Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

by Harold J. Laski

So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for English Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import. It can never be forgotten in the history of political ideas that the alliance of Church and State made Nonconformists suspicious of government interference. Their original desire to be left unimpeded was soon exalted into a definite theory; and since political conditions had confined them so largely to trade none felt as they did the hampering influence of State-restrictions. The result has been a great difficulty in making liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the organic nature of the State. It remains for them almost entirely a police institution which, once it aims at the realization of right, usurps a function far better performed by individuals. There is no sense of the community; all that exists is a sum of private sentiments. "Civil liberty," says Priestley, "has been greatly impaired by an abuse of the maxim that the joint understanding of all the members of a State, properly collected, must be preferable to that of individuals; and consequently that the more the cases are in which mankind are governed by this united reason of the whole community, so much the better; whereas, in truth, the greater part of human actions are of such a nature, that more inconvenience would follow from their being fixed by laws than from their being left to every man's arbitrary will." If my neighbor assaults me, he suggests, I may usefully call in the police; but where the object is the discovery of truth, the means of education, the method of religious belief, individual initiative is superior to State action. The latter produces an uniform result "incompatible with the spirit of discovery." Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just to posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future. Men are too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all action.

Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past tradition; and the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered broadcast over his pages. Nevertheless the basis upon which he defended his ideas was a utilitarianism hardly less complete than that which Bentham made the instrument of revolution. "Regard to the general good," he says, "is the main method by which natural rights are to be defended." "The good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be determined." In substance, that is to say, if not completely in theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to those of expediency. His chief attack upon religious legislation is similarly based upon considerations of policy. His view of the individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual energy. Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar fashion to Adam Smith and his followers. Priestley, of course, was inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that government has the future in its hands than that government action may well be decisive for good or evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all doors. That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the previous age.

It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley exerted; certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small. Dr. Richard Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he might have had has been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents. His sinking-fund scheme was taken up by the younger Pitt, and proved, though the latter believed in it to the last, to be founded upon an arithmetical fallacy which did not sit well upon a fellow of the Royal Society. His sermon on the French Revolution provoked the Reflections of Burke; and, though much of the right was on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he survived Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day, and he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb optimism; for the rigid a priori morality of which he was the somewhat muddled defender was less favorable to a confidence in reason. He had a good deal of John Brown's fear that luxury was the seed of English degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential to the general thesis he had to make.

Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to print by the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely popular, his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776) attained its eighth edition within a decade. This, with its supplement Additional Observations (1777), presents a perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their ancestry concealed. They represent the tradition of Locke, modified by the importations of Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume, and he takes sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has little or nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument is upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government, and self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator. Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to its last consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public services"; laws are "particular provisions or regulations established by Common Consent for gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are "trustees or deputies for carrying these regulations into execution." And almost in the words of Rousseau, Price goes on to admit that liberty, "in its most perfect degree, can be enjoyed only in small states where every independent agent is capable of giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen into public offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though he thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize the sacrifice of liberty involved.

But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized. "Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust; and all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects the theory of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with self-government; if the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its life, it would betray its constituents and dissolve itself. "If omnipotence," he writes, "can with any sense be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all legislative authority originates; that is, in the People." Such a system is alone compatible with the ends of government, since it cannot be supposed that men "combine into communities and institute government" for self-enslavement. Nor is any other political system "consistent with the natural equality of mankind"; by which Price means that no man "is constituted by the author of nature the vassal or subject of another, or has any right to give law to him, or, without his consent, to take away any part of his property or to abridge him of his liberty." From all of which it is concluded that liberty is inalienable; and a people which has lost it "must have a right to emancipate themselves as soon as they can." The aptness of the argument to the American situation is obvious enough; and nowhere is Price more happy or more formidable than when he applies his precepts to phrases like "the unity of the empire" and the "honor of the kingdom" which were so freely used to cover up the inevitable results of George's obstinacy.

The Essay on the Right of Property in Land (1781) of William Ogilvie deserves at least a passing notice. The author, who published his book anonymously, was a Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen and an agriculturist of some success. His own career was distinctly honorable. The teacher of Sir James Mackintosh, he had a high reputation as a classical scholar and deserves to be remembered for his effort to reform a college which had practically ceased to perform its proper academic functions. His book is virtually an essay upon the natural right of men to the soil. He does not doubt that the distress of the times is due to the land monopoly. The earth being given to men in common, its invasion by private ownership is a dangerous perversion. Men have the right to the full product of their labor; but the privileges of the landowner prevent the enjoyment of that right. The primary duty of every State is the increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation is that which has the greatest number of free and independent cultivators. But governments attend rather to the interest of the higher classes, even while they hold out the protection of the common people as the main pretext of their authority. The result is their maintenance of land-monopoly even though it affects the prime material of all essential industries, prevents the growth of population, and makes the rich wealthier at the expense of the poor. It breeds oppression and ignorance, and poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative. He points out how a nation is dominated by its landlords, and how they have consistently evaded the fiscal burdens they should bear. Only in a return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source of an increase in happiness.

Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to speak of actual changes, he had little more to propose than a system of peasant proprietorship. What is striking in the book is its sense of great, impending changes, its thorough grasp of the principle of utility, its realization of the immense agricultural improvement that is possible if the landed system can be so changed as to bring into play the impulses of humble men. He sees clearly enough that wealth dominates the State; and his interpretation of history is throughout economic. Ogilvie is one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who, chiefly through Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special current of their own in the great tide of protest against the unjust situation of labor. Like them, he builds his system upon natural rights; though, unlike them, his natural rights are defended by expediency and in a style that is always clear and logical. The book itself has rather a curious history. At its appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind. Mackintosh knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against the amiable delusion that its excellence would persuade the British government to force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the East India Company. Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby, it was intended to instruct the Chartists in the secret of their oppression; and therein it may well have contributed to the tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus O'Connor. In 1891 the problem of the land was again eagerly debated under the stimulus of Mr. Henry George; and a patriotic Scotchman published the book with biographical notes that constitute one of the most amazing curiosities in English political literature.

V

Against the school of Rousseau's English disciples it is comparatively easy to multiply criticisms. They lacked any historic sense. Government, for them, was simply an instrument which was made and unmade at the volition of men. How complex were its psychological foundations they had no conception; with the single factor of consent they could explain the most marvellous edifice of any time. They were buried beneath a mountain of metaphysical right which they never related to legal facts or to political possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led. They overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy themselves with political affairs. They made no proper allowance for the protective armour each social system must acquire by the mere force of prescription. Nor is there sufficient allowance in their attitude for those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman must of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to say, so completely with staatslehre that they do not admit the mollifying influence of politik. They search for principles of universal right, without the perception that a right which is to be universal must necessarily be so general in character as to be useless in its application.

Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their insight. They were protesting against a system strongly upheld on grounds which now appear to have been simply indefensible. The business of government had been made the private possession of a privileged class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from the minds of most men engaged in its direction. The loss of America, the heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most to the fact that principle is a vital part of policy. The revolutionists recalled men to the need of explaining, no less than carrying on, the government of the Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid intrigues of the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated, unconvinced. It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes of Europe and America before they would give serious heed; and even then they met antagonism with nothing save oppression and hate. Yet the doctrines remained; for thought, after all, is killed by reasoned answer alone. And when the first gusts of war and revolution had passed, the cause for which they stood was found to have permeated all classes save that which had all to lose by learning.