The Unitarians were revolutionaries in religion and in politics alike, and were opposed to the Established Church. "Let them disband as a faction," said Burke, "and let them act as individuals; and when I see them with no other views than to enjoy their own conscience in peace, I for one shall most cheerfully vote for their relief." Fox was beaten by two to one, and the Unitarians were not relieved until the end of the French War.
With the exception of this Rockingham section, and the small section which at a later date took the Liberal view of the French Revolution, there were no Whigs who showed a real tendency towards Liberalism. They suffered, for the most part, no uneasiness at aristocratic monopolies, and had no illusions about the equal worth of all human beings and their right to equal opportunities. They believed in a governing class as firmly as the Tories, and but for their religious freedom and their dislike of prosecutions for seditious libels the Rockingham Whigs were not much better than the rest. Government must always remain in the hands of aristocracy. There must be an element of representation in order to prevent an abuse of the governed by men endowed with absolute power. But representation must be of classes and interests, and not of persons; and it must always be qualified by property. "Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a State that does not represent its ability as well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it can never be safe from the invasions of ability unless it be out of all proportion in the representation."[[71]] The franchise must be confined to men of substance, and so long as there was a fair representation of all classes, except those who had no property, it was of little importance that whole centres of population had no representatives at all, while some depopulated districts had almost as many representatives as electors. The individual voter did not count. He voted as representing an interest. One manufacturing town would be able to protect the industries of all. One seaport
would maintain the interest of all. It was a sufficient check on a Government that there was one channel of communication through which its subjects might make their complaints audible.
The elector thus appointed had no power to suggest or to originate. He could only check and prevent. So Burke, in his speech on a Bill for Shortening the Duration of Parliaments, said: "Faithful watchmen we ought to be over the rights and privileges of the people. But our duty, if we are qualified for it as we ought, is to give them information, and not to receive it from them; we are not to go to school to them to learn the principles of law and government. In doing so we should not dutifully serve, but we should basely and scandalously betray the people, who are not capable of this service by nature, nor in any instance called to it by the constitution.... They can well see whether we are tools of a court or their honest servants ... but of the particular merits of a measure I have other standards." Philip Francis was no less explicit: "In the lowest situations of life the people know, as well as we do, that wherever personal industry is encouraged, and property is protected, there must be inequalities of possession, and consequently distinction of ranks. Then come the form and the order, by which the substance is at once defined and preserved. Distribution and limitation prevent confusion, and government by orders is the natural result of property protected by Freedom."[[72]] In plain English, the Whigs regarded man not as a political, but as a proprietary animal. The object of the State was to protect man as the owner of property. Man as a living creature was not its concern. If he could acquire property he came within its consideration. If he could not, it would not help him; he must fend for himself. He had a right to its protection against interference, but he must expect no positive help. Equal worth, equal rights, and equal opportunities were principles of which the Whigs knew as little as the Tories themselves.
Between 1760 and 1820 there were only two prominent Whigs who approached complete Liberalism. Others occasionally used
language which led in the same direction. Lord Moira was not far away in 1796, when he opposed a Bill for suppressing public meetings. "He could not believe that the Almighty made any part of mankind merely to work and eat like beasts. He had endowed man with reasoning faculties, and given him leave to use them." Whitbread was as near when he introduced a Bill to enable justices to fix a minimum wage instead of leaving workmen to charity and the Poor Law. "Charity afflicted the mind of a good man, because it took away his independence—a consideration as valuable to the labourer as to the man of high rank."[[73]] But the Whig leaders whose settled habits of mind were most Liberal were Shelburne and Charles James Fox. Shelburne's Liberalism was deep and philosophic, that of Fox impetuous and practical. But both, though they were never friendly with each other, had substantially the same sympathies in all controversies of their time. Shelburne seems to have had no social prejudices. He was an intimate friend of Bentham the Utilitarian, of Priestley the Unitarian, of Price the Dissenting parson-economist, and of Horne Tooke the Radical. He even appointed a Dissenting minister as tutor to his son. In politics he held opinions which were astonishingly in advance of those of his contemporaries. He was a Free Trader. He favoured the election of local authorities, the abolition of alehouses, the encouragement of workmen's clubs and friendly societies, annual national holidays, cheap county courts, the conversion of prisons into reformatory institutions, and national compulsory education.[[74]] This practical Liberalism was inspired by original Liberal theory. The old feudalism and government by territorial aristocracy must go, and the middle and working classes must take its place. After the fall of the Bastille he said: "The nonsense of feudality can never be revived.... The Bastille cannot be rebuilt. The administration of justice
and feudality cannot again go together.... The rest ... may be very safely left to public opinion and to the light of the times. Public opinion once set free acts like the sea never ceasingly, controlling imperceptibly and irresistibly both laws and ministers of laws, reducing and advancing everything to its own level."[[75]] In drawing up a series of reflections on society he laid down "one fundamental principle, never to be departed from, to put yourself in the power of no man."
"Constitutional liberty consists in the right of exercising freely every faculty of mind or body, which can be exercised without preventing another man from doing the like.... No man can be trusted with power over another.... No gratitude can withstand power. Every man from the monarch down to the peasant is sure to abuse it."[[76]] The territorial theory he despised. "It would have been happy if the right of primogeniture was destroyed altogether or never had existed."[[77]] He said that the middle and working classes were sure to govern England in the long run, and not only published an English edition of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, in order to spread sound economic ideas among them, but even proposed to found a non-party and Free Trade newspaper to be called The Neutralist.[[78]] He welcomed the rise of the new industrial democracy. "Towns," he said, "will be always found the most open to conviction, and among them the tradesmen and middling class of men. Next to them are the manufacturers [i.e., the workmen], after which, but at a great distance, comes the mercantile interest, for in fact they belong to no country, their wealth is movable, and they seek to gain by all, which they are in the habit of doing at the expense of every principle; but last of all come the country gentlemen and farmers, for the former have had both their fortunes and their understandings at a stand ... and the farmers, who, uneducated and centered in their never-ceasing pursuit of gain, are incapable of comprehending anything beyond it."[[79]] This frank acceptance of the new order at home and abroad, and this wise confidence in the good sense of the
classes who were coming into power contrast very forcibly with the frantic denunciations of Jacobinism in which Burke taught most of his contemporaries to indulge. Shelburne was generally suspected and disliked by his associates, and the only explanation seems to be his undisguised indifference to the conventions of the old order.
Fox was as Liberal in his own way as Shelburne, and if his Liberalism was less wise, it was much more lively. Even his vices seem not to have impaired what was a rare and beautiful nature. He never took sides coldly. As a mere debater he excelled. He was a perfect master of words, and no English orator has ever surpassed him in readiness, in force, in the arrangement of a case, in simplicity and directness of statement. But his finest quality was his warmth of heart. He was a very spendthrift of sympathy, and every speech of his on behalf of the Americans against England, of the Indians against Warren Hastings, of Revolutionary France against her foreign invaders, of the Irish Catholics against their Protestant oppressors, or of the English common people against their reactionary Government, had a reality which was absent from the more splendid utterances of men like Sheridan. Even Burke, who was allied with Fox in such fierce contests as those about America, Warren Hastings, and Catholic disabilities, never felt a cause as Fox felt it. Fox had that very rare and admirable faculty of inserting himself into the very heart of the oppressed and of resenting their wrongs as if they had been his own. Even in his greatest moments, when he denounced the treatment of the Americans or of the Hindoos, Burke was external to the object of his sympathy. He was a sort of divine arbiter, condemning wickedness because it violated an eternal principle. Fox was never more than human, and if he was always less majestic than Burke, his sensitiveness was far more acute. "The defeats of great armies of invaders," he said, "always gave me the greatest satisfaction in reading history, from Xerxes' time downwards."[[80]] A man who can feel the ardour of a patriot in a struggle more than two thousand years old may