Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885

by Various

A RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHER ON ENGLISH POLITICS.

About five-and-twenty years ago, I happened to be engaged in the service of my country in a distant part of the world. The duties which devolved upon me threw me into a daily contact with a Russian officer similarly employed. Notwithstanding the conflicting interests which we severally represented, and the somewhat delicate and often strained relations resulting therefrom, we had not been long in each other’s society without becoming sensible of a personal sympathy too powerful to be resisted, and which soon ripened into an intimacy which lasted for many years; indeed we were thrown so exclusively upon our own resources, deprived as we were of all other society, that we must probably soon either have become bitter enemies or fast friends. A certain similarity of taste, I had almost said of aspiration, forced upon us the latter alternative; and it was probably due to this that we were enabled to bring the special duties upon which we were engaged to a successful conclusion, whereby we earned the approval of our respective Governments,—represented in his case by a decoration, and in mine by a curt complimentary despatch; for in those days C.B.’s and C.M.G.’s were not flung about with the lavish profusion which has since so largely depreciated their value. It was a relief, when the labors of the day were over—which had taxed all our powers of ingenuity and forbearance, and we had fatigued our brains by inventing compromises and devising solutions which should satisfy the susceptibilities of our respective Governments—to jump on our horses and take a sharp dash across country, just by way of clearing our brains of diplomatic cobwebs. Generally we played at follow-my-leader, and we took it in turns to be leader; for we were both young, and had, in fact, been weighted with responsibilities beyond our years, which made us rush into a reaction that consisted in an active endeavor to break our necks every afternoon with all the keener zest,—to the intense astonishment of the natives of the uncivilised region to which we had been temporarily banished. Then, as we jogged slowly home, we would fall into those discussions, on social, religious, psychological, and moral problems, by which our souls were vexed, which lasted through dinner, and often far into the night. I found in my companion an earnestness, depth, and originality of sentiment which were most remarkable in one so young, the more especially as I had not supposed that his training and early associations had been of a character to develop that side of his nature; possibly the very restraints to which he had been subjected had stimulated his instincts for independent thought and speculation. Knowing English, French, and German almost as well as his mother-tongue, he had read extensively and greedily in all three languages; and, owing to certain family circumstances, he had spent the most part of his life away from his native land, applying himself, with an acuteness and a faculty of observation extraordinary in one so young, to a study of the political institutions, social conditions, and national characteristics of the different European countries in which he had lived. So precocious did his intelligence appear to me in this respect, that I soon came to consider myself in some degree a sort of disciple; and I have always been conscious that his influence during the nine months that we were together affected my own subsequent views of life, and indeed to some extent moulded my future. In the course of these discussions he unburdened himself to me on all subjects as fully as he would have done to a brother—indeed, considering who his brother was, far more freely; and did not shrink from commenting upon the social and political condition of his own country, and from giving vent to opinions which would probably have consigned him to the mines of Siberia for life had he been known to entertain them. The confidence which he thus displayed towards me only served to bind us more closely together, though I was ever haunted by the fear that the day might come when he might misplace it, with consequences which might be fatal to himself. As he was absolutely devoid of all personal ambition, this would be of little moment, if it only resulted in the abrupt termination of his career, which, from his natural independence of character, I anticipated could not long be postponed. It occurred even sooner than I expected. Within six months of my parting from him, I received a letter in which he told me he had fallen into disgrace, and was going to live in Italy. The exigencies of my own service had taken me to a very different part of the world; but we kept up, nevertheless, an active correspondence for some years, during which he occasionally sent me notes of a book he was writing, in letters which continued to exhibit more and more the results of his extensive reading and profound faculty of observation, philosophic speculation and generalisation. Suddenly, about fifteen years ago, and without a word of warning, these ceased. All my letters remained unanswered; and when, some time afterwards, I found myself in Rome, and inquired at the address to which I had sent them, it was only to learn that the present proprietors of the house were comparatively new people, and had never heard of him. Meantime I had myself retired from the service, and being of a wandering and unsettled disposition, had only returned to my own country for a few months at a time. I had lived too long in summer climes, and under less conventional restraints, to be happy in it; but one of my constant regrets was that I had never thought of providing my Russian friend with a permanent address, so that in case of his ever being able or willing to communicate with me again, he might know where to find me. Meanwhile I could only account for his silence by the painful supposition that he had in some manner incurred the severe displeasure of his Government, and was languishing in that distant semi-arctic region which is hermetically sealed to all communication with the outside world.

My delight may easily be imagined, therefore, when scarce two months ago, chancing to be a passenger on board a steamer in the Mediterranean, I found myself seated the first day at dinner next to a man, the tones of whose voice I thought I recognised, though I was for a moment puzzled by the alteration in his general appearance, and who turned out to be my long-lost friend, upon whom, as I looked at the furrows on his countenance, I saw that something more than time—though it had extended over twenty-five years—had worked a change. This same interval had, doubtless, done something for me; so we both looked at each other for a moment in hesitation before permitting the joy of mutual recognition to burst forth. We soon found, on comparing notes, that we had been longing to find each other, and that nothing now prevented our pitching our tent together on the sunny Mediterranean shore, in the hope and belief that we should find that the companionship which had suited us so well twenty-five years previously, would only be rendered more full of interest and profit by the experiences which we had undergone since that period; nor had we conversed an hour before we became convinced that, however much we might have changed in outward appearance, our affection for each other, and our human sympathies generally, had undergone no alteration. It is therefore in a villa surrounded by orange-groves, with terraces overlooking the sea, built curiously into the fissures of impending rock, that I am writing this; or, to be more strictly accurate, I should say it is in a summer-house attached to the villa, fifty feet beneath which the sea is rippling in ceaseless murmur, while my friend, stretched on a Persian rug in the shade formed by the angle of the wall with the overhanging rock, here covered with a creeping jasmine, heavy with blossom, is watching the smoke of his cigarette, and listening while I read to him passages here and there of the notes which I had taken of our last night’s conversation. It had been suggested by the arrival of letters and newspapers from England, and it occurred to me that the remarks of my friend as a calm and unprejudiced observer upon the present political, social, and moral condition of my own country, possessed a value which justified me in asking his permission to be allowed to publish them, the more so as he had just returned from spending some months in London; and he was of far too liberal and philosophical a temperament and cosmopolitan training and sympathy to be influenced by national prejudice; while, had he ever been once biassed by it, the treatment he had undergone at the hands of his own Government would have long since effectually removed it.

“I will introduce you to the public by telling the story of our previous acquaintance, just as it occurred,” I observed. This the reader will remark that I have already done; but I did not read my introduction to my friend, as I knew he would have raised strong objections to the complimentary passages. “Now tell me what I am to call you?”

“Ivan is safe, simple, and not far from the truth, unless you prefer a pair of initials like my well-known countrywoman O. K. It has amused me to observe,” he added, with a smile, “as I have watched the performances, social, literary, and political, how much more easy it is for a woman to understand the genius of a man than the genius of a nation.”

“Perhaps that is because the nation is composed of women as well as of men,”I replied.

“After all, it comes to pretty much the same thing,” said Ivan; “for the genius that he understood well enough to beguile, seems to apprehend equally well the genius of the nation he governs, or he could not have beguiled it in the sense she desired. The whole incident serves to illustrate the mystery of woman’s true sphere of influence, so little understood by the women themselves who agitate for their rights.”

“I am not disposed to admit,”I answered, “that the incident in question proves your case; for I know none of your own countrymen, to say nothing of the women, who understand the genius of the English people, for to do so implies an apprehension of the genius of their institutions, and it is the incapacity of foreigners generally to appreciate these which causes them to regard our domestic policy in the light of an unfathomable mystery which it is hopeless to attempt to penetrate, and our foreign policy as a delusion and a snare.”

“When your Government gets into difficulties,”said Ivan, “it certainly goes to work to get out of them in a way exactly the opposite to that which other European Governments, and especially we in Russia, are in the habit of pursuing. Foreign policy is with us the great safety-valve by which the bubbling passions of the country find a vent, and our central authority takes refuge from its troubles in foreign wars and schemes of territorial aggrandisement; your Government pursues a diametrically opposite system, and considers, apparently, that its best chance of safety lies in stirring up domestic broils, and exciting the people to fever-heat of political passion among themselves. In other words, while our statesmen believe that they can best secure their own positions and avert the perils arising from mis-government by distracting public attention from internal affairs and rushing into dangers abroad, yours hope to escape the consequences of their blunders abroad by promoting revolutionary tendencies at home. It would be curious to analyse the causes which have resulted in such opposite political methods, the more especially as both, in their different ways, are equally prejudicial to the highest national interests, and, from a philosophical point of view, would furnish a most interesting political and sociological study. As it is, my own country produces upon me the effect of a dashing young woman, still intoxicated with her youthful conquests and greedy for more, while she refuses to admit that a gnawing disease is preying upon her vitals, still less to apply any remedies to it; in yours, on the other hand, I seem to see an old woman in her dotage, who makes blatant and canting profession of that virtue which her age and feebleness have imposed upon her as a necessity, while she paints, and rouges, and pampers herself with luxury, and fritters away the little strength and energy she still possesses in absorbing herself with domestic details and the quarrels of her servants, and leaves her vast estates to take care of themselves. Considering the dangers with which both countries are menaced, the great difference which I observed between the Governments of the two countries is, that in one, government takes the form of active insanity—in the other, of drivelling imbecility. After all, there is always more hope for a young lunatic than an old idiot. We may pull through all right yet, but we shall have a very rough time to pass through first.”

“And you think that we are too far gone ever to do so,”I remarked, rather discouraged by the gloomy view he took of the present condition and future prospects of my native country.”

“I don’t altogether say that. It is not with countries as with individuals; the latter always pass from their second childhood into their graves. But for nations, who can say that there is not reserved a second youth? though history does not record an instance of any nation having ever attained to it. The process is probably a slow one; but in these days of rapid development, to say nothing of evolution, we cannot be sure even of that.”

“Still,”I pursued, a little nettled at the severity of his judgment in regard to my own country,—I did not care what he said about Russia, of which I was in no position to judge,—“I should like to know upon what grounds you base your opinion that England is an old idiot. The expression, I think, is scarcely parliamentary.”

“In using the term to which you object,” said Ivan,—“which, after reading the language recently used in debate in your House of Commons, I maintain is strictly parliamentary,—I was not so much alluding to England as to its Government; and I will endeavor to explain to you the reasons which lead me to think that the expression is not misapplied. There are at the present day, including the population of the United States, between eighty and ninety millions of people who owe their origin to the British Isles; who speak the English language as their mother-tongue; who possess in a more or less degree the national characteristics of the race from which they have sprung; who exercise an influence over a greater area of the surface of the earth than that of any other race upon it; who directly control over 250 millions of people not of their own race, and indirectly control many millions more; whose commercial relations are more extensive than those of all the other nations of the world put together; whose wealth is unrivalled; whose political institutions have hitherto served as a model, as they have been the envy of less favored peoples; and who may be said, without fear of contradiction, to lead the van of the world’s civilisation. It is difficult, when we spread a map out before us, to realise that so small a dot as Great Britain appears upon it, should have given birth to these stupendous forces; and one is led to examine into the processes by which so marvellous a position has been achieved in the world’s history as that which these small islands must occupy, even though that position seems now about to be destroyed by what appears to an outsider to be a combination of national decrepitude and administrative impotence,—for it is only when a nation has itself lost its vigor, that it tolerates imbecility on the part of its rulers. The greatness of England has been built up, not on the conquests of its neighbors, or of nations equally civilised with itself, as we have seen occur in the cases of other great empires, but in the comparatively easy subjugation of barbarous peoples; in the occupation and colonisation of countries sparingly inhabited by savage races; in the material development of vast tracts of the earth’s surface; in the creation of new markets, of new sources alike of supply and of demand; and in the energetic and profitable employment of capital in all the regions of the earth. This was possible, and possible only because her adventurous sons who went forth into wild and distant regions to occupy, to develop, and to create, always felt that they had behind them a motherland whose proud boast it was that she ruled the waves, and a nation and Government so thoroughly animated by their own daring and adventurous spirit, that they knew that none were too humble or insignificant to be watched over and protected; nay, more, they were encouraged in hardy enterprises, and often assisted to carry them out.

“During the last two or three years, the circumstances of my life, into which it is not necessary for me now to enter, have forced me not merely to circumnavigate the globe, but especially to visit those British possessions, and those seaboards of lands still relative if barbarous, upon which your countrymen are so thickly dotted as merchants or settlers, and where British subjects of foreign race abound, who carry on their avocations under that British protection which used to be a reality, but is now only a name. Familiar as I have been with Englishmen from my youth, I found a spirit of bitter discontent rife, which, even among your grumbling race, was altogether a new feature in their conversation, especially with a foreigner. Many were making arrangements to close up their business and abandon the commerce in which they were engaged; some, and this was especially the case among the British subjects of foreign race, were taking steps to change their nationality. In some of the colonies the language held sounded to my Russian ears little short of high treason; while I often heard Englishmen in the society of foreigners say that they were ashamed to call themselves Englishmen—a sentiment which I do not remember ever having heard one of your countrymen give vent to in my youth.

“I only mention these as illustrations of the fact which was forcibly impressed upon me during my travels, that the influence of England was waning, not in Europe, where it has waned, but where it might be recovered by a vigorous stroke of policy,—but in Asia, Africa, and America—in those continents from which she derives her position and her wealth. The waning of British influence in Europe means, comparatively, nothing, so far as British commerce is concerned. The waning of that influence in the three other continents means national decay. It has not been by her great wars, her European campaigns, that England has achieved greatness, but by her little ones in those distant countries which your Government seems ready to retire from, bag and baggage, at the first word of a new-comer; and yet one would suppose that nothing could be clearer to a people not in its dotage than this, that if they do not protect their merchants, the latter will not be able to compete with those who are protected. If you desire proof of this, look at the increasing substitution of German for English houses of commerce all over the world; and if commerce languishes, food becomes dearer for those very classes who cry out against those little wars which, when wisely turned to account have proved your best national investments, and have been the indirect means of giving food and employment to your starving millions. I see that there is some talk of a committee being appointed to inquire into the causes of the depression of trade. Those causes are not very far to seek; or rather, in another sense, they are very far to seek. You must travel from China to Peru to find them, and they will stare you in the face. I have been watching, while you are squabbling over your Franchise and your Redistribution Bills, how your trade is slipping from you. So you go on fiddling on the two strings of your electoral fiddle, while Rome is burning. One would have supposed that England was old enough by this time to have discovered that it would not improve her voters to give them another shuffle; that she had experience enough to know that electors were like playing cards, the more you shuffle them the dirtier they get. With the interests of the empire at stake, certainly in two if not in three continents, you play the ostrich, and bury your heads in parish politics—parish politics of the most pestilent and useless description.

“Do you want to know why trade languishes? It is summed up in a short sentence: Want of confidence on the part of the trader; it cramps his enterprise, damps his ardor, spoils his temper, and crushes all the manliness out of him. The commercial stability of England was not built up by a lot of unprotected females, which is the condition the British merchant abroad is rapidly being reduced to by the neglect and apathy and indifference to his interests of his Government. He is perfectly well aware in every port there is a consul, that he is considered a nuisance by that functionary, who knows that in the degree in which he prevents his complaints from reaching the department which is supposed to direct the foreign policy of England, he will be considered capable and efficient. No longer does he feel himself to be the Civis Romanus of old days. His sugar plantations may be destroyed in Madagascar, his commercial interests may be imperilled in China, he may be robbed and insulted in Turkey; but he is gradually being taught, by bitter experience, that it is hopeless to look to diplomatic interference for redress. Meanwhile the British taxpayer continues to pay for that expensive luxury whose function it is supposed to be to protect those commercial interests abroad upon which the prosperity and wealth of Great Britain depends. In like manner the ties between the mother country and her colonies are weakened by her persistent shrinking from the responsibilities and obligations which the welfare and security of those colonies involve. She sacrifices ruthlessly that prestige upon the maintenance of which the safety, and in some cases the allegiance, of her subjects depends. She deludes unhappy colonists into making investments and settlements in half-civilised States upon the faith of treaties, which she ignominiously shrinks from enforcing at the first appearance of danger, and calmly leaves her savage allies to be slaughtered and her colonists to be plundered, as in the case of South Africa; or she makes transparent display of her timidity and weakness, as has been conspicuously the case in her relations with her Australian possessions; or retreats from the protection of her natural frontiers, as she has lately done in India. And all this is in pursuance of a theory of political economy incomprehensible to the unprejudiced observer like myself, that it is cheaper and more advantageous to the national prosperity to sacrifice the commercial interests of the country than to incur the risks and expense of protecting them. The only explanation one can give of an infatuation so incredible, of a policy so short-sighted and so fraught with disaster, is, that it is based on ignorance—ignorance of the present injury that it is working, and ignorance of the dangers to which it is giving birth. There can be no surer way of precipitating the crisis which England seeks to avoid, and which, when it comes, must involve the utter ruin of her trade, than the invitation which her craven attitude offers to her covetous and unscrupulous neighbors, whether they be civilised or uncivilised, to encroach to their own profit, until at last the veil which is now before the eyes of the public in England will be torn away, and they will find themselves suddenly called upon to abandon the parochial details over which they have been wrangling, for sterner work. It will be too late then to regret the penny-wise and pound-foolish policy which plunged them into the mess: the only question they will have to consider is, whether it is not too late to get out of it.”

“I am a good deal surprised,”I remarked, after having listened to the unflattering utterances of my friend with some dissatisfaction, “that you entirely ignore all other considerations than those of mere policy and expediency. Granting, as you say, that the present policy of England imperils its commercial ascendency, are no other considerations to be allowed to guide the policy of a nation than those connected with its pocket? Have we no moral duties to perform, no example to set, no principles to maintain? Or are we ever to remain a nation of shopkeepers, fighting unscrupulously for markets; grabbing the territory of savages, under the pretext of civilising them, which is usually accomplished by the process of extermination; and jostling all other comers out of the markets of the world by fair means or foul? Because these means served us some centuries ago, and because, if you will, our national greatness is built upon them, does it follow that we should cling to them in these more enlightened days? If the moral instinct of the people of England begins to revolt against them, even to the prejudice of the national purse, do our money-bags constitute a sufficient reason why we should remain in the Cimmerian darkness and brutality of the middle ages? Of all men you were the last whom I expected to hear confound moral progress with political imbecility.”

“Nay,” returned Ivan, “I should be the first to congratulate you on a policy of moral progress, if, in that pursued at present by England, I could discover it. What moral progress is there in a policy which has resulted in the slaughter of thousands of unhappy Arabs in Egypt and the Eastern Soudan? Where does moral progress show itself in the expedition which has worked its weary way into the heart of Africa, to fight against the naked savages there? Where is the moral progress of a policy which has necessitated another military expedition to South Africa, and new annexations of territory there? What moral progress have you achieved in Turkey, where you are bound by treaty to institute reforms in that part of the empire over which you are supposed by the same treaty to exercise a protectorate, the very existence of which, under the policy of moral progress, it has been found convenient to ignore, because it involves responsibilities towards an oppressed and suffering people, whose oppression and whose sufferings it would now be expensive and troublesome to recognise, though political capital enough is made out of them when the exigencies of your local party warfare demand it? The question is, in what does real moral progress consist? Certainly not in the blatant profession of moral platitudes—the abstract truth of which everybody recognizes—when they are accompanied by a practice which gives them the lie direct. There can be nothing more demoralising to the moral welfare of a nation than a policy which is in flagrant contradiction to its lofty moral pretensions. Not only does it degrade the national conscience, but it renders that conscience an object of derision and contempt among foreign nations. To be logical and consistent, the politician ‘who is in trouble about his soul’ must follow one of two courses,—either he must recognise the fact that national egotism, like individual egotism, is a vice which admits of no compromise, and that the duty of his country is to love other countries better than itself; that the love of money, and therefore the making of it, is the root of all evil; that when the nation is metaphorically asked for its cloak, it should give its coat also—and when smitten on one cheek, should turn the other to the smiter;—when he is reluctantly convinced that, however desirable this higher law might be, and however indisputable its morality, it is, under the existing conditions of humanity, impracticable, then he has no alternative but to base the national policy upon the exactly opposite principle, which is that which governs the policy of all other nations, and assume that his duty consists in protecting the interests of his own country against those of rival countries, which are all engaged in an incessant competitive warfare against each other; and he will find, by experience, that any attempt to compromise with the opposite or altruistic principle will inevitably lead to disaster, for it will involve that hesitation and weakness in the conduct of affairs which will encourage those rivals to overt acts of offence and encroachment that must ultimately lead to bloody wars in defence of those national interests which a policy of vacillation and of moral inconsistency will have imperilled. Sooner or later, it is certain that the force of events will rip off the thin veneering of cant which had served to delude the ignorant masses, and to conceal either the stupidity or the insincerity of its professors. I say stupidity, for there can be little doubt that among those who guide the destinies of the nation are many who honestly share the belief with the public they help to mislead, that to shrink from responsibilities, to temporise in the face of danger, to make sacrifices and concessions in order to conciliate, will avert catastrophes instead of precipitating them; while there are others to whose common-sense it would be an insult to make any such assumption.”

“But these others,”I observed, “may, without any insult to their common-sense, be supposed to entertain the opinion that the possessions of the British empire are sufficiently extended and difficult to protect, to render any further annexation of territory, or acquisition of responsibility, undesirable.”

“Doubtless; and in this I agree with them. Indeed, the incapacity they have shown to protect what they have got, is the best reason they could assign for being unwilling to have more; but it does not touch the question of the principle upon which England’s policy should be based in her dealings with foreign nations, and with her own colonial possessions; in other words, what are the most economical and at the same time the most moral methods of self-preservation? I put economy before morality, because, whatever may be the professions of Governments in practice, as a consideration, it always precedes it. If bloodguiltiness was not always attended with so much expense, people’s consciences would be far less sensitive on the subject. Hence it happens that highly moral financiers are apt to regard things as wicked in the degree in which they are costly, while they are too short-sighted as statesmen to perceive that a prompt expenditure is often the best way of saving a far heavier amount, which must be the result of the delay—or, in homely phraseology, that a stitch in time saves nine. The most economical and the most moral method of self-preservation, then, will be found in consolidating, protecting, and extending the commercial position and moral influence of the great English-speaking people in all quarters of the globe. At this moment, though surrounded by enemies who envy and hate her, there is no country more safe from attack than Germany, because she is governed by a statesman who never shirks responsibility, cowers before danger, or, in moments of difficulty, takes refuge in compromise or concession. It is not England, with her horror of war, that has, during the last decade, been the Power which has prevented a European war, otherwise inevitable, from breaking forth; the statesman to whom the peace of Europe has been due, upon whom that peace now depends, and who is therefore doing the most for the moral progress of Europe, is exactly that statesman who never indulges in moral platitudes, and whom his worst enemy cannot accuse of hypocrisy. No one will pretend that peace is not more conducive to economy and moral progress than war; but to secure it, a great military position and a great national prestige are alike indispensable. England has, or should have, the first naval position in the world, and, until lately, her national prestige was second to none. These advantages confer on her great responsibilities; to part with them is to diminish her powers of usefulness in the world, and her mission of civilising it. As the champion of civil and religious liberty, she owes a duty to humanity, which it would be a crime alike in the eyes of God and man for her to relinquish, even though it may cost blood and treasure to maintain it,—for the amount expended to maintain it would be as nothing compared to the sacrifices of both life and money which the abandonment of this duty would entail upon the world. I speak feelingly, for I cannot conceive a greater disaster befall the human race, than to see the place of England usurped by the nation of which I have the honor of being a humble member,”here Ivan smiled bitterly. “So absorbed are you in your own vestry quarrels, that you either forget or are ignorant of the place you occupy in the regard of millions, who see in England the apostle of free thought, free speech, free institutions. Your standard, which we look up to as the flag of liberty, and which should be nailed to the mast, we watch you with dismay lowering to every piratical craft, while the crew are fighting about a distribution of provisions, and the pilot seems to prefer running his ship on the rocks to boldly facing the enemy’s cruisers. Nothing strikes us members of the oppressed and suppressed races as more anomalous and incomprehensible, than the fact that the party in England which are most ready to compromise the honor of that flag, and to haul it down on the least provocation, are precisely that party who are most loud-tongued in their profession of sympathy for those races to whom it is the banner on which their hopes are fixed—the symbol in their eyes of progress, civilisation, and political freedom. Hence it is that all those among us who are not absolute anarchists, find ourselves unconsciously withdrawing our sympathies from that political party in your country, who, while they style themselves the party of progress and of advanced thought, are in reality compromising the cause which I feel sure they honestly cherish and believe in, by destroying the prestige and lowering the influence of the one European Power which is its great representative—and, to our own great wonderment, are beginning rather to pin our hopes for the future upon those whom we have hitherto considered reactionary, because they called themselves Conservative and aristocratic, but who, in this crisis of the fortunes of their country, resist a policy calculated to impair its supremacy. Thus, on a higher principle than that appealed to by the political moralists who direct the helm of State, may the best interests of morality be reconciled with those of their own country; for it is by maintaining the supremacy of England that the principle which is identified with her institutions, her traditions, and the aspirations of her people, can be best secured in the interests of that universal society of which she forms part, and towards which she undoubtedly has moral obligations and responsibilities. The party which seeks to evade them, whether upon specious theories started by doctrinaires ignorant of international conditions, or upon penny-wise and pound-foolish grounds of economy, are in reality the party of reaction; for they are the best allies of reactionists, and are playing into their hands, as no people have better reason for knowing than the Russians, who have observed with dismay the sympathy of your Prime Minister with ‘the divine figure of the North,’ as he has styled our ruler, and his methods of government; while from our point of view, the party of progress in England, let them call themselves Conservative if they so please, are those who, true to the grand traditions of the country, are determined to keep it in the van of freedom, not merely because its wealth and prosperity are due to that absolute civil and political liberty which imposed no check upon individual enterprise or achievement, but because with the preservation of its greatness are bound up the most cherished interests of the human race.”

“Come, Ivan,”I said, laughing, “you have wound up with a peroration as much too flattering to my country as you were too uncomplimentary at the start. For an ‘old idiot,’ you have ended by giving her a pretty good character.”

“Not at all,”he rejoined; “I ended by describing her splendid position and advantages. I called her an old idiot for either being unconscious of them, or throwing them away consciously. And I ventured to add a word of encouragement to those who are struggling to prevent these being thrown away, and to assure them that, in their resistance to the short-sighted and fatuous policy of their present rulers, they have the cordial sympathy of philosophic Liberals like myself (I am not now speaking of Socialists and Nihilists, whose lands are against all parties) all over Europe. One of your own most eminent philosophers, himself a Liberal, has recently written a book, in which he has shown the danger by which the true principle of liberty is threatened from the reactionary tendencies of the democratic autocracy. I merely wish to assure you that we in Europe are fully alive to this danger, and dread as much the despotism which springs from the divine right of mobs, as from that of kings. There is to my mind as little of God in the vox populi as in an Imperial ukase; and our only safety between these two extremes, which I should rather be disposed to call infernal than divine, lies in the common-sense, patriotism, and virtue of those statesmen, politicians, and lawyers who, holding a middle course between them, as being both equally dangerous to the principles of true liberty, endeavor not merely to preserve the institutions of that country which is the home of liberty, but, by maintaining its supremacy, enable it to resist attacks from whatever quarter.”

“I have lived too much out of England for the greater part of my life,”I remarked, “to be much of a party man; still, from early and family association, my sympathies rather incline towards that party which now control its policy, though I admit they have shown but indifferent foresight, skill, or judgment in grappling with the difficulties which they had to confront. Still it is only fair to them to remember that these were left them as a heritage by their predecessors; and that if they have blundered somewhat in the effort to set matters right—conspicuously in Egypt, for example—it was not they who set matters wrong in the first instance in that country.”

“That I entirely deny,”responded Ivan, “as I think I can prove to you in a very few words. But before doing so, allow me to express my surprise at your admission that, because you were a Liberal in the days of Lord Palmerston, who was pre-eminently the representative of the policy which I have advocated as being that which should animate a British statesman, your sympathies should extend to those who, while they wear the old party livery, have entirely departed from the old party lines. His mantle has indeed fallen upon them, but they have so completely turned it inside out that it is no longer recognisable. In the days when a party existed which called itself ‘Liberal-Conservative,’ there was no violent political issues at home to check the current of a domestic legislation which was ever steadily progressive; while in foreign affairs the Government of the day, whether it was Conservative or Liberal, followed the well-established traditions of British policy abroad, which, if it had incurred the jealousy of European Powers, at all events commanded their admiration and respect. The utterly inconsistent and perplexing attitude which England has now assumed, so entirely at variance with the principles by which her foreign policy was formerly governed, must of necessity deprive her of all sympathy abroad, for she has proved herself totally untrustworthy as an ally—while all true Liberals must deplore the agitation which has resulted from a domestic legislation that has a tendency unnecessarily to exacerbate party feeling, and drive people into violently opposite extremes. Nothing is more fatal to all real progress than a wild and unreasoning rush in the direction in which it is supposed to lie, because the inevitable consequence is a reaction most probably equally unreasoning. Moreover, these violent swings of the political pendulum must always be attended with the greatest possible danger. A Conservative triumph which is purchased at the price of acts of folly, rashness, or weakness, perpetrated by their opponents, is paid for by the country, and is but a sorry bargain. It is not under such violently disturbing influences that sound and healthy Liberal progress is made. And all history proves that the liberty which is born in convulsions invariably degenerates into a license which culminates in a tyranny.

“And now one word in reply to your allusion to the present position of matters in Egypt, and more especially with regard to that legacy of disasters which the present Government maintain they have inherited from the policy of Lord Beaconsfield, and which, with characteristic weakness, they constantly invoke as an excuse for their own shortcomings. When the Anglo-French condominium was established in Egypt—which is regarded as the fons et origo mali—an entente cordiale, which was rapidly ripening into an alliance, had been formed between Germany, Austria, and England, in which, to a certain extent, Italy was included, and upon which Turkey depended for her existence; it formed, therefore, a combination of European Powers which controlled Europe, and was in a position to dictate, especially to Prussia and France, both weakened as those two Powers were by recent wars, and by internal dangers and dissensions—both being, moreover, the only Powers in Europe whose interests clashed with those of England in the East, and whose policy, therefore, it was the interest of England narrowly to watch, and, if need be, to control. The faculty for doing this had been wisely secured to her by the European combination in which she had entered, above alluded to. Under these circumstances she had nothing to fear in Egypt from an association with France in the dual control. Practically it became a single control; for, with Germany and Austria at her back, England could dictate her own policy in Egypt, and, in the event of its not suiting her French associate, could even dare to enforce it without the slightest fear of the peace of Europe being endangered thereby. Her political supremacy in Egypt was, in fact, guaranteed to her by Germany and Austria, who had no reason to regard it with jealousy, while they obtained in return that commanding position which England’s adhesion to their alliance secured them in Europe. So far, then, from having succeeded to a heritage of difficulty, the present Government succeeded to one of absolute security. But the whole aspect of the political chessboard was changed when the new player, who took over the game in the middle of it, removed the piece which gave check to king and queen, and which, if it was not moved away, rendered final victory a certainty. Lord Beaconsfield’s policy in Egypt turned upon the Anglo-Germanic-Austrian Alliance. When, after his fall from office, this was rudely ruptured by insulting expressions of antipathy to Austria on the part of his successor, the effect of which, subsequent expressions of apology were inadequate to efface—by a strongly marked coldness towards Germany, and a no less marked rapprochement towards France—the latter Power, relieved from the dread of the European combination, which had up to that moment held her quiescent in Egypt, jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, and favored us with that series of intrigues which gave us Arabi, and the evils that followed in his train. Meantime, utterly isolated in Europe by that rupture with the most powerful friends in it, with which the policy of Lord Beaconsfield had provided you, you found yourselves betrayed and deserted by the ally you had chosen instead of them; while every concession you made to that ally, and every attempt at conciliation, only plunged you deeper in the mire, in which you have since been left to flounder alone, a laughing-stock and object of derision to all Europe, and more especially to those Powers who might have proved your salvation, but who have since entered into other European combinations from which England is excluded, and which may prove in the highest degree dangerous to her. No assertion, therefore, can be more utterly false in fact than the statement that the heritage to which this Government succeeded was one of trouble. So far from it, the policy of their predecessors had left them in a position of commanding strength; and to lay the misfortunes which have since arisen at the door of those who had taken such precautions that they could never arise, is as though a general who should take over the command of an army placed strategically in an impregnable position, should abandon that position altogether, and after being defeated in the open field, find fault with the nature of the defences he had abandoned. But,” added Ivan, with a yawn, stretching himself, looking at his watch, and going to the open window, “you will think that I have degenerated from the philosophical spectator into the keen party politician. This I was compelled to be during my recent visit to London, where you are nothing if you are not partisan. The flavor of Piccadilly clings to me still: how much more delicious are the odorous night airs of these southern climes! Look up at those stars, my old friend, before you go to bed, and thank them that you have been spared the cares and the ambitions of the Treasury bench.”—Blackwood’s Magazine.

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[BLACKSTONE.]
BY G. P. MACDONELL.

Blackstone has now been dead more than a century, but neither lawyers nor laymen have yet made up their minds whether he was an intellectual giant, or only a second-rate man of letters, with a little learning and a pretty style, who acquired popularity because he flattered the English constitution. His friends have pitched high their eulogy. Sir William Jones, speaking to the freeholders of Middlesex, who had little reason to love Blackstone, called him the pride of England, and in a grave legal treatise referred to the Commentaries as the most correct and beautiful outline that ever was exhibited of any human science. Hargrave, fresh from annotating Coke upon Littleton, described him as an almost second Hale, and that as it were in the very presence of Hale, in a volume of tracts half filled with Hale’s legal lore. “To me,” said Mr. Justice Coleridge, the nephew of the poet, and one of Blackstone’s many editors, “the Commentaries appear in the light of a national property, which all should be anxious to improve to the uttermost, and which no one of proper feeling will meddle with inconsiderately.” And a distinguished German jurist, exaggerating only a little, has said that Englishmen regard the Commentaries as “ein juristisches Evangelium.” The history of the work is in itself remarkable. If we except the Institutes of Justinian, and the De Jure Belli ac Pacis of Grotius, perhaps no law book has been oftener printed. Not to speak of the many adaptations, more or less close, or of the many abridgments of the Commentaries (one of these was “intended for the use of young persons, and comprised in a series of letters from a father to his daughter,”) they have, in their original form, gone through more than twenty complete editions in England since the publication of the first volume in 1765. Nor has the homage of parody—in the shape of a “Comic Blackstone”—been wanting to place them among the classics. In America they have attained at least an equal fame. In the speech on Conciliation, delivered in 1775, Burke said that he had heard from an eminent bookseller that nearly as many copies had been sold there as here. Two years later, one of the five members appointed to frame the laws of Virginia seriously proposed that, with suitable modifications, the Commentaries should be taken as their text. There is reason to believe that they are now held in higher esteem in America than among ourselves. The American editions, already nearly as numerous as the English, still continue to multiply,[9] while forty years have passed since we have had an English Blackstone with an unmutilated text. His own countrymen are now content to know him through the medium of condensed and often lifeless versions, though it is not so far back since, for those who aspired to the amount of legal knowledge which a gentleman should possess, Blackstone was the very voice of the law. If on many sides Blackstone received the meed of excessive praise, his critics, it must be allowed, did not spare him. They have not been many, but they have spoken so emphatically, and, within certain limits, so unanswerably, that they have aroused suspicion whether, after all, Blackstone may not have been a charlatan. He was naturally regarded with distrust by lawyers of the rigid school, who felt that legal learning was gone if such primers as the Commentaries were to displace the venerable Coke. The book was not many years old before the phrase “Blackstone lawyers” came to be used as synonymous with smatterers in law. But such criticism had a professional ring, and perhaps in the end did the assailed author more good than harm.

If nowadays the name of Blackstone is held in diminished respect, the fact is mainly due to the contempt poured upon him by Bentham and Austin. They mercilessly exposed his shallow and confused philosophy. Bentham, reviewing one by one his opinions on government, maintained that they were not so much false as wholly meaningless; and Austin declared that neither in the general conception, nor in the detail of his book, is there a single particle of original and discriminating thought. It is tainted throughout, said the one, with hostility to reform; it was popular, said the other, because it “truckled to the sinister interests and mischievous prejudices of power.” Austin found nothing to praise even in its style, which, though fitted to tickle the ear, seemed to him effeminate, rhetorical, and prattling, and not in keeping with the dignity of the subject.

So long as his admirers could see no defects in his work, and his critics were blind to its merits, judgments of Blackstone kept moving along parallel lines, and never met. Standing at this distance of time, when the Commentaries have long lost the glitter of novelty, when we have not Bentham’s cause for anger, and when nobody retains a belief in the infallibility of Austin, it should be possible to treat Blackstone more fairly than either his friends or his enemies have done. There are signs that a juster estimate is now being formed, and the clearest of these is the testimony of one who must know by his own experience what were the difficulties which Blackstone surmounted. Sir James Stephen admits that he was neither a profound nor an accurate thinker, that he is often led to speak of English law in terms of absurd praise, and that his arrangement of the subject is imperfect. But “the fact still remains,” he says, “that Blackstone first rescued the law of England from chaos. He did, and did exceedingly well, for the end of the eighteenth century, what Coke tried to do, and did exceedingly ill, about 150 years before; that is to say, he gave an account of the law as a whole, capable of being studied, not only without disgust, but with interest and profit.... A better work of the kind has not yet been written, and, with all its defects, the literary skill, with which a problem of extraordinary difficulty has been dealt with is astonishing.”

Few authors ever had a clearer field. Long before his day, indeed, the immense growth of the law had been regarded as a heavy burden. Lawyers groaned, just as they groan now, over the increasing accumulation of statutes and reports. And yet Coke upon Littleton remained the beginner’s chief guide. Coke called his work the Institutes of the Laws of England; but, whatever its other merits, it lacks every quality which the title would suggest. It is unsystematic, undigested; it makes no pretence of leading its reader from principles to rules; and it spares him the details of no curious anomaly. It is like an overgrown treatise on the subjunctive mood. The need had long been felt for a better work; and the broad outlines had been sketched by Hale in his admirable Analysis of the Civil Part of the Law, which Blackstone followed in every essential feature. Some treatises too had appeared written with a purely educational purpose. Of these the most successful, long recommended as an elementary text-book for students, was the Institutes of Wood, a Buckinghamshire clergyman. It was a praiseworthy attempt to present the law in a methodical form, but it lacked literary merit, and had all the dulness of an epitome. It is memorable only as the book which the Commentaries displaced.

Blackstone saw his opportunity. Perhaps no one else in his time combined in the same degree the qualities which the work required; nor was there any one so capable of writing a law-book, which could be read with interest by educated laymen, and at the same time be accepted as almost authoritative by practising lawyers. Blackstone’s training enabled him to gain the ear of both; for he was not only a lawyer, but a man of letters. His love of literature developed early, and along with it a desire to win literary fame. He does not seem to have read widely, but the pleasure which in his school days he derived from Shakespeare and Milton, Pope and Addison, was dulled neither by advancing years nor by the absorbing demands of the law. “The notes which he gave me on Shakespeare,” said Malone, who used them in his edition, “show him to have been a man of excellent taste and accuracy, and a good critic.” He was something of a poet himself; but the “Lawyer’s Farewell to his Muse,” the “Lawyer’s Prayer,” and the “Elegy on the Death of the Prince of Wales,” though they have occasionally been unearthed as curiosities, have long been swept away with other rubbish of the kind. The following lines, which are his best, and in which we feel the very spirit of the Commentaries, will not tempt further even the most diligent seeker after neglected poets. Their historical audacity would amaze Professor Freeman.

‘Oh, let me pierce the secret shade

Where dwells the venerable maid!

There humbly mark, with rev’rent awe,

The guardian of Britannia’s Law,

Unfold with joy her sacred page

(Th’ united boast of many an age,

Where mix’d yet uniform appears

The wisdom of a thousand years) ...

Observe how parts with parts unite

In one harmonious rule of right;

See countless wheels distinctly tend

By various laws to one great end;

While mighty Alfred’s piercing soul

Pervades and animates the whole.’

The Pope who was lost in Blackstone we can as easily spare as the Ovid who was lost in Murray. Yet it was from that love of literature to which his poetical compositions bear witness, perhaps in some degree also from the enforced measure and restraint of verse, that he acquired a style, which though it has not the freshness and variety of Addison’s, its most direct model, has the same singular clearness and almost the same ease and flow. By education, not by accident, did he come to deserve Bentham’s one compliment that he it was who first, of all institutional writers, taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and the gentleman.

Beyond keeping up a certain interest in architecture, on which in early youth he is said to have composed a treatise, Blackstone seldom allowed himself to be diverted from a persevering and varied study of law. He divided his time between Westminster and Oxford, and long remained undecided whether he should finally settle in the law-courts or among his books. While, with hardly any practice of his own, he was training himself with unusual diligence, as his reports of cases testify, in the practical part of his profession, he had it clearly before him that law is not to be mastered by any one who neglects its history. “In my apprehension,” he said, when he was a student, “the learning out of use is as necessary as that of every day’s practice;” and he carried out this belief by making the Commentaries as much a history as an exposition. Even more plainly than in his great work we can see in his edition of Magna Charta and the Charter of the Forest how unflagging were his zeal and patience, and how minute his investigations. His knowledge of general history may have been superficial, as Hallam said it was; he may have had old-fashioned notions about Alfred the Great, even though he does warn his readers against the tendency to ascribe all imaginable things to that king; yet the Commentaries contain what, on the whole, is still the best history written in English of English law.

The plan of the book had long been in his mind; he was indirectly led to carry it out through an attempt of the Duke of Newcastle to corrupt him. Lord Mansfield (then Mr. Murray) recommended him to the chair of civil law at Oxford, which was vacant in 1756, but he lost the appointment, according to report, because he was not hearty enough in promising the duke support “whenever anything in the political hemisphere is agitated in the university.” Murray, hearing of his disappointment, advised him to lecture on his own account upon English law. He took the advice; the novelty of the lectures and their ability made them successful; and when the Vinerian chair of common law was founded in 1758 he was appointed the first professor. Making hardly any change in form, arrangement, or mode of treatment, as appears from his notes which are still extant written in the neatest of hands, he expanded the lectures into the Commentaries. But while he never deviated from his original plan, his store of knowledge grew steadily throughout the fourteen years which elapsed between his first private lectures and the appearance of his work. When the question of ex officio informations was debated in the House of Lords in 1812, Lord Ellenborough spoke of him as follows:—“Blackstone, when he compiled his lectures, was comparatively an ignorant man; he was merely a fellow of All Souls’ College, moderately skilled in the law! His true and solid knowledge was acquired afterwards. He grew learned as he proceeded with his work. It might be said of him, at the time he was composing his book, that it was not so much his learning that made the book, as it was the book that made him learned.” The Commentaries were not, however, the work of a merely book-learned man; besides his attendance in the courts as a spectator, Blackstone had enjoyed several years of good practice before the first volume appeared; but Ellenborough’s opinion is substantially sound. It is indeed one of the striking facts about Blackstone that while as years went on his mind gained little in breadth, and his fundamental ideas underwent no change, he was able, by simple hard work and with abilities not by any means the highest, to make himself at length one of the really learned lawyers of his time. Several names might be mentioned which on special lines of law stand far above his; but there was no one who rivalled him in that extent of general knowledge which an institutional writer must possess. The Commentaries have won the peculiar distinction of being quoted and of carrying weight in every political discussion which raises questions of constitutional importance, and also of being cited in our courts (though under protest from some rigid judges) as only a little lower than that small group among our law-books which have an inherent, and not merely a reflected, authority. We should do Blackstone grievous wrong if from his popularity we assumed that his knowledge was superficial.

Thus, both as lawyer and as man of letters, he was peculiarly fitted for his work. Written with less literary skill, the Commentaries would long ago have been forgotten; if his learning had been more minute he would never have written them at all. A work which, partly through favoring circumstances, but mainly through its merits, has effected a real revolution in legal studies, is not to be dismissed by saying that its philosophy is weak, and that it is hostile to reform.

There is certainly no profound nor much original thought in Blackstone’s four volumes. Nobody was ever made better able to comprehend a difficulty in English law by means of the notions on laws in general to be found in that famous chapter, which, as Sir Henry Maine puts it, may almost be said to have made Bentham and Austin into jurists by virtue of sheer repulsion. They lead to nothing, and explain nothing. They are rather the obeisances made by a polite professor to his subject, or a lawyer’s invocation of his muse, than the necessary foundations of a system. Blackstone repeats the venerable doctrine that human laws depend on the law of nature and the law of revelation, and that no laws are valid which conflict with these; but he never dares to apply it to any rule of English law. And when he comes to speak of parliament and monarchy, he has forgotten that odd proof of the perfection of the British constitution, with its divine combination of power, wisdom, and goodness, of which Bentham made such easy fun. He does not so much as pretend to be original. He is so dependent on others that he adopts not only their opinions but even their language, and by no means always does he let us know that he is quoting. He does not refer to Locke when he is stating, practically in Locke’s words, the theory of the right of society to inflict punishment; he never mentions the name of Burlamaqui, who was his guide, most faithfully followed, in the analysis of laws in general; and he fails to acknowledge half his obligations to Montesquieu.[10] Indeed, the free use he makes of Montesquieu’s famous chapter on the English constitution would be appalling, did we not remember that he was only following a professional custom of appropriation, which legal authors have not yet wholly abandoned. There is, in fact, scarcely a single sentence of that chapter which has not, somewhere or other, found its way into the Commentaries; and, as often as not, the Commentator leaves us to infer that the reflections are his own.

In estimating the value of Blackstone’s work, however, we should not make too much of the fact that his general theories are either weak or borrowed. The truth is that when we have got rid of them we have not touched the substance of the work itself; his exposition of English law remains unaffected, whether they be true or false. Moreover, these same theories of his have a considerable indirect interest; for as they afford us an opportunity of observing how, at a turning-point in the history of modern thought, certain important ideas acted upon an intellect, which, from its very want of independence and courage, all the better reflected the common opinions of the time. His philosophy exhibits the doctrine of the social contract in a state of decay, and enables us to watch the English mind preparing itself for utilitarianism.

Blackstone refuses to accept the social contract in its naked form; he ridicules the notion of individuals meeting together on a large plain to choose the tallest man present as their governor; and he traces the growth of society upwards from the family living a pastoral life to the settled agricultural community. His conception of social development comes as near the current modern theories as that of any thinker of his century, save Mandeville. But the social contract was too tempting to be altogether abandoned. He speaks of it as a tacit agreement between governor and governed, of protection on the one side and submission on the other, and from this implied agreement he draws conclusions as freely as if it were a historical fact. Stating Locke’s theory without any qualification, he bases upon the contract (for he recurs to the word) the right of society to punish crime. The laws under which thieves suffer were made, he tells us, with their own consent. So he says that the oath of allegiance is nothing more than a declaration in words of what was before implied in law. And he justifies the Revolution on the ground that King James had endeavored to subvert the constitution by breaking the original contract. Believer as he is in the law of nature, Blackstone is more than half a utilitarian. True, he has based all law on both the natural and the revealed law; but by a fortunate coincidence everything that tends to man’s happiness is in accordance with the former. Except where the revealed law applies, the actual rule of life is that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness. “This,” he says, “is the foundation of what we call ethics or natural law.” Throughout the whole of his work his tests are purely those of utility, and with his broad principles of unbending orthodoxy he mingles theories, some of which the most thoroughgoing utilitarian would think too bluntly stated. Repudiating the notion of atonement or expiation, he maintains that punishment is only a precaution against future offences. He treats property as an adventitious right, unknown in the natural state; and to the amazement of some of his editors he has the courage to face the logical result, that theft is punished, not by any natural right, but only because it is detrimental to society. It is a malum prohibitum, not a malum in se. He goes so far as to say that where the law prohibits certain acts under pecuniary penalties, the prohibition does not make the transgression a moral offence, or sin, and that the only obligation in conscience is to submit to the penalty. He affirms as a thing beyond doubt that human laws have no concern with private vices. And he professes to defend the measures which placed Catholics and Dissenters under disabilities, not upon theological grounds, but simply because all dissent is subversive of civil government. We may be sure that Blackstone would not have spoken as he did if he had believed that average men in his time would consider his doctrines offensive; and taking him as an index of contemporary opinion, we can see that the field was ready for Bentham.

Blackstone’s hostility to reform has a special interest. There is, perhaps, no better example to be found in our literature of the typical Englishman, who loves his country, who considers its constitution the best constitution, its laws the best laws, and the liberty which its citizens enjoy the completest liberty which the world has known. He was conservative by circumstances and profession, as well as by temperament. His opinions were formed at a time when men lived politically at a lower level than they ever did before or have done since. No bold reforming spirit could have grown up in the Jacobite unrest of half a century, with the Whigs, to all appearance, permanently seated in power, and desirous of showing that the party of the Revolution was capable of moderation. There was no party of progress. No clear line of principle divided Whigs from Tories; so that it became a plausible thesis that they had exchanged positions. There were, in short, no great ideals in the air, which could stimulate to movement such a sluggish man as Blackstone. Perhaps some of his conservatism was due to his profession. The instances are probably rare of an English lawyer, with either extensive practice or great learning, who, on questions of personal liberty, whether of religion or of speech or of trade, has stood far in advance of the average opinion of his age. The profession tends to foster conservatism. The habit of deciding by precedents and usage is not to be shaken off when the mind turns from law to politics; and the men who declared that the common law is the perfection of reason, and who thought that it savored of profanity to speak disrespectfully of common recoveries, could not be expected to doubt the excellence of the British constitution or the necessity of Catholic disabilities. Something, too, must be allowed for the influence of a training which both narrows the scope of reasoning, and within the narrower limits makes it close and unbroken. A mind so schooled will naturally shrink from the gaps in evidence which the innovator must boldly face and overstep. May we not in the same way explain the alleged conservatism of men of science?

The main theme of Blackstone’s teaching is that of contentment with a constitution which to him seemed as nearly perfect as any work of man can be. “Of a constitution,” he says, “so wisely contrived, so strongly raised, and so highly finished, it is hard to speak with that praise which is justly and severely its due: the thorough and attentive contemplation of it will furnish its best panegyric. It has all the elements of stability; for by a graduated scale of dignity from the peasant to the prince, it rises like a pyramid from a broad foundation, diminishing to a point as it rises. It is this ascending and contracting proportion” he says, with the law of gravitation in his mind, “that adds stability to any government.” “All of us have it in our choice,”these are Blackstone’s words, “to do everything that a good man would desire to do; and are restrained from nothing, but what would be pernicious either to ourselves or our fellow-citizens.” He does not, however, mean us to accept this statement too literally. He allows that the constitution has faults—“lest we should be tempted to think it of more than human structure”—and he is careful to tell us what he means when he says that this or that institution is perfect. As the expounder and historian of English law, he uses words of higher praise than he would do if he wrote as a politician. He feels that he is dealing with the spirit of laws, and that it is not his business to consider every change of circumstances which may have impaired their efficiency. To point out each defect, or to suggest ways of amendment, would, moreover, have been alien from the purpose of a work in which he sought to interpret the laws and to teach respect for them; and therefore he does not guard himself against exaggeration, sharing the opinion of Burke, that we only lessen the authority of the constitution if we circulate among the people a notion that it is not so perfect as it might be, before we are sure of mending it. He has in his mind the idea of a theoretical perfection not incompatible with practical injustice. In a well-known passage he says that by the law as it stood in the time of Charles II., “the people had as large a portion of real liberty as is consistent with a state of society,” naming the year 1679 as the point of time at which he would fix what he calls the theoretical perfection of our public law; and yet he observes that “the years which immediately followed it were times of great practical oppression.”[11] This is in substance the view of Burke when he says that the machine is well enough for the purpose, provided the materials were sound. Indeed there is scarcely one of Blackstone’s thoughts on politics and government which may not be paralleled in the writings and speeches of Burke. They were agreed that our representative system was practically perfect; that religious dissent is subversive of civil government; and that the people were bound by their original contract to a scheme of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed on king, lords, and commons. Burke was among the first to read and admire the Commentaries; and had Blackstone lived ten years longer he would have read the Reflections on the Revolution in France, and applauded every word. We might describe him, in fact, as a Burke with the genius left out.

Over Blackstone’s mind the antiquity of the constitution exercised a potent spell. The retrospective imagination, as it has been called, made him regard with reverence institutions that reach back to a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. The parliament and the monarchy, the sheriff, the corner, and trial by jury, seemed to be less the work of man’s hands than to partake of the dignity and immutability of the laws of nature; and the sense of trivial anomalies was lots in the veneration which he felt for a system of laws embodying in unbroken continuity the wisdom of a thousand years. It is not an unworthy emotion. There are few, let us hope, who have never been stirred by reflecting on the growth of that English liberty, which finds splendid voice in the prose of Milton, and whose presence, with “its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and titles,” glows in every line of Burke. On its practical side the emotion may be healthy or may be baneful. We call him the crudest of politicians who never reflects that our laws have grown with the people, that they contain the experience of a nation, and are not the paper schemes of clever theorists, and that they are surrounded by traditions which no convulsion ever swept away and which give them half their strength. It is this that a greater lawyer than Blackstone meant when he said that time is the wisest thing in the inferior world. But to timid natures antiquity becomes the proof, and not merely the evidences of excellence; so that the mind is led to make a severance between the past and the present, and while respecting the constitution as a thing of gradual growth to forget that the growth continues. Blackstone’s whole nature was affected by this illusion of distance. It distorted alike his historical beliefs and his practical judgments. It made him maintain, as Bolingbroke did, that our liberties are but the restoration of the ancient constitution of which our Saxon forefathers were deprived by the policy and force of the Normans. To Montesquieu’s opinion that as Rome, Sparta, and Carthage lost their liberties, so those of England must in time perish, it made him give the naïve reply that Rome, Sparta, and Carthage, at the time when their liberties were lost, were strangers to trial by jury. It made him spend all his ingenuity in defending the rule of descent which excluded kinsmen of the half-blood. And it was the chief cause of the contempt which, like Coke, he had for statute law. Though he never ventures to say so in plain terms, as his predecessors did with something more than rhetorical belief, yet at heart he is convinced that the common law is the perfection of reason.

Yet to represent Blackstone’s mind as absolutely stationary would be unjust; for now and again he puts forward a gentle suggestion of improvement. He draws attention to defects in the system of trial by jury, and makes several excellent proposals for its amendment. He even anticipates the legislation of our own day when he points out that our laws are faulty in not constraining parents to bestow a proper education on their children. He recognises the possibility of a change in political representation, which would admit the people to a somewhat larger share; and it is doubtless on the strength of that mild admission that Major Cartwright included him in the list of men conversant with public affairs who had expressed themselves in favor either of a fair representation or of short parliaments. The criminal law seemed to him very far from perfect. Within his own lifetime it had been made a capital crime to break down the mound of a fish-pond whereby any fish should escape, or to cut down a cherry-tree in an orchard. These laws would never have been passed, he says, with a confidence which it is not easy to share, if, as was usual with private bills in his days, public bills had been first referred to some of the learned judges for their consideration. It was still felony without benefit of clergy to be seen for one month in the company of the persons called Egyptians. He believed that this would not have continued, if a committee were appointed at least once in a hundred years to revise the criminal law—a proposal which his friend Daines Barrington made about the same time and worked out in some detail.

His conservatism, or, to give it the harsher name, his hostility to reform, was in great part due to timidity and insufficient knowledge of the world. He was a shy and reserved man, whose life was divided between one kind of narrowness at Westminster, and another kind of narrowness at Oxford. He was shut off from the real life of England. Among his books, which taught him that the state should foster trade, he could know only by hearsay of the new industrial movement then beginning to transform the country, and destined soon to sweep away the absurdities which he upheld, such as the innumerable attempts to fix the rate of wages, the navigation laws, and the statute of Charles II., commanding the people to bury their dead in wool. The very fact that he does not suggest a compromise between restriction of trade and its freedom, leads one to infer that he had never seriously thought about the question. Only with regard to apprenticeship does he mention that a doubt could exist, and then he refrains from giving a clear opinion. Amid the Toryism of Oxford, where he had seen students expelled for Methodists, Blackstone was hardly likely to understand what toleration, much less what religious freedom, meant. He deprecated persecution, once indeed he uses with unwonted energy the phrase “dæmon of persecution,”[12] but it is rather under the impulse of a mild humanity than from any trust in the people or any large love of liberty. When a strong protest was raised by Dr. Priestley and Dr. Furneaux against his account of the laws relating to Protestant Dissenters, whom almost in so many words he called dangerous citizens, he seems to have been quite surprised at the attack. He wrote a pamphlet in reply to Priestley, explaining that his aim had been to expound the law not justify it, which was not quite accurate, and declaring that he was all for tolerance; and he went so far as to expunge the most obnoxious sentence, and to give in subsequent editions a fuller and somewhat fairer account of the law. Even in its final form the passage is not worthy of one who was speaking from a position of really high authority, which should have induced judicial calmness. “They have made him sophisticate,” said Bentham, referring to Priestley’s and Furneaux’s attack; “they have made him even expunge; but all the doctors in the world, I doubt, would not bring him to confession.” Yet it is not so much utter illiberality of nature that the passage suggests as simple inexperience, and his fixed belief that truth must always be a compromise. He was but echoing the opinion commonly held by churchmen in his time, an opinion which he had never tested by contact with the people.

He had an opportunity of gaining experience as a politician, but in the House of Commons he learned nothing, and succeeded only in tarnishing his legal reputation. He entered it in 1762, and sat first for the rotten borough of Hindon, and afterwards for Westbury till 1770. For the first six years his name scarcely ever occurs in the debates. The only fact, indeed, known of this part of his political life, is a proposal which he made when the repeal of the Stamp Act was carried, that “it should not be of force in any colony where any votes, resolves, or acts had passed derogatory to the honor or authority of Parliament, until such votes, etc., were erased or taken off the records,” The second stage of the Wilkes case, after the elections of 1768, raised him to an unfortunate notoriety. Every circumstance combined to make Blackstone the most bitter of Wilkes’s opponents. He had committed himself to strong opinions on the absolute supremacy of Parliament; he was solicitor-general to the Queen; he was shocked at Wilkes’s blasphemy; and Lord Mansfield had been maligned. He had only one moment of merely formal hesitation. When De Grey, the Attorney-General moved that the comments on Lord Weymouth’s letter were an insolent, scandalous, and seditious libel, Blackstone argued that the courts were open, and that the House of Commons was not the place to try the question. The other acts of the persecution had his complete approval. He himself took the lead in moving that the charge against Lord Mansfield was “an audacious aspersion on the said Chief Justice;” he advocated the expulsion of Wilkes; he supported the motion which declared that Wilkes being expelled was incapable of sitting in the existing Parliament; and he delivered an able speech, in which he put forth all his strength, in favor of the validity of Colonel Luttrell’s election. He was rash enough in that speech to give it as his firm and unbiassed opinion that the law and custom of Parliament on a matter of privilege is part of the common law, that the House had acted according to that law and custom, and that Wilkes was therefore disqualified by common law from sitting as a member of Parliament. He paid heavily for his “firm and unbiassed opinion.” In the Commentaries he had given what was, no doubt, intended to be a complete list of the causes of disqualification; and none of them applied to Wilkes. Twice during the remainder of the debate, first by Mr. Seymour and afterwards by Grenville, “the gentle shepherd,” was this passage effectively turned against him. “It is well known,” according to Junius, “that there was a pause of some minutes in the House, from a general expectation that the doctor would say something in his own defence; but it seems, his faculties were too much overpowered to think of those subtleties and refinements which have since occurred to him.” A paper war ensued in which Junius, Sir W. Jones, Dr. Johnson, and Blackstone himself took part. In an anonymous pamphlet, betraying its author, as Junius said, by “its personal interests, personal resentments, and above all that wounded spirit, unaccustomed to reproach, and, I hope, not frequently conscious of deserving it,” Blackstone clung tenaciously and almost angrily to his opinion, which he stated even more emphatically than he had done in the House of Commons. There he expressly refrained from saying whether expulsion necessarily involves incapacity; in his reply to “the writer in the public press, who subscribes himself Junius,” he said as expressly that incapacity is the necessary consequence of expulsion. He retracted nothing. Sincere, no doubt, in his belief that it was Wilkes the blasphemer, not Wilkes the demagogue, whom he had helped to expel and incapacitate, he still held that the House of Commons had acted not only legally but wisely. He gave a pledge of his conviction by repairing the omission in his book. In its subsequent editions appears, as if it were a well settled rule, the statement that if a person is made a peer or elected to serve in the House of Commons, the respective Houses of Parliament may upon complaint of any crime in such person, and proof thereof, adjudge him disabled and incapable to sit as a member. His earlier statement of the law, however, was not forgotten, and “the first edition of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England” is said to have become a toast at Opposition banquets. Nobody has now any doubt that Blackstone was in the wrong, confounding, as was pointed out at the time, the independence of the several parts of the legislature with the authority of the whole. His tenacity and the prestige of his name gave him the support of his party; but before long, had he lived, he would have suffered the mortification of seeing the House of Commons expunge from its journals all the declarations, orders, and resolutions respecting the election of John Wilkes, Esquire, as “subversive of the rights of the whole body of the electors of this kingdom.”

Having failed as a politician, he was made a judge. He sat on the bench from 1770 till his death in 1780, and he left behind him the reputation of having striven to administer justice with scrupulous care. He was certainly not a great judge. He was cursed with indecision; he was diffident of his own opinion, and never strenuous in supporting it; and in consequence, if we can trust Malone’s account of him, “there were more new trials granted in causes which came before him on circuit than were granted on the decisions of any other judge who sat at Westminster in his time.” The habit of mind which in private life produced in him almost a mania for punctuality made him as a judge a strict observer of forms; and he would not have consented, even if he had been able, to make and modify law as did his contemporary, Lord Mansfield. The time was pre-eminently favorable for earning a great judicial reputation; the law, impeded by fictions, formalities, and obsolete statutes, lagged behind a nation whose commerce had increased more than tenfold within living memory; and public opinion would have dealt leniently with a judge who shaped the old rules to satisfy the new needs. But Blackstone had not the courage for such work; and, save for the case of Perrin v. Blake, one might well tell the legal history of the ten years which he spent on the bench and never mention his name. Perrin v. Blake is too technical to be here described; enough to say that it maintained inviolate the venerable rule in Shelley’s case, with which Lord Mansfield had been profanely tampering. The case excited great interest in the profession, partly from its own importance and partly from some personal controversies to which it gave rise. Lord Campbell, indeed, writing more than seventy years after it had been decided, says that when conversation flags amongst lawyers the mention of Perrin v. Blake never fails to cause excitement and loquacity!

The politician and the judge are forgotten now, and only the commentator remains. But his life was consistent throughout. He had a reverence for authority and a respect for formalities; his mind turned more readily to apology than to criticism; and destitute of ideals he lived in a narrow groove, contented with himself and the world. When he and Serjeant Nares were calling for the expulsion of Wilkes because he was a blasphemer, Burke described their arguments as “solid, substantial, roast-beef reasoning.” The phrase paints to the life the worshipper of the constitution, who staked the fate of England upon trial by jury.—Macmillan’s Magazine.

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