dignity, a reverence for themselves, a vehement and a jealous love of independence."[[65]]
These Whigs, speaking after the French Revolution had shaken old political systems to their foundations, expressed the Liberal theory of the Empire, that local control of local affairs is not only the best preventive of English egoism, but also the best cure for local feuds. But in 1760, thirty years before the Revolution, few Englishmen of either party could be persuaded, in dealing with Ireland, to consult anybody's interest but their own. In 1778 Bills were introduced to abolish most of the restrictions upon Irish trade with England and the Colonies. So vehement was the opposition aroused by these proposals that we are assured by a contemporary authority that "a foreign invasion could scarcely have created a greater alarm." Petitions poured in from every quarter except the City of London. Even the errors of the English manufacturers displayed their bitter and unreasoning jealousy. An old Statute had permitted the importation of Irish sailcloth. This Statute was overlooked, and one of the new Bills proposed, in effect, to enact what was already law. But this was opposed as fiercely as the rest, and the most disastrous consequences were predicted from a practice which had been in operation for half a century. The efforts of Burke and the other champions of Ireland were powerless in this whirl of selfishness. Most of the proposed reforms were abandoned, and his disinterested conduct cost Burke his seat for Bristol.[[66]] No other events of the time so clearly showed how the great majority of Englishmen regarded Ireland.
Such was the general scheme of Toryism, an elaborate system of distinctions. A small class of male, rich, Church of England landowners controlled and regulated the whole of political society. This class monopolized public honours and dignities of every kind, and in each of their separate spheres of aristocracy smaller personages lorded it over those without the pale. Some were invested with all the privileges at once, others might content themselves with one or two. Everywhere some one was
exalted and some one depressed, irrespective of their natural capacities and their intrinsic worth. It is not suggested here that active tyranny was at all common. The Catholics were not persecuted as they had been in the reign of William III. Dissenters were generally indulged. The education of women, bad as it was, was substantially better than in the time of the later Stuarts. The working classes enjoyed a much higher degree of comfort and security than was to be theirs for a century to come. But the atmosphere of Toryism remained. The test of a political system is not how it operates in a state of equilibrium, but how it shows itself in the face of changes. Condescension and indulgence are no less the marks of tyranny than persecution and confiscation, and its essential nature is revealed when the inferior asks to be permitted to think and act for himself. When economic and psychological changes began to break down the old acquiescence in arbitrary disposition, Toryism became active, positive, and subjugating.
Formally contrasted with the political party which was called Tory, was the political party which was called Whig. In many respects the contrast was no more than formal. The fundamental assumptions of the two parties about the comparative worth of classes were the same, though the Whigs relied more than the Tories upon commercial places like the City of London. In theory there was substantial difference between the two conceptions of the State. The Tories preferred strong government, and inclined towards the Crown, as its titular head. The theory of Hobbes thus expressed the Tory mind: "The Covenant of the State is made in such a manner as if every man should say to every man, 'I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner.' This done, the multitude so united is called a Commonwealth."[[67]] In this view association in political society is association in surrender. The essence of it is subordination. The Whigs, on the other hand, inclined towards Locke. "Men
being by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the power of another without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community."[[68]] The essence of this association was delegation and not surrender. The subject conferred power without abandoning his right to control the use of it. The theory of Locke was afterwards incorporated by Rousseau and the other French thinkers into their revolutionary philosophy, and at the end of the eighteenth century its effect was tremendous. It contains the germ of complete Liberalism, But in England it was long embedded in a mass of circumstances which prevented it from attaining to full growth. The people who held it were aristocrats and landowners, and they converted the potentiality of Liberalism into the fact of Whiggery. Whiggery, in short, was nothing but Liberalism qualified by interest.
To this extent Whigs and Tories were distinguished. The Whigs, in the line of old controversies, inclined to Parliament as against the Crown. Society, according to Locke, was based upon a sort of contract. Each member, subject to the corresponding rights of his neighbours, was entitled to enjoy such property as he acquired without interference by others. For the common good, certain general rules are contrived by agreement, and the State is entrusted with all powers necessary for protecting the common interest of the whole as well as the separate interests of the individual members. As the State affects all, so it must act with the consent of all, and a representative Parliament is the only means of expressing that consent. This argument puts the supreme control of the State in the hands of Parliament. If the Tories had any definite theory of this nature, it was more that of Hobbes, who suggested that the State was imposed upon Society for the purpose of maintaining order among mutually hostile individuals. The two schools of thought were
thus led to emphasize, in the one case, the need for Parliamentary control, and in the other, the need for a strong executive Government. But this theoretic distinction, though it contained the seeds of many practical divergences, did not correspond, in the year 1760, to any great difference of character. The Whigs as a body were aristocratic, they were Protestant, they were Church of England, they were territorial, they were male. The sole point in which they were substantially more Liberal than the Tories was the toleration of opinion. They inherited from Locke a much more real belief that a man had a right to think as he pleased, and to express his opinions as he pleased. They were more willing that other people should differ from themselves. They had no doubt of their own superiority, but they did not abuse their inferiors. They remained themselves orthodox, but they declined to persecute.
This general toleration must not be rated at too high a value. Religion was a cold and lifeless thing among the governing class, and the Wesleyan movement, which began about this time to breathe a new moral spirit into the common people, was treated by the bulk of fashionable society with extreme contempt. Toleration sprang more often from indifference than from generosity, and when the French Revolution broke out most of the Whig aristocracy deserted to the Established Church as one of the strongholds of reaction. Religion then became valuable to property. So long as it meant little, they gave it liberty. When restriction became useful to the magistrate, liberty was forgotten. It was only a small section of the Whigs that, at any particular date between 1760 and 1820, could be found steadily and conscientiously practising Liberal ideas even in religion. In the early part of that period Liberalism existed only among the body headed by Lord Rockingham, of whom Edmund Burke was the brains and the tongue. Burke thus attacked the Catholic disabilities: "To exclude whole classes of men entirely from this part of government cannot be considered as absolute slavery. It only implies a lower and degraded state of citizenship; such is (with more or less strictness) the condition of all countries in
which an hereditary nobility possess the exclusive rule." He admits that "this may be no bad form of government," but declares that in the Irish case the indirect hardships produced by the Protestant ascendancy are more even than the indirect. "They are rivalled, to say the least of the matter, in every laborious and lucrative cause of life; while every franchise, every honour, every trust, every place down to the very lowest and least confidential (besides whole professions) is reserved for the master cast.... If they who compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too frequently have motives of pride, passion, petulance, peevish jealousy, a tyrannic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with contempt and rigour." This is pure Liberalism, perceiving that the whole man is depreciated by his political disabilities.[[69]] So Fox said of the Catholic claims: "Though they require only qualification for corporations, Parliament, and offices under Government, the object is of great magnitude to them. It is founded on the great principle of requiring to be placed on a footing of equality with their fellow-subjects."[[70]] This insight was rare, and it was confined almost entirely to matters of religion. Discussion of political and proprietary institutions was as hateful to the ordinary Whig after the Revolution as to any Tory, and even Burke always drew the line at Unitarians. This Church had been excluded from the Toleration Act of William III, and in 1792, the year in which Burke wrote his Letter to Langrishe, Fox introduced a Bill to put them in the same position as other Dissenters. Some of the Unitarians, especially Priestley of Birmingham, had written and spoken in favour of the Revolution, and a Unitarian society had celebrated the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Burke's support of the Catholics may have been partly due to his reverence for the antiquity of their creed, which was, if anything, more venerable and more august than his own.