Of course, spreading his topics far and wide in the domain of history and philosophy, he was at many points superficial. He took most of his materials at second hand; and it has been said that he borrowed many of his ideas from the French. But no matter who mined the gold, he coined it; the image and superscription are his. Certain separate, isolated truths which served under him may have been doing individual, guerilla warfare elsewhere for the advancement of science; but it was he who marshalled them into drilled hosts for the conquering of the nations. Adam Smith was doubtless indebted to the Physiocrats, but all the world is indebted to Adam Smith. Education and the world of thought need men who, like this man, will dare to know a multitude of things. Without them and their bold synthetic methods, all knowledge and all thought would fall apart into a weak analysis. Their minds do not lack in thoroughness; their thoroughness simply lacks in minuteness. It is only in their utterances that the mind finds the exhilaration and exaltation that come with the free air that blows over broad uplands. They excite you with views of the large aspects of thought; conduct you through the noblest scenery of the mind’s domain; delight you with majesty of outline and sweep of prospect. In this day of narrow specialties, our thinking needs such men to fuse its parts, correlate its forces, and centre its results; and our thinking needs them in its college stage, in order that we may command horizons from our study windows in after days.
The breadth and comprehensiveness of treatment characteristic of the utterances of such a teacher are inseparable attributes of his manner of thought. He has the artist’s eye. For him things stand in picturesque relations; their great outlines fit into each other; the touch of his treatment is necessarily broad and strong. The same informing influence of artistic conception and combination gives to his style its luminous and yet transparent qualities. His sentences cannot retain the stiff joints of logic; it would be death to them to wear the chains of formal statement; they must take leave to deck themselves with eloquence. In a word, such men must write literature, or nothing. Their minds quiver with those broad sympathies which constitute the life of written speech. Their native catholicity makes all minds receive them as kinsmen. By reason of the very strength of their humanity, they are enabled to say things long waiting to be said, in such a way that all men may receive them. They hold commissions from the King of Speech. Such men will not, I am persuaded, always seek in vain invitations to those academic platforms which are their best coignes of vantage. But this is not just the time when they are most appreciated, or most freely encouraged to discover themselves; and it cannot be amiss to turn back to another order of things, and remind ourselves how a master of academic inspiration, possessing, in a great power to impart intellectual impulse, something higher than a trained capacity to communicate method, may sometimes be found even in a philosophical Scotchman.
II
THE STUDY OF POLITICS
It has long been an open secret that there is war among the political economists. John Stuart Mill no longer receives universal homage, but has to bear much irreverent criticism; even Adam Smith might be seriously cavilled at were not the habit of praise grown too old in his case. He is still ‘the father of political economy;’ but, like other fathers of his day, he seems to us decidedly old fashioned. The fact is, that these older writers, who professed to point out the laws of human business, are accused of leaving out of view a full half of human nature; in insisting that men love gain, they are said to have quite forgotten that men sometimes love each other, that they are not only prehensile, but also a great many other things less aggressive and less selfish.
Those who make these charges want to leave nothing human out of their reckonings; they want to know ‘all the facts,’ and are ready, if necessary, to reduce every generalization of the older writers to the state—the wholly exceptional state—of a rule in German grammar. Their protest is significant, their purpose heroic, beyond a doubt; and what interesting questions are not raised by their programme! How is the world to contain the writings, statistical, historical, critical, which must be accumulated ere this enormous diagnosis of trade and manufacture shall be completed in its details? And after it shall have been completed in detail who is to be born great enough in genius and patience to reduce the mass to a system comprehensible by ordinary mortals? Moreover, who is going surety that these new economists will not be dreadful defaulters before they get through handling these immense assets of human nature, which Mill confessed himself unable to handle without wrecking his bookkeeping? Are they assured of the eventual collaboration of some Shakespeare who will set before the world all the standard types of economic character? Let the world hope so. Even those who cannot answer the questions I have broached ought to bid such sturdy workers ‘God speed!’
The most interesting reflection suggested by the situation is, that political economists are being harassed by the same discipline of experience that, one day or another, sobers all constructors of systems. They cannot build in the air and then escape chagrin because men only gaze at their structures, and will not live in them. Closet students of politics are constantly undergoing new drill in the same lesson: the world is an inexorable schoolmaster; it will have none of any thought which does not recognize it. Sometimes theorists like Rousseau, being near enough the truth to deceive even those who know something of it, are so unfortunate as to induce men to rear fabrics of government after their aerial patterns out of earth’s stuffs, with the result of bringing every affair of weight crashing about their ears, to the shaking of the world. But there are not many such coincidences as Rousseau and his times, happily; and other closet politicians, more commonly cast and more ordinarily placed than he, have had no such perilous successes.
There is every reason to believe that in countries where men vote as well as write books, political writers at any rate give an honest recognition of act to these facts. They do not vote their opinions, they vote their party tickets; and they are the better citizens by far for doing so. Inside their libraries they go with their masters in thought—mayhap go great lengths with Adolph Wagner, or hold stiffly back, “man versus the state,” with Spencer; outside their libraries they ‘go with their party.’ In a word, like sensible men, they frankly recognize the difference between what is possible in thought and what is practicable in action.
But the trouble is, that when they turn from voting to writing they call many of their abstract reflections on government studies of politics, and thereby lose the benefit of some very wholesome aids to just thought. Even when they draw near the actual life of living governments, as they frequently do, and read and compare statutes and constitutions, they stop short of asking and ascertaining what the men of the street think and say of institutions and laws; what little, as well as what big, influences brought particular laws into existence; how much of each law actually lives in the regulation of public function or private activity, how much of it has degenerated into ‘dead letter;’ in brief, just what things it is—what methods, what habits, what human characteristics and social conditions—that make the appearance of politics outside the library so different from its appearance inside that quiet retreat; what it is that constitutes ‘practical politics’ a peculiar province. And yet these are the questions most necessary to be answered in order to reach the heart of their study.
Every one who has read great treatises on government which were not merely speculative in their method must have been struck by their exhaustive knowledge of statutes, of judicial precedents, and of legal and constitutional history; and equally by their tacit ignorance of anything more than this gaunt skeleton of institutions. Their best pages are often those on which a modest asterisk, an unobtrusive numeral, or a tiny dagger sticking high in the stately text, carries the eye down to a foot-note, packed close in small print, in which some hint is let drop of the fact that institutions have a daily as well as an epochal life, from which the student might ‘learn something to his advantage.’
The inherent weakness of such a method is shown by the readiness with which it is discredited when once a better one is put beside it. What modern writer on political institutions has not felt, either directly or indirectly, the influence of de Tocqueville and Bagehot? Both these inimitable writers were men of extraordinary genius, and, whatever they might have written about, their writings would have been admiringly preserved, if only for the wonder of their luminous qualities. But their political works live, not only as models of effective style, but also as standards of stimulating wisdom; because Bagehot and de Tocqueville were not merely students, but also men of the world, for whom the only acceptable philosophy of politics was a generalization from actual daily observation of men and things. They could see institutions writ small in the most trivial turns of politics, and read constitutions more clearly in a biography than in a statute-book. They were men who, had they written history, would have written the history of peoples, and not of courts or parliaments merely. Their methods have, therefore, because of their essential sanity, gone far toward discrediting all others; they have leavened the whole mass of political literature. Was it not Bagehot, for instance, who made it necessary for Professor Dicey to entitle his recent admirable work “The Law of the Constitution,” that no one might think he mistook it for the Life of the Constitution?