Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

by Harold J. Laski

Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power of government which Locke had proposed. It is a removal at every point conditioned by the interest of the people. For Rousseau declared that the existing distribution of power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and he made the people sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their achievement in the shape of sinister interest. The powers of the people thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for innovation. It is easy enough then to understand why such a philosophy should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager sympathy for humble men, his optimistic faith in the immediate prospect of popular power were to Burke the symptoms of insane delusion and their author "the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England." But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's influence was the success of the American Revolution; and no one had done more than Burke himself to promote its cause and justify its principles. That revolution established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the soberness with which it checked the supposed weakness of the sovereign people. America made herself independent while what was best in Europe combined in enthusiastic applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of Rousseau had been taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of power could remove what deliberation was impotent to secure. Here Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage denied. Nor, at the moment, was it influential except in the general impetus it gave to thought. But from the moment of its appearance it is an undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its metaphysical form it failed to command acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its results were victorious. Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the conclusions he recommends so much as in the language in which he clothes them. Either make a final end of the optimism of men like Hume and Blackstone, or the veneration for the past which is at the root of Burke's own teaching.

It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the stimulus it did. Montesquieu came to praise the British constitution at a time when good men were aghast at its perversion. There was no room in many years for revolution, but at least there was place for hearty discontent and a seeking after new methods. Of that temper two men so different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are the political symbols. The former's rise to power upon the floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant nothing so much as a protest against the cynical corruption of the previous generation. Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly awaking to a sense of its own power. The French creed was too purely logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden shoes played not a little part in its rejection. The rights of man made only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was involved in that rejection; and then it was too late. But no one could feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes. The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would have been a supreme achievement.

II

The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757. John Brown's Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times is largely forgotten now; though it went through seven editions in a year and was at once translated into French. Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in the vast Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of comment upon the Characteristics of Shaftesbury. His book is too evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with reverence, to make us doubt its derivation. There is the same reliance upon Livy and Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking generalization; though the argument upon which Brown's conclusions are based is seldom given, perhaps because his geometric clarity of statement impressed him as self-demonstrative. Brown's volumes are an essay upon the depravity of the times. He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy. He condemns the universities out of hand, in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would not have rejected. He deplores the decay of taste and learning. Men trifle with Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would, appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize money. Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman. The poor, indeed, the middle class, and the legal and medical professions, Brown specifically exempts from this indictment. But he emphasizes his belief that this is unimportant. "The manners and principles of those who lead," he says, "... not of those who are governed ... will ever determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the continuance or dissolution of a state."

This profligacy Brown compares to the languid vice which preceded the fall of Carthage and of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great Britain at the hands of France, unless it can be cured. So far as he has an explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the decay of religious sentiment. His remedy is only Bolingbroke's Patriot King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen to the height of power. What mainly stirred Englishmen was the prophecy of defeat on the morrow of the disastrous convention of Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe and Clive repaired that royal humiliation Brown seems to have died a natural death. What is more interesting than his prophecies was the evidence of a close reading of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is the product of the climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and sullen temper. Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation. Brown has no passion, and his book reads rather like Mr. Galsworthy's Island Pharisees sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of attention to the evils of his time. It describes undoubted facts, and it shows that the era of content has gone. But its careful periods and strangely far-off air lack the eagerness for truth which Rousseau put into his questions. Brown can neither explain nor can he proffer remedy. He sees that Pitt is somehow significant; but when he rules out the popular voice as devoid of all importance, he deprives himself of the means whereby to grasp the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted. Nothing could prove more strongly the exactitude of Burke's Present Discontents. Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of Junius.

Hume was the friend of Montesquieu, though twenty years his junior; and the Esprit des Lois travelled rapidly to Scotland. There it caught the eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a treatise on refinement, and by the influence of Hume and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular in his time, and certainly he has a skill for polished phrase, and a genial paraphrase of other men's ideas. His Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), which in a quarter of a century went through six editions, was thought by Helvétius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the investigation of savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government. He sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature. He insists, probably after conversation with Adam Smith, upon the social value of the division of functions. He does not doubt the original equality of men. He thinks the luxury of his age has reached the limit of its useful growth. Property he traces back to a parental desire to make a better provision for children "than is found under the promiscuous management of many copartners." Climate has the new importance upon which Montesquieu has insisted; or, at least, as it "ripens the pineapple and the tamarina," so it "inspires a degree of mildness that can even assuage the rigours of despotical government." The priesthood—this is Hume—becomes a separate influence under the sway of superstition. Liberty, he says, "is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in behalf of equitable government." The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is certainly not here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in the obscurity into which he has fallen. The Esprit des Lois took twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of men like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped. Facile popularisers of this sort may have mollified the drawing-room; but they did not add to political ideas.

III

A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the students of constitutional law. Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-9) has had ever since its first publication an authority such as Coke only before possessed. "He it is," said Bentham, "who, first of all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the Scholar and the Gentleman." Certainly, as Professor Dicey has remarked, "the book contains much real learning about our system of government." We are less concerned here with Blackstone as an antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy. Here his purpose seems obvious enough. The English constitution raised him from humble means through a Professorship at Oxford to a judgeship in the Court of Common Pleas. He had been a member of Parliament and refused the office of Solicitor-General. He had thus no reason to be dissatisfied with the conditions of his time; and the first book of the Commentaries is nothing so much as an attempt to explain why English constitutional law is a miracle of wisdom.

Constitutional law, as such, indeed, found no place in Blackstone's book. It creeps in under the rights of persons, where he deals with the power of king and Parliament. His treatment implies a whole philosophy. Laws are of three kinds—of nature, of God, and of the civil state. Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is "a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong." It is, he tells us, "called a rule to distinguish it from a compact or agreement." It derives from the sovereign power, of which the chief character is the making of laws. Society is based upon the "wants and fears" of men; and it is coeval with their origin. The idea of a state of nature "is too wild to be seriously admitted," besides being contrary to historical knowledge. Society implies government, and whatever its origins or its forms there "must be in all of them a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summa imperii, or rights of sovereignty reside." The forms of government are classified in the usual way; and the British constitution is noted as a happy mixture of them all. "The legislature of the Kingdom," Blackstone writes, "is entrusted to three powers entirely independent of each other; first the King, secondly the lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical assembly of persons, chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour or their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy; and as this aggregate body, actuated by different springs and attentive to different interests, composes the British Parliament and has the supreme disposal of everything; there can be no inconvenience attempted by either of the three branches, but will be withstood by one of the other two; each branch being armed with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous." It is in the king in Parliament that British sovereignty resides. Eschewing the notion of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the implications of it are secured. "The constitutional government of this island," he says, "is so admirably tempered and compounded, that nothing can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the equilibrium of power between one branch of the legislature and the rest."

All this is not enough; though, as Bentham was to show in his Fragment on Government, it is already far too much. "A body of nobility," such is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, "is also more peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded constitution, in order to support the rights of both the Crown and people, by forming a barrier to withstand the encroachments of both ... if they were confounded with the mass of the people, and like them had only a vote in electing representatives, their privileges would soon be borne down and overwhelmed by the popular torrent, which would effectually level all distinctions." "The Commons," he says further, "consist of all such men of property in the kingdom as have not seats in the House of Lords." The legal irresponsibility of the King is emphasized. "He is not only incapable of doing wrong," says Blackstone, "but even of thinking wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or weakness," though he points out that the constitution "has allowed a latitude of supposing the contrary." The powers of the King are described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of William the Norman than to the backstairs corruption of George III. The right of revolution is noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals rather than of law.