7. A Dialogue on the best Form of Government. By the Same. London, 1863.
8. The English Constitution. By Walter Bagehot. Revised Edition. London, 1883.
Of the latest Work on the Characteristics of Democracy we are precluded from speaking, as Sir Henry Maine's valuable Essays first appeared in the pages of this Review. But we desire on the present occasion to call attention to some writers on the subject, who are almost unknown to a younger generation, or known only by occasional references made to them by those who were well acquainted with the writers and their works. And among these half-forgotten names few perhaps will recur more frequently in the recollections of the best-informed men of from forty-five to sixty, or more surprise those who have entered on life since their owners left it, than those of Alexis de Tocqueville, Nassau William Senior, and Walter Bagehot. Among the statesmen of the last generation, few who will fill so small a space in history are so often or so reverently quoted by those who remember Lord Palmerston's Government, the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Most men under forty will hear with surprise that in the City, at least, he was deemed a sounder and safer financier than Mr. Gladstone; honoured as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who first redeemed the financial reputation of the Whigs from the discredit that had clung to the party of retrenchment and reform for a whole generation. Of the small minority who know him as the founder of the English school of historical sceptics, how many have heard of his multifarious literary and political works, or his shrewd, genial, two-edged, criticisms on public and social life? It seems too probable that our grandchildren will retain nothing of his save the characteristic saying, that 'life would be very tolerable but for its pleasures;' and that, probably, will be assigned to some more famous and far less wise causeur or phrasemaker, losing half its force in the transfer. Even Mill is known to the passing and the rising generation by different works and diverse characteristics. To the one he is little more than the greatest, most original, and most heretical of English economists; a standard author on logic and metaphysics. The other prefers to remember him by his later and lesser writings; those sexagenarian and posthumous Essays, in which the riper wisdom of a mind, very slow to learn the lessons of practical life, was gathered, and the wilder errors of his earlier theories modified or corrected. Much of that which is really best in his thought and teaching, set forth in these last writings, bears a close analogy to the views of Tocqueville Senior, and Bagehot, and shows that a tardy, hardly-acquired, unwillingly accepted, knowledge of men and women, of the real and ineradicable tendencies of human nature, brought the giant of the closet into nearer accord with the practical philosophy of a man like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, wise, calm, and judicial, by natural temper, wiser yet by the closet-study which had analysed the experiences of the literary, business, and political, world, of administration, Parliament, and the Cabinet.
One common and very striking feature characterizes the political thought of all these men—all of them Liberals in more than mere nominal profession or party connection. All regarded the triumph of Democracy as near and inevitable, and all, from different points of view, regarded it with a mixture of resignation and distrust, strangely significant in men of such different views, of such diverse character, mental training, and personal experience. None of them were fatalists, much less pessimists; none inclined à priori to that political superstition which recognizes, in the tendencies of a thing so uncertain and changeful as the spirit of the age, the hand of Providence, or the indication of 'manifest destiny.' All were men of more than average independence of temper, an independence which, in one or two, approached nearly to that which practical politicians call impracticability. None of them were disposed to be silent when the many-headed Cæsar had spoken. Mill's most striking, and—to the credit of Democracy be it spoken—most popular characteristic, was a stern and almost pardoxical defiance alike of personal consequences and of public opinion. On the verge of his entrance into public life he affronted the working-classes by telling them, with more than Carlylese directness and exaggeration, that they were 'mostly liars.' If ever there were a man sure to protest to the last against false doctrines and mischievous tendencies, to protest the more fiercely the more certain their victory seemed, it was John Stuart Mill.
Tocqueville, conscious of no common political and administrative capacity—a statesman whose strong popular sympathies, practical wisdom, contempt of popular catchwords, knowledge of and respect for concrete facts; above all, whose signal freedom from the characteristic weaknesses and vices of French statesmanship, rendered him the fittest of all men to direct the destiny of France, whose counsels and guidance would have saved her from all the worst mistakes and most signal disasters—was content to spend a lifetime first in opposition, afterwards in absolute exile from public life, rather than go 'the way that was not his way for an inch.' An Orleanist, an enthusiastic lover of Parliamentary institutions, he would not stoop with Guizot and Thiers to serve a King whose power was founded on corruption. A minister of the President, he held aloof as sternly from the despotism of the Empire as from the factions of the Republican Assembly. He never designed to conceal or soften the expressions of the most unpopular sentiments or convictions.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis was an eminently English statesman, fully aware of the necessity of mutual concession—more willing than most to be guided as a Minister by the tradition of his office, to leave the administration for which he must answer in Parliament to the practical experience of his permanent subordinates—but one whom, assuredly, no one ever accused of undue pliancy, or excessive deference to party or popular feeling.
Mr. Bagehot alone of the three was a man likely, cœteris paribus, to prefer the winning side; to believe that the belief of the many was likely to be right; looking, however, to the opinion of the many educated and thoughtful rather than of the many ignorant and over-occupied. Yet all agree at once in treating the coming rule of numbers almost as a law of nature, which it were folly to criticize and madness to resist; and in anticipating its advent with doubt and distrust, with deep and sometimes gloomy apprehension. Their constant, thoughtful concurrence in both convictions, their equal assurance that pure Democracy was dangerous and that it was inevitable, deserves a profound significance from their utterly distinct points of view; from the utter unlikeness of their tempers, their experience, and their natural bias.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, as a Liberal politician, was decidedly distrustful of electoral reform, and accepted it only as a party necessity. His personal delight in the exposure of popular errors, his insistence on the value of authority, and the immense extent of the sphere in which the thought and conduct of the many are necessarily controlled by the authority of the few, the spirit of such books as his 'Essay on the Government of Dependencies' are those of a mind wholly adverse to democratic theories, and intensely mistrustful of popular judgments. He was not fascinated by what he describes as 'the splendid vision of a community bound together by the ties of fraternity, liberty, and equality, exempt from hereditary privilege, giving all things to merit, and presided over by a government in which all the national interests are faithfully represented.' He put these words into the mouth of the advocate of Democracy in his 'Dialogue on the best form of Government,' which he published shortly before his death. In this work his own views are expressed in the person of Crito.
'Even if I were to decide in favour of one of these forms, and against the two others, I should not find myself nearer the solution of the practical problem. A nation does not change the form of its government with the same facility that a man changes his coat. A nation in general only changes the form of its government by means of a violent revolution.... The history of forcible attempts to improve governments is not cheering. Looking back upon the course of revolutionary movements, and upon the character of their consequences, the practical conclusion which I draw is, that it is the part of wisdom and prudence to acquiesce in any form of government, which is tolerably well administered, and affords tolerable security to person and property. I would not, indeed, yield to apathetic despair or acquiesce in the persuasion that a merely tolerable government is incapable of improvement. I would form an individual model, suitable to the character, disposition, wants, and circumstances of the country, and I would make all exertions, whether by action or by writing, within the limits of the existing law, for ameliorating its existing condition, and bringing it nearer to the model selected for imitation; but I should consider the problem of the best form of government as purely ideal, and as unconnected with practice; and should abstain from taking a ticket in the lottery of revolution, unless there was a well-founded expectation that it would come out a prize.'
The conservatism of Lewis was that of a profoundly sceptical instinct, of practical cautious incredulity. Bagehot's was the conservatism of middle-class English thought and experience. Tocqueville's was that of wide observation and bitter disappointment. Mill was a Conservative only so far as conservatism was forced upon a mind essentially radical and even revolutionary, imbued with a profound faith in abstract principles leading far beyond universal suffrage to, if not across the verge of communism, by the danger which he foresaw to individual liberty and unfettered intellectual freedom from the ascendency of mere numbers. Upon this point he agreed closely with Tocqueville, though upon nearly every other their views were as opposite as their character and experience; and their teaching has been fully confirmed by the actual working of the most successful, the most tolerant, and the most fortunately situated democracy that the world has ever seen.