Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

by Harold J. Laski

His American speeches are the true text-book for colonial administration. He put aside the empty plea of right which satisfied legal pedants like George Grenville. What moved him was the tragic fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom. He never concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the maintenance of English liberties. "Armies," he said many years later, "first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself." He had firm hold of that insidious danger which belittles freedom itself in the interest of curtailing some special desire. "In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties," he said in the famous Speech on Conciliation with America (1775), "we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own." The way for the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke saw, prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character of the American contest. His own receipt was sounder. In the Speech on American Taxation (1774) he had riddled the view that the fiscal methods of Lord North were likely to succeed. The true method was to find a way of peace. "Nobody shall persuade me," he told a hostile House of Commons, "when a whole people are concerned that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation." "Magnanimity in politics," he said in the next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." He did not know, in the most superb of all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment against a whole people. He would win the colonies by binding them to England with the ties of freedom. "The question with me," he said, "is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy." The problem, in fact, was one not of abstract right but of expediency; and nothing could be lost by satisfying American desire. Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was apparent to every first-class mind in England. But the obstinate king prevailed; and Burke's great protest remained no more than material for the legislation of the future. Yet it was something that ninety years after his speech the British North America Act should have given his dreams full substance.

Ireland had always a place apart in Burke's affections, and when he first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in his thoughts was the desire to assist its freedom. He saw that here, as in America, no man will be argued into slavery. A government which defied the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster. How could it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its subjects? Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan? The system of Protestant control, he said in the Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792), was "well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself." The Catholics paid their taxes; they served with glory in the army and navy. Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth. "Common sense," he said, "and common justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a people for their slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for great, general and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress them. "No man will assert seriously," he said, "that when people are of a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them with something to complain of." The advantages of subjects were, as he urged, their right; and a wise government would regard "all their reasonable wishes as so many claims." To neglect them was to have a nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.

There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research may well have shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there maintained. He was the first English statesman fully to understand the moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an eternal challenge to their malignant complacency. He did not ask the abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the wisdom of its conquest. All that he insisted upon was this, that in imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code. A lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white. The European must respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by law to respect them in his own State. "If we are not able," he said, "to contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that country to our constitution." England must be in India for India's benefit or not at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as the East India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was the antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a magnificent passage, "before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting." Sympathy with the native, regard for his habits and wants, the Company's servants failed to display. "The English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for the excesses of their premature power. The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds to be blown about in every breaking up of the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean." More than a century was to pass before the wisest of Burke's interpreters attempted the translation of his maxims into statute. But there has never, in any language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in imperial adventure. "The situation of man," said Burke, "is the preceptor of his duty." He saw how a nation might become corrupted by the spoils of other lands. He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of a later cruelty at home. Men will complain of their wrongdoing in the remoter empire; and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield. He denied that the government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction. Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit. He abhorred the politics of prestige. He knew the difficulties involved in administering distant territories, the ignorance and apathy of the public, the consequent erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong will fail of discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let us do what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national reputation." That is a general truth not less in Africa and China than in India itself. The main thought in Burke's mind was the danger lest colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of arbitrary ideas. That his own safeguards were inadequate is clear enough at the present time. He knew that the need was good government. He did not nor could he realize how intimately that ideal was connected with self-government. Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final outcome of his teaching.

IV

A background so consistent as this in the inflexible determination to moralize political action resulted in a noble edifice. Yet, through it all, the principles of policy are rather implied than admitted. It was when he came to deal with domestic problems and the French Revolution that Burke most clearly showed the real trend of his thought. That trend is unmistakable. Burke was a utilitarian who was convinced that what was old was valuable by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity. The State appeared to him an organic compound that came but slowly to its full splendour. It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible. Political philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty. While he did not belittle the value of reason, he was always impressed by the immense part played by prejudice in the determination of policy. He had no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates. Nor must we miss the religious aspect of his philosophy. He never doubted that religion was the foundation of the English State. "Englishmen," he said in the Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), "know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort." The utterance is characteristic, not merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its ultimate reliance upon a mystic explanation of social facts. Nothing was more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. The only safeguard he could find was in empiricism.

This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his earliest publication; but it remained with him to the end. He would not discuss America in terms of right. "I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions," he said in the Speech on American Taxation, "I hate the very sound of them." "One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state," he wrote in the Reflections, "is the propensity of the people to resort to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a Speech on the Duration of Parliament, "when men are driven to search into the foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of a social contract he declared "at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles," and he found no sense in the doctrine of popular sovereignty. "The lines of morality," he said in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), "are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious conclusion. "This," he said, "is the true touchstone of all theories which regard man and the affairs of men—does it suit his nature in general, does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?"

Of the truth of this general attitude it is difficult to make denial. But when Burke came to apply it to the British Constitution the "rules of prudence" he was willing to admit are narrow enough to cause surprised enquiry. He did not doubt that the true end of a legislature was "to give a direction, a form, a technical dress ... to the general sense of the community"; he admitted that popular revolt is so much the outcome of suffering that in any dispute between government and people, the presumption is at least equal in the latter's favor. He urged the acceptance of Grenville's bill for improving the method of decision upon disputed elections. He made a magnificent defence of the popular cause in the Middlesex election. He was in favor of the publication of parliamentary debates and of the voting lists in divisions. He supported almost with passion the ending of that iniquitous system by which the enfranchisement of revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir of electoral support. His Speech on Economical Reform (1780) was the prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack upon the waste of the Civil list.

Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go. He was against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible. He opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature. He would not, as in the great speech at Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather than a representative of his own convictions. "Government and legislation," he said, "are matters of reason and of judgment"; and once the private member had honorably arrived at a decision which he thought was for the interest of the whole community, his duty was done. All this, in itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke's admirable grasp of the practical application of attractive theories to the event. But it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic constitutional change which is more dubious. He had no sympathy with the Radicals. "The bane of the Whigs," he said, "has been the admission among them of the corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by persuading many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers." "If the nation at large," he wrote in another letter, "has disposition enough to oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of government is, in my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the general disposition be against a virtuous and manly line of public conduct, there is no form into which it can be thrown that will improve its nature or add to its energy"; and in the same letter he foreshadows a possible retirement from the House of Commons as a protest against the growth of radical opinion in his party. He resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage qualification. He had no sympathy with the effort either to add to the county representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs. The framework of the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent. He deplored all criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials. "Our representation," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the necessary imperfections of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to be." It was in the same temper that he resisted all effort at the political relief of the Protestant dissenters. "The machine itself," he had said, "is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were sound"; and he never moved from that opinion.

Burke's attitude was obsolete even while he wrote; yet the suggestiveness of his very errors makes examination of their ground important. Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the name of expediency. His opponents argued that, since men are by nature equal, it must follow that they have an equal right to self-government. To Burke, the admission of this principle would have meant the overthrow of the British constitution. Its implication was that every institution not of immediate popular origin should be destroyed. To secure their ends, he thought, the radicals were compelled to preach the injustice of those institutions and thus to injure that affection for government upon which peace and security depend. Here was an effort to bring all institutions to the test of logic which he thought highly dangerous. "No rational man ever did govern himself," he said, "by abstractions and universals." The question for him was not the abstract rightness of the system upon some set of a priori principles but whether, on the whole, that system worked for the happiness of the community. He did not doubt that it did; and to overthrow a structure so nobly tested by the pressure of events in favor of some theories outside historic experience seemed to him ruinous to society. Government, for him, was the general harmony of diverse interests; and the continual adjustments and exquisite modifications of which it stood in need were admirably discovered in the existing system. Principles were thus unimportant compared to the problem of their application. "The major," he said of all political premises, "makes a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory depends upon the little minor of circumstances."

To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription. The presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change, we act at our peril. "Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but to what is to secure that property, to government." Because he saw the State organically he was impressed by the smallness both of the present moment and the individual's thought. It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had the opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a reason; and that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So the prescriptive title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution. So, too, his main attack on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be discussed." He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a past experience which built according to the general need. Nor does he doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth," he said, "may be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of the virtues."