What, then, and in general, is his place in the history of political thought? Clearly enough, he is not the founder of a system; his work is rather a series of pregnant hints than a consecutive account of political facts. Nor must we belittle the debt he owes to his predecessors. Much, certainly, he owed to Locke, and the full radiance of the Scottish enlightenment emerges into the day with his teaching. Francis Hutcheson gave him no small inspiration; and Hutcheson means that he was indebted to Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism. He first showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He brings to an end what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical school." After him we are done with the abuse of history to bolster up Divine Right and social contract; for there is clearly present in his use of facts a true sense of historical method. He put an end also to the confusion which resulted from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong independent of all positive law. He took the facts as phenomena to be explained rather than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be maintained in part defiance of them. Conventional Whiggism has no foothold after he has done with its analysis. His utilitarianism was the first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract school; and even if he was not the first to see through its pretensions—that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury—he was the first to show the grounds of their uselessness. He saw that history and psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy. So that even if he could not himself construct it the hints at least were there.
[17] There are few books which show so clearly as Lorimer's Institutes of Nations (1872) how fully the Scottish school was in the midstream of European thought.
His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion. The metaphysics of Burke, so far as one may use a term he would himself have repudiated, are largely those of Hume. The place of habit and of social instinct alongside of consent, the perception that reason alone will not explain political facts, the emphasis upon resistance as of last resort, the denial that allegiance is a mere contract to be presently explained, the deep respect for order—all these are, after all, the fabric from which the thought of Burke was woven. Nor is there in Bentham's defence of Utilitarianism argument in which he would have recognized novelty. Herein, at least, his proof that morality is no more than general opinion of utility constructs, in briefer form, the later arguments of Bentham, Paley and the Mills, nor can their mode of statement claim superiority to Hume's. So that on either side of his work he foreshadows the advent of the two great schools of modern political thought. His utilitarianism is the real path by which radical opinion at last found means of acceptance. His use of history is, through Burke, the ancestor of that specialized conservatism begotten of the historical method. If there is thus so much, it is, of course, tempting to ask why there is not more. If Hume has the materials why did he fail to build up a system from them? The answer seems twofold. In part it is the man himself. His genius, as his metaphysics show, lay essentially in his power of destruction; and the man who gave solipsism to philosophy was not likely to effect a new creation in politics. In part, also, the condition of the time gave little stimulus to novelty. Herein Hume was born a generation too early. Had he written when George III attempted the destruction of the system of the Revolution, and when America and France combined to raise again the basic questions of politics, he might have done therein what Adam Smith effected in his own field. But the time had not yet come; and it was left to Burke and Bentham to reap where he had sown.
CHAPTER V
SIGNS OF CHANGE
I
From Hume until the publication of Burke's Present Discontents (1770) there is no work on English politics of the first importance. Walpole had fallen in 1742; but for the next fifteen years his methods dominated the parliamentary scene. It was only with the advent of the elder Pitt to power that a new temper may be observed, a temper quickened by what followed on the accession of George III. Henceforward, it is not untrue to say that the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it was no longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight, though collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for men to grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to victory. Something of the exhilaration of these years we can still catch in the letters which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to turn off with easy laughter his deep sense of pride. In the House of Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show that a new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent.
So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single source, the French influence is the effective cause of change. Voltaire and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole's administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw. Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution, and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience. Yet when he came, in 1762, to publish the Contrat Social it was obvious that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real meaning of their work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English institutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing—less admirable than they accounted it—the difference between a Habeas Corpus and a lettre de cachet, the regular succession of Parliaments, all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a magnificent achievement. The English constitution revealed to France an immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration. Even to Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was a generalization from its significance at a special crisis. Hume had partial glimpses of its inner substance. But for most it had become a discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs. Its analysis as a connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was more significant was the realization of Montesquieu's import simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence. Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers. Rousseau's time was not yet; though within a score of years it was possible to see him as the rival to Burke's conservatism.
It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which underlies the Esprit des Lois (1748). It is a commonplace now that Montesquieu is to be regarded as the founder of the historical method. The present is to be explained by its ancestry. Laws, governments, customs are not truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin and the country from which they derive. It would be inaccurate, with Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in the most complete unreality, are to be found in Godwin's Political Justice; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly saw—the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in his inaugural lecture as Vinerian professor. He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent utterance both in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention, and in the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What, perhaps, is most immediately significant is his famous praise of the British Constitution—the secret of which he entirely misapprehended—and his discovery of its essence in the separation of powers. The short sixth chapter of his eleventh book is the real keynote of Blackstone and De Lolme. It led them to investigate, on principles of at least doubtful validity, an edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That it was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been made. The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines have been more noxious in their consequence than this theory of checks and balances. But Blackstone's Commentaries (1765-9) produced Bentham's Fragment on Government (1776), and with that book we enter upon the realistic study of the British Constitution.