal industry encouraged, andthe influence of the Crown reducedto that mediocrity it ought to have."Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-

century before its time; and one canimagine the good Dean crustilyexplaining his notions to themerchants of Bristol who had justrejected Edmund Burke foradvocating free trade with Ireland.

No word on Toryism would becomplete without mention of Dr.Johnson. Here, indeed, we meetless with opinion than with a set ofgloomy prejudices, acceptable onlybecause of the stout honesty of thesource from which they come. He

thought life a poor thing at the bestand took a low view of humannature. "The notion of liberty," hetold the faithful Boswell, "amusesthe people of England and helps tokeep off the tedium vitae." The ideaof a society properly organized intoranks and societies he alwaysesteemed highly. "I am a friend tosubordination," he said, "as mostconducive to the happiness ofsociety." He was a Jacobite andTory to the end. Whiggism was theoffspring of the devil, the "negation

of all principle"; and he seems tohave implied that it led to atheism,which he regarded as the worst ofsins. He did not believe in thehonesty of republicans; theylevelled down, but were neverinclined to level up. Men, he felt,had a part to act in society, and theirbusiness was to fulfil their allottedstation. Rousseau was a very badman: "I would sooner sign asentence for his transportation thanthat of any fellow who has gonefrom the Old Bailey these many

years." Political liberty wasworthless; the only thing worthwhile was freedom in privateconcerns. He blessed thegovernment in the case of generalwarrants and thought the power ofthe Crown too small. Toleration heconsidered due to an inaptdistinction between freedom tothink and freedom to talk, and anymagistrate "while he thinks himselfright ... ought to enforce what hethinks." The American revolt heascribed to selfish faction; and in

his Taxation no Tyranny (1775) hedefended the British governmentroot and branch upon his favoriteground of the necessity ofsubordination. He was willing, hesaid, to love all mankind except anAmerican.

Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend ofBurke, and he found pleasure in anacquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, inall his admiration for rank andfortune, is there a single element ofmeanness. The man who wrote the

letter to Lord Chesterfield neednever fear the charge of abasement.He knew that there was "a remedyin human nature that will keep ussafe under every form ofgovernment." He defined a courtierin the Idler as one "whose businessit is to watch the looks of a beingweak and foolish as himself." Muchof what he felt was in part a revoltagainst the sentimental aspect ofcontemporary liberalism, in part asturdy contempt for the talk ofdegeneracy that men such as Brown

had made popular. There is, indeed,in all his political observations astrong sense of the virtue of order,and a perception that the radicalismof the time was too abstract toprovide an adequate basis forgovernment. Here, as elsewhere,Johnson hated all speculation whichraised the fundamental questions.What he did not see was theimportant truth that in no age arefundamental questions raised savewhere the body politic is diseased.Rousseau and Voltaire, even

Priestley and Price, requiresomething more for answer thanunreasoned prejudice. Johnson'sattitude would have been admirablewhere there were no questions todebate; but where Pelham ruled, orGrenville, or North, it had nothingto contribute. Thought, after all, isthe one certain weapon of utility ina different and complex world; andit was because the age refused tolook it in the face that it invited theapproach of revolution.

CHAPTER VI

BURKE

I

It is the special merit of theEnglish constitutional system thatthe king stands outside thecategories of political conflict. Heis the dignified emollient of anorganized quarrel which, at least intheory, is due to the clash ofantagonistic principle. The merit,

indeed, is largely accidental; andwe shall miss the real fashion inwhich it came to be establishedunless we remark the vicissitudesthrough which it has passed. Theforeign birth of the first twoHanoverians, the insistentwidowhood of Queen Victoria,these rather than deliberateforesight have secured the elevatednullification of the Crown. Yet thefirst twenty-five years of GeorgeIII's reign represent the deliberateeffort of an obstinate man to stem

the progress of fifty years andsecure once more the balance ofpower. Nor was the effort defeatedwithout a struggle which went to theroot of constitutional principle.

And George III attempted therealization of his ambition at a timehighly favorable to its success.Party government had lost muchcredit during Walpole'sadministration. Men likeBolingbroke, Carteret and the elderPitt were all of them dissatisfied

with a system which depended forits existence upon the exclusion ofable men from power. A generationof corrupt practice and the finaldefeat of Stuart hopes had alreadydeprived the Whigs of any specialhold on their past ideals. They weredivided already into factions thepurpose of which was no more thanthe avid pursuit of place andpension. Government by connectionproved itself irreconcilable withgood government. But it showedalso that once corruption was

centralized there was no limit to itsinfluence, granted only the absenceof great questions. When George IIItransferred that organization fromthe office of the minister to his owncourt, there was already a tolerablecertainty of his success. For morethan forty years the Tories had beenexcluded from office; and they weremore than eager to sell theirsupport. The Church had becomethe creature of the State. The drift ofopinion in continental Europe wastowards benevolent despotism. The

narrow, obstinate and ungenerousmind of George had been fed onhigh notions of the power he mightexert. He had been taught thekingship of Bolingbroke's glowingpicture; and a reading in manuscriptof the seventh chapter ofBlackstone's first book can onlyhave confirmed the ideals he foundthere. Nor was it obvious that agenuine kingship would have beenworse than the oligarchy of the greatWhig families.

What made it worse, and finallyimpossible, was the character of theking. The pathetic circumstances ofhis old age have combinedsomewhat to obscure theviciousness of his maturity. He wasexcessively ignorant and asobstinate as arbitrary. He trusted noone but himself, and he totallymisunderstood the true nature of hisoffice. There is no question whicharose in the first forty years of hisreign in which he was not upon thewrong side and proud of his error.

He was wrong about Wilkes, wrongabout America, wrong aboutIreland, wrong about France. Hedemanded servants instead ofministers. He attacked everymeasure for the purification of thepolitical system. He supported theSlave trade and he opposed therepeal of the Test Act. Heprevented the grant of Catholicemancipation at the one momentwhen it might have genuinely healedthe wounds of Ireland. He destroyedby his perverse creations the value

of the House of Lords as alegislative assembly. He wasclearly determined to make his willthe criterion of policy; and hisdesign might have succeeded hadhis ability and temper beenproportionate to its greatness. Itwas not likely that the mass of menwould have seen with regret thedestruction of the aristocraticmonopoly in politics. The elder Pittmight well have based a ministry ofthe court upon a broad bottom ofpopularity. The House of Commons,

as the event proved, could be assubservient to the king as to hisminister.

Yet the design failed; and itfailed because, with characteristicstupidity, the king did not know theproper instruments for his purpose.Whatever he touched hemismanaged. He aroused thesuspicion of the people by enforcingthe resignation of the elder Pitt. Inthe Wilkes affair he threw theclearest light of the century upon the

true nature of the House ofCommons. His own system ofproscription restored to the Whigparty not a little of the idealism ithad lost; and Burke came to supplythem with a philosophy. Chathamremained the idol of the peopledespite his hatred. He raisedWilkes to be the champion ofrepresentative government and ofpersonal liberty. He lost Americaand it was not his fault that Irelandwas retained. The early popularityhe received he never recovered

until increasing years and madnesshad made him too pathetic fordislike. The real result of hisattempt was to compel attentiononce again to the foundations ofpolitics; and George's effort, in thelight of his immense failures, couldnot, in the nature of things, survivethat analysis.

Not, of course, that George everlacked defenders. As early as 1761,the old rival of Walpole, Pulteney,whom a peerage had condemned to

obsolescence, published hisSeasonable Hints from an HonestMan on the new Reign. Pulteneyurged the sovereign no longer to becontent with the "shadow ofroyalty." He should use his "legalprerogatives" to check "the illegalclaims of factious oligarchy."Government had become the privatepossession of a few powerful men.The king was but a puppet inleading strings. The basis ofgovernment should be widened, forevery honest man was aware that

distinctions of party were nowmerely nominal. The Tories shouldbe admitted to place. They werenow friendly to the accession andthey no longer boasted theirhostility to dissent. They knew thatToleration and the Establishmentwere of the essence of theConstitution. Were once the Whigoligarchy overthrown, corruptionwould cease and Parliament couldno longer hope to dominate thekingdom. "The ministers," he said,"will depend on the Crown not the

Crown on ministers" if George butshowed "his resolution to break allfactitious connections andconfederacies." The tone isBolingbroke's, and it was the lessonGeorge had insistently heard fromearly youth. How sinister was theadvice, men did not see until theelder Pitt was in political exile,with Wilkes an outlaw, and generalwarrants threatening the wholebasis of past liberties.

The first writer who pointed out

in unmistakable terms the meaningof the new synthesis was Junius.That his anonymity concealed themalignant talent of Sir PhilipFrancis seems now beyond denial.Junius, indeed, can hardly claim aplace in the history of politicalideas. His genius lay not in thediscussion of principle but thedissection of personality. Hispower lay in his style and theknowledge that enabled him toinform the general public of factswhich were the private possession

of the inner political circle. Hismind was narrow and pedantic. Hestood with Grenville on Americantaxation; and he maintained withoutperceiving what it meant that anomination borough was a freeholdbeyond the competence of thelegislature to abolish. He was nevergenerous, always abusive, and truthdid not enter into his calculations.But he saw with unsurpassedclearness the nature of the issue andhe was a powerful instrument in thediscomfiture of the king. He won a

new audience for political conflictand that audience was theunenfranchised populace ofEngland. His letters, moreover,appearing as they did in the dailyjournals gave the press asignificance in politics which it hasnever lost. He made the significanceof George's effort known to themass of men at a time when no othermeans of information was at hand.The opposition was divided; theking's friends were in a vastmajority; the publication of debates

was all but impossible. Englishgovernment was a secret conflict inwhich the entrance of spectatorswas forbidden even though theywere the subjects of debate. It wasthe glory of Junius that he destroyedthat system. Not even the combinedinfluence of the Crown andCommons, not even LordMansfield's doctrine of the law oflibel, could break the power of hisvituperation and Wilkes' courage.Bad men have sometimes been theinstruments of noble destiny; and

there are few more curiousepisodes in English history than theresult of this alliance betweenrevengeful hate and insolentambition.

II

Yet, in the long run, the realweapon which defeated Georgewas the ideas of Edmund Burke; forhe gave to the political conflict itsreal place in philosophy. There is

no immortality save in ideas; and itwas Burke who gave a permanentform to the debate in which he wasthe liberal protagonist. His career isillustrative at once of the merits anddefects of English politics in theeighteenth century. The son of anIrish Protestant lawyer and aCatholic mother, he served, afterlearning what Trinity College,Dublin, could offer him, a longapprenticeship to politics in theupper part of Grub Street. The storythat he applied, along with Hume,

for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgowseems apocryphal; though theDissertation on the Sublime andthe Beautiful (1756) shows hissingular fitness for the studies thatHutcheson had made the specialpossession of the Scottish school. Itwas in Grub Street that he appearsto have attained that amazingamount of varied yet profoundknowledge which made him withoutequal in the House of Commons.His earliest production was aVindication of Natural Society

(1756), written in the manner ofLord Bolingbroke, and successfulenough in its imitative satire notonly to deceive its immediatepublic, but also to become the basisof Godwin's Political Justice. Aftera vain attempt to serve in Irelandwith "Single-Speech" Hamilton, hebecame the private secretary toLord Rockingham, the leader of theone section of the Whig party towhich an honorable record stillremained. That connection securedfor him a seat in Parliament at the

comparatively late age of thirty-six;and henceforward, until his death in1797, he was among its leadingmembers. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from thevery outset to have been recognizedon all hands; though he was still, inthe eyes of the system, enough of anoutsider to be given, in the shortmonths during which he held office,the minor office of Paymaster-General, without a seat in theCabinet. The man of whom allEngland was the political pupil was

denied without discussion a place atthe council board. Yet when Fox islittle more than a memory of greatlovableness and Pitt a marvellousyouth of apt quotations, Burke hasendured as the permanent manual ofpolitical wisdom without whichstatesmen are as sailors on anuncharted sea.

For it has been the singular goodfortune of Burke not merely toobtain acceptance as the apostle ofphilosophic conservatism, but to

give deep comfort to men of liberaltemper. He is, indeed, a singularlylovable figure. "His stream of mindis perpetual," said Johnson; andGoldsmith has told us how hewound his way into a subject like aserpent. Macaulay thought him thegreatest man since Milton, LordMorley the "greatest master of civilwisdom in our tongue." "No Englishwriter," says Sir Leslie Stephen,"has received or has deserved moresplendid panegyrics." Even whenthe last criticism has been made,

detraction from these estimates isimpossible. It is easy to show howirritable and violent was histemperament. There is evidence andto spare of the way in which heallowed the spirit of party to cloudhis judgment. His relations withLord Chatham give lamentableproof of the violence of hispersonal antipathies. As an orator,his speeches are often turgid,wanting in self-control, and full ofthose ample digressions in whichMr. Gladstone delighted to obscure

his principles. Yet the irritation didnot conceal a magnificent loyalty tohis friends, and it was in his days ofcomparative poverty that he sharedhis means with Barry and withCrabbe. His alliance with Fox is theclassic partnership in Englishpolitics, unmarried, even enriched,by the tragedy of its close. He wasnever guilty of mean ambition. Hethought of nothing save the publicwelfare. No man has ever moreconsistently devoted his energies tothe service of the nation with less

regard for personal advancement.No English statesman has ever morefirmly moved amid a mass ofdetails to the principle they involve.

He was a member of no school ofthought, and there is no influence towhom his outlook can be directlytraced. His politics, indeed, bearupon their face the preoccupationwith the immediate problems of theHouse of Commons. Yet throughthem all the principles that emergeform a consistent whole. Nor is this

all. He hated oppression with allthe passion of a generous moralnature. He cared for the good as hesaw it with a steadfastness whichBright and Cobden only can claimto challenge. What he had to say hesaid in sentences which form themaxims of administrative wisdom.His horizon reached from Londonout to India and America; and hecared as deeply for the Indian ryot'swrongs as for the iniquities ofEnglish policy to Ireland. With lesswidth of mind than Hume and less

intensity of gaze than Adam Smith,he yet had a width and intensitywhich, fused with his ownimaginative sympathy, gave himmore insight than either. He had anunerring eye for the eternalprinciples of politics. He knew thatideals must be harnessed to an Actof Parliament if they are not tocease their influence. Admittingwhile he did that politics must restupon expediency, he never failed tofind good reason why expediencyshould be identified with what he

saw as right. It is a stainless and asplendid record. There are men inEnglish politics to whom a greateri mme d i a te influence may beascribed, just as in politicalphilosophy he cannot claim thepersistent inspiration of Hobbes andLocke. But in that middle groundbetween the facts and speculationhis supremacy is unapproached.There had been nothing like himbefore in English politics; and incontinental politics Royer Collardalone has something of his moral

fibre, though his practical insightwas far less profound. Hamiltonhad Burke's full grasp of politicalwisdom, but he lacked his moralelevation. So that he remains afigure of uniqueness. He may, asGoldsmith said, have expendedupon his party talents that shouldhave illuminated the universalaspect of the State. Yet there is noquestion with which he dealt that hedid not leave the richer for hisenquiry.

III

The liberalism of Burke is mostapparent in his handling of theimmediate issues of the age. UponIreland, America and India, he wasat every point upon the side of thefuture. Where constitutional reformwas in debate no man saw moreclearly than he the evils that neededremedy; though, to a latergeneration, his own schemes bearthe mark of timid conservatism. Inthe last decade of his life he

encountered the greatest cataclysmunloosed upon Europe since theReformation, and it is not too muchto say that at every point he missedthe essence of its meaning. Yet evenupon France and the EnglishConstitution he was full of practicalsagacity. Had his warning beenuttered without the fury of hate thataccompanied it, he might well haveguided the forces of the Revolutioninto channels that would have leftno space for the militarydictatorship he so marvellously

foresaw. Had he perceived the realevils of the aristocratic monopolyagainst which he so eloquentlyinveighed, forty barren years mightwell have been a fruitful epoch ofwise and continuous reform. ButBurke was not a democrat, and, atbottom, he had little regard for thatpopular sense of right which, uponoccasion, he was ready to praise.What impressed him was less theevils of the constitution than itspossibilities, could the defects quitealien from its nature but be pruned

away. Moments, indeed, there areof a deeper vision, and it is notuntrue to say that the best answer toBurke's conservatism is to be foundin his own pages. But he was toomuch the apostle of order to watchwith calm the struggles involved inthe overthrow of privilege. He hadtoo much the sense of a DivineProvidence taking thought for thewelfare of men to interfere withviolence in his handiwork. Thetinge of caution is never absent,even from his most liberal moments;

and he was willing to endure greatevil if it seemed dangerous toestimate the cost of change.

His American speeches are thetrue text-book for colonialadministration. He put aside theempty plea of right which satisfiedlegal pedants like GeorgeGrenville. What moved him was thetragic fashion in which men clung tothe shadow of a power they couldnot maintain instead of searching forthe roots of freedom. He never

concealed from himself that thesuccess of America was bound upwith the maintenance of Englishliberties. "Armies," he said manyyears later, "first victorious overEnglishmen, in a conflict forEnglish constitutional rights andprivileges, and afterwardshabituated (though in America) tokeep an English people in a state ofabject subjection, would prove fatalin the end to the liberties of Englanditself." He had firm hold of thatinsidious danger which belittles

freedom itself in the interest ofcurtailing some special desire. "Inorder to prove that the Americanshave no right to their liberties," hesaid in the famous Speech onConciliation with America (1775),"we are every day endeavoring tosubvert the maxims which preservethe whole spirit of our own." Theway for the later despotism of theyounger Pitt, was, as Burke saw,prepared by those who persuadedEnglishmen of the paltry characterof the American contest. His own

receipt was sounder. In the Speechon American Taxation (1774) hehad riddled the view that the fiscalmethods of Lord North were likelyto succeed. The true method was tofind a way of peace. "Nobody shallpersuade me," he told a hostileHouse of Commons, "when a wholepeople are concerned that acts oflenity are not means ofconci l iation." "Magnanimity inpolitics," 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, inthe most superb of all his maxims,how to draw up an indictmentagainst a whole people. He wouldwin the colonies by binding them toEngland with the ties of freedom."The question with me," he said, "isnot whether you have a right torender your people miserable, butwhether it is not your interest tomake them happy." The problem, infact, was one not of abstract rightbut of expediency; and nothingcould be lost by satisfying

American desire. Save for Johnsonand Gibbon, that was apparent toevery first-class mind in England.But the obstinate king prevailed;and Burke's great protest remainedno more than material for thelegislation of the future. Yet it wassomething that ninety years after hisspeech the British North AmericaAct should have given his dreamsfull substance.

Ireland had always a place apartin Burke's affections, and when he

first entered the House of Commonshe admitted that uppermost in histhoughts was the desire to assist itsfreedom. He saw that here, as inAmerica, no man will be arguedinto slavery. A government whichdefied the fundamental impulses ofmen was bound to court disaster.How could it seek security where itdefied the desires of the vastmajority of its subjects? Why is theIrish Catholic to have less justicethan the Catholic of Quebec or theIndian Mohammedan? The system

of Protestant control, he said in theLetter to Sir Hercules Langrishe(1792), was "well fitted for theoppression, impoverishment anddegradation of a people, and thedebasement in them of human natureitself." The Catholics paid theirtaxes; they served with glory in thearmy and navy. Yet they weredenied a share in thecommonwealth. "Common sense,"he said, "and common justicedictate ... some sort ofcompensation to a people for their

slavery." The British Constitutionwas not made "for great, generaland proscriptive exclusions; sooneror later it will destroy them, or theywill destroy the constitution." Theargument that the body of Catholicswas prone to sedition was noreason to oppress them. "No manwill assert seriously," he said, "thatwhen people are of a turbulentspirit the best way to keep them inorder is to furnish them withsomething to complain of." Theadvantages of subjects were, as he

urged, their right; and a wisegovernment would regard "all theirreasonable wishes as so manyclaims." To neglect them was tohave a nation full of uneasiness; andthe end was bound to be disaster.

There is nothing more noble inBurke's career than his long attemptto mitigate the evils of Companyrule in India. Research may wellhave shown that in some details hepressed the case too far; yet nothinghas so far come to light to cast

doubt upon the principles he theremaintained. He was the first Englishstatesman fully to understand themoral import of the problem ofsubject races; and if he did notmake impossible the JosephSedleys of the future, at least heflung an eternal challenge to theirmalignant complacency. He did notask the abandonment of Britishdominion in India, though he mayhave doubted the wisdom of itsconquest. All that he insisted uponwas this, that in imperial adventure

the conquering race must abide by amoral code. A lie was a lie whetherits victim be black or white. TheEuropean must respect the powersand rights of the Hindu as he wouldbe compelled by law to respectthem in his own State. "If we are notable," he said, "to contrive somemethod of governing India wellwhich will not of necessity becomethe means of governing GreatBritain ill, a ground is laid for theireternal separation, but none forsacrificing the people of that

country to our constitution."England must be in India for India'sbenefit or not at all; political powerand commercial monopoly such asthe East India Company enjoyedcould be had only insofar as theyare instruments of right and not ofviolence. The Company's systemwas the antithesis of this. "There isnothing," he said in a magnificentpassage, "before the eyes of thenatives but an endless, hopelessprospect of new flights of birds ofprey and passage, with appetites

continually renewing for a food thatis continually wasting." Sympathywith the native, regard for his habitsand wants, the Company's servantsfailed to display. "The Englishyouth in India drink the intoxicatingdraught of authority and dominionbefore their heads are able to bearit, and as they are full grown infortune long before they are ripe inprinciple, neither nature nor reasonhave any opportunity to exertthemselves for the excesses of theirpremature power. The

consequences of their conduct,which in good minds (and many oftheirs are probably such) mightproduce penitence or amendment,are unable to pursue the rapidity oftheir flight. Their prey is lodged inEngland; and the cries of India aregiven to seas and winds to beblown about in every breaking up ofthe monsoon over a remote andunhearing ocean." More than acentury was to pass before thewisest of Burke's interpretersattempted the translation of his

maxims into statute. But there hasnever, in any language, been drawna clearer picture of the dangerimplicit in imperial adventure. "Thesituation of man," said Burke, "isthe preceptor of his duty." He sawhow a nation might becomecorrupted by the spoils of otherlands. He knew that cruelty abroadis the parent of a later cruelty athome. Men will complain of theirwrongdoing in the remoter empire;and imperialism will employ themeans Burke painted in

unforgettable terms in his picture ofPaul Benfield. He denied that thegovernment of subject races can beregarded as a commercialtransaction. Its problem was not tosecure dividends but to accomplishmoral benefit. He abhorred thepolitics of prestige. He knew thedifficulties involved inadministering distant territories, theignorance and apathy of the public,the consequent erosion ofresponsibility, the chance thatwrong will fail of discovery. But he

did not shrink from his conclusion."Let us do what we please," hesaid, "to put India from ourthoughts, we can do nothing toseparate it from our public interestand our national reputation." That isa general truth not less in Africa andChina than in India itself. The mainthought in Burke's mind was thedanger lest colonial dominionbecome the breeding-ground ofarbitrary ideas. That his ownsafeguards were inadequate is clearenough at the present time. He knew

that the need was good government.He did not nor could he realize howintimately that ideal was connectedwith self-government. Yet the latestlesson is no more than the finaloutcome of his teaching.

IV

A background so consistent asthis in the inflexible determinationto moralize political action resultedin a noble edifice. Yet, through it

all, the principles of policy arerather implied than admitted. It waswhen he came to deal with domesticproblems and the French Revolutionthat Burke most clearly showed thereal trend of his thought. That trendis unmistakable. Burke was autilitarian who was convinced thatwhat was old was valuable by themere fact of its arrival at maturity.The State appeared to him anorganic compound that came butslowly to its full splendour. It waseasy to destroy; creation was

impossible. Political philosophywas nothing for him but accurategeneralization from experience; andhe held the presumption to beagainst novelty. While he did notbelittle the value of reason, he wasalways impressed by the immensepart played by prejudice in thedetermination of policy. He had nodoubt that property was a rightfulindex to power; and to disturbprescription seemed to him theopening of the flood gates. Nor mustwe miss the religious aspect of his

philosophy. He never doubted thatreligion was the foundation of theEnglish State. "Englishmen," he saidin the Reflections on the FrenchRevolution (1790), "know, andwhat is better, we feel inwardly,that religion is the basis of civilsociety and the source of all goodand of all comfort." The utterance ischaracteristic, not merely in itsdepreciation of reason, but in itsultimate reliance upon a mysticexplanation of social facts. Nothingwas more alien from Burke's temper

than deductive thinking in politics.The only safeguard he could findwas in empiricism.

This hatred of abstraction is, ofcourse, the basis of his earliestpublication; but it remained withhim to the end. He would notdiscuss America in terms of right. "Ido not enter into these metaphysicaldistinctions," he said in the Speechon American Taxation, "I hate thevery sound of them." "One suresymptom of an ill-conducted state,"

he wrote in the Reflections, "is thepropensity of the people to resort totheories." "It is always to belamented," he said in a Speech onthe Duration of Parliament, "whenmen are driven to search into thefoundations of the commonwealth."The theory of a social contract hedeclared "at best a confusion ofjudicial with civil principles," andhe found no sense in the doctrine ofpopular sovereignty. "The lines ofmorality," he said in the Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs

(1791), "are not like ideal lines ofmathematics. They are broad anddeep as well as long. They admit ofexceptions; they demandmodifications. These exceptionsand modifications are made, not bythe process of logic but by the rulesof prudence. Prudence is not onlyfirst in rank of the virtues politicaland moral, but she is the director,the regulator, the standard of themall." Nor did he hesitate to draw theobvious conclusion. "This," he said,"is the true touchstone of all

theories which regard man and theaffairs of men—does it suit hisnature in general, does it suit hisnature as modified by his habits?"

Of the truth of this generalattitude it is difficult to make denial.But when Burke came to apply it tothe British Constitution the "rules ofprudence" he was willing to admitare narrow enough to causesurprised enquiry. He did not doubtthat the true end of a legislature was"to give a direction, a form, a

technical dress ... to the generalsense of the community"; headmitted that popular revolt is somuch the outcome of suffering thatin any dispute between governmentand people, the presumption is atleast equal in the latter's favor. Heurged the acceptance of Grenville'sbill for improving the method ofdecision upon disputed elections.He made a magnificent defence ofthe popular cause in the Middlesexelection. He was in favor of thepublication of parliamentary

debates and of the voting lists indivisions. He supported almost withpassion the ending of that iniquitoussystem by which theenfranchisement of revenue officersgave government a corruptreservoir of electoral support. HisSpeech on Economical Reform(1780) was the prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack uponthe waste of the Civil list.

Yet beyond these measures Burkecould never be persuaded to go. He

was against the demand for shorterParliaments on the excellent groundthat the elections would be morecorrupt and the Commons lessresponsible. He opposed theremedy of a Place Bill for the goodand sufficient reason that it gave theexecutive an interest against thelegislature. He would not, as in thegreat speech at Bristol (1774),accept the doctrine that a member ofParliament was a mere delegate ofhis constituents rather than arepresentative of his own

convictions. "Government andlegislation," he said, "are matters ofreason and of judgment"; and oncethe private member had honorablyarrived at a decision which hethought was for the interest of thewhole community, his duty wasdone. All this, in itself, isunexceptionable; and it showsBurke's admirable grasp of thepractical application of attractivetheories to the event. But it is to beread in conjunction with a generalhostility to basic constitutional

change which is more dubious. Hehad no sympathy with the Radicals."The bane of the Whigs," he said,"has been the admission amongthem of the corps of schemers ...who do us infinite mischief bypersuading many sober and well-meaning people that we havedesigns inconsistent with theConstitution left us by ourforefathers." "If the nation at large,"he wrote in another letter, "hasdisposition enough to oppose allbad principles and all bad men, its

form of government is, in myopinion, fully sufficient for it; but ifthe general disposition be against avirtuous and manly line of publicconduct, there is no form into whichit can be thrown that will improveits nature or add to its energy"; andin the same letter he foreshadows apossible retirement from the Houseof Commons as a protest against thegrowth of radical opinion in hisparty. He resisted every effort toreduce the suffrage qualification.He had no sympathy with the effort

either to add to the countyrepresentation or to abolish therotten boroughs. The framework ofthe parliamentary system seemed tohim excellent. He deplored allcriticism of Parliament, and eventhe discussion of its essentials. "Ourrepresentation," he said, "is asnearly perfect as the necessaryimperfections of human affairs andof human creatures will suffer it tobe." It was in the same temper thathe resisted all effort at the politicalrelief of the Protestant dissenters.

"The machine itself," he had said,"is well enough to answer any goodpurpose, provided the materialswere sound"; and he never movedfrom that opinion.

Burke's attitude was obsoleteeven while he wrote; yet thesuggestiveness of his very errorsmakes examination of their groundimportant. Broadly, he wasprotesting against natural right in thename of expediency. His opponentsargued that, since men are by nature

equal, it must follow that they havean equal right to self-government.To Burke, the admission of thisprinciple would have meant theoverthrow of the Britishconstitution. Its implication was thatevery institution not of immediatepopular origin should be destroyed.To secure their ends, he thought, theradicals were compelled to preachthe injustice of those institutions andthus to injure that affection forgovernment upon which peace andsecurity depend. Here was an effort

to bring all institutions to the test oflogic which he thought highlydangerous. "No rational man everdid govern himself," he said, "byabstractions and universals." Thequestion for him was not theabstract rightness of the systemupon some set of a priori principlesbut whether, on the whole, thatsystem worked for the happiness ofthe community. He did not doubtthat it did; and to overthrow astructure so nobly tested by thepressure of events in favor of some

theories outside historic experienceseemed to him ruinous to society.Government, for him, was thegeneral harmony of diverseinterests; and the continualadjustments and exquisitemodifications of which it stood inneed were admirably discovered inthe existing system. Principles werethus unimportant compared to theproblem of their application. "Themajor," he said of all politicalpremises, "makes a pompous figurein the battle, but the victory depends

upon the little minor ofcircumstances."

To abstract natural right hetherefore opposed prescription. Thepresumption of wisdom is on theside of the past, and when wechange, we act at our peril."Prescription," he said in 1782, "isthe most solid of all titles, not onlyto property, but to what is to securethat property, to government."Because he saw the Stateorganically he was impressed by

the smallness both of the presentmoment and the individual's thought.It is built upon the wisdom of thepast for "the species is wise, andwhen time is given to it, as aspecies it almost always acts right."And since it is the past alone whichhas had the opportunity toaccumulate this rightness ourdisposition should be to preserveall ancient things. They could not bewithout a reason; and that reason isgrounded upon ancestralexperience. So the prescriptive title

becomes "not the creature, but themaster, of positive law ... thesoundest, the most general and themost recognized title between manand man that is known in municipalor public jurisprudence." It is byprescription that he defends theexistence of Catholicism in Irelandnot less than the supposeddeformities of the BritishConstitution. So, too, his mainattack on atheism is its implicationthat "everything is to be discussed."He does not say that all which is

has rightness in it; but at least heurges that to doubt it is to doubt theconstruction of a past experiencewhich built according to the generalneed. Nor does he doubt the chancethat what he urges may be wrong.Rather does he insist that at least itgives us security, for him the highestgood. "Truth," he said, "may be farbetter ... but as we have scarcelyever that certainty in the one that wehave in the other, I would, unlessthe truth were evident indeed, holdfast to peace, which has in her

company charity, the highest of thevirtues."

Such a philosophy, indeed, sobarely stated, would seem a defenceof political immobility; but Burkeattempted safeguards against thatdanger. His insistence upon thesuperior value of past experiencewas balanced by a generaladmission that particularcircumstances must always governthe immediate decision. "When thereason of old establishments is

gone," he said in his Speech onEconomical Reform, "it is absurd topreserve nothing but the burden ofthem." "A disposition to preserveand an ability to improve," he wrotein the Reflections on the FrenchRevolution, "taken together wouldbe my standard of a statesman." Butthat "ability to improve" concealstwo principles of which Burkenever relaxed his hold. "All thereformations we have hithertomade," he said, "have proceededupon the principle of reference to

antiquity"; and the Appeal from theNew to the Old Whigs, which is themost elaborate exposition of hisgeneral attitude, proceeds upon thegeneral basis that 1688 is aperpetual model for the future. Noris this all. "If I cannot reform withequity," said Burke, "I will notreform at all"; and equity seemshere to mean a sacrifice of thepresent and its passionate demandsto the selfish errors of past policy.

Burke, indeed, was never a

democrat, and that is the real root ofhis philosophy. He saw the value ofthe party-system, and he admittedthe necessity of some degree ofpopular representation. But he wasentirely satisfied with current Whigprinciples, could they but be purgedof their grosser deformities. Heknew too well how little reason iswont to enter into the formation ofpolitical opinion to make thesacrifice of innovation to its power.He saw so much of virtue in the oldorder, that he insisted upon the

equation of virtue withquintessence. Men of great propertyand position using their influence asa public trust, delicate in their senseof honor, and acting only frommotives of right—these seemed tohim the men who should withjustice exercise political power. Hedid not doubt that "there is noqualification for government butvirtue and wisdom ... wherever theyare actually found, they have, inwhatever state, condition,profession or trade, the passport to

heaven"; but he is careful todissociate the possibility that theycan be found in those who practicethe mechanical arts. He did notmean that his aristocracy shouldgovern without response to populardemand. He had no objection tocriticism, nor to the public exerciseof government. There was no reasoneven for agreement, so long as eachparty was guided by an honorablesense of the public good. This, sohe urged, was the system whichunderlay the temporary evils of the

British Constitution. An aristocracydelegated to do its work by themass of men was the best form ofgovernment his imagination couldconceive. It meant that propertymust be dominant in the system ofgovernment, that, while officeshould be open to all, it should beout of the reach of most. "Thecharacteristic essence of property,"he wrote in the Reflections, "... is tobe unequal"; and he thought theperpetuation of that inequality byinheritance "that which tends most

to the perpetuation of society itself."The system was difficult tomaintain, and it must be put out ofthe reach of popular temptation."Our constitution," he said in thePresent Discontents, "stands on anice equipoise, with sharpprecipices and deep waters on allsides of it. In removing it from adangerous leaning towards oneside, there may be a danger towardsoversething it on the other." Instraining, that is to say, after toolarge a purification, we may end

with destruction. And Burke, ofcourse, was emphatic upon the needthat property should be undisturbed.It was always, he thought, at a greatdisadvantage in any struggle withability; and there are many passagesin which he urges the consequentspecial representation which theadequate defence of propertyrequires.

The argument, at bottom, iscommon to all thinkers over-impressed by the sanctity of past

experience. Hegel and Savigny inGermany, Taine and Renan inFrance, Sir Henry Maine and Leckyin England, have all urged what isin effect a similar plea. We must notbreak what Bagehot called the cakeof custom, for men have beentrained to its digestion, and newfood breeds trouble. Laws are theoffspring of the original genius of apeople, and while we may renovate,we must not unduly reform. The trueidea of national development isalways latent in the past experience

of the race and it is from thatperpetual spring alone that wisdomcan be drawn. We render obedienceto what is with effortlessunconsciousness; and without thisloyalty to inherited institutions thefabric of society would bedissolved. Civilization, in fact,depends upon the performance ofactions defined in preconceivedchannels; and if we obeyed thosenovel impulses of right which seem,at times, to contradict ourinheritance, we should disturb

beyond repair the intricateequilibrium of countless ages. Theexperience of the past rather thanthe desires of the present is thus thetrue guide to our policy. "Weought," he said in a famoussentence, "to venerate where we areunable presently to comprehend."

It is easy to see why a mind soattuned recoiled from horror at theFrench Revolution. There issomething almost sinister in thedestiny which confronted Burke

with the one great spectacle of theeighteenth century which he wascertain not merely to misunderstandbut also to hate. He could notendure the most fragmentary changein tests of religious belief; and theRevolution swept overboard thewhole religious edifice. He wouldnot support the abolition even of themost flagrant abuses in the systemof representation; and he was to seein France an overthrow of amonarchy even more august in itsprescriptive rights than the English

Parliament. Privileges werescattered to the winds in a singlenight. Peace was sacrificed toexactly those metaphysical theoriesof equality and justice which hemost deeply abhorred. The doctrineof progress found an eloquentdefender in that last and noblestutterance of Condorcet which isstill perhaps its most perfectjustification. On all hands there wasthe sense of a new world built bythe immediate thought of man uponthe wholehearted rejection of past

history. Politics was emphaticallydeclared to be a system of whichthe truths could be stated in terms ofmathematical certainty. Thereligious spirit which Burke wasconvinced lay at the root of goodgave way before a generalscepticism which, from the outset ofhis life, he had declaredincompatible with social order.Justice was asserted to be the centreof social right; and it was definedas the overthrow of thoseprescriptive privileges which Burke

regarded as the protective armourof the body politic. Above all, themen who seized the reins of powerbecame convinced that theirs was aspecific of universal application.Their disciples in England seemedin the same diabolic frenzy withthemselves. In a moment of time, theEngland which had been theexample to Europe of orderedpopular liberty became, for theseenthusiasts, only less barbaric thanthe despotic princes of thecontinent. That Price and Priestley

should suffer the infection was,even for Burke, a not unnaturalthing. But when Charles Fox castaside the teaching of twenty yearsfor its antithesis, Burke must havefelt that no price was too great topay for the overthrow of theRevolution.

Certainly his pamphlets on eventsin France are at every pointconsistent with his earlier doctrine.The charge that he supported theRevolution in America and deserted

it in France is without meaning; forin the one there is no word that canhonorably be twisted to support theother. And when we makeallowances for the grave errors ofpersonal taste, the grossexaggeration, the inability to see theRevolution as something more thana single point in time, it becomesobvious enough that his criticism,de Maistre's apart, is by far thesoundest we possess from thegeneration which knew themovement as a living thing. The

attempt to produce an artificialequality upon which he seized asthe essence of the Revolution was,as Mirabeau was urging in privateto the king, the inevitable precursorof dictatorship. He realized thatfreedom is born of a certainspontaneity for which the rigid linesof doctrinaire thinkers left no room.That worship of symmetrical formwhich underlies the constitutionalexperiments of the next few years heexposed in a sentence which has init the essence of political wisdom.

"The nature of man is intricate"; hewrote in the Reflections, "theobjects of society are of the greatestpossible complexity; and thereforeno simple disposition or directionof power can be suitable either toman's nature or to the quality of hisaffairs." The note recurs insubstance throughout his criticism.Much of its application, indeed,will not stand for one moment thetest of inquiry; as when, forinstance, he correlates themonarchical government of France

with the English constitutionalsystem and extols the perpetualvirtues of 1688. The French madeevery effort to find the secret ofEnglish principles, but the rootswere absent from their nationalexperience.

A year after the publication of theReflections he himself perceivedthe narrowness of that judgment. Int h e Thoughts on French Affairs(1791) he saw that the essence ofthe Revolution was its foundation in

theoretic dogma. It was like nothingelse in the history of the worldexcept the Reformation; which lastevent it especially resembles in itsgenius for self-propagation. Hereinhe has already envisaged theimportance of that "patrieintellectuelle" which Tocquevilleemphasized as born of theRevolution. That led Burke onceagain to insist upon the peculiargenius of each separate state, thedifficulties of a change, the dangerof grafting novelties upon an ancient

fabric. He saw the certainty that inadhering to an abstract metaphysicalscheme the French were in truthomitting human nature from theirpolitical equation; for general ideascan find embodiment in institutionalforms only after they have beenmoulded by a thousand varieties ofcircumstance. The French createdan universal man not lessdestructive of their practicalsagacity than the Frankenstein of theeconomists. They omitted, as Burkesaw, the elements which objective

experience must demand; with theresult that, despite themselves, theycame rather to destroy than to fulfil.Napoleon, as Burke prophesied,reaped the harvest of their failure.

Nor was he less right in hisdenunciation of that distrust of thepast which played so large a part inthe revolutionary consciousness."We are afraid," he wrote in theReflections, "to put men to live andtrade each on his own private stockof reason, because we suspect that

this stock in each man is small, andthat the individuals would do betterto avail themselves of the generalbank and capital of nations and ofages." Of Siéyès' buildingconstitutions overnight, this is nounfair picture; but it points a moregeneral truth never long absent fromBurke's mind. Man is for him somuch the creature of prejudice, somuch a mosaic of ancestraltradition, that the chance of novelthought finding a peaceful placeamong his institutions is always

small. For Burke, thought is alwaysat the service of the instincts, andthese lie buried in the remoteexperience of the state. So that menlike Robespierre were asking fromtheir subjects an impossible task.That which they had conceived inthe gray abstractness of theirspeculations was too little relatedto what the average Frenchmanknew and desired to be enduring.Burke looks with sober admirationat the way in which the Englishrevolution related itself at every

point to ideas and theories withwhich the average man was asfamiliar as with the physicallandmarks of his ownneighborhood. For the motiveswhich underlie all human effort are,he thought, sufficiently constant tocompel regard. That upon whichthey feed submits to change; but theeffort is slow and thedisappointments many. TheRevolution taught the populace thethirst for power. But it failed toremember that sense of continuity in

human effort without which newconstructions are built on sand. Thepower it exercised lacked thathorizon of the past through whichalone it suffers limitation to rightends.

The later part of Burke's attackupon the Revolution does notbelong to political philosophy. Noman is more responsible than he forthe temper which drew England intowar. He came to write rather withthe zeal of a fanatic waging a holy

war than in the temper of astatesman confronted with newideas. Yet even the Letters on aRegicide Peace (1796) have flashesof the old, incomparable insight;and they show that even in the midstof his excesses he did not war forlove of it. So that it is permissibleto think he did not lightly pen thosesentences on peace which stand asoases of wisdom in a desert ofextravagant rhetoric. "War neverleaves where it found a nation," hewrote, "it is never to be entered

upon without mature deliberation."That was a lesson his generationhad still to learn; nor did it take toheart the even nobler passage thatfollows. "The blood of man," hesaid, "should never be shed but toredeem the blood of man. It is wellshed for our family, for our friends,for our God, for our country, formankind. The rest is vanity; the restis crime." It is perhaps the mosttragic wrong in that century's historythat these words were written tojustify an effort of which they

supply an irrefutable condemnation.

V

Criticism of Burke's theories canbe made from at least two angles. Itis easy to show that his picture ofthe British Constitution was remotefrom the facts even when he wrote.Every change that he opposed wasessential to the security of the nextgeneration; and there followed noneof the disastrous consequences he

had foreshadowed. Such criticismwould be at almost every point just;and yet it would fail to touch theheart of Burke's position. What ismainly needed is analysis at once ofhis omissions and of the underlyingassumptions of what he wrote.Burke came to his maturity upon theeve of the Industrial Revolution;and we have it upon the authority ofAdam Smith himself that no one hadso clearly apprehended his owneconomic principles. Yet there is noword in what Burke had to say of

their significance. The vast agrarianchanges of the time contained, as itappears, no special moment evenfor him who burdened himselfunduly to restore the Beaconsfieldestate. No man was more eager thanhe that the public should beadmitted to the mysteries ofpolitical debate; yet he steadfastlyrefused to draw the obviousinference that once the means ofgovernment were made known thosewho possessed the knowledgewould demand their share in its

application. He did not see that themetaphysics he so profoundlydistrusted was itself the offspring ofthat contemptible worship ofexpediency which Blackstonegeneralized into a legalistic jargon.Men never move to the adumbrationof general right until the conquest ofpolitical rights has been provedinadequate. That Burke himself maybe said in a sense to have seenwhen he insisted upon the danger ofexamining the foundations of theState. Yet a man who refuses to

admit that the constantdissatisfaction with thosefoundations his age expressed is theexpression of serious ill in the bodypolitic is wilfully blind to the factsat issue. No one had more faithfullythan Burke himself explained whythe Whig oligarchy was obsolete;yet nothing would induce him everto realize that the alternative toaristocratic government isdemocracy and that its absence wasthe cause of that disquiet of whichhe realized that Wilkes was but the

symptom.

Broadly, that is to say, Burkewould not realize that the reign ofpolitical privilege was drawing toits close. That is the real meaning ofthe French Revolution and therein itrepresents a stream of tendency notless active in England than abroad.In France, indeed, the lines weremore sharply drawn than elsewhere.The rights men craved were not, asBurke insisted, the immediateoffspring of metaphysic fancy, but

the result of a determination to endthe malignant wrong of centuries. Apower that knew no responsibility,war and intolerance that derivedonly from the accidental caprice ofthe court, arrest that bore norelation to offence, taxationinversely proportionate to theability to pay, these were theprescriptive privileges that Burkeinvited his generation to accept aspart of the accumulated wisdom ofthe past. It is not difficult to see whythose who swore their oath in the

tennis-court at Versailles shouldhave felt such wisdom worthy to becondemned. Burke's caution was forthem the timidity of one whoembraces existent evils rather thanfly to the refuge of an accessiblegood. In a less degree, the same istrue of England. The constitutionthat Burke called upon men toworship was the constitution whichmade the Duke of Bedfordpowerful, that gave norepresentation to Manchester and amember to Old Sarum, which

enacted the game laws and left uponthe statute-book a penal code whichhardly yielded to the noble attack ofRomilly. These, which were forBurke merely the accidentalexcrescences of a noble ideal, werefor them its inner essence; andwhere they could not reform theywere willing to destroy.

The revolutionary spirit, in fact,was as much the product of the pastas the very institutions it came tocondemn. The innovations were the

inevitable outcome of pastoppression. Burke refused to seethat aspect of the picture. Heascribed to the crime of the presentwhat was due to the half-wilfulerrors of the past. The man whogrounded his faith in historicexperience refused to admit ashistory the elements alien from hisspecial outlook. He took that libertynot to venerate where he wasunable to comprehend which hedenied to his opponents. Nor did headmit the uses to which his doctrine

of prescription was bound to be putin the hands of selfish andunscrupulous men. No one willobject to privilege for a Chatham;but privilege for the Duke ofGrafton is a different thing, andBurke's doctrine safeguards theinnumerable men of whom Graftonis the type in the hope that by happyaccident some Chatham will oneday emerge. He justifies theprivileges of the English Church inthe name of religious well-being;but it is difficult to see what men

like Watson or ArchbishopCornwallis have got to do withreligion. The doctrine ofprescription might be admirable ifall statesmen were so wise asBurke; but in the hands of lessermen it becomes no more than theprotective armour of vestedinterests into the ethics of which itrefuses us leave to examine.

That suspicion of thought isintegral to Burke's philosophy, andit deserves more examination than it

has received. In part it is a rejectionof the Benthamite position that manis a reasoning animal. It puts itstrust in habit as the chief source ofhuman action; and it thus isdistrustful of thought as leading intochannels to which the nature of manis not adapted. Novelty, which isassumed to be the outcome ofthought, it regards as subversive ofthe routine upon which civilizationdepends. Thought is destructive ofpeace; and it is argued that weknow too little of political

phenomena to make us venture intothe untried places to which thoughtinvites us. Yet the first of manyanswers is surely the most obviousfact that if man is so much thecreature of his custom no reasonwould prevail save where theyproved inadequate. If thought issimply a reserve power in society,its strength must obviously dependupon common acceptance; and thatcan only come when some routinehas failed to satisfy the impulses ofmen.

But we may urge a difficulty thatis even more decisive. No system ofhabits can ever hope to endure longin a world where the cumulativepower of memory enables change tobe so swift; and no system of habitscan endure at all unless itsunderlying idea represents thesatisfaction of a general desire. Itmust, that is to say, make rationalappeal; and, indeed, as Aristotlesaid, it can have virtue only to thepoint where it is conscious of itself.

The uncritical routine of whichBurke is the sponsor would heredeprive the mass of men of virtue.Yet in modern civilization thewhole strength of any customdepends upon exactly thatconsciousness of right which Burkerestricted to his aristocracy. Ourreal need is less the automaticresponse to ancient stimulus thanpower to know what stimulus hassocial value. We need, that is tosay, the gift of criticism rather thanthe gift of inert acceptance. Not, of

course, that the habits which Burkeso earnestly admired are at all partof our nervous endowment in anyintegral sense. The short space ofthe French Revolution made thehabit of thinking in terms ofprogress an essential part of ourintellectual inheritance; and wherethe Burkian school proclaims howexceptional progress has been inhistory, we take that as proof of theease with which essential habit maybe acquired. Habit, in fact, withoutphilosophy destroys the finer side

of civilized life. It may leave astratum to whom its riches havebeen discovered; but it leaves themass of men soulless automatawithout spontaneous response to thechords struck by another hand.

Burke's answer would, of course,have been that he was not ademocrat. He did not trust thepeople and he rated their capacityas low. He thought of the people—itwas obviously a generalizationfrom his time—as consistently

prone to disorder and checked onlyby the force of ancient habit. Yet hehas himself supplied the answer tothat attitude. "My observation," hesaid in his Speech on the EastIndia Bill, "has furnished me withnothing that is to be found in anyhabits of life or education whichtends wholly to disqualify men forthe functions of government." Wecan go further than that sobercaution. We know that there is onetechnique only capable of securinggood government and that is the

training of the mass of men tointerest in it. We know that no Statecan hope for peace in which largetypes of experience are withoutrepresentation. Indeed, if proofwere here wanting, an examinationof the eighteenth century wouldsupply it. Few would deny thatstatesmen are capable ofdisinterested sacrifice for classes ofwhose inner life they are ignorant;yet the relation between law and theinterest of the dominant class is toointimate to permit with safety the

exclusion of a part of the State fromsharing in its guidance. Nor didBurke remember his own wisesaying that "in all disputes betweenthe people and their rulers thepresumption is at least upon a par infavor of the people"; and he quoteswith agreement that great sentenceof Sully's which traces popularviolence to popular suffering. Noone can watch the economicstruggles of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries or calculate thepain they have involved to humble

men, without admitting that theyrepresent the final protest of anoutraged mind against oppressiontoo intolerable to be borne. Burkehimself, as his own speeches show,knew little or nothing of the paininvolved in the agrarian changes ofhis age. The one way to avoidviolent outbreak is not exclusion ofthe people from power but theirparticipation in it. The popularsense of right may often, asAristotle saw, be wiser than theopinion of statesmen. It is not

necessary to equate the worth ofuntrained commonsense withexperienced wisdom to suggest that,in the long run, neglect of commonsense will make the effort of thatwisdom fruitless.

This, indeed, is to take the lowestground. For the case against Burke'saristocracy has a moral aspect withwhich he did not deal. He did notinquire by what right a handful ofmen were to be hereditarygovernors of a whole people.

Expediency is no answer to thequestion, for Bentham was presentlyto show how shallow was that basisof consent. Once it is admitted thatthe personality of men is entitled torespect institutional room must befound for its expression. The Stateis morally stunted where theirpowers go undeveloped. There issomething curious here in Burke'sinability to suspect deformity in asystem which gave his talents butpartial place. He must have knownthat no one in the House of

Commons was his equal. He musthave known how few of those hecalled upon to recognize thesplendor of their function werecapable of playing the part hepictured for them. The answer to amorally bankrupt aristocracy issurely not the overwhelming effortrequired in its purification when theplaintiff is the people; for the merefact that the people is the plaintiff isalready evidence of its fitness forpower. Burke gave no hint of howthe level of his governing class

could be maintained. He saidnothing of what education mightaccomplish for the people. He didnot examine the obviousconsequences of their economicstatus. Had his eyes not beenobscured by passion the work ofthat States-General the names inwhich appeared to him soastonishing in their inexperience,might have given him pause. The"obscure provincial advocates ...stewards of petty local jurisdictions... the fomenters and conductors of

the petty war of village vexation"legislated, out of their inexperience,for the world. Their resolution,their constancy, their high sense ofthe national need, were preciselythe qualities Burke demanded in hisgoverning class; and the States-General did not move from thestraight path he laid down until theymet with intrigue from those ofwhom Burke became the licensedchampion.

Nor is it in the least clear that his

emphasis upon expediency is, in anyreal way, a release frommetaphysical inquiry. Rather may itbe urged that what was needed inBurke's philosophy was the clearavowal of the metaphysic itimplied. Nothing is more greatlywanted in political inquiry thandiscovery of that "intuition moresubtle than any articulate majorpremise" which, as Mr. JusticeHolmes has said, is the truefoundation of so many of ourpolitical judgments. The theory of

natural rights upon which Burkeheaped such contempt was wrongrather in its form than in itssubstance. It clearly suffered fromits mistaken effort to trace to animaginary state of nature what wasdue to a complex experience. Itsuffered also from its desire to laydown universal formulæ. It neededto state the rights demanded in termsof the social interests they involvedrather than in the abstract ethic theyimplied. But the demands whichunderlay the thought of men like

Price and Priestley was as much theoffspring of experience as Burke'sown doctrine. They made, indeed,the tactical mistake of seeking togive an unripe philosophic form to apolitical strategy wherein, clearlyenough, Burke was their master. Butno one can read the answers ofPaine and Mackintosh, who bothwere careful to avoid the panoplyof metaphysics, to the Reflections,without feeling that Burke failed tomove them from their main position.Expediency may be admirable in

telling the statesmen what to do; butit does not explain the sources ofhis ultimate act, nor justify the thingfinally done. The unconscious deepswhich lie beneath the surface of themind are rarely less urgent than themotives that are avowed. Action isless their elimination than theirindex; and we must penetrate withintheir recesses before we have thefull materials for judgment.

Considered in this fashion, thecase for natural rights is surely

unanswerable. The things that mendesire correspond, in some roughfashion, to the things they need.Natural rights are nothing more thanthe armour evolved to protect theirvital interests. Upon the narrowbasis of legal history it is, ofcourse, impossible to protect them.History is rather the record of thethwarting of human desire than of itsachievement. But upon the value ofcertain things there is a sufficientand constant opinion to give usassurance that repression will

ultimately involve disorder. Nor isthere any difference between theclasses of men in this regard.Forms, indeed, will vary; and thepower we have of answeringdemand will always wait upon thediscoveries of science. Our naturalrights, that is to say, will have achanging content simply becausethis is not a static world. But thatdoes not mean, as Burke insisted,that they are empty of experience.They come, of course, mainly frommen who have been excluded from

intimate contact with the fruits ofpower. Nonconformists in religion,workers without land or capitalsave the power of their own hands,it is from the disinherited that theydraw, as demands, their strength.Yet it is difficult to see, as Burkewould undoubtedly have insisted,that they are the worse from thesource whence they derive. Ratherdo they point to grave inadequacy inthe substance of the state,inadequacy neglect of which has ledto the cataclysms of historic

experience. The unwillingness ofBurke to examine into theirfoundation reveals his lack of moralinsight into the problem heconfronted.

That lack of insight must, ofcourse, be given some explanation;and its cause seems rooted inBurke's metaphysic outlook. He wasprofoundly religious; and he did notdoubt that the order of the universewas the command of God. It was, asa consequence, beneficent; and to

deny its validity was, for him, todoubt the wisdom of God. "Havingdisposed," he wrote, "andmarshalled us by a divine tactic, notaccording to our will, but to His,He had, in and by that disposition,vitally subjected us to act the partwhich belongs to the place assignedus." The State, in fact, it is to bebuilt upon the sacrifice of men; andthis they must accept as of the willof God. We are to do our duty inour allotted station withoutrepining, in anticipation, doubtless,

of a later reward. What we are isthus the expression of his goodness;and there is a real sense in whichBurke may be said to havemaintained the inherent rightness ofthe existing order. Certainly hethrows a cloak of religiousveneration about the purelymetaphysical concept of property;and his insistence upon the value ofpeace as opposed to truth is surelypart of the same attitude. Nor is iterroneous to connect thisbackground with his antagonism to

the French Revolution. What therewas most distressing to him was theoverthrowal of the Church, and hedid not hesitate, in very strikingfashion, to connect revolutionaryopinion with infidelity. IndeedBurke, like Locke, seems to havebeen convinced that a social sensewas impossible in an atheist; andhi s Letters on a Regicide Peacehave a good deal of that relentlessillogic which made de Maistreconnect the first sign of dissent fromultramontanism with the road to a

denial of all faith. Nothing is moredifficult than to deal with a thinkerwho has had a revelation; and thissense that the universe was a divinemystery not to be too nearlyscrutinized by man grew greatlyupon Burke in his later years. It wasnot an attitude which reason couldoverthrow; for its first principlewas an awe in the presence of factsto which reason is a stranger.

There is, moreover, in Burke aPlatonic idealism which made him,

like later thinkers of the school,regard existing difficulties withsomething akin to complacentbenevolence. What interested himwas the idea of the English State;and whatever, as he thought,deformed it, was not of the essenceof its nature. He denied, that is tosay, that the degree to which apurpose is fulfilled is as importantas the purpose itself. A thingbecomes good by the end it has inview; and the deformities of timeand place ought not to lead us to

deny the beauty of the end. It is thegreat defect of all idealisticphilosophy that it should come tothe examination of facts in sooptimistic a temper. It neversufficiently realizes that in thetransition from theoretic purpose topractical realization a significanttransformation may occur. We donot come to grips with the facts.What we are bidden to remember isthe splendor of what the facts aretrying to be. The existing order isbeatified as a necessary stage in a

beneficent process. We are not toseparate out the constituent elementstherein, and judge them as facts intime and space. Society is one andindivisible; and the defects do not atany point impair the ultimateintegrity of the social bond.

Yet it is surely evident that in theheat and stress of social life, wecannot afford so long a period asthe basis for our judgment. We maywell enough regard the corruptionof the monarchy under the later

Hanoverians as the necessaryprelude to its purification underVictoria; but that does not make itany the less corrupt. We may evensee how a monistic view of societyis possible to one who, like Burke,is uniquely occupied with the publicgood. But the men who, like Muirand Hardy in the treason trials ofthe Revolution, think rather in termsof the existing disharmonies than thebeauty of the purpose upon whichthey rest, are only human if theythink those disharmonies more real

than the purpose they do not meet.They were surely to be pardoned if,reading the Reflections of Burke,they regarded class distinctions asmore vital than their harmony ofinterest, when they saw the tenacitywith which privileges they did notshare were defended. It is evenpossible to understand why someinsisted that if those privilegeswere, as Burke had argued,essential to the construction of thewhole, it was against that whole,alike in purpose and in realization,

that they were in revolt. For themthe fact of discontinuity was vital.They could not but ask forhappiness in their own individuallives no less than in the State ofwhich they were part. They came tosee that without self-government inthe sense of their own activeparticipation in power, suchhappiness must go unfulfilled. TheState, in fact, may have the noblestpurpose; but its object is attemptedby agents who are also mortal men.The basis of their scrutiny became

at once pragmatic. The test ofallegiance to established institutionsbecame immediately theachievement for which they wereresponsible. The achievement, asthey urged, was hardly written withadequacy in terms of the lives ofhumble men. That was why theyjudged no attitude of worth whichsought the equation of the real andthe ideal. The first lesson of theirown experience of power was theneed for its limitation by theinstructed judgment of free

minds.[18]

[18] Cf. my Authority in theModern State, pp. 65-9.

VI

No man was more deeply hostileto the early politics of the romanticmovement, to the Contrat Social ofRousseau and the Political Justiceof Godwin, than was Burke; yet, onthe whole, it is with the romanticsthat Burke's fundamental influenceremains. His attitude to reason, hisexaltation of passion and

imagination over the consciouslogic of men, were of the inmoststuff of which they were made. Inthat sense, at least, his kinship iswith the great conservativerevolution of the generation whichfollowed him. Hegel and Savigny inGermany, de Maistre and Bonald inFrance, Coleridge and the laterWordsworth in England, are in atrue sense his disciples. That doesnot mean that any of them weredirectly conscious of his work butthat the movement he directed had

its necessary outcome in theirdefence of his ideals. The path ofhistory is strewn with undistributedmiddles; and it is possible that inthe clash between his attitude andthat of Bentham there were thematerials for a fuller synthesis in alater time. Certainly there is nomore admirable corrective inhistorical politics that the contrastthey afford.

It is easy to praise Burke andeasier still to miss the greatness of

his effort. Perspective apart, he isdestined doubtless to live rather asthe author of some maxims that fewstatesmen will dare to forget than asthe creator of a system which, evenin its unfinished implications, ishardly less gigantic than that ofHobbes or Bentham. His verydefects are lessons in themselves.His unhesitating inability to seehow dangerous is the concentrationof property is standing proof thatmen are over-prone to judge therightness of a State by their own

wishes. His own contempt for theresults of reasonable inquiry is aceaseless lesson in the virtue ofconsistent scrutiny of ourinheritance. His disregard ofpopular desire suggests the fatalease with which we neglect theopinion of those who stand outsidethe active centre of politicalconflict. Above all, his hostility tothe Revolution should at least makelater generations beware lestnovelty of outlook be undulyconfounded with erroneous

doctrine.

Yet even when such deductionhas been made, there is hardly agreater figure in the history ofpolitical thought in England.Without the relentless logic ofHobbes, the acuteness of Hume, themoral insight of T.H. Green, he hasa large part of the faculties of each.H e brought to the politicalphilosophy of his generation a senseof its direction, a lofty vigour ofpurpose, and a full knowledge of its

complexity, such as no otherstatesman has ever possessed. Hisflashes of insight are things that go,as few men have ever gone, into thehidden deeps of politicalcomplexity. Unquestionably, hisspeculation is rather that of theorator in the tribune than of thethinker in his study. He never forgothis party, and he wrote always inthat House of Commons atmospherewhich makes a man unjust to theargument and motives of hisopponent. Yet, when the last word

of criticism has been made, thebalance of illumination is immense.He illustrates at its best the value ofthat party-system the worth of whichmade so deep an impression on allhe wrote. He showed thatgovernment by discussion can bemade to illuminate great principles.He showed also that allegiance toparty is never inconsistent with thedeeper allegiance to the demand ofconscience. When he came to theHouse of Commons, the prospectsof representative government were

very dark; and it is mainly to hisemphasis upon its virtues that itsvictory must be attributed.Institutional change is likely to bemore rapid than in his generation;for we seem to have reached thatmoment when, as he foresaw, "theywho persist in opposing that mightycurrent will appear rather to resistthe decrees of Providence itselfthan the mere designs of men." Theprinciples upon which we proceedare doubtless different from thosethat he commended; yet his very

challenge to their wisdom onlygives to his warning a deeperinspiration for our effort.

CHAPTER VII

THE FOUNDATIONS OFECONOMIC

LIBERALISM

I

The Industrial Revolution ishardly less a fundamental change inthe habits of English thought than inthe technique of commercialproduction. Alongside the

discoveries of Hargreaves andCrompton, the ideas of Hume andAdam Smith shifted the wholeperspective of men's minds. TheRevolution, indeed, like all greatmovements, did not originate at anygiven moment. There was no suddeninvention which made thehampering system of government-control seem incompatible withindustrial advance. Themercantilism against which thework of Adam Smith was somagistral a protest was already

rather a matter of external thaninternal commerce when he wrote.He triumphed less because hesuddenly opened men's eyes to atruth hitherto concealed thanbecause he represented theculmination of certain principleswhich, under various aspects, werecommon to his time. The movementfor religious toleration is not onlyparalleled in the next century by themovement for economic freedom,but is itself in a real sense theparent of the latter. For it is not

without significance that the pre-Adamite economists were almostwithout exception the urgentdefenders of religious toleration.The landowners were churchmen,the men of commerce largelyNonconformist; and religiousproscription interfered with thebalance of trade. When the roots ofreligious freedom had been secured,it was easy for them to transfer theirargument to the secular sphere.

Nothing, indeed, is more

important in the history of Englishpolitical philosophy than to realizethat from Stuart times theNonconformists were deeply bittenwith distrust of government. Itscourts of special instance hamperedindustrial life at every turn in theinterest of religious conformity.Their heavy fines and irritatingrestrictions upon foreign workmenwere nothing so much as a tax uponindustrial progress. What theNonconformists wanted was to beleft alone; and Davenant explained

the root of their desire when he tellsof the gaols crowded withsubstantial tradesmen whoseimprisonment spelt unemploymentfor thousands of workmen. SirWilliam Temple, in his descriptionof Holland, represents economicprosperity as the child of toleration.The movement for ecclesiasticalfreedom in England, moreover,became causally linked with thatprotest against the system ofmonopolies with which it was thehabit of the court to reward its

favorites. Freedom in economicmatters, like freedom in religion,came rapidly to mean permissionthat diversity shall exist; andeconomic diversity soon came tomean free competition. The lattereasily became imbued withreligious significance. Englishpuritanism, as Troeltsch has shownus, insisted that work was the willof God and its performance the testof grace. The greater the energy ofits performance, the greater thelikelihood of prosperity; and thence

it is but a step to argue that the freedevelopment of a man's industrialworth is the law of God. Success inbusiness, indeed, became for manya test of religious grace, andpoverty the proof of God's disfavor.Books like Steele's ReligiousTradesman (1684) show clearlyhow close is the connection. Thehostility of the English landownersto the commercial classes in theeighteenth century is at bottom theinheritance of religious antagonism.The typical qualities of dissent

became a certain pushful exertionby which the external criteria ofsalvation could be secured.

Much of the contemporaryphilosophy, moreover, fits in withthis attitude. From the time ofBacon, the main object ofspeculation was to disrupt thescholastic teleology. In the resultthe State becomes dissolved into adiscrete mass of individuals, andthe self-interest of each is thestarting-point of all inquiry. Hobbes

built his state upon the selfishnessof men; even Locke makes theindividual enter political life for thebenefits that accrue therefrom. Thecynicism of Mandeville, theutilitarianism of Hume, are onlybypaths of the same tradition. Theorganic society of the middle agesgives place to an individual whobuilds the State out of his owndesires. Liberty becomes theirrealization; and the object of theState is to enable men in the fullestsense to secure the satisfaction of

their private wants. How far is thatconception from the Anglicanoutlook of the seventeenth century, asermon of Laud's makes clear. "Ifany man," he said,[19] "be soaddicted to his private interest thathe neglects the common State, he isvoid of the sense of piety, andwishes peace and happiness forhimself in vain. For, whoever he be,he must live in the body of thecommonwealth and in the body ofthe Church." So Platonic an outlookwas utterly alien from the temper of

puritanism. They had no thought ofsacrificing themselves to aninstitution which they had muchground for thinking existed only fortheir torment. The development ofthe religious instinct to the level ofsalvation found its philosophicanalogue in the development of theeconomic sense of fitness. The Statebecame the servant of the individualfrom being his master; and servicebecame equated with an internalpolicy of laissez-faire.

[19] Sermon of June 19, 1621.Works (ed. of 1847), p. 28.

Such summary, indeed, abridgesthe long process of release fromwhich the eighteenth century hadstill to suffer; nor does itsufficiently insist upon the degree towhich the old idea of state controlstill held sway in external policiesof trade. Mercantilism was still inthe ascendant when Adam Smithcame to write. Few statesmen ofimportance before the younger Pitt

had learned the secret of itsfallacies; and, indeed, the chiefground for difference betweenChatham and Burke was theformer's suspicion that Burke hadembraced the noxious doctrine offree trade. Mercantilism, by thetime of Locke, is not the simpleerror that wealth consists in bullionbut the insistence that the balance oftrade must be preserved. Partly itwas doubtless derived from themethods of the old politicalarithmetic of men like Petty and

Davenant; the individual seeks abalance at the end of his year'saccounting and so, too, the Statemust have a balance. "A Kingdom,"said Locke, "grows rich or poor justas a farmer does, and no otherway"; and while there is a sense inwhich this is wholly true, themeaning attached to it by themercantilists was that foreigncompetition meant nationalweakness. They could not conceivea commercial bargain which wasprofitable to both sides. Nations

grow prosperous at each other'sexpense; wherefore a woolen tradein Ireland necessarily spells Englishunemployment. Even Davenant, whowas in many respects on the highroad to free trade, was in thisproblem adamant. Protection wasessential in the colonial market; forunless the trade of the colonies wasdirected through England they mightbe dangerous rivals. So Ireland andAmerica were sacrificed to the fearof British merchants, with theinevitable result that repression

brought from both the obvioussearch for remedy.

Herein it might appear that AdamSmith had novelty to contribute; yetnothing is more certain than that hisfull sense of the world as the onlytrue unit of marketing was fullygrasped before him. In 1691 SirDudley North published hisDiscourses upon Trade. Therein heclearly sees that commercialbarriers between Great Britain andFrance are basically as senseless as

would be commercial barriersbetween Yorkshire and Middlesex.Indeed, in one sense, North goeseven further than Adam Smith, forhe argues against the usury laws interms Bentham would hardly havedisowned. Ten years later ananonymous writer in a tract entitledConsiderations on the East IndiaTrade (1701) has no illusions aboutthe evil of monopoly. He sees withstriking clarity that the real problemis not at any cost to maintain theindustries a nation actually

possesses, but to have the nationalcapital applied in the most efficientchannels. So, too, Hume dismissedthe Mercantile theory with thecontemptuous remark that it wastrying to keep water beyond itsproper level. Tucker, as has beenpointed out, was a free trader, andhis opinion of the American warwas that it was as mad as those whofought "under the peaceful Cross torecover the Holy Land"; and heurged, indeed, prophesied, the unionwith Ireland in the interest of

commercial amity. Nor must theemphasis of the Physiocrats uponfree trade be forgotten. There is noevidence now that Adam Smithowed this perception to hisacquaintance with Quesnay andTurgot; but they may well haveconfirmed him in it, and they showthat the older philosophy wasattacked on every side.

Nor must we miss the generalatmosphere of the time. On thewhole his age was a conservative

one, convinced, without due reason,that happiness was independent ofbirth or wealth and that natural lawsomehow could be made to justifyexisting institutions. The poets, likePope, were singing of the small partof life which kings and laws mayhope to cure; and that attitude iswritten in the general absence ofeconomic legislation during theperiod. Religiously, the Churchexalted the status quo; and where,as with Wesley, there was revolt,its impetus directed the mind to the

source of salvation in the individualact. It may, indeed, be generallyargued that the religious teachersacted as a social soporific. Whereriches accumulated, they could beregarded as the blessing of God;where they were absent theirunimportance for eternal happinesscould be emphasized. Burke's earlyattack on a system whichcondemned "two hundred thousandinnocent persons ... to so intolerableslavery" was, in truth, a justificationo f the existing order. The social

question which, in the previouscentury, men like Bellers andWinstanley had brought into view,dropped out of notice until the lastquarter of the century. There was,that is to say, no organizedresistance possible to the power ofindividualism; and resistance wasunlikely to make itself heard oncethe resources of the IndustrialRevolution were brought into play.Men discovered with somethingakin to ecstasy the possibilities ofthe new inventions; and when the

protest came against the misery theyeffected, it was answered that theyrepresented the working of thatnatural law by which the energies ofmen may raise them to success. Anddiscontent could easily, as with thesaintly Wilberforce, be counteredby the assertion that it was revoltagainst the will of God.

II

Few lives represent more

splendidly than that of Adam Smiththe speculative ideal of adispassionate study of philosophy.He was fortunate in his teachers andhis friends. At Glasgow he was thepupil of Francis Hutcheson; andeven if he was taught nothing atOxford, at least six years of leisuregave him ample opportunity tolearn. His professorship at Glasgownot only brought him into contactwith men like Hume, but alsoadmitted him to intercourse with agroup of business men whose

liberal sentiments on commerceundoubtedly strengthened, if theydid not originate, his own liberalviews. At Glasgow, too, in 1759, hepublished his Theory of MoralSentiments, written with sufficientpower of style to obscure its innerpoverty of thought. The bookbrought him immediately adistinguished reputation from apublic which exalted elegance ofdiction beyond all literary virtues.The volatile Charles Townshendmade him tutor to the Duke of

Buccleuch, through whom Smith notonly secured comparative affluencefor the rest of his days, but also aFrench tour in which he met at itsbest the most brilliant society inEurope. The germ of his Wealth ofNations already lay hidden in thoseGlasgow lectures which Mr.Cannan has so happily recoveredfor us; and it was in a moment ofleisure in France that he set to workto put them together in systematicfashion. Not, indeed, that theFrenchmen whom he met, Turgot,

Quesnay and Dupont de Nemours,can be said to have done more thanconfirm the truths he had alreadybeen teaching. When he returned toScotland and a competence tenyears of constant labor werenecessary before the Wealth ofNations was complete. After itspublication, in 1776, Adam Smithdid little save attend to theadministrative duties of a minor, butlucrative office in the Customs.Until the end, indeed, he never quitegave up the hope, foreshadowed

first in the Moral Sentiments ofcompleting a gigantic survey ofcivilized institutions. But he was aslow worker, and his health wasnever robust. It was enough that heshould have written his book andcherished friendships such as it isgiven to few men to possess. Humeand Burke, Millar the jurist, JamesWatt, Foulis the printer, Black thechemist and Hutton of geologicalfame—it is an enviable circle. Hehad known Turgot on intimate termsand visited Voltaire on Lake

Geneva. Hume had told him that hisbook had "depth and solidity andacuteness"; the younger Pitt hadconsulted him on public affairs.Few men have moved amid suchhappy peace within the very centreof what was most illustrious in theirage.

We are less concerned here withthe specific economic details of theWealth of Nations than with itsgeneral attitude to the State. Buthere a limitation upon criticism

must be noted. The man of whomSmith writes is man in search ofwealth; by definition the economicmotive dominates his actions. Suchabuse, therefore, as Ruskin pouredupon him is really beside the pointwhen his objective is borne inmind. What virtually he does is toassume the existence of a naturaleconomic order which tends, whenunrestrained by counter-tendencies,to secure the happiness of men."That order of things whichnecessity imposes in general," he

writes, "... is, in every particularcountry promoted by the naturalinclinations of man"; and he goes onto explain what would have resulted"if human institutions had neverthwarted those natural inclinations.""All systems either of preference orof restraint, therefore, being thuscompletely taken away," he writesagain, "the obvious and simplesystem of natural liberty establishesitself of its own accord. Every man,as long as he does not violate thelaws of justice, is left perfectly free

to pursue his own interest in hisown way.... The sovereign iscompletely discharged from a dutyin the attempting to perform whichhe must always be exposed toinnumerable delusions, and for theproper performance of which nohuman wisdom or knowledge wouldever be sufficient; the duty ofsuperintending the industry ofprivate people and of directing ittowards the employments mostsuitable to the interests of thesociety."

The State, in this conception hasbut three functions—defence,justice and "the duty of erecting andmaintaining certain public worksand certain public institutions whichit can never be for the interest ofany individual, or small number ofindividuals, to erect and maintain."The State, in fact, is simply toprovide the atmosphere in whichproduction is possible. Nor doesSmith conceal his thought that themain function of justice is the

protection of property. "Theaffluence of the rich," he wrote,"excites the indignation of the poor,who are often both driven by wantand prompted by envy to invadetheir possessions. It is only underthe shelter of the civil magistratethat the owner of that valuableproperty, acquired by the labor ofmany years, or perhaps manysuccessive generations, can sleep asingle night in security." Theattitude, indeed, is intensified by hisconstant sense that the capital which

makes possible new productivity isthe outcome of men's sacrifice; toprotect it is thus to safeguard thesources of wealth itself. And even ifthe State is entrusted with educationand the prevention of disease, thisis rather for the general benefit theyconfer and the doubt that privateenterprise would find themprofitable than as the expression ofa general rule. Collective effort ofevery kind awakened in him a deepdistrust. Trade regulations such asthe limitation of apprenticeship he

condemned as "manifestencroachment upon the just libertyof the workman and of those whomay be disposed to employ him."Even educational establishments aresuspect on the ground—notunnatural after his own experienceof Oxford—that their possibilitiesof comfort may enervate the naturalenergies of men.

The key to this attitude is clearenough. The improvement of societyis due, he thinks not to the

calculations of government but tothe natural instincts of economicman. We cannot avoid the impulseto better our condition; and the lessits effort is restrained the morecertain it is that happiness willresult. We gain, in fact, some senseof its inherent power when we bearin mind the magnitude of itsaccomplishment despite the follyand extravagance of princes.Therein we have some index ofwhat it would achieve if leftunhindered to work out its own

destinies. Human institutionscontinually thwart its power; forthose who build those institutionsare moved rather "by the momentaryfluctuations of affairs" than theirtrue nature. "That insidious andcrafty animal, vulgarly called apolitician or statesman" meets littlemercy for his effort compared to themagic power of the natural order."In all countries where there is atolerable security," he writes,"every man of commonunderstanding will endeavor to

employ whatever stock he cancommand in procuring eitherpresent enjoyment or future profit."Individual spontaneity is thus theroot of economic good; and the realjustification of the state is theprotection it affords to this impulse.Man, in fact, is by nature a traderand he is bound by nature todiscover the means most apt toprogress.

Nor was he greatly troubled bydifferences of fortune. Like most of

the Scottish school, especiallyHutcheson and Hume, he thoughtthat men are much alike inhappiness, whatever their station orendowments. For there is a "never-failing certainty" that "all mensooner or later accommodatethemselves to whatever becomestheir permanent situation"; though headmits that there is a certain levelbelow which poverty and misery gohand in hand. But, for the most part,happiness is simply a state of mind;and he seems to have had but little

suspicion that differences of wealthmight issue in dangerous socialconsequence. Men, moreover, heregarded as largely equal in theiroriginal powers; and differences ofcharacter he ascribes to the variousoccupations implied in the divisionof labor. Each man, therefore, as hefollows his self-interest promotesthe general happiness of society.That principle is inherent in thesocial order. "Every man," he wrotein the Moral Sentiments, "is bynature first and principally

recommended to his own care" andtherein he is "led by an invisiblehand to promote an end which wasno part of his intention." The State,that is to say, is the sum ofindividual goods; whereby to betterourselves is clearly to its benefit.And that desire "which comes withus from the womb and never leavesus till we go to the grave" is themore efficacious the less it isrestrained by governmental artifice.For we know so well what makesus happy that none can hope to help

us so much as we help ourselves.

Enlightened selfishness is thusthe root of prosperity; but we mustnot fall into the easy fallacy whichmakes Smith deaf to the plaint of thepoor. He urged the employer tohave regard to the health andwelfare of the worker, a regardwhich was the voice of reason andhumanity. Where there was conflictbetween love of the status quo anda social good which Revolutionalone could achieve, he did not, at

least in the Moral Sentiments,hesitate to choose the latter. Orderwas, for the most part,indispensable; but "the greatest andnoblest of all characters" he madethe reformer of the State. Yet he istoo impressed by the working ofnatural economic laws to belittletheir influence. Employers, in hispicture, are little capable ofbenevolence or charity. Their ruleis the law of supply and demandand not the Sermon on the Mount.They combine without hesitation to

depress wages to the lowest pointof subsistence. They seize everyoccasion of commercial misfortuneto make better terms for themselves;and the greater the poverty the moresubmissive do servants become sothat scarcity is naturally regarded asmore favorable to industry.

Obviously enough, the innerhinge of all this argument is Smith'sconception of nature. Nor can therebe much doubt of what he thought itsinner substance. Facile distinctions

such as the effort of Buckle to showthat while in the Moral SentimentsAdam Smith was dealing with theunselfish side of man's nature, in theWealth of Nations he was dealingwith a group of facts whichrequired the abstraction of suchaltruistic elements, are reallybeside the point. Nature for Smith issimply the spontaneous action ofhuman character unchecked byhindrances of State. It is, as Bonarhas aptly said, "a vindication of theunconscious law present in the

separate actions of men when theseactions are directed by a certainstrong personal motive." AdamSmith's argument is an assumptionthat the facts can be made to showthe relative powerlessness ofinstitutions in the face of economiclaws grounded in humanpsychology. The psychology itselfis relatively simple, and, at least inthe Wealth of Nations not greatlydifferent from the avowedassumptions of utilitarianism. Heemphasizes the strength of reason in

the economic field, and his sensethat it enables men to judge muchbetter of their best interests than anexternal authority can hope to do.And therefore the practicesaccomplished by this reason arethose in which the impulses of menare to be found. The order theyrepresent is the natural order; andwhatever hinders its full operationis an unwise check upon the thingsfor which men strive.

Obviously enough, this attitude

runs the grave risk of seeming toabstract a single motive—the desirefor wealth—from the confusedwelter of human impulses and tomake it dominant at the expense ofhuman nature itself. A hasty readingof Adam Smith would, indeed,confirm that impression; and that isperhaps why he seemed to Ruskin toblaspheme human nature. But amore careful survey, particularlywhen the Moral Sentiments isborne in mind suggests a differentconclusion. His attitude is implicit

in the general medium in which heworked. What he was trying to dowas less to emphasize that men careabove all things for the pursuit ofwealth than that no institutionalmodifications are able to destroythe power of that motive to labor.There is too much history in theWealth of Nations to make tenablethe hypothesis of completeabstraction. And there is even cleara sense of a nature behind hiscustom when he speaks of a "sacredregard" for life, and urges that every

man has property in his own labor.The truth here surely is that Smithwas living in a time of commercialexpansion. What was evident to himwas the potential wealth to be madeavailable if the obsolete system ofrestraint could be destroyed.Liberty to him meant absence ofrestraint not because its morepositive aspect was concealed fromhim but rather because the kind offreedom wanted in the environmentin which he moved was exactly thatfor which he made his plea. There

is a hint that freedom as a positivething was known to him from thefact that he relied upon education torelieve the evils of the division oflabor. But the general context of hisbook required less emphasis uponthe virtues of state-interference thanupon its defects. His cue was toshow that all the benefits ofregulation had been achieveddespite its interference; from which,of course, it followed that restraintwas a matter of supererogation.

III

It would be tedious to praise theWealth of Nations. It may bedoubtful whether Buckle's ecstaticjudgment that it has had moreinfluence than any other book in theworld was justified even when hewrote; but certainly it is one of theseminal books of the modern time.What is more important is to notethe perspective in which its mainteaching was set. He wrote in themidst of the first significant

beginnings of the IndustrialRevolution; and his emphaticapproval of Watt's experimentssuggests that he was not unalive toits importance. Yet it cannot in anyfull sense be said that the IndustrialRevolution has a large part in hisbook. The picture of industrialorganization and its possibilities istoo simple to suggest that he hadcaught any far reaching glimpse intothe future. Industry, for him, is stillin the last stage of handicraft; it is amatter of skillful workmanship and

not of mechanical appliance.Capital is still the laborious resultof parsimony. Credit is spoken ofrather in the tones of one who seesit less as a new instrument offinance than a dangerous attempt bythe aspiring needy to scale theheights of wealth. Profits arealways a justified return forproductive labor; interest thepayment for the use of the owner'spast parsimony. Business is still themiddleman distributing to theconsumer on a small scale. He did

not, or could not, conceive of anindustry either so vast or sodepersonalized as at present. Hewas rather writing of a systemwhich, like the politics of theeighteenth century, had reached anequilibrium of passable comfort.His natural order was, at bottom,the beatification of that to whichthis equilibrium tended. Its benefitsmight be improved by free trade andfree workmanship; but, upon thewhole, he saw no reason to call inquestion its fundamental dogmas.

Therein, of course, may be foundthe main secret of his omissions.The problem of labor finds no placein his book. The things that the poorhave absent from their lives, thatconcept of a national minimumbelow which no State can hope tofulfil even the meanest of its aims,of these he has no conception.Rather the note of the book is aquiet optimism, impressed by thepossibilities of constantimprovement which lie imbedded in

the human impulse to better itself.What he did not see is the way inwhich the logical outcome of thesystem he describes may well bethe attainment of great wealth at aprice in human cost that is beyondits worth. Therein, it is clear, allindividualistic theories of the statemiss the true essence of the socialbond. Those who came after AdamSmith saw only half his problem.He wrote a consumer's theory ofvalue. But whereas he had in mind ahappy and contented people, the

economics of Ricardo and Malthusseized upon a single element inhuman nature as that which alonethe State must serve. Freedom fromrestraint came ultimately to mean ajudgment upon national well-beingin terms of the volume of trade. "Itis not with happiness," said NassauSenior, "but with wealth that I amconcerned as a political economist;and I am not only justified inomitting, but am perhaps bound toomit, all considerations which haveno influence upon wealth."

In such an aspect, it was naturalfor the balance of investigation toswing towards the study of thetechnique of production; and withthe growing importance of capital,as machinery was introduced, theworker, without difficulty, becamean adjunct, easily replaced, to themachine. What was rememberedthen was the side of Adam Smithwhich looked upon enlightenedselfishness as the key to socialgood. Regulation became anathema

even when the evils it attempted torestrain were those which made themass of the people incapable ofcitizenship. Even national educationwas regarded as likely to destroyinitiative; or, as a pauper's dolewhich men of self-respect wouldregard with due abhorrence. TheState, in short, ceased to concernitself with justice save insofar asthe administration of a judicial codespelled the protection of the newindustrial system. Nothing is morestriking in the half-century after

Adam Smith than the optimism ofthe economist and the business manin contrast to the hopeless despairof labor. That men can organize toimprove their lot was denied withemphasis, so that until FrancisPlace even the workers themselveswere half-convinced. Themanufacturers were the State; andthe whole intellectual strength ofeconomics was massed to prove therightness of the equation. Theliterature of protest, men like Halland Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray,

exerted no influence upon thelegislation of the time; and RobertOwen was deemed an amiableeccentric rather than the prophet ofa new hope. The men whosucceeded, as Wilberforce, carriedout to the letter the unstatedassumptions of Puritan economics.The poor were consigned to a Godwhose dictates were by definitionbeneficent; and if they failed tounderstand the curious incidence ofhis rewards that was because hisways were inscrutable. No one who

reads the tracts of writers likeHarriet Martineau can fail to seehow pitiless was the operation ofthis attitude. Life is made a strugglebeneficent, indeed, but deriving itsultimate meaning from the miseryincident to it. The tragedy isexcused because the export-tradeincreases in its volume. The ironlaw of wages, the assumedtransition of every energetic workerto the ranks of wealth, the dangerlest the natural ability of the workerto better his condition be sapped by

giving to him that which his self-respect can better win—thesebecame the unconsciousassumptions of all economicdiscussion.

In all this, as in the foundationwith which Adam Smith providedit, we must not miss the element oftruth that it contains. No poison ismore subtly destructive of thedemocratic State than paternalism;and the release of the creativeimpulses of men must always be the

coping-stone of public policy.Adam Smith is the supremerepresentative of a tradition whichsaw that release effected byindividual effort. Where each mancautiously pursued the good as hesaw it, the realization was bound, inhis view, to be splendid. Apopulation each element of whichwas active and alert to its economicproblems could not escape theachievement of greatness. All that istrue; but it evades the obviousconditions we have inherited. For

even when the psychologicalinadequacies of Smith's attitude areput aside, we can judge his theoryin the light of the experience itsummarizes. Once it is admitted thatthe object of the State is theachievement of the good life, thefinal canon of politics is bound tobe a moral one. We have to inquireinto the dominant conception of thegood life, the number of those uponwhom it is intended that good shallbe conferred.

In the light of this conception it isobvious enough that Smith's view isimpossible. No mere conflict ofprivate interests, however pure inmotive, seems able to achieve aharmony of interest between themembers of the State. Liberty, in thesense of a positive and equalopportunity for self-realization, isimpossible save upon the basis ofthe acceptance of certain minimalstandards which can get acceptedonly through collective effort. Smithdid not see that in the processes of

politics what gets accepted is notthe will that is at every moment apart of the state-purpose, but thewill of those who in fact operate themachinery of government. In thehalf-century after he wrote the menwho dominated political life were,with the best intentions, moved bymotives at most points unrelated tothe national well-being. The fellow-servant doctrine would never haveobtained acceptance in a statewhere, as he thought, employer andworkman stood upon an equal

footing. Opposition to the FactoryActs would never have developedin a community where it wasrealized that below certainstandards of subsistence the veryconcept of humanity is impossible.Modern achievement implies atraining in the tools of life; and that,for most, is denied even in our ownday to the vast majority of men. Inthe absence of legislation, it iscertain that those who employ theservices of men will be theirpolitical masters; and it will follow

that their Acts of Parliament will beadapted to the needs of property.That shrinkage of the purpose of theState will mean for most not merelyhardship but degradation of all thatmakes life worthy. Upon thosestunted existences, indeed, awealthy civilization may easily bebuilded. Yet it will be a civilizationof slaves rather than of men.

The individualism, that is to say,for which Adam Smith was zealousdemands a different institutional

expression from that which he gaveit. We must not assume an a priorijustification for the forces of thepast. The customs of men mayrepresent the thwarting of theimpulses of the many at the expenseof the few not less easily than theymay embody a general desire; and itis surely a mistaken usage to dignifyas natural whatever may happen tohave occurred. A man may findself-realization not less in workingfor the common good than in thelimited satisfaction of his narrow

desire for material advancement.And that, indeed, is the starting-point of modern effort. Our libertymeans the consistent expression ofour personality in media where wefind people like-minded withourselves in their conception ofsocial life. The very scale ofcivilization implies collective plansand common effort. The constantrevision of our basic notions wasinevitable immediately science wasapplied to industry. There was thusno reason to believe that the system

of individual interests for whichSmith stood sponsor was morelikely to fit requirements of a newtime than one which implied thenational regulation of businessenterprise. The danger in everyperiod of history is lest we take ourown age as the term in institutionalevolution. Private enterprise has thesanction of prescription; but sincethe Industrial Revolution the chieflesson we have had to learn is theunsatisfactory character of that title.History is an unenviable record of

bad metaphysics used to defendobsolete systems. It took almost acentury after the publication of theWealth of Nations for men torealize that its axioms representedthe experience of a definite time.Smith thought of freedom in theterms most suitable to hisgeneration and stated them with alargeness of view which remainsimpressive even at a century'sdistance.

But nothing is more certain in the

history of political philosophy thanthat the problem of freedom changeswith each age. The nineteenthcentury sought release frompolitical privilege; and it built itssuccess upon the system preparedby its predecessor. It can never betoo greatly emphasized that in eachage the substance of liberty will befound in what the dominating forcesof that age most greatly want. WithLocke, with Smith, with Hegel andwith Marx, the ultimate hypothesisis always the summary of some

special experience universalized.That does not mean that the past isworthless. Politics, as Seeley said,are vulgar unless they areliberalized by history; and a statewhich failed to see itself as amosaic of ancestral institutionswould build its novelties uponfoundations of sand. Suspicions ofcollective effort in the eighteenthcentury ought not to mean suspicionin the twentieth; to think in suchfashion is to fall into the error forwhich Lassalle so finely criticized

Hegel. It is as though one were toconfound the accidental phases ofthe history of property with thephilosophic basis of property itself.From such an error it is the task ofhistory above all to free us. For itrecords the ideals and doubts ofearlier ages as a perennialchallenge to the coming time.

The rightness of this attitudeadmits of proof in terms of thedouble tradition to which AdamSmith gave birth. On the one hand

he is the founder of the classicpolitical economy. With Ricardo,the elder Mill and Nassau Senior,the main preoccupation is theproduction of wealth without regardto its moral environment; and thestate for them is merely an engine toprotect the atmosphere in whichbusiness men achieve their labors.There is nothing in them of that finedespair which made Stuart Millwelcome socialism itself rather thanallow the continuance of the newcapitalist system. Herein the State is

purged of moral purpose; and theutilitarian method achieves thegreatest happiness by insisting thatthe technique of production mustdominate all other circumstances.Until the Reform Act of 1867, theorthodox economists remainedunchallenged. The use of thefranchise was only beginning to beunderstood. The "new model" oftrade unionism had not yet beentested in the political field. But itwas discovered impossible to actany longer upon the assumptions of

the abstract economic man. Theinfallible sense of his own interestwas discovered to be without basisin the facts for the simple reasonthat the instruments of hisperception obviously requiredtraining if they were to be appliedto a complex world. Individualism,in the old, utilitarian sense, passedaway because it failed to build aState wherein a channel ofexpression might be found for thecreative energies of humble men.

It is only within the last twodecades that we have begun tounderstand the inner significance ofthe protest against this economicliberalism. Adam Smith haddeclared the source of value to liei n labor; and, at the moment of itsdeepest agony, there were menwilling to point the moral of histale. That it represented anincautious analysis was, for them,unimportant beside the fact that itopened once more a path wherebyeconomics could be reclaimed for

moral science. For if labor was thesource of value, as Bray andThompson pointed out, it seemed asthough degradation was the solepayment for its services. They didnot ask whether the organizationthey envisaged was economicallyprofitable, but whether it wasethically right. No one can read thehistory of these years and fail tounderstand their uncompromisingdenial of its rightness. Theirnegation fell upon unheeding ears;but twenty years later, the tradition

for which they stood came intoMarx's hands and was fashioned byhim into an interpretation of history.With all its faults of statement andof emphasis, the doctrine of theEnglish socialists has been, in laterhands, the most fruitful hypothesisof modern politics. It was adeliberate effort, upon the basis ofAdam Smith's ideas, to create acommonwealth in the interests ofthe masses. Wealth, in its view, wasless the mere production of goodsthan the accumulated happiness of

humble men. The impulses itpraised and sought through state-action to express were, indeed,different from those upon whichSmith laid emphasis; and he woulddoubtless have stood aghast at theway in which his thought was turnedto ends of which he did not dream.Yet he can hardly have desired agreater glory. He thus madepossible not only knowledge of aState untrammelled in its economiclife by moral considerations; butalso the road to those categories

wherein the old conception of co-operative effort might find a newexpression. Those who trod in hisfootsteps may have repudiated theideal for which he stood, but theymade possible a larger hope inwhich he would have been proudand glad to share.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography makes nopretence to completeness. Itattempts only to enumerate the moreobvious sources that an interestedreader would care to examine.

GENERAL

LESLIE STEPHEN.History of English

Thought in theEighteenth Century.1876. Vol. II, Chapters IXand X.

W.E.H. LECKY.History of England in theEighteenth Century.

A.L. SMITH.Political Philosophy inEngland in theSeventeenth andEighteenth Centuries int h e Cambridge ModernHistory. Vol. VI, Chapter

XXIII.J. BONAR.

Philosophy and PoliticalEconomy. Chapters V-IX.

F.W. MAITLAND.An Historical Sketch ofLiberty and Equality inCollected Papers. Vol. I.

CHAPTER II

JOHN LOCKE.Works (Eleventh

Edition), 10 volumes.London, 1812.

H.R. FOX-BOURNE.Life of John Locke.London, 1876.

T.H. GREEN.The Principles ofPolitical Obligation inCollected Works. Vol. II.London, 1908.

PETER. LORD KING.The Life and Letters ofJohn Locke. London,1858.

SIR F. POLLOCK.Locke's Theory of theState in Proc. Brit.Acad.. Vol. I. London,1904.

S.P. LAMPRECHT.The Moral and PoliticalPhilosophy of Locke.New York, 1918.

A.A. SEATON.The Theory of Tolerationunder the Later Stuarts.Cambridge, 1911.

J.N. FIGGIS.

The Divine Right ofKings. Cambridge, 1914.

CHAPTER III

JEREMY COLLIER.The History of PassiveObedience. London,1689.

WILLIAM SHERLOCK.The Case of Resistance.London, 1684.

CHARLES LESLIE.The Case of the Regale(Collected Works). Vol.Ill, p. 291.The Rehearsal.The New Association.Cassandra.The Finishing Stroke.Obedience to CivilGovernment ClearlyStated.The Best Answer.The Best of All.

SAMUEL GRASCOM.

A Brief Answer.E. SHELLINGFLEET.

A Vindication of theirMajesties Authoritie.

B. SHOWER.A Letter to aConvocation Man.

W. WAKE.The Authority ofChristian Princes. TheState of the Church(1703).

FRANCIS ATTERBURY.Rights, Powers and

Privileges of an EnglishConvocation (1701).

BENJAMIN HOADLY.Origins of CivilGovernment (1710).Preservative AgainstNonjurors (1716).Works, 3 vols. London(1773).

WILLIAM LAW.A Defence of ChurchPrinciples (ed. Gore).Edinburgh, 1904.

W. WARBURTON.

Alliance between Churchand State (1736).

J.H. OVERTON.The Nonjurors. NewYork, 1903.

T. LATHEBURY.History of Convocation.London, 1842.

CHAPTER IV

BERKELEY.

Essay TowardsPreventing the Ruin ofGreat Britain (1721).

H. ST. JOHN (ViscountBolingbroke).

Works. 5 vols. London,1754.

LORD EGMONT.Faction detected by theEvidence of Facts(1742).

DAVID HUME.Inquiry Concerning thePrinciples of Morals

(1752).Essays. (1742-1752) ed.Green & Grose. London,1876.

W. SICHEL.Life of Bolingbroke. 2vols. 1900-4.

J. CHURTON COLLINS.Bolingbroke andVoltaire in England.

J. HILL BURTON.Life of Hume.

CHAPTER V

MONTESQUIEU.L'Esprit des Lois (1748).

J.J. ROUSSEAU.Du Contrat Social(1762). See ed. byVaughan, 1918.

JOHN BROWN.Estimate of the Mannersand Principles of theTimes (1757).

ADAM FERGUSON.Essay on the History of

Civil Society (1767).WILLIAM BLACKSTONE.

Commentaries (1765-9).JEREMY BENTHAM.

A Fragment onGovernment (1776). Ed.F.C. Montague, 1891.

J. DE LOLME.The Constitution ofEngland (1775).

ROBERT WALLACE.Various Prospects(1761).

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY.

Essay on the FirstPrinciples ofGovernment (1768).

RICHARD PRICE.Observations on CivilLiberty (1776).Additional Observations(1777).

WILLIAM OGILVIE.The Right of Property inLand (1781). Ed.Macdonald, 1891.

JOSIAH TUCKER.Treatise on Civil

Government (1781).SAMUEL JOHNSON.

Taxation No Tyranny(1775).

M. BEER.History of BritishSocialism (1919).

JAMES BOSWELL.Life of Samuel Johnson(1791).

CHAPTER VI

EDMUND BURKE.Collected Works.London, 1808.

JOHN MORLEY.Edmund Burke (1867).Life of Burke (1887).

J. MACCUNN.The Political Philosophyof Burke (1908).

JUNIUS.Letters (1769-72).London, 1812.

THOMAS PAINE.The Rights of Man

(1791-2).JAMES MACKINTOSH.

Vendiciæ Gallicæ(1791).

CHAPTER VII

CHARLES DAVENANT.Works. London, 1771.

SIR DUDLEY NORTH.A Discourse upon Trade(1691).

ADAM SMITH.

Theory of MoralSentiments (1759).Wealth of Nations(1776).Lectures on Justice andPolice. (Ed. Cannan,1896).

W.R. SCOTT.Life of FrancisHutcheson (1900).

JOHN RAE.Life of Adam Smith(1895).

W. BAGEHOT.

Adam Smith as a Personin Coll. Works. Vol. VII.

F.W. HIRST.Adam Smith (1904).

W. HASBACH.Untersuchungen überAdam Smith (1891).

J. BONAR.A Catalogue of AdamSmith's Library (1894).

T. CLIFFE LESLIE.Adam Smith in Essays inMoral and PoliticalPhilosophy (1879).

E. TROELTSCH.Die Sociallehren derChristlichen Kirchen(1912).

INDEX

Addison, 69Andrewes, 83Ashley, 33-4

Atterbury, 102Austin, 62

Bagehot, 9, 249Barbeyrac, 68

Barrow, 84Bellarmine, 83, 121

Bentham, 23, 62, 72, 151, 157,175, 194

Berkeley, 10, 129Blackstone, 163-4, 174fBolingbroke, 69, 131f

Bonald, 277Bonar, 300

Bonwicke, 82Boswell, 209

Bray, 307, 315Brown (J.), 168Brown (R.), 52

Burke, 7, 8, 16, 30, 157, 159,166, 221f, 286

Burnet, 80, 87, 93Busher, 52

Cartwright, 97Chatham, 132, 167, 188, 262

Chillingworth, 52Chubb, 128

Coleridge, 277Collier, 84nCowper, 20Crabbe, 20

Dalrymple, 8Darwin, 67

Davenant, 283, 287Defoe, 8, 128, 132

Dicey, 175, 179

Disraeli, 132Divine Right, 7, 30

Dodwell, 82Dupont de Nemours, 292

Egmont, 142Eldon, 159

Ferguson, 172-4Fielding, 160Filmer, 7, 38

Galsworthy, 171-2George III, 13, 15, 158, 188,

213f

Godwin, 10, 163, 222, 276Goldsmith, 19, 223

Goodman, 57Grascom, 86

Gray, 160Green (T.H.), 61, 279

Haldane, 126Hales, 52

Halifax, 8, 27Hall, 17, 307

Hamilton (J.L. & B.), 19Harrington, 147

Hegel, 249, 277, 212-3

Hickes, 83Hoadly, 9, 22, 69, 107f

Hobbes, 8, 16, 30, 40f, 72, 91,278, 284

Hodgskin, 17, 307Holmes (O.W.), 63n, 269

Holt, 14,Hooker, 44

Hotman, 57, 68Hume, 8, 11, 71, 92, 143f,

278, 284, 297Hutcheson, 11, 153, 155, 291,

297

Independents, 40

Jackson, 84James II, 24f, 35

Johnson (Dr.), 18, 210f, 223,230

Junius, 21, 219

Keble, 82Kerr, 82

Knox, 57, 83, 97

Lassalle, 313Laud, 285

Law, 22, 108f

Leslie, 80, 85, 88, 90, 97, 104,132

Locke, 7, 11, 21, 29-76, 79,197, 207, 273, 287de Lolme, 10, 183f

Mackintosh, 269Madison, 63

Maine, 66, 249Maistre, 91, 252, 273

Malthus, 305Mandeville, 129, 284

Mariana, 57Martin, 69

Marx, 312, 315Melville, 121

Mill, 157Milton, 52

Molyneux, 68Montesquieu, 12, 63, 160f,

173, 183Morley, 132, 223

Newton, 37Newman, 81, 122, 125

North, 287

Ogilvie, 199fOwen, 17, 307

Oxford Movement, 81

Paine, 202, 269Paley, 157Pattison, 10

Penn, 58Place, 306

Pope, 69, 128, 132Price, 196f

Priestley, 72, 190fProast, 64

Prynne, 8, 55Pufendorf, 68Pulteney, 217

Quesnay, 288, 292

Renan, 249Ricardo, 305

Richardson, 160Richardson (S.), 52

Rousseau, 8, 74, 162f, 188,197, 276

Royer-Collard, 226Ruskin, 293, 301

Sanderson, 84Savigny, 249, 277

Seeley, 312Selden, 9

Senior, 304Separation of Powers, 63fShaftesbury, 11, 128, 155

Sherlock (T.), 108Sherlock (W.), 87

Shower, 99Sidney, 7, 57

Smith (Adam), 9, 16, 152, 195,258, 281f

Smith (A.L.), 140Snape, 108

Social Contract, 57Spelman, 9Spence, 202

Stammler, 60Steele, 284

Stephen (F.), 65Stephen (L.), 108, 223Stillingfleet, 37, 87, 93

Suarez, 57

Taylor, 52, 57Temple, 283

Thompson, 307, 215Tindal, 123

Tocqueville, 254Toleration, 52, 64

Tucker, 71, 206f, 288

Turgot, 288, 292

Voltaire, 12, 132, 160

Wake, 80, 100fWallace, 188

Walpole, 13, 21, 128-30Warburton, 69, 118f, 192

Wilberforce, 290Wilkes, 167, 188, 220

William III, 25fWilliams (Roger), 52

Woolston, 128Wordsworth, 277

End of the Project GutenbergEBook of Political Thought inEngland fromLocke to Bentham, by Harold J.Laski

*** END OF THIS PROJECTGUTENBERG EBOOK

POLITICAL THOUGHT INENGLAND ***

***** This file should be named14735-h.htm or 14735-h.zip *****This and all associated files ofvarious formats will be found in:http://www.gutenberg.net/1/4/7/3/14735/

Produced by David King and theOnline Distributed ProofreadingTeam

Updated editions will replace the

previous one--the old editionswill be renamed.

Creating the works from publicdomain print editions means that noone owns a United States copyrightin these works, so the Foundation(and you!) can copy and distribute itin the United States withoutpermission and without payingcopyright royalties. Special rules,set forth in the General Terms ofUse part of this license, apply tocopying and distributing Project

Gutenberg-tm electronic works toprotect the PROJECTGUTENBERG-tm concept andtrademark. ProjectGutenberg is a registeredtrademark, and may not be used ifyoucharge for the eBooks, unless youreceive specific permission. If youdo not charge anything for copies ofthis eBook, complying with therules is very easy. You may use thiseBook for nearly any purposesuch as creation of derivative

works, reports, performances andresearch. They may be modified andprinted and given away--you maydopractically ANYTHING withpublic domain eBooks.Redistribution issubject to the trademark license,especially commercialredistribution.

*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECTGUTENBERG LICENSEPLEASE READ THIS BEFOREYOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THISWORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tmmission of promoting the freedistribution of electronic works, byusing or distributing this work(or any other work associated inany way with the phrase "ProjectGutenberg"), you agree to comply

with all the terms of the Full ProjectGutenberg-tm License (availablewith this file or online athttp://gutenberg.net/license).

Section 1. General Terms of Useand Redistributing ProjectGutenberg-tmelectronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part ofthis Project Gutenberg-tmelectronic work, you indicate that

you have read, understand, agree toand accept all the terms of thislicense and intellectual property(trademark/copyright) agreement. Ifyou do not agree to abide by allthe terms of this agreement, youmust cease using and return ordestroyall copies of Project Gutenberg-tmelectronic works in yourpossession.If you paid a fee for obtaining acopy of or access to a ProjectGutenberg-tm electronic work and

you do not agree to be bound by theterms of this agreement, you mayobtain a refund from the person orentity to whom you paid the fee asset forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is aregistered trademark. It may only beused on or associated in any waywith an electronic work by peoplewhoagree to be bound by the terms ofthis agreement. There are a fewthings that you can do with most

Project Gutenberg-tm electronicworkseven without complying with thefull terms of this agreement. Seeparagraph 1.C below. There are alot of things you can do with ProjectGutenberg-tm electronic works ifyou follow the terms of thisagreementand help preserve free future accessto Project Gutenberg-tm electronicworks. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary

Archive Foundation ("theFoundation"or PGLAF), owns a compilationcopyright in the collection ofProjectGutenberg-tm electronic works.Nearly all the individual works inthecollection are in the public domainin the United States. If anindividual work is in the publicdomain in the United States and youarelocated in the United States, we do

not claim a right to prevent youfromcopying, distributing, performing,displaying or creating derivativeworks based on the work as long asall references to Project Gutenbergare removed. Of course, we hopethat you will support the ProjectGutenberg-tm mission of promotingfree access to electronic works byfreely sharing Project Gutenberg-tmworks in compliance with the termsofthis agreement for keeping the

Project Gutenberg-tm nameassociated withthe work. You can easily complywith the terms of this agreement bykeeping this work in the sameformat with its attached full ProjectGutenberg-tm License when youshare it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of theplace where you are located alsogovernwhat you can do with this work.Copyright laws in most countries

are ina constant state of change. If you areoutside the United States, checkthe laws of your country in additionto the terms of this agreementbefore downloading, copying,displaying, performing, distributingorcreating derivative works based onthis work or any other ProjectGutenberg-tm work. The Foundationmakes no representationsconcerningthe copyright status of any work in

any country outside the UnitedStates.

1.E. Unless you have removed allreferences to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, withactive links to, or other immediateaccess to, the full ProjectGutenberg-tm License must appearprominentlywhenever any copy of a ProjectGutenberg-tm work (any work onwhich the

phrase "Project Gutenberg"appears, or with which the phrase"ProjectGutenberg" is associated) isaccessed, displayed, performed,viewed,copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyoneanywhere at no cost and withalmost no restrictions whatsoever.You may copy it, give it away orre-use it under the terms of theProject Gutenberg License included

with this eBook or online atwww.gutenberg.net

1.E.2. If an individual ProjectGutenberg-tm electronic work isderivedfrom the public domain (does notcontain a notice indicating that it isposted with permission of thecopyright holder), the work can becopiedand distributed to anyone in theUnited States without paying anyfees

or charges. If you are redistributingor providing access to a workwith the phrase "Project Gutenberg"associated with or appearing on thework, you must comply either withthe requirements of paragraphs1.E.1through 1.E.7 or obtain permissionfor the use of the work and theProject Gutenberg-tm trademark asset forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project

Gutenberg-tm electronic work ispostedwith the permission of the copyrightholder, your use and distributionmust comply with both paragraphs1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and anyadditionalterms imposed by the copyrightholder. Additional terms will belinkedto the Project Gutenberg-tm Licensefor all works posted with thepermission of the copyright holderfound at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach orremove the full Project Gutenberg-tmLicense terms from this work, orany files containing a part of thiswork or any other work associatedwith Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display,perform, distribute or redistributethiselectronic work, or any part of thiselectronic work, without

prominently displaying the sentenceset forth in paragraph 1.E.1 withactive links or immediate access tothe full terms of the ProjectGutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6. You may convert to anddistribute this work in any binary,compressed, marked up,nonproprietary or proprietary form,including anyword processing or hypertext form.However, if you provide access toor

distribute copies of a ProjectGutenberg-tm work in a formatother than"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or otherformat used in the official versionposted on the official ProjectGutenberg-tm web site(www.gutenberg.net),you must, at no additional cost, feeor expense to the user, provide acopy, a means of exporting a copy,or a means of obtaining a copy uponrequest, of the work in its original"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other

form. Any alternate format mustinclude the full Project Gutenberg-tmLicense as specified in paragraph1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee foraccess to, viewing, displaying,performing, copying or distributingany Project Gutenberg-tm worksunless you comply with paragraph1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable

fee for copies of or providingaccess to or distributing ProjectGutenberg-tm electronic worksprovidedthat

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% ofthe gross profits you derive fromthe use of Project Gutenberg-tmworks calculated using the methodyou already use to calculate yourapplicable taxes. The fee isowed to the owner of the ProjectGutenberg-tm trademark, but he

has agreed to donate royalties underthis paragraph to theProject Gutenberg Literary ArchiveFoundation. Royalty paymentsmust be paid within 60 daysfollowing each date on which youprepare (or are legally required toprepare) your periodic taxreturns. Royalty payments should beclearly marked as such andsent to the Project GutenbergLiterary Archive Foundation at theaddress specified in Section 4,"Information about donations to

the Project Gutenberg LiteraryArchive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of anymoney paid by a user who notifiesyou in writing (or by e-mail) within30 days of receipt that s/hedoes not agree to the terms of thefull Project Gutenberg-tmLicense. You must require such auser to return ordestroy all copies of the workspossessed in a physical mediumand discontinue all use of and all

access to other copies ofProject Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance withparagraph 1.F.3, a full refund of anymoney paid for a work or areplacement copy, if a defect in theelectronic work is discovered andreported to you within 90 daysof receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other termsof this agreement for freedistribution of Project Gutenberg-tm

works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee ordistribute a Project Gutenberg-tmelectronic work or group of workson different terms than are setforth in this agreement, you mustobtain permission in writing fromboth the Project Gutenberg LiteraryArchive Foundation and MichaelHart, the owner of the ProjectGutenberg-tm trademark. ContacttheFoundation as set forth in Section 3

below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteersand employees expend considerableeffort to identify, do copyrightresearch on, transcribe andproofreadpublic domain works in creating theProject Gutenberg-tmcollection. Despite these efforts,Project Gutenberg-tm electronicworks, and the medium on which

they may be stored, may contain"Defects," such as, but not limitedto, incomplete, inaccurate orcorrupt data, transcription errors, acopyright or other intellectualproperty infringement, a defectiveor damaged disk or other medium, acomputer virus, or computer codesthat damage or cannot be read byyour equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY,DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES -Except for the "Right

of Replacement or Refund"described in paragraph 1.F.3, theProjectGutenberg Literary ArchiveFoundation, the owner of theProjectGutenberg-tm trademark, and anyother party distributing a ProjectGutenberg-tm electronic work underthis agreement, disclaim allliability to you for damages, costsand expenses, including legalfees. YOU AGREE THAT YOUHAVE NO REMEDIES FOR

NEGLIGENCE, STRICTLIABILITY, BREACH OFWARRANTY OR BREACH OFCONTRACT EXCEPT THOSEPROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.YOU AGREE THAT THEFOUNDATION, THETRADEMARK OWNER, ANDANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDERTHIS AGREEMENT WILL NOTBELIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL,DIRECT, INDIRECT,CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE

ORINCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVENIF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THEPOSSIBILITY OF SUCHDAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OFREPLACEMENT OR REFUND - Ifyou discover adefect in this electronic work within90 days of receiving it, you canreceive a refund of the money (ifany) you paid for it by sending awritten explanation to the person

you received the work from. If youreceived the work on a physicalmedium, you must return themedium withyour written explanation. Theperson or entity that provided youwiththe defective work may elect toprovide a replacement copy in lieuof arefund. If you received the workelectronically, the person or entityproviding it to you may choose togive you a second opportunity to

receive the work electronically inlieu of a refund. If the second copyis also defective, you may demand arefund in writing without furtheropportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right ofreplacement or refund set forthin paragraph 1.F.3, this work isprovided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NOOTHERWARRANTIES OF ANY KIND,EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED

TOWARRANTIES OFMERCHANTIBILITY ORFITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allowdisclaimers of certain impliedwarranties or the exclusion orlimitation of certain types ofdamages.If any disclaimer or limitation setforth in this agreement violates thelaw of the state applicable to thisagreement, the agreement shall be

interpreted to make the maximumdisclaimer or limitation permittedbythe applicable state law. Theinvalidity or unenforceability of anyprovision of this agreement shallnot void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree toindemnify and hold the Foundation,thetrademark owner, any agent oremployee of the Foundation, anyoneproviding copies of Project

Gutenberg-tm electronic works inaccordancewith this agreement, and anyvolunteers associated with theproduction,promotion and distribution ofProject Gutenberg-tm electronicworks,harmless from all liability, costsand expenses, including legal fees,that arise directly or indirectly fromany of the following which you door cause to occur: (a) distribution ofthis or any Project Gutenberg-tm

work, (b) alteration, modification,or additions or deletions to anyProject Gutenberg-tm work, and (c)any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about theMission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm issynonymous with the freedistribution ofelectronic works in formatsreadable by the widest variety of

computersincluding obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It existsbecause of the efforts of hundreds ofvolunteers and donations frompeople in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support toprovide volunteers with theassistance they need, is critical toreaching Project Gutenberg-tm'sgoals and ensuring that the ProjectGutenberg-tm collection willremain freely available for

generations to come. In 2001, theProjectGutenberg Literary ArchiveFoundation was created to providea secureand permanent future for ProjectGutenberg-tm and futuregenerations.To learn more about the ProjectGutenberg Literary ArchiveFoundationand how your efforts and donationscan help, see Sections 3 and 4and the Foundation web page at

http://www.pglaf.org.

Section 3. Information about theProject Gutenberg Literary ArchiveFoundation

The Project Gutenberg LiteraryArchive Foundation is a non profit501(c)(3) educational corporationorganized under the laws of thestate of Mississippi and granted taxexempt status by the InternalRevenue Service. The Foundation's

EIN or federal tax identificationnumber is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted athttp://pglaf.org/fundraising.Contributions to the ProjectGutenbergLiterary Archive Foundation are taxdeductible to the full extentpermitted by U.S. federal laws andyour state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office islocated at 4557 Melan Dr. S.Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its

volunteers and employees arescatteredthroughout numerous locations. Itsbusiness office is located at809 North 1500 West, Salt LakeCity, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887,emailbusiness@pglaf.org. Email contactlinks and up to date contactinformation can be found at theFoundation's web site and officialpage at http://pglaf.org

For additional contact information:

Dr. Gregory B. NewbyChief Executive and Directorgbnewby@pglaf.org

Section 4. Information aboutDonations to the Project GutenbergLiterary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends uponand cannot survive without widespread public support and donationsto carry out its mission ofincreasing the number of public

domain and licensed works that canbefreely distributed in machinereadable form accessible by thewidestarray of equipment includingoutdated equipment. Many smalldonations($1 to $5,000) are particularlyimportant to maintaining tax exemptstatus with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed tocomplying with the laws regulating

charities and charitable donations inall 50 states of the UnitedStates. Compliance requirementsare not uniform and it takes aconsiderable effort, muchpaperwork and many fees to meetand keep upwith these requirements. We do notsolicit donations in locationswhere we have not received writtenconfirmation of compliance. ToSEND DONATIONS or determinethe status of compliance for anyparticular state visit http://pglaf.org

While we cannot and do not solicitcontributions from states where wehave not met the solicitationrequirements, we know of noprohibitionagainst accepting unsoliciteddonations from donors in such stateswhoapproach us with offers to donate.

International donations aregratefully accepted, but we cannotmake

any statements concerning taxtreatment of donations receivedfromoutside the United States. U.S. lawsalone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project GutenbergWeb pages for current donationmethods and addresses. Donationsare accepted in a number of otherways including including checks,online payments and credit carddonations. To donate, please visit:http://pglaf.org/donate

Section 5. General InformationAbout Project Gutenberg-tmelectronicworks.

Professor Michael S. Hart is theoriginator of the Project Gutenberg-tmconcept of a library of electronicworks that could be freely sharedwith anyone. For thirty years, heproduced and distributed Project

Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only aloose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks areoften created from several printededitions, all of which are confirmedas Public Domain in the U.S.unless a copyright notice isincluded. Thus, we do notnecessarilykeep eBooks in compliance withany particular paper edition.

Most people start at our Web sitewhich has the main PG searchfacility:

http://www.gutenberg.net

This Web site includes informationabout Project Gutenberg-tm,including how to make donations tothe Project Gutenberg LiteraryArchive Foundation, how to helpproduce our new eBooks, and howto

subscribe to our email newsletter tohear about new eBooks.