'Errare atque viam palantes quærere vitæ.'
They laboured devotedly to dispel ignorance and to advance knowledge; they spared no pains to promote the material well-being of society. They helped to raise the wind that filled the sails of practical reform; they headed the attack upon legal and administrative abuses; they stirred up the national conscience against social injustice; they proclaimed a lofty standard of moral obligation. They laid down principles that in the long run accord with human progress, yet in their hopes of rapidly modifying society by the application of those principles they were disappointed; for their systematic theories were blocked by facts, feelings, and misunderstandings which had not been taken into calculation. They were averse to coercion, as an evil in itself; but though they would have agreed with Mr. Bright's dictum that 'Force is no remedy,' they were latterly brought to perceive that in another sense there is no remedy except force, and that the vested interests and preconceptions of society make a stiff and prolonged opposition to enlightened persuasion. They were disposed to rely too confidently upon the spread of intelligence by general education for preparing the minds of people to accept and act upon doctrines that were logically demonstrable, and to reject what could not be proved. Mr. Stephen has somewhere written that to support a religion by force instead of by argument is to admit that argument condemns it. The proposition is too absolutely stated even for the domain of spiritual authority, since it might be replied that no great religion, certainly no organised Church, has existed by argument alone, and it has usually been supported by laws. But at any rate the temporal power subsists and operates by coercion, and the sphere of the State's direct action, instead of diminishing, as the earlier Utilitarians expected it to do, with the spread of education and intelligence, is perceptibly extending itself. The Utilitarians demurred to religion as an ultimate authority in morals, and substituted the plain unvarnished criterion of utility. Upon this ground the State steps in, replaces religious precept by positive law, and public morality is enforced by Acts of Parliament. They were for entrusting the people with full political power, to be exercised in vigilant restraint of the interference by Government with individual rights and conduct; the people have obtained the power, and are using it more and more to place their affairs and even their moral interests under the control of organised authority. We do not here question the expediency of the movement; we are simply registering the tendency.
There are few literary enterprises more arduous than the task of following and demarcating from the written record of a period the general course of political and philosophic movements. The tendencies are so various, the conditions which determine them are so complicated, that it is difficult to keep hold of the clue which guides and connects them. Mr. Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century took the broad ground that is denoted by its title; but, as he now tells us in his preface, he has found it expedient to reduce his present work within less comprehensive limits, by confining it to 'an account of the compact and energetic school of the English Utilitarians.' This reduction of its scope has not, however, damaged the continuity of the narrative, since in the great departments of morals, religion, and political philosophy the Utilitarians were mainly the lineal heirs of the characteristic English writers in the preceding century. It is true that Mr. Stephen has not been able to bring within the compass of his three volumes the subject of general literature, especially of poetry and novels, which in the nineteenth century have given their vivid expression to the doubts and the hopes, to the aims and aspirations of the time. But we can see that such an enlargement of his plan would have rendered it unmanageable, and that Mr. Stephen may have wisely considered the example of Buckle's History of Civilisation in England, which was projected on too large a scale, exhausted the author's strength, and remains unfinished. Mr. Stephen's present work fulfils its promise and completes its design. The Utilitarians are very fortunate in having found a historian whose vivacity of style, consummate literary knowledge, and masculine power of thought will have revived their declining reputations, and secured to them their proper place in the literature of the nineteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] The English Utilitarians. By Leslie Stephen. 3 vols. London, Duckworth and Co., 1900.—Edinburgh Review, April 1901.
[29] The Greek Theory of the State, by Charles John Shebbeare, B.A., 1895.
[30] Sir Robert Peel's speech on Reform, March 1831.