Studies in Literature and History

by Sir Alfred C. Lyall

'Never' (says Mr. Stephen) 'was an adviser more at cross purposes with the advised. It would be impossible to draw a more striking portrait of the abstract reasoner, whose calculations of human motives omit all reference to passion, and who fancied that all prejudice can be dispelled by a few bits of logic.'

Here, in fact, we have the key to Bentham's character, to its weakness and also to its strength. A philosopher who plunges into the practical affairs of the world without taking human feelings and imagination into account is sure to find himself stumbling about among blocks and blockheads, and tripped up by the ill-will of vested interests; but on the other hand, if he has taken the right direction, his ardent energies have the impetus of some natural force. Bentham's earlier notion had been that political reforms could be introduced like improvements in machinery; you had only to prove the superior utility of your new invention to obtain its adoption by all who were concerned in the business. Latterly he made the surprising discovery that in the public offices, in the Law, and in the Church, the heads of these professions are usually quite satisfied with their own monopolies, are opposed to change, and are always ready with a stock of plausible arguments to show the folly and danger of innovation. If the Utilitarian appeals to facts, common sense, and experience, so also does the Conservative; and until public opinion is decidedly for progress the dead weight prevails. Not for a day did Bentham relax his strenuous exertions, but he changed his tactics; he turned from his mechanical workshop to the study of political dynamics, and he found what he wanted in the rising radicalism—'his principal occupation, in a word, was to provide political philosophy for radical reformers.'

Of the philosophic creed which Bentham undertook to proclaim from his hermitage at Ford Abbey, with James Mill as his leading apostle, Mr. Stephen gives us a very shrewd and incisively critical examination. The founder of a new faith has usually begun by the earnest and authoritative declaration of a few simple truths and positive doctrines, for which his disciples provide, in course of time, the necessary philosophical basis. Bentham's voice had been crying ineffectually in the wilderness; and he now set about laying with his own hands the foundations of his beliefs upon primary scientific principles, always with unswerving aim and application to concrete facts. He was a thorough-going iconoclast, wielding, like Mohammed, a single formula, to the destruction of idols of the market or tribe, and to the confusion of those who fattened upon antique superstitions. 'All government is one vast evil,' and can only be kept from mischief by minute regulations and constant vigilance. Whatever is plainly illogical must be radically wrong—'to make a barrister a judge is as sensible as it would be to select a procuress for mistress of a girls' school;' and a parish boy, if he could read properly, might go through the Church services with the Prayer Book and the Homilies, so that an established Church is a costly and indefensible luxury. Taking Utility, founded on observation of actual facts, as his guide and his measure of existing institutions, he treated them as colossal iniquities, as frauds upon the people, as dead and ineffectual for the purposes of moral and political life. Nevertheless, although he condemned the whole fabric as it stood, Bentham was an absolute believer in the unlimited power of laws and institutions; nor was he far from wishing to deal with them on the principles applicable to the reform of prisons, as undesirable but necessary instruments of coercion to be despotically administered upon a scientific model, after the fashion of his favourite Panopticon. He was, in short, as Mr. Stephen points out, an unconscious follower of Hobbes, with this difference, that in Bentham's case the omnipotent Leviathan, for control and direction, was to be enlightened public opinion. And he was apparently convinced, without misgivings, that a model government, framed logically upon that common sense which is a public property, could be introduced and enforced under popular sanction as easily as new regulations for an ill-managed gaol. He was fully prepared to make liberal allowance, in framing his constitution, for the different needs, circumstances, and habits of communities; he was quite aware that precisely the same legislation would not suit England and India; but he believed national circumstance and character to be extensively modifiable by manifestly useful institutions, and he was ready to begin the operation at once, 'to legislate for Hindostan as well as for his own parish, and to make codes not only for England, Spain, and Russia, but also for Morocco.'

Mr. Stephen has no difficulty in exposing the shortcomings and inadequacy of these doctrines. But he is writing the history of certain political ideas; so his main object is to show how such ideas are formed, the course they have followed, and their influence upon thought and action up to the present day. To trace the links and continuity of ideas is to analyse their elements, and to show the impress that they received from external circumstance, permanent or temporary; it is an important method in the science of politics. Upon the empiricism of English philosophy in the eighteenth century Bentham constructed a Theory of Morals that purported to rest exclusively on facts ascertained and verifiable, with happiness as our being's end and aim, with pain and pleasure as the ultimate principles of conduct; and upon this foundation he proceeded to build up his system of politics and legislation. Any attempt to derive morality from other sources, or to measure it by other standards, he denounced as arbitrary and misleading; he threw aside metaphysics, and therefore theology, as illusory. The exclusive appeal to experience, to plain reasoning from the evidence of our senses, from actual observation of human propensities, was sufficient for his purposes, and tallied with his designs as a practical reformer. In these views he was a disciple of Hume, whose influence has surreptitiously percolated all modern thought, and his unintentional allies were the teachers of Natural religion, with Paley as its principal exponent. Having thus defined and explained the basis of ethical philosophy, the Utilitarian has to build up the superstructure of legal ordinance; and he is at once confronted by the difficult problem of distinguishing the sphere of ethics from the province of law. Upon this vital question Mr. Stephen, as an expert in ethics, gives a dissertation that is exceedingly acute and instructive; and we may commend, in particular, his criticism of the doctrine that the morality of an act depends upon its consequences, not upon its motives. As he observes, this may be true, with certain reserves, in law, where the business of the legislature is to prohibit and punish acts that directly endanger the order and security of a community. But 'the exclusion of motive justifiable in law may take all meaning out of morality'; and yet nothing is more complicated than the question of demarcating a clear frontier between the two provinces. Mr. Stephen's examination of this question is the more important because it involves the problem of regulating private morals by public enactments; and also because the confusion of motives with intentions lies at the bottom of much mischievous sophistry, for some of the worst crimes in history have been suggested by plausible motives, and have been defended on that ground. He shows that Bentham's survey of the springs of human action was incomplete, that he overstrained his formula to make it universally applicable, and that he nevertheless gave a far-reaching impulse to clearer notions and an effective advance in the simplification of legal procedure and the codification of laws. As a moral philosophy, Bentham's system appeared so arid and materialistic that its unpopularity has obscured his real services. For he was the engineer who first led a scientific attack up to the ramparts of legal chicanery, and made a breach through which all subsequent reform found its entry.

The axiom that utility is the source of justice and equity is of very ancient date, and indeed the word is sufficiently elastic to comprehend every conceivable human motive; but no one before Bentham had employed it so energetically as a lever to overturn ponderous abuses, or had pointed his theory so directly against notorious facts. On the other hand, since he despised and rejected historical studies, he greatly miscalculated the binding strength of long usage and possession. He forgot, what Hume had been careful to remember, that whether men's reasoning on these subjects be right or wrong, the conclusions have not really been reached by logic, but have grown up out of instincts, and correspond with certain immemorial needs and aspirations of humanity. Hume had sketched, before Bentham, his Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth; yet he begins by the warning that

'It is not with forms of government as with other artificial contrivances; where an old engine may be rejected if we can discover another more accurate and commodious ... the bulk of mankind' (he adds) 'being governed by authority, not by reason, and never attributing authority to anything that has not the recommendation of antiquity.'

Hume's mission was to undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. Political projectors, says the cautious Hume, are pernicious if they have power, and ridiculous if they want it. Bentham was quite confident that if he could only get the power he could radically change for the better the circumstances of a people in any part of the world, by legislation on the principles of Utility; and he was sure that character is indefinitely modifiable by circumstances. That human nature is constantly altering with, and adapting itself to, the environment, is an undeniable truth; but in the moral as in the physical world the natural changes occupy long periods, and to stir the soil hastily may produce a catastrophe. The latter result actually followed in France; while in England the doctrine of the unlimited power of legislation, to be used for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and wielded by a sovereign State according to the dictates of public opinion, was met by alarm, suspicion, and protracted opposition. It is the habit of Englishmen to admit no proposition, however clear and convincing, until they discover what the propounder intends to do with it. Yet it will be seen that Bentham's plans of reform, if not his principles, did suggest, and to some extent shape, the main direction of judicial and administrative changes during the nineteenth century, though with some consequences that he neither anticipated nor desired. He thought that the State might be invested with power to modify society, and yet might be strictly controlled in the exercise of that power. He might have foreseen, what has actually happened, that the State, once established on a democratic basis, would exercise the power and disregard his carefully drawn limitations. A tendency toward State Socialism he would have detested above all things; and yet that is the direction inevitably taken by supreme authority when the responsibility for the greatest happiness of the greatest number is imposed upon it by popular demand.

Mr. Stephen's second volume describes the later phase of the Utilitarian creed, when it passed from its founder into the hands of ardent disciples. The transition necessarily involves some divergence of views and methods. In religious movements it usually begins after the founder's death; but as Bentham lived to superintend his apostolic successors, his relations with them were not invariably harmonious. The leadership fell upon James Mill, whose early life and general character, the development of his opinions, and the bearing of his philosophy upon his politics, are the subjects of one of those condensed biographical sketches in which Mr. Stephen excels. In the History of India, which brought to James Mill reputation and pecuniary independence, he could apply his deductive theories to a remote and little known country without much risk of contradiction from actual circumstances or of checks from the misapprehension of facts. In England the Utilitarian doctrines, as propounded in Mill's writings, raised up opposition and hostile criticism from various quarters. The general current of ideas and feelings had now set decidedly toward the suppression of inveterate abuses, and toward constitutional reform. Radicalism was gaining ground rapidly, and even Socialism had come to the surface, while Political Economy was in the ascendant. But the old Tories closed their ranks for a fierce resistance against theories that menaced, as it seemed to them, nothing less than destruction to time-honoured institutions; and the Whigs had no taste for doctrines that pretended to be reasonable, but appeared to them in effect revolutionary. The different positions of contending parties were illustrated, as Mr. Stephen shows, by their respective attitudes towards Church Reform. The Tories defended ecclesiastical establishment as one of the main bastions of the citadel; the Whigs would preserve the Church in subjection to the State; while James Mill, in the Westminster Review, declared the Church of England to be a mere State machine, worked in subservience to the sinister interest of the governing classes. He desired 'to abolish all dogmas and ceremonies, and to employ the clergy to give lectures on ethics, botany, and political economy, with decent dances and social meals for the celebration of Sunday.' Mr. Stephen, after observing that this plan exemplifies 'the incapacity of an isolated clique to understand the real tone of public opinion,' adds that 'it seems to have some sense, but one would like to know whether Newman read his article.' Our own notion would be that it is a signal instance of shortsightedness and of insensibility, on the part of a psychologist, to the strength and persistence of one of the most powerful among the emotions that dominate mankind. Mill's article proclaiming these views appeared in 1835, just at the time when the Oxford Movement was stirring up a wave of enthusiasm for the dogmas and ritual which he treated as obsolete and nonsensical; nor is there anything more remarkable or unexpected in the political changes of the last sixty years, than the discomfiture of those prophets who have foretold the decay of all liturgies and the speedy dissolution of ecclesiastical establishments. This phenomenon is by no means confined to England, or even to Europe; and at the present day, when the power of religious idealism is better understood upon wider experience, no practical politician attempts to disregard sentiments that defy logic and pass the understanding.

Nevertheless Utilitarianism, as represented by James Mill's 'Essay on Government,' was attracting increased attention, and was provoking serious alarm. It was a period of confidence in theories which have been partly confirmed and partly contradicted by subsequent experiences of those 'principles of human nature' in which political speculators so unreservedly trusted. In France, some fifty years earlier, the destructive theorist had swept all before him; in England, while he was assaulting with effect the entrenchments of Conservatism, he was taken in flank by the moderate reformers. Mill had denounced the Whigs as half-hearted and even treacherous allies, who dallied with Radicalism to conceal their nefarious design of obtaining political mastery with the fewest concessions possible. He relied upon universal education to qualify the masses for the possession of an extensive franchise, and upon enlightened self-interest to guarantee their proper use of it. Macaulay rejoined, in the Edinburgh Review, that the masses might possibly conclude that they would get more pleasure than pain out of universal spoliation; and that if his opponent's principles were correct and his scheme adopted, 'literature, science, commerce, and manufactures might be swept away, and a few half-naked fishermen would divide with the owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities.' It was a notable controversial tournament, at which the intelligent bystander probably assisted with much satisfaction and no excessive alarm, having little faith in the absolute theorist, and not much in the disinterestedness of the Whigs. For the moment it was sufficient that both parties agreed in supporting the Reform Bill, although, as Mr. Stephen remarks, the Radical regarded it as a payment on account, while the Whig hoped that it would be a full and final discharge. We may observe, to the honour of a great Liberal family, that as the first Lord Lansdowne discerned Bentham's talents and gave him his start in life, so the impression made upon the second marquis by Macaulay's articles induced him to offer the writer his first seat in Parliament.

Mr. Stephen deals with the duel between Mill and Macaulay from the standpoint of an impartial umpire, with an expert's appreciation of their logical fencing and some humorous glances at the heated combatants. Mill was an austere Puritan, who would fell the Tory like an ox and would trample upon the cunning self-seeking Whig. The Edinburgh Reviewers were a set of brilliant young men who represented intellectual Liberalism; but 'they were men who meant to become judges, members of Parliament, or even bishops, and nothing in their social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against social injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.' As a sample of Whiggism Mr. Stephen takes Mackintosh, who, on the subject of the French Revolution, stood half-way between Burke's holy horror of a diabolic outburst and the applause of root-and-branch Radicals. For a type of Conservatism he gives us Robert Southey, whose fortune it was to be fiercely abused by the Utilitarians and ridiculed by the Whigs. Southey, like many others, had been frightened out of early Liberalism into the conviction that Reform would be the inevitable precursor of revolution; and in 1817 he had written to Lord Liverpool that the only hope of saving the country lay in gagging the seditious press. 'Concessions,' he said, 'can only serve to hasten the catastrophe. Woe be to the garrison who hoist a white flag to an enemy that gives no quarter.' Yet Southey had a deep feeling for the misery of the lower classes at this period of widespread distress. In his belief in the power of Government to remedy social evils, he was much nearer the accepted line of later public opinion than Macaulay, who would have confined the State's business to the maintenance of order, the defence of property, and the practice of departmental economy. And when Southey, following Coleridge and preceding Gladstone, insisted upon the vital importance of religion as a principle of State policy, neither he nor Gladstone deserved all the ridicule cast upon them by Macaulay in his brilliant essays; for at any rate no first-class Government in Europe has hitherto ventured upon dissolving connection with the Church.