This, however, hardly gives the key to his first difference with the utilitarians, though it greatly affects his conclusions. He called himself, as I have said, a Liberal; but there were, according to him, two classes of Liberals, the intellectual Liberals, whom he identified with the old utilitarians, and the Liberals who are generally described as the Manchester school. Which of those was to be the school of the future, and which represented the true utilitarian tradition? Here I must just notice a fact which is not always recognised. The utilitarians are identified by most people with the (so-called) Manchester doctrines. They are regarded as advocates of individualism and the laissez-faire or, as I should prefer to call it, the let-alone principle. There was no doubt a close connection, speaking historically; but a qualification must be made in a logical sense, which is very important for my purpose. The tendency which Fitzjames attacked as especially identified with Mill's teaching—the tendency, namely, to restrict the legitimate sphere of government—is far from being specially utilitarian. It belonged more properly to the adherents of the 'rights of man,' or the believers in abstract reason. It is to be found in Price and Paine, and in the French declaration of the rights of man; and Mr. Herbert Spencer, its chief advocate (in a new form) at the present day remarks himself that he was partly anticipated by Kant. Bentham expressly repudiated this view in his vigorous attack upon the 'anarchical fallacies' embodied in the French declaration. In certain ways, moreover, Bentham and his disciples were in favour of a very vigorous Government action. Bentham invented his Panopticon as a machine for 'grinding rogues honest,' and proposed to pass paupers in general through the same mill. His constitutional code supposes a sort of omnipresent system of government, and suggests a national system of education and even a national church—with a very diluted creed. As thorough-going empiricists, the utilitarians were bound to hold, and did, in fact, generally declare themselves to hold, not that Government interference was wrong in general, but simply that there was no general principle upon the subject. Each particular case must be judged by its own merits.
Historically speaking, the case was different. The political economy of Ricardo and the Mills was undoubtedly what is now called thoroughly 'individualistic.' Its adherents looked with suspicion at everything savouring of Government action. This is in part one illustration of the general truth that philosophies of all kinds are much less the real source of principles than the theories evoked to justify principles. Their course is determined not by pure logic alone, but by the accidents of contemporary politics. The revolutionary movement meant that governments in general were, for the time, the natural enemies of 'reason.' Philosophers who upon any ground sympathised with the movement took for their watchword 'liberty,' which, understood absolutely, is the antithesis to all authority. They then sought to deduce the doctrine of liberty from their own philosophy, whatever that might be. The à priori school discovered that kings and priests and nobles interfered with a supposed 'order of nature,' or with the abstract 'rights of man.' The utilitarian's argument was that all government implies coercion; that coercion implies pain; and therefore that all government implies an evil which ought to be minimised. They admitted that, though 'minimised,' it should not be annihilated. Bentham had protested very forcibly that the 'rights of man' doctrine meant anarchy logically, and asserted that government was necessary, although a necessary evil. But the general tendency of his followers was to lay more stress upon the evil than upon the necessity. The doctrine was expounded with remarkable literary power by Buckle,[119] who saw in all history a conflict between protection and authority on the one hand and liberty and scepticism on the other.
J. S. Mill had begun as an unflinching advocate of the stern old utilitarianism of his father and Ricardo. He had become, as Fitzjames observes, 'humane' or 'sentimental' in later years. He tried, as his critics observe, to soften the old economic doctrines and showed a certain leaning to socialism. In regard to this part of his teaching, in which Fitzjames took little interest, I shall only notice that, whatever his concessions, he was still in principle an 'individualist.' He maintained against the Socialists the advantages of competition; and though his theory of the 'unearned increment' looks towards the socialist view of nationalisation of the land, he seems to have been always in favour of peasant proprietorship, and of co-operation as distinguished from State socialism. Individualism, in fact, in one of its senses, for like other popular phrases it tends to gather various shades of meaning, was really the characteristic of the utilitarian school. Thus in philosophy they were 'nominalists,' believing that the ultimate realities are separate things, and that abstract words are mere signs calling up arbitrary groups of things. Politically, they are inclined to regard society as an 'aggregate,' instead of an 'organism.' The ultimate units are the individual men, and a nation or a church a mere name for a multitude combined by some external pressure into a collective mass of separate atoms.[120] This is the foundation of Mill's political theories, and explains the real congeniality of the let-alone doctrines to his philosophy. It gives, too, the key-note of the book upon 'Liberty,' which Fitzjames took for his point of assault. Mill had been profoundly impressed by Tocqueville, and, indeed, by an order of reflections common to many intelligent observers. What are to be the relations between democracy and intellectual culture? Many distinguished writers have expressed their forebodings as to the future. Society is in danger of being vulgarised. We are to be ground down to uniform and insignificant atoms by the social mill. The utilitarians had helped the lower classes to wrest the scourge from the hands of their oppressors. Now the oppressed had the scourge in their own hands; how would they apply it? Coercion looked very ugly in the hands of a small privileged class; but when coercion could be applied by the masses would they see the ugliness of it? Would they not use the same machinery in order to crush the rich and the exalted, and take in the next place to crushing each other? Shall we not have a dead level of commonplace and suffer, to use the popular phrase, from a 'tyranny of the majority,' more universal and more degrading than the old tyranny of the minority? This was the danger upon which Mill dwelt in his later works. In his 'Liberty' he suggests the remedy. It is nothing less than the recognition of a new moral principle. Mankind, he said, individually or collectively, are justified in interference with others only by the need of 'self-protection.' We may rightfully prevent a man from hurting his neighbour, but not from hurting himself. If we carefully observe this precaution the individual will have room to expand, and we shall cease to denounce all deviations from the common type.
Here Fitzjames was in partial sympathy with his antagonist. He reviewed 'Liberty' in the 'Saturday Review' upon its first appearance; and although making certain reservations, reviewed it with warm approbation. Mill and he were agreed upon one point. A great evil, perhaps the one great evil of the day, as Fitzjames constantly said, is the prevalence of a narrow and mean type of character; the decay of energy; the excessive devotion to a petty ideal of personal comfort; and the systematic attempt to turn our eyes away from the dark side of the world. A smug, placid, contemptible optimism is creeping like a blight over the face of society, and suppressing all the grander aspirations of more energetic times. But in proportion to Fitzjames's general agreement upon the nature of the evil was the vehemence of his dissent from the suggested remedy. He thought that, so far from meeting the evil, it tended directly to increase it. To diminish the strength of the social bond would be to enervate not to invigorate society. If Mill's principles could be adopted, everything that has stimulated men to pursue great ends would lose its interest, and we should become a more contemptible set of creatures than we are already.
I have tried to show how these convictions had been strengthened by circumstances. Fitzjames's strong patriotic feeling, his pride in the British race and the British empire, generated a special antipathy to the school which, as he thought, took a purely commercial view of politics; which regarded the empire as a heavy burthen, because it did not pay its expenses, and which looked forward to a millennium of small shopkeepers bothered by no taxes or tariffs. During the 'Pall Mall Gazette' period he had seen such views spreading among the class newly entrusted with power. Statesmen, in spite of a few perfunctory attempts at better things, were mainly engaged in paltry intrigues, and in fishing for votes by flattering fools. The only question was whether the demagogues who were their own dupes were better or worse than the demagogues who knew themselves to be humbugs. Carlyle's denunciations of the imbecility of our system began to be more congenial to his temper, and encouraged him in his heresy. Carlyle's teachings were connected with erroneous theories indeed, and too little guided by practical experience. But the general temper which they showed, the contempt for slovenly, haphazard, hand-to-mouth modes of legislation, the love of vigorous administration on broad, [intelligible] principles, entirely expressed his own feeling. Finally, in India he had, as he thought, found his ideal realised. There, with whatever shortcomings, there was at least a strong Government; rulers who ruled; capable of doing business; of acting systematically upon their convictions; strenuously employed in working out an effective system; and not trammelled by trimming their sails to catch every temporary gust of sentiment in a half-educated community. His book, he often said, was thus virtually a consideration of the commonplaces of British politics in the light of his Indian experience. He wished, he says in one of his letters, to write about India; but as soon as he began he felt that he would be challenged to give his views upon these preliminary problems: What do you think of liberty, of toleration, of ruling by military force, and so forth? He resolved, therefore, to answer these questions by themselves.
I must add that this feeling was coloured by Fitzjames's personal qualities. He could never, as I have pointed out, like Mill himself; he pronounced him to be 'cold as ice,' a mere 'walking book,' and a man whose reasoning powers were out of all proportion to his 'seeing powers.' If I were writing about Mill I should think it necessary to qualify this judgment of a man who might also be described as sensitive to excess, and who had an even feminine tenderness. But from Fitzjames's point of view the judgment was natural enough. The two men could never come into cordial relations, and the ultimate reason, I think, was what I should call Mill's want of virility. He might be called 'cold,' not as wanting in tenderness or enthusiasm, but as representing a kind of philosophical asceticism. Whether from his early education, his recluse life, or his innate temperament, half the feelings which moved mankind seemed to him simply coarse and brutal. They were altogether detestable—not the perversions which, after all, might show a masculine and powerful nature. Mill's view, for example, seemed to be that all the differences between the sexes were accidental, and that women could be turned into men by trifling changes in the law. To a man of ordinary flesh and blood, who had grounded his opinions, not upon books, but upon actual experience of life, such doctrines appear to be not only erroneous, but indicative of a hopeless thinness of character. And so, again, Fitzjames absolutely refused to test the value of the great patriotic passions which are the mainsprings of history by the mere calculus of abstract concepts which satisfied Mill. Fitzjames, like Henry VIII., 'loved a man,' and the man of Mill's speculations seemed to be a colourless, flaccid creature, who required, before all things, to have some red blood infused into his veins.
Utilitarianism of the pedantic kind—the utilitarianism which substitutes mere lay figures for men and women—or the utilitarianism which refuses to estimate anything that cannot be entered in a ledger, was thus altogether abhorrent to Fitzjames. And yet he was, in his way, a utilitarian in principle; and his reply to Mill must be given in terms of utilitarianism. To do that, it was only necessary to revert to the original principles of the sect, and to study Austin and Bentham with a proper infusion of Hobbes. Then it would be possible to construct a creed which, whatever else might be said of it, was not wanting in vigour or in danger of substituting abstractions for concrete realities. I shall try to indicate the leading points of this doctrine without following the order partly imposed upon Fitzjames by his controversial requirements. Nor shall I inquire into a question not always quite clear, namely, whether his interpretation of Mill's principles was altogether correct.
One fundamental ground is common to Fitzjames and his antagonist. It is assumed in Austin's analysis of 'law,' which is accepted by both.[121] Law properly means a command enforced by a 'sanction.' The command is given by a 'sovereign,' who has power to reward or punish, and is made effectual by annexing consequences, painful or pleasurable, to given lines of conduct. The law says, 'Thou shalt not commit murder'; and 'shalt not' means 'if you commit murder you shall be hanged.' Nothing can be simpler or more obviously in accordance with common sense. Abolish the gaoler and the hangman and your criminal law becomes empty words. Moreover, the congeniality of this statement to the individualist point of view is obvious. Consider men as a multitude of independent units, and the problem occurs, How can they be bound into wholes? What must be the principle of cohesion? Obviously some motive must be supplied which will operate upon all men alike. Practically that means a threat in the last resort of physical punishment. The bond, then, which keeps us together in any tolerable order is ultimately the fear of force. Resist, and you will be crushed. The existence, therefore, of such a sanction is essential to every society; or, as it may be otherwise phrased, society depends upon coercion.
This, moreover, applies in all spheres of action. Morality and religion 'are and always must be essentially coercive systems.'[122] They restrain passion and restrain it by appealing to men's hopes and fears—chiefly to their fears. For one man restrained by the fear of the criminal law, a vast number are restrained by the 'fear of the disapprobation of their neighbours, which is the moral sanction, or by the fear of punishment in a future state of existence, which is the religious sanction, or by the fear of their own disapprobation, which may be called the conscientious sanction, and may be regarded as a compound case of the other 'two.'[123] An objection, therefore, to coercion would be an objection to all the bonds which make association possible; it would dissolve equally states, churches, and families, and make even the peaceful intercourse of individuals impossible. In point of fact, coercion has built up all the great churches and nations. Religions have spread partly by military power, partly by 'threats as to a future state,'[124] and always by the conquest of a small number of ardent believers over the indifferent mass. Men's lives are regulated by customs as streams are guided by dams and embankments. The customs like the dams are essentially restraints, and moreover restraints imposed by a small numerical minority, though they ultimately become so familiar to the majority that the restraint is not felt. All nations have been built up by war, that is, by coercion in its sternest form. The American civil war was the last and most striking example. It could not ultimately be settled by conveyancing subtleties about the interpretation of clauses in the Constitution, but by the strong hand and the most energetic faith.[125] War has determined whether nations are to be and what they are to be. It decides what men shall believe and in what mould their religion, laws, morals, and the whole tone of their lives shall be cast.[126]
Nor does coercion disappear with the growth of civilisation. It is not abolished but transformed. Lincoln and Moltke commanded a force which would have crushed Charlemagne and his paladins and peers like so many eggshells.[127] Scott, in the 'Fair Maid of Perth,' describes the 'Devil's Dick of Hellgarth' who followed the laird of Wamphray, who rode with the lord of Johnstone, who was banded with the Earl of Douglas, and earl, and lord, and laird, and the 'Devil's Dick' rode where they pleased and took what they chose. Does that imply that Scotland was then subject to force, and that now force has disappeared? No; it means that the force that now stands behind a simple policeman is to the force of Douglas and his followers as the force of a line of battle ship to the force of an individual prize-fighter.[128] It works quietly precisely because it is overwhelming. Force therefore underlies and permeates every human institution. To speak of liberty taken absolutely as good is to condemn all social bonds. The only real question is in what cases liberty is good, and how far it is good. Buckle's denunciation of the 'spirit of protection' is like praising the centrifugal and reviling the centripetal force. One party would be condemning the malignity of the force which was dragging us all into the sun, and the other the malignity of the force which was driving us madly into space. The seminal error of modern speculation is shown in this tendency to speak as advocates of one of different forces, all of which are necessary to the harmonious government of conduct.[129]