“Come, Ivan,”I said, laughing, “you have wound up with a peroration as much too flattering to my country as you were too uncomplimentary at the start. For an ‘old idiot,’ you have ended by giving her a pretty good character.”
“Not at all,”he rejoined; “I ended by describing her splendid position and advantages. I called her an old idiot for either being unconscious of them, or throwing them away consciously. And I ventured to add a word of encouragement to those who are struggling to prevent these being thrown away, and to assure them that, in their resistance to the short-sighted and fatuous policy of their present rulers, they have the cordial sympathy of philosophic Liberals like myself (I am not now speaking of Socialists and Nihilists, whose lands are against all parties) all over Europe. One of your own most eminent philosophers, himself a Liberal, has recently written a book, in which he has shown the danger by which the true principle of liberty is threatened from the reactionary tendencies of the democratic autocracy. I merely wish to assure you that we in Europe are fully alive to this danger, and dread as much the despotism which springs from the divine right of mobs, as from that of kings. There is to my mind as little of God in the vox populi as in an Imperial ukase; and our only safety between these two extremes, which I should rather be disposed to call infernal than divine, lies in the common-sense, patriotism, and virtue of those statesmen, politicians, and lawyers who, holding a middle course between them, as being both equally dangerous to the principles of true liberty, endeavor not merely to preserve the institutions of that country which is the home of liberty, but, by maintaining its supremacy, enable it to resist attacks from whatever quarter.”
“I have lived too much out of England for the greater part of my life,”I remarked, “to be much of a party man; still, from early and family association, my sympathies rather incline towards that party which now control its policy, though I admit they have shown but indifferent foresight, skill, or judgment in grappling with the difficulties which they had to confront. Still it is only fair to them to remember that these were left them as a heritage by their predecessors; and that if they have blundered somewhat in the effort to set matters right—conspicuously in Egypt, for example—it was not they who set matters wrong in the first instance in that country.”
“That I entirely deny,”responded Ivan, “as I think I can prove to you in a very few words. But before doing so, allow me to express my surprise at your admission that, because you were a Liberal in the days of Lord Palmerston, who was pre-eminently the representative of the policy which I have advocated as being that which should animate a British statesman, your sympathies should extend to those who, while they wear the old party livery, have entirely departed from the old party lines. His mantle has indeed fallen upon them, but they have so completely turned it inside out that it is no longer recognisable. In the days when a party existed which called itself ‘Liberal-Conservative,’ there was no violent political issues at home to check the current of a domestic legislation which was ever steadily progressive; while in foreign affairs the Government of the day, whether it was Conservative or Liberal, followed the well-established traditions of British policy abroad, which, if it had incurred the jealousy of European Powers, at all events commanded their admiration and respect. The utterly inconsistent and perplexing attitude which England has now assumed, so entirely at variance with the principles by which her foreign policy was formerly governed, must of necessity deprive her of all sympathy abroad, for she has proved herself totally untrustworthy as an ally—while all true Liberals must deplore the agitation which has resulted from a domestic legislation that has a tendency unnecessarily to exacerbate party feeling, and drive people into violently opposite extremes. Nothing is more fatal to all real progress than a wild and unreasoning rush in the direction in which it is supposed to lie, because the inevitable consequence is a reaction most probably equally unreasoning. Moreover, these violent swings of the political pendulum must always be attended with the greatest possible danger. A Conservative triumph which is purchased at the price of acts of folly, rashness, or weakness, perpetrated by their opponents, is paid for by the country, and is but a sorry bargain. It is not under such violently disturbing influences that sound and healthy Liberal progress is made. And all history proves that the liberty which is born in convulsions invariably degenerates into a license which culminates in a tyranny.
“And now one word in reply to your allusion to the present position of matters in Egypt, and more especially with regard to that legacy of disasters which the present Government maintain they have inherited from the policy of Lord Beaconsfield, and which, with characteristic weakness, they constantly invoke as an excuse for their own shortcomings. When the Anglo-French condominium was established in Egypt—which is regarded as the fons et origo mali—an entente cordiale, which was rapidly ripening into an alliance, had been formed between Germany, Austria, and England, in which, to a certain extent, Italy was included, and upon which Turkey depended for her existence; it formed, therefore, a combination of European Powers which controlled Europe, and was in a position to dictate, especially to Prussia and France, both weakened as those two Powers were by recent wars, and by internal dangers and dissensions—both being, moreover, the only Powers in Europe whose interests clashed with those of England in the East, and whose policy, therefore, it was the interest of England narrowly to watch, and, if need be, to control. The faculty for doing this had been wisely secured to her by the European combination in which she had entered, above alluded to. Under these circumstances she had nothing to fear in Egypt from an association with France in the dual control. Practically it became a single control; for, with Germany and Austria at her back, England could dictate her own policy in Egypt, and, in the event of its not suiting her French associate, could even dare to enforce it without the slightest fear of the peace of Europe being endangered thereby. Her political supremacy in Egypt was, in fact, guaranteed to her by Germany and Austria, who had no reason to regard it with jealousy, while they obtained in return that commanding position which England’s adhesion to their alliance secured them in Europe. So far, then, from having succeeded to a heritage of difficulty, the present Government succeeded to one of absolute security. But the whole aspect of the political chessboard was changed when the new player, who took over the game in the middle of it, removed the piece which gave check to king and queen, and which, if it was not moved away, rendered final victory a certainty. Lord Beaconsfield’s policy in Egypt turned upon the Anglo-Germanic-Austrian Alliance. When, after his fall from office, this was rudely ruptured by insulting expressions of antipathy to Austria on the part of his successor, the effect of which, subsequent expressions of apology were inadequate to efface—by a strongly marked coldness towards Germany, and a no less marked rapprochement towards France—the latter Power, relieved from the dread of the European combination, which had up to that moment held her quiescent in Egypt, jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, and favored us with that series of intrigues which gave us Arabi, and the evils that followed in his train. Meantime, utterly isolated in Europe by that rupture with the most powerful friends in it, with which the policy of Lord Beaconsfield had provided you, you found yourselves betrayed and deserted by the ally you had chosen instead of them; while every concession you made to that ally, and every attempt at conciliation, only plunged you deeper in the mire, in which you have since been left to flounder alone, a laughing-stock and object of derision to all Europe, and more especially to those Powers who might have proved your salvation, but who have since entered into other European combinations from which England is excluded, and which may prove in the highest degree dangerous to her. No assertion, therefore, can be more utterly false in fact than the statement that the heritage to which this Government succeeded was one of trouble. So far from it, the policy of their predecessors had left them in a position of commanding strength; and to lay the misfortunes which have since arisen at the door of those who had taken such precautions that they could never arise, is as though a general who should take over the command of an army placed strategically in an impregnable position, should abandon that position altogether, and after being defeated in the open field, find fault with the nature of the defences he had abandoned. But,” added Ivan, with a yawn, stretching himself, looking at his watch, and going to the open window, “you will think that I have degenerated from the philosophical spectator into the keen party politician. This I was compelled to be during my recent visit to London, where you are nothing if you are not partisan. The flavor of Piccadilly clings to me still: how much more delicious are the odorous night airs of these southern climes! Look up at those stars, my old friend, before you go to bed, and thank them that you have been spared the cares and the ambitions of the Treasury bench.”—Blackwood’s Magazine.
[BLACKSTONE.]
BY G. P. MACDONELL.
Blackstone has now been dead more than a century, but neither lawyers nor laymen have yet made up their minds whether he was an intellectual giant, or only a second-rate man of letters, with a little learning and a pretty style, who acquired popularity because he flattered the English constitution. His friends have pitched high their eulogy. Sir William Jones, speaking to the freeholders of Middlesex, who had little reason to love Blackstone, called him the pride of England, and in a grave legal treatise referred to the Commentaries as the most correct and beautiful outline that ever was exhibited of any human science. Hargrave, fresh from annotating Coke upon Littleton, described him as an almost second Hale, and that as it were in the very presence of Hale, in a volume of tracts half filled with Hale’s legal lore. “To me,” said Mr. Justice Coleridge, the nephew of the poet, and one of Blackstone’s many editors, “the Commentaries appear in the light of a national property, which all should be anxious to improve to the uttermost, and which no one of proper feeling will meddle with inconsiderately.” And a distinguished German jurist, exaggerating only a little, has said that Englishmen regard the Commentaries as “ein juristisches Evangelium.” The history of the work is in itself remarkable. If we except the Institutes of Justinian, and the De Jure Belli ac Pacis of Grotius, perhaps no law book has been oftener printed. Not to speak of the many adaptations, more or less close, or of the many abridgments of the Commentaries (one of these was “intended for the use of young persons, and comprised in a series of letters from a father to his daughter,”) they have, in their original form, gone through more than twenty complete editions in England since the publication of the first volume in 1765. Nor has the homage of parody—in the shape of a “Comic Blackstone”—been wanting to place them among the classics. In America they have attained at least an equal fame. In the speech on Conciliation, delivered in 1775, Burke said that he had heard from an eminent bookseller that nearly as many copies had been sold there as here. Two years later, one of the five members appointed to frame the laws of Virginia seriously proposed that, with suitable modifications, the Commentaries should be taken as their text. There is reason to believe that they are now held in higher esteem in America than among ourselves. The American editions, already nearly as numerous as the English, still continue to multiply,[9] while forty years have passed since we have had an English Blackstone with an unmutilated text. His own countrymen are now content to know him through the medium of condensed and often lifeless versions, though it is not so far back since, for those who aspired to the amount of legal knowledge which a gentleman should possess, Blackstone was the very voice of the law. If on many sides Blackstone received the meed of excessive praise, his critics, it must be allowed, did not spare him. They have not been many, but they have spoken so emphatically, and, within certain limits, so unanswerably, that they have aroused suspicion whether, after all, Blackstone may not have been a charlatan. He was naturally regarded with distrust by lawyers of the rigid school, who felt that legal learning was gone if such primers as the Commentaries were to displace the venerable Coke. The book was not many years old before the phrase “Blackstone lawyers” came to be used as synonymous with smatterers in law. But such criticism had a professional ring, and perhaps in the end did the assailed author more good than harm.
If nowadays the name of Blackstone is held in diminished respect, the fact is mainly due to the contempt poured upon him by Bentham and Austin. They mercilessly exposed his shallow and confused philosophy. Bentham, reviewing one by one his opinions on government, maintained that they were not so much false as wholly meaningless; and Austin declared that neither in the general conception, nor in the detail of his book, is there a single particle of original and discriminating thought. It is tainted throughout, said the one, with hostility to reform; it was popular, said the other, because it “truckled to the sinister interests and mischievous prejudices of power.” Austin found nothing to praise even in its style, which, though fitted to tickle the ear, seemed to him effeminate, rhetorical, and prattling, and not in keeping with the dignity of the subject.
So long as his admirers could see no defects in his work, and his critics were blind to its merits, judgments of Blackstone kept moving along parallel lines, and never met. Standing at this distance of time, when the Commentaries have long lost the glitter of novelty, when we have not Bentham’s cause for anger, and when nobody retains a belief in the infallibility of Austin, it should be possible to treat Blackstone more fairly than either his friends or his enemies have done. There are signs that a juster estimate is now being formed, and the clearest of these is the testimony of one who must know by his own experience what were the difficulties which Blackstone surmounted. Sir James Stephen admits that he was neither a profound nor an accurate thinker, that he is often led to speak of English law in terms of absurd praise, and that his arrangement of the subject is imperfect. But “the fact still remains,” he says, “that Blackstone first rescued the law of England from chaos. He did, and did exceedingly well, for the end of the eighteenth century, what Coke tried to do, and did exceedingly ill, about 150 years before; that is to say, he gave an account of the law as a whole, capable of being studied, not only without disgust, but with interest and profit.... A better work of the kind has not yet been written, and, with all its defects, the literary skill, with which a problem of extraordinary difficulty has been dealt with is astonishing.”