Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

by Harold J. Laski

What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of the king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined somewhat to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was excessively ignorant and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no one but himself, and he totally misunderstood the true nature of his office. There is no question which arose in the first forty years of his reign in which he was not upon the wrong side and proud of his error. He was wrong about Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about France. He demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked every measure for the purification of the political system. He supported the Slave trade and he opposed the repeal of the Test Act. He prevented the grant of Catholic emancipation at the one moment when it might have genuinely healed the wounds of Ireland. He destroyed by his perverse creations the value of the House of Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly determined to make his will the criterion of policy; and his design might have succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to its greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in politics. The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the court upon a broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as the event proved, could be as subservient to the king as to his minister.

Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with characteristic stupidity, the king did not know the proper instruments for his purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the suspicion of the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder Pitt. In the Wilkes affair he threw the clearest light of the century upon the true nature of the House of Commons. His own system of proscription restored to the Whig party not a little of the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to supply them with a philosophy. Chatham remained the idol of the people despite his hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of representative government and of personal liberty. He lost America and it was not his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had made him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt was to compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George's effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature of things, survive that analysis.

Not, of course, that George ever lacked defenders. As early as 1761, the old rival of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage had condemned to obsolescence, published his Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the new Reign. Pulteney urged the sovereign no longer to be content with the "shadow of royalty." He should use his "legal prerogatives" to check "the illegal claims of factious oligarchy." Government had become the private possession of a few powerful men. The king was but a puppet in leading strings. The basis of government should be widened, for every honest man was aware that distinctions of party were now merely nominal. The Tories should be admitted to place. They were now friendly to the accession and they no longer boasted their hostility to dissent. They knew that Toleration and the Establishment were of the essence of the Constitution. Were once the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would cease and Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom. "The ministers," he said, "will depend on the Crown not the Crown on ministers" if George but showed "his resolution to break all factitious connections and confederacies." The tone is Bolingbroke's, and it was the lesson George had insistently heard from early youth. How sinister was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in political exile, with Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants threatening the whole basis of past liberties.

The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the meaning of the new synthesis was Junius. That his anonymity concealed the malignant talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now beyond denial. Junius, indeed, can hardly claim a place in the history of political ideas. His genius lay not in the discussion of principle but the dissection of personality. His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled him to inform the general public of facts which were the private possession of the inner political circle. His mind was narrow and pedantic. He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He was never generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness the nature of the issue and he was a powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king. He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover, appearing as they did in the daily journals gave the press a significance in politics which it has never lost. He made the significance of George's effort known to the mass of men at a time when no other means of information was at hand. The opposition was divided; the king's friends were in a vast majority; the publication of debates was all but impossible. English government was a secret conflict in which the entrance of spectators was forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate. It was the glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. Not even the combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord Mansfield's doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of his vituperation and Wilkes' courage. Bad men have sometimes been the instruments of noble destiny; and there are few more curious episodes in English history than the result of this alliance between revengeful hate and insolent ambition.

II

Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was the ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict its real place in philosophy. There is no immortality save in ideas; and it was Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in which he was the liberal protagonist. His career is illustrative at once of the merits and defects of English politics in the eighteenth century. The son of an Irish Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, he served, after learning what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to politics in the upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied, along with Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal; though the Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) shows his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub Street that he appears to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge which made him without equal in the House of Commons. His earliest production was a Vindication of Natural Society (1756), written in the manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the basis of Godwin's Political Justice. After a vain attempt to serve in Ireland with "Single-Speech" Hamilton, he became the private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the one section of the Whig party to which an honorable record still remained. That connection secured for him a seat in Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six; and henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading members. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still, in the eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in the short months during which he held office, the minor office of Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom all England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a place at the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.

For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a singularly lovable figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said Johnson; and Goldsmith has told us how he wound his way into a subject like a serpent. Macaulay thought him the greatest man since Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest master of civil wisdom in our tongue." "No English writer," says Sir Leslie Stephen, "has received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics." Even when the last criticism has been made, detraction from these estimates is impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent was his temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe. His alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics, unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public welfare. No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to the service of the nation with less regard for personal advancement. No English statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a mass of details to the principle they involve.

He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no influence to whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics, indeed, bear upon their face the preoccupation with the immediate problems of the House of Commons. Yet through them all the principles that emerge form a consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw it with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the maxims of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London out to India and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian ryot's wrongs as for the iniquities of English policy to Ireland. With less width of mind than Hume and less intensity of gaze than Adam Smith, he yet had a width and intensity which, fused with his own imaginative sympathy, gave him more insight than either. He had an unerring eye for the eternal principles of politics. He knew that ideals must be harnessed to an Act of Parliament if they are not to cease their influence. Admitting while he did that politics must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find good reason why expediency should be identified with what he saw as right. It is a stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English politics to whom a greater immediate influence may be ascribed, just as in political philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of Hobbes and Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and speculation his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like him before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his practical insight was far less profound. Hamilton had Burke's full grasp of political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation. So that he remains a figure of uniqueness. He may, as Goldsmith said, have expended upon his party talents that should have illuminated the universal aspect of the State. Yet there is no question with which he dealt that he did not leave the richer for his enquiry.

III

The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he was at every point upon the side of the future. Where constitutional reform was in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy; though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid conservatism. In the last decade of his life he encountered the greatest cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the Reformation, and it is not too much to say that at every point he missed the essence of its meaning. Yet even upon France and the English Constitution he was full of practical sagacity. Had his warning been uttered without the fury of hate that accompanied it, he might well have guided the forces of the Revolution into channels that would have left no space for the military dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real evils of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently inveighed, forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch of wise and continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he was ready to praise. What impressed him was less the evils of the constitution than its possibilities, could the defects quite alien from its nature but be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a deeper vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke's conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was too much the apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles involved in the overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense of a Divine Providence taking thought for the welfare of men to interfere with violence in his handiwork. The tinge of caution is never absent, even from his most liberal moments; and he was willing to endure great evil if it seemed dangerous to estimate the cost of change.