We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and Priestley as representing more than an important segment of opinion. The opposition to their theories was not less articulate than their own defence of them. Some, like Burke, desired a purification of the existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had no sort of sympathy with new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least, deserves some mention less for the inherent value of what he had to say, than for the nature of the opinions he expounded. Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a reputation alike in political and economic enquiry. He represents the sturdy nationalism of Arbuthnot's John Bull, the unreasoned prejudice against all foreigners, the hatred of all metaphysics as inconsistent with common sense, the desire to let things be on the ground that the effort after change is worse than the evil of which men complain. His Treatise on Civil Government (1781) is in many ways a delightful book, bluff, hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that is all its own. He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the first place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the second, to explode the new bubble of Rousseau's followers. The second point takes the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as Tucker shrewdly saw, the theories of the school may trace their ancestry. He analyses the theory of consent in such fashion as to show that if its adherents could be persuaded to be logical, they would have to admit themselves anarchists. He has no sympathy with the state of nature; the noble savage, on investigation, turns out to be a barbaric creature with a club and scalping knife. Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or, as he prefers, somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that does not mean that the actual governors can be dismissed when any eccentric happens to take exception to their views. He has no sympathy with parliamentary reform. Give the mob an increase of power, he says, and nothing is to be expected but outrage and violence. He thinks the constitution very well as it is, and those who preach the evils of corruption ought to prove their charges instead of blasphemously asserting that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own. He does not doubt that the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered upon them. Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as ever George III himself could have desired. But not for one moment would he fight them to compel their return to British allegiance. If the American colonies want to go, let them by all means cut adrift. They are only a useless source of expenditure. The trade they represent does not depend upon allegiance but upon wants that England can supply if she keeps shop in the proper way, if, that is, she makes it to their interest to buy in her market. Indeed, colonies of all kinds seem to him quite useless. They ever are, he says, and ever were, "a drain to and an incumbrance on the Mother-country, requiring perpetual and expensive nursing in their infancy, and becoming headstrong and ungovernable in proportion as they grow up." All wise relations depend upon self-interest, and that needs no compulsion. If Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up, the result would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and contracts effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal industry encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-century before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean crustily explaining his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had just rejected Edmund Burke for advocating free trade with Ireland.
No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr. Johnson. Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of gloomy prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of the source from which they come. He thought life a poor thing at the best and took a low view of human nature. "The notion of liberty," he told the faithful Boswell, "amuses the people of England and helps to keep off the tedium vitae." The idea of a society properly organized into ranks and societies he always esteemed highly. "I am a friend to subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he seems to have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as the worst of sins. He did not believe in the honesty of republicans; they levelled down, but were never inclined to level up. Men, he felt, had a part to act in society, and their business was to fulfil their allotted station. Rousseau was a very bad man: "I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years." Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth while was freedom in private concerns. He blessed the government in the case of general warrants and thought the power of the Crown too small. Toleration he considered due to an inapt distinction between freedom to think and freedom to talk, and any magistrate "while he thinks himself right ... ought to enforce what he thinks." The American revolt he ascribed to selfish faction; and in his Taxation no Tyranny (1775) he defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite ground of the necessity of subordination. He was willing, he said, to love all mankind except an American.
Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the Idler as one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular. There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no age are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's attitude would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution.
CHAPTER VI
BURKE
I
It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the king stands outside the categories of political conflict. He is the dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory, is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once more the balance of power. Nor was the effort defeated without a struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.
And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost much credit during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power. A generation of corrupt practice and the final defeat of Stuart hopes had already deprived the Whigs of any special hold on their past ideals. They were divided already into factions the purpose of which was no more than the avid pursuit of place and pension. Government by connection proved itself irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also that once corruption was centralized there was no limit to its influence, granted only the absence of great questions. When George III transferred that organization from the office of the minister to his own court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his success. For more than forty years the Tories had been excluded from office; and they were more than eager to sell their support. The Church had become the creature of the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was towards benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and a reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's first book can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor was it obvious that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the great Whig families.