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It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The contract does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton "in the same archive with the famous original compact between monarch and people" which has been the object of vast but fruitless searches. Nor does the Act of Submission bear upon its face the marks of that tender care of the protection of an independent society which Warburton declared a vital tenet of the Union. Yet such criticisms miss the real significance of the theory. It is really the introduction into English politics of that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the superior. Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had seemed mutually exclusive.

Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the English Church because its temper, under the aegis of Laudian views, had been in substance theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly expressed the compromise the dominant party of the Church had then in mind. They did, indeed, mistake the power of the Church, or, rather, they submitted to the State so fully that what they had intended for a partnership became an absorption. So that the Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep enough to make the Church no more than a moral police department of the State. Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the obstrusive Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until Newman's advent was the provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility. It is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church which was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.

No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The opponents of Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making. They saw that a Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the Church to possess an ethos of her own. It was thus against the sovereignty of the State that they protested. Somewhere, a line must be drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be safeguarded. For its supporters could not be true to their divine mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to impose its will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived from the State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an authority not rightly its own.

The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment. For here the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived upon terms of her own definition. That was possible before the Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of rationalism the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become unacceptable. If the Church was to become so intimately involved with the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to complain, if statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to sacrifice it to the attainment of that ideal. For the real secret of independence is, after all, no more than independence. The Church sought it without being willing to pay the price. And this it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge triumphant from an ordeal where logically he should have failed. The State, by definition is an absorptive animal; and the Church had no right to complain if the price of its privileges was royal supremacy. A century so self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High Church theory.

THE ERA OF STAGNATION

A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings is too stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the Church; for Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with such matters as the apostolic succession. He makes great show of his love of liberty, which is the true end of government; and we are informed with a vast solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in which it always stands. So that the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained. The social compact seems to win his approbation and we learn that the secret of the British constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual independency. But what the powers are, and how their independence is preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his sincerity. The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted. He wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He would have disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen from Parliament. The press was to be free; and there is at least a degree of generous insight in his plea for a wider commercial freedom in colonial matters. Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man with the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the committee for the settlement of disputed elections? And what else can we see in his desire for liberty of the press save a desire to fight Walpole in the open, without fear of the penalties his former treason had incurred?

Hume, of course, is always critical and suggestive, and even if he had no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new turn to speculation. There is something almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes divine right and the social contract. The one is an inevitable deduction from theism, but it protects an usurper not less than an hereditary king, and gives a "divine commission" as well to a constable as to the most majestic prince. The proponents of the social contract are in no better case. "Were you to preach," he remarks, "in most parts of the world that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary consent, or on a mutual promise, the magistrate would soon imprison you as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience; if your friends did not before shut you up as delirious for advancing such absurdities." The original contract could not be produced, and, even if it were, it would suppose the "consent of the fathers to bind the children even to the most remote generations." The real truth, as he remarks, is that "almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally on usurpation, or on conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people." If we then ask why obedience is possible, the sufficient answer is that "it becomes so familiar that most men never make any inquiry about its origin or cause, any more than about the principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of nature."

Government, in short, is dependent upon the inescapable facts of psychology. It might be unnecessary if all desires could be individually fulfilled by making them, or if man showed to his fellow-men the same tender regard he has for himself. So happy a condition does not exist; and government is the most useful way of remedying the defects of our situation. A theologian might say that Hume derives government from original sin; to which he would have replied by denying the fall. His whole attitude is simply an insistence that utility is the touchstone of institutions, and he may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its application to the whole field of political science. He knows that opinion is the sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie at the base of the thoughts which get accepted. He does not, indeed, deny that fear and consent enter into the attitude of men; he simply asserts that these also are founded upon a judgment of utility in the thing judged. We obey because otherwise "society could not subsist," and society subsists for its utility. "Men," he says "could not live at all in society, at least in a civilized society, without laws and magistrates and judges, to prevent the encroachments of the strong upon the weak, of the violent upon the just and equitable."

Utilitarianism is, of course, above all a method; and it is not unfair to say of Hume that he did not get very far beyond insistence on that point. He sees that the subjection of the many to the few is rooted in human impulse; but he has no penetrating inquiry, such as that of Locke or Hobbes, into the purpose of such subjection. So, too, it is the sense of public interest which determines men's thoughts on government, on who should rule, and what should be the system of property; but the ethical substance of these questions he leaves undetermined. Politics, he thinks, may one day be a science; though he considers the world still too young for general truths therein. The maxims he suggests as of permanent value, "that a hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their representatives form the best monarchy, autocracy and democracy"; that "free governments ... are the most ruinous and oppressive to their provinces"; that republics are more favorable to science, monarchies to art; that the death of a political body is inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most thinkers at the present time. And when he constructs an ideal constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be regarded as practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is obvious that the historical method had not yet come fully into being.

Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is absent. Hume was a typical child of one aspect of the eighteenth century in his hatred of enthusiasm, and the form in which he most abominates it is religious. Why people's religious opinions should lead to antagonism he could no more understand than why people should refuse to pass one another on a road. Wars of religion thus seemed to him based upon a merely frivolous principle; and in his ideal commonwealth he made the Church a department of the State lest it should get out of hand. He was, moreover, a static philosopher, disturbed by signs of political restlessness; and this led to the purgation of Whig doctrines from his writings, and their consistent replacement by a cynical conservatism. He was always afraid that popular government would mean mob-rule; and absolute government is accordingly recommended as the euthanasia of the British constitution. Not even the example of Sweden convinced him that a standing army might exist without civil liberty being endangered; and he has all the noxious fallacies of his time upon the balance of power. Above all, it is striking to see his helplessness before the problem of national character. Mainly he ascribes it to the form of government, and that in turn to chance. Even the friend of Montesquieu can see no significance in race or climate. The idea, in fact, of evolution is entirely absent from his political speculation. Political life, like human life, ends in death; and the problem is to make our egress as comfortable as we can, for the prime evil is disturbance. It is difficult not to feel that there is almost a physical basis in his own disease for this love of quiet. The man who put indolence among the primary motives of human happiness was not likely to view novel theories with unruffled temper.

Hume has an eminent place among economists, and for one to whom the study of such phenomena was but a casual inquiry, it is marvelous how much he saw. He is free from the crude errors of mercantilism; and twenty years before Adam Smith hopes, "as a British subject," for the prosperity of other countries. "Free communication and exchange" seems to him an ordinance of nature; and he heaps contempt upon those "numberless bars, obstructions and imposts which all nations of Europe, and none more than England, have put upon trade." Specie he places in its true light as merely a medium of exchange. The supposed antagonism between commerce and agriculture he disposes of in a half-dozen effective sentences. He sees the place of time and distance in the discussion of economic want. He sees the value of a general level of economic equality, even while he is sceptical of its attainment. He insists upon the economic value of high wages, though he somewhat belittles the importance of wealth in the achievement of happiness. Before Bentham, who on this point converted Adam Smith, he knew that the rate of interest depends upon the supply of and demand for loans. He insists that commerce demands a free government for its progress, pointing out, doubtless from his abundant French experience, that an absolute government gives to the commercial class an insufficient status of honor. He pointed out, doubtless with France again in his mind, the evils of an arbitrary system of taxation. "They are commonly converted," he says with unwonted severity, "into punishments on industry; and also, by their unavoidable inequality, are more grievous, than by the real burden which they impose." And he emphasizes his belief that the best taxes are those which, like taxes upon luxury, press least upon the poor.

SIGNS OF CHANGE

Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power of government which Locke had proposed. It is a removal at every point conditioned by the interest of the people. For Rousseau declared that the existing distribution of power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and he made the people sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their achievement in the shape of sinister interest. The powers of the people thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for innovation. It is easy enough then to understand why such a philosophy should have been anathema to Burke. Rousseau's eager sympathy for humble men, his optimistic faith in the immediate prospect of popular power were to Burke the symptoms of insane delusion and their author "the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England." But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau's influence was the success of the American Revolution; and no one had done more than Burke himself to promote its cause and justify its principles. That revolution established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the soberness with which it checked the supposed weakness of the sovereign people. America made herself independent while what was best in Europe combined in enthusiastic applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of Rousseau had been taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of power could remove what deliberation was impotent to secure. Here Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage denied. Nor, at the moment, was it influential except in the general impetus it gave to thought. But from the moment of its appearance it is an undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its metaphysical form it failed to command acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its results were victorious. Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the conclusions he recommends so much as in the language in which he clothes them. Either make a final end of the optimism of men like Hume and Blackstone, or the veneration for the past which is at the root of Burke's own teaching.

It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the stimulus it did. Montesquieu came to praise the British constitution at a time when good men were aghast at its perversion. There was no room in many years for revolution, but at least there was place for hearty discontent and a seeking after new methods. Of that temper two men so different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are the political symbols. The former's rise to power upon the floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant nothing so much as a protest against the cynical corruption of the previous generation. Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly awaking to a sense of its own power. The French creed was too purely logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden shoes played not a little part in its rejection. The rights of man made only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was involved in that rejection; and then it was too late. But no one could feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes. The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would have been a supreme achievement.

As a description of the existing government there is thus hardly an element of Blackstone's work which could stand the test of critical inquiry. But even worse was its philosophy. As Bentham pointed out, he was unaware of the distinction between society and government. The state of nature exists, or fails to exist, with startling inconsistency. Blackstone, in fact, was a Lockian who knows that Hume and Montesquieu have cut the ground from under his master's feet, and yet cannot understand how, without him, a foundation is to be supplied. Locke, indeed, seems to him, as a natural conservative, to go too far, and he rejects the original contract as without basis in history; yet contractual notions are present at every fundamental stage of his argument. The sovereign power, so we are told, is irresistible; and then because Blackstone is uncertain what right is to mean, we hear of moral limitations upon its exercise. He speaks continually of representation without any effort to examine into the notions it conveys. The members of society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify existent inequalities. "The natural foundations of sovereignty," he writes, "are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and power." Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have been taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the actual exertion of authority. Nor has he clear notions of the way in which property is to be founded. Communism, he writes in seventeenth century fashion, is the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the earth to men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions. This is pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are utterly remote from the logical result of his own premises.

The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these questions, only the most confused sort of notions. He had to preface his work with some sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded it. The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to the great sceptic's speculations. So that he was driven back upon notions he felt to be false, without a proper realization of their falsity. His use of Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a great idea can be in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than the fertility it contained. The merit of Blackstone is his learning, which was substantial, his realization that the powers of law demand some classification, his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is right alike in searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying the historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions of his time to question its assumptions.

Nor must we belittle what insight De Lolme possessed. He saw that the early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented the continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with the result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the English people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior power. He understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was the independence of the judges. He realized that the party-system--he never used the actual term--while it provides room for men's ambitions at the same time prevents the equation of ambition with indispensability. "Woe to him," says De Lolme, "... who should endeavor to make the people believe that their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single citizen." He sees the paramount value of freedom of the press. This, as he says, with the necessity that members should be re-elected, "has delivered into the hands of the people at large the exercise of the censorial power." He has no doubt but that resistance is the remedy whereby governmental encroachment can be prevented; "resistance," he says, "is the ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of power." He points out how real is the guarantee of liberty where the onus of proof in criminal cases is thrown upon the government. He regards with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military arm, and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding to the royal power. Nor can he fail to admire the insight which organizes "the agitation of the popular mind," not as "the forerunner of violent commotions" but to "animate all parts of the state." Therein De Lolme had grasped the real essence of party government.

So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for English Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import. It can never be forgotten in the history of political ideas that the alliance of Church and State made Nonconformists suspicious of government interference. Their original desire to be left unimpeded was soon exalted into a definite theory; and since political conditions had confined them so largely to trade none felt as they did the hampering influence of State-restrictions. The result has been a great difficulty in making liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the organic nature of the State. It remains for them almost entirely a police institution which, once it aims at the realization of right, usurps a function far better performed by individuals. There is no sense of the community; all that exists is a sum of private sentiments. "Civil liberty," says Priestley, "has been greatly impaired by an abuse of the maxim that the joint understanding of all the members of a State, properly collected, must be preferable to that of individuals; and consequently that the more the cases are in which mankind are governed by this united reason of the whole community, so much the better; whereas, in truth, the greater part of human actions are of such a nature, that more inconvenience would follow from their being fixed by laws than from their being left to every man's arbitrary will." If my neighbor assaults me, he suggests, I may usefully call in the police; but where the object is the discovery of truth, the means of education, the method of religious belief, individual initiative is superior to State action. The latter produces an uniform result "incompatible with the spirit of discovery." Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just to posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future. Men are too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all action.

Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past tradition; and the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered broadcast over his pages. Nevertheless the basis upon which he defended his ideas was a utilitarianism hardly less complete than that which Bentham made the instrument of revolution. "Regard to the general good," he says, "is the main method by which natural rights are to be defended." "The good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be determined." In substance, that is to say, if not completely in theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to those of expediency. His chief attack upon religious legislation is similarly based upon considerations of policy. His view of the individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual energy. Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar fashion to Adam Smith and his followers. Priestley, of course, was inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that government has the future in its hands than that government action may well be decisive for good or evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all doors. That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the previous age.

But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized. "Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust; and all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects the theory of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with self-government; if the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its life, it would betray its constituents and dissolve itself. "If omnipotence," he writes, "can with any sense be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all legislative authority originates; that is, in the People." Such a system is alone compatible with the ends of government, since it cannot be supposed that men "combine into communities and institute government" for self-enslavement. Nor is any other political system "consistent with the natural equality of mankind"; by which Price means that no man "is constituted by the author of nature the vassal or subject of another, or has any right to give law to him, or, without his consent, to take away any part of his property or to abridge him of his liberty." From all of which it is concluded that liberty is inalienable; and a people which has lost it "must have a right to emancipate themselves as soon as they can." The aptness of the argument to the American situation is obvious enough; and nowhere is Price more happy or more formidable than when he applies his precepts to phrases like "the unity of the empire" and the "honor of the kingdom" which were so freely used to cover up the inevitable results of George's obstinacy.

Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to speak of actual changes, he had little more to propose than a system of peasant proprietorship. What is striking in the book is its sense of great, impending changes, its thorough grasp of the principle of utility, its realization of the immense agricultural improvement that is possible if the landed system can be so changed as to bring into play the impulses of humble men. He sees clearly enough that wealth dominates the State; and his interpretation of history is throughout economic. Ogilvie is one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who, chiefly through Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special current of their own in the great tide of protest against the unjust situation of labor. Like them, he builds his system upon natural rights; though, unlike them, his natural rights are defended by expediency and in a style that is always clear and logical. The book itself has rather a curious history. At its appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind. Mackintosh knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against the amiable delusion that its excellence would persuade the British government to force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the East India Company. Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby, it was intended to instruct the Chartists in the secret of their oppression; and therein it may well have contributed to the tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus O'Connor. In 1891 the problem of the land was again eagerly debated under the stimulus of Mr. Henry George; and a patriotic Scotchman published the book with biographical notes that constitute one of the most amazing curiosities in English political literature.

Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their insight. They were protesting against a system strongly upheld on grounds which now appear to have been simply indefensible. The business of government had been made the private possession of a privileged class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from the minds of most men engaged in its direction. The loss of America, the heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most to the fact that principle is a vital part of policy. The revolutionists recalled men to the need of explaining, no less than carrying on, the government of the Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid intrigues of the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated, unconvinced. It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes of Europe and America before they would give serious heed; and even then they met antagonism with nothing save oppression and hate. Yet the doctrines remained; for thought, after all, is killed by reasoned answer alone. And when the first gusts of war and revolution had passed, the cause for which they stood was found to have permeated all classes save that which had all to lose by learning.

BURKE

What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of the king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined somewhat to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was excessively ignorant and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no one but himself, and he totally misunderstood the true nature of his office. There is no question which arose in the first forty years of his reign in which he was not upon the wrong side and proud of his error. He was wrong about Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about France. He demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked every measure for the purification of the political system. He supported the Slave trade and he opposed the repeal of the Test Act. He prevented the grant of Catholic emancipation at the one moment when it might have genuinely healed the wounds of Ireland. He destroyed by his perverse creations the value of the House of Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly determined to make his will the criterion of policy; and his design might have succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to its greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in politics. The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the court upon a broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as the event proved, could be as subservient to the king as to his minister.

Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with characteristic stupidity, the king did not know the proper instruments for his purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the suspicion of the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder Pitt. In the Wilkes affair he threw the clearest light of the century upon the true nature of the House of Commons. His own system of proscription restored to the Whig party not a little of the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to supply them with a philosophy. Chatham remained the idol of the people despite his hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of representative government and of personal liberty. He lost America and it was not his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had made him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt was to compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George's effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature of things, survive that analysis.

The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the meaning of the new synthesis was Junius. That his anonymity concealed the malignant talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now beyond denial. Junius, indeed, can hardly claim a place in the history of political ideas. His genius lay not in the discussion of principle but the dissection of personality. His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled him to inform the general public of facts which were the private possession of the inner political circle. His mind was narrow and pedantic. He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He was never generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness the nature of the issue and he was a powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king. He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover, appearing as they did in the daily journals gave the press a significance in politics which it has never lost. He made the significance of George's effort known to the mass of men at a time when no other means of information was at hand. The opposition was divided; the king's friends were in a vast majority; the publication of debates was all but impossible. English government was a secret conflict in which the entrance of spectators was forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate. It was the glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. Not even the combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord Mansfield's doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of his vituperation and Wilkes' courage. Bad men have sometimes been the instruments of noble destiny; and there are few more curious episodes in English history than the result of this alliance between revengeful hate and insolent ambition.

For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a singularly lovable figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said Johnson; and Goldsmith has told us how he wound his way into a subject like a serpent. Macaulay thought him the greatest man since Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest master of civil wisdom in our tongue." "No English writer," says Sir Leslie Stephen, "has received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics." Even when the last criticism has been made, detraction from these estimates is impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent was his temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe. His alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics, unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public welfare. No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to the service of the nation with less regard for personal advancement. No English statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a mass of details to the principle they involve.

He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no influence to whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics, indeed, bear upon their face the preoccupation with the immediate problems of the House of Commons. Yet through them all the principles that emerge form a consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw it with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the maxims of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London out to India and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian ryot's wrongs as for the iniquities of English policy to Ireland. With less width of mind than Hume and less intensity of gaze than Adam Smith, he yet had a width and intensity which, fused with his own imaginative sympathy, gave him more insight than either. He had an unerring eye for the eternal principles of politics. He knew that ideals must be harnessed to an Act of Parliament if they are not to cease their influence. Admitting while he did that politics must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find good reason why expediency should be identified with what he saw as right. It is a stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English politics to whom a greater immediate influence may be ascribed, just as in political philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of Hobbes and Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and speculation his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like him before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his practical insight was far less profound. Hamilton had Burke's full grasp of political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation. So that he remains a figure of uniqueness. He may, as Goldsmith said, have expended upon his party talents that should have illuminated the universal aspect of the State. Yet there is no question with which he dealt that he did not leave the richer for his enquiry.

The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he was at every point upon the side of the future. Where constitutional reform was in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy; though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid conservatism. In the last decade of his life he encountered the greatest cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the Reformation, and it is not too much to say that at every point he missed the essence of its meaning. Yet even upon France and the English Constitution he was full of practical sagacity. Had his warning been uttered without the fury of hate that accompanied it, he might well have guided the forces of the Revolution into channels that would have left no space for the military dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real evils of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently inveighed, forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch of wise and continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he was ready to praise. What impressed him was less the evils of the constitution than its possibilities, could the defects quite alien from its nature but be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a deeper vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke's conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was too much the apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles involved in the overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense of a Divine Providence taking thought for the welfare of men to interfere with violence in his handiwork. The tinge of caution is never absent, even from his most liberal moments; and he was willing to endure great evil if it seemed dangerous to estimate the cost of change.

There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research may well have shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there maintained. He was the first English statesman fully to understand the moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an eternal challenge to their malignant complacency. He did not ask the abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the wisdom of its conquest. All that he insisted upon was this, that in imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code. A lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white. The European must respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by law to respect them in his own State. "If we are not able," he said, "to contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that country to our constitution." England must be in India for India's benefit or not at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as the East India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was the antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a magnificent passage, "before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting." Sympathy with the native, regard for his habits and wants, the Company's servants failed to display. "The English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for the excesses of their premature power. The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds to be blown about in every breaking up of the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean." More than a century was to pass before the wisest of Burke's interpreters attempted the translation of his maxims into statute. But there has never, in any language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in imperial adventure. "The situation of man," said Burke, "is the preceptor of his duty." He saw how a nation might become corrupted by the spoils of other lands. He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of a later cruelty at home. Men will complain of their wrongdoing in the remoter empire; and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield. He denied that the government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction. Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit. He abhorred the politics of prestige. He knew the difficulties involved in administering distant territories, the ignorance and apathy of the public, the consequent erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong will fail of discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let us do what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national reputation." That is a general truth not less in Africa and China than in India itself. The main thought in Burke's mind was the danger lest colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of arbitrary ideas. That his own safeguards were inadequate is clear enough at the present time. He knew that the need was good government. He did not nor could he realize how intimately that ideal was connected with self-government. Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final outcome of his teaching.

Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go. He was against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible. He opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature. He would not, as in the great speech at Bristol , accept the doctrine that a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather than a representative of his own convictions. "Government and legislation," he said, "are matters of reason and of judgment"; and once the private member had honorably arrived at a decision which he thought was for the interest of the whole community, his duty was done. All this, in itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke's admirable grasp of the practical application of attractive theories to the event. But it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic constitutional change which is more dubious. He had no sympathy with the Radicals. "The bane of the Whigs," he said, "has been the admission among them of the corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by persuading many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers." "If the nation at large," he wrote in another letter, "has disposition enough to oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of government is, in my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the general disposition be against a virtuous and manly line of public conduct, there is no form into which it can be thrown that will improve its nature or add to its energy"; and in the same letter he foreshadows a possible retirement from the House of Commons as a protest against the growth of radical opinion in his party. He resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage qualification. He had no sympathy with the effort either to add to the county representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs. The framework of the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent. He deplored all criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials. "Our representation," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the necessary imperfections of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to be." It was in the same temper that he resisted all effort at the political relief of the Protestant dissenters. "The machine itself," he had said, "is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were sound"; and he never moved from that opinion.

To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription. The presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change, we act at our peril. "Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but to what is to secure that property, to government." Because he saw the State organically he was impressed by the smallness both of the present moment and the individual's thought. It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had the opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a reason; and that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So the prescriptive title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution. So, too, his main attack on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be discussed." He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a past experience which built according to the general need. Nor does he doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth," he said, "may be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of the virtues."

The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the sanctity of past experience. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, Taine and Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and Lecky in England, have all urged what is in effect a similar plea. We must not break what Bagehot called the cake of custom, for men have been trained to its digestion, and new food breeds trouble. Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a people, and while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform. The true idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness; and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance, we should disturb beyond repair the intricate equilibrium of countless ages. The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present is thus the true guide to our policy. "We ought," he said in a famous sentence, "to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend."

It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the destiny which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious edifice. He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than the English Parliament. Privileges were scattered to the winds in a single night. Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred. The doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect justification. On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves. In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not unnatural thing. But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.

Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two angles. It is easy to show that his picture of the British Constitution was remote from the facts even when he wrote. Every change that he opposed was essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed. Such criticism would be at almost every point just; and yet it would fail to touch the heart of Burke's position. What is mainly needed is analysis at once of his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke came to his maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we have it upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so clearly apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian changes of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment even for him who burdened himself unduly to restore the Beaconsfield estate. No man was more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious inference that once the means of government were made known those who possessed the knowledge would demand their share in its application. He did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a sense to have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining the foundations of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the facts at issue. No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized that Wilkes was but the symptom.

Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of political privilege was drawing to its close. That is the real meaning of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream of tendency not less active in England than abroad. In France, indeed, the lines were more sharply drawn than elsewhere. The rights men craved were not, as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries. A power that knew no responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only from the accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation to offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay, these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his generation to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past. It is not difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the tennis-court at Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to be condemned. Burke's caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good. In a less degree, the same is true of England. The constitution that Burke called upon men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the statute-book a penal code which hardly yielded to the noble attack of Romilly. These, which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform they were willing to destroy.

The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past as the very institutions it came to condemn. The innovations were the inevitable outcome of past oppression. Burke refused to see that aspect of the picture. He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to the half-wilful errors of the past. The man who grounded his faith in historic experience refused to admit as history the elements alien from his special outlook. He took that liberty not to venerate where he was unable to comprehend which he denied to his opponents. Nor did he admit the uses to which his doctrine of prescription was bound to be put in the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men. No one will object to privilege for a Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a different thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of whom Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham will one day emerge. He justifies the privileges of the English Church in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to see what men like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do with religion. The doctrine of prescription might be admirable if all statesmen were so wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men it becomes no more than the protective armour of vested interests into the ethics of which it refuses us leave to examine.

That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke's philosophy, and it deserves more examination than it has received. In part it is a rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning animal. It puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human action; and it thus is distrustful of thought as leading into channels to which the nature of man is not adapted. Novelty, which is assumed to be the outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon which civilization depends. Thought is destructive of peace; and it is argued that we know too little of political phenomena to make us venture into the untried places to which thought invites us. Yet the first of many answers is surely the most obvious fact that if man is so much the creature of his custom no reason would prevail save where they proved inadequate. If thought is simply a reserve power in society, its strength must obviously depend upon common acceptance; and that can only come when some routine has failed to satisfy the impulses of men. But we may urge a difficulty that is even more decisive. No system of habits can ever hope to endure long in a world where the cumulative power of memory enables change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a general desire. It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and, indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it is conscious of itself. The uncritical routine of which Burke is the sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of virtue. Yet in modern civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy. Our real need is less the automatic response to ancient stimulus than power to know what stimulus has social value. We need, that is to say, the gift of criticism rather than the gift of inert acceptance. Not, of course, that the habits which Burke so earnestly admired are at all part of our nervous endowment in any integral sense. The short space of the French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take that as proof of the ease with which essential habit may be acquired. Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized life. It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered; but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous response to the chords struck by another hand.

This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground. For the case against Burke's aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal. He did not inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors of a whole people. Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent. Once it is admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect institutional room must be found for its expression. The State is morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped. There is something curious here in Burke's inability to suspect deformity in a system which gave his talents but partial place. He must have known that no one in the House of Commons was his equal. He must have known how few of those he called upon to recognize the splendor of their function were capable of playing the part he pictured for them. The answer to a morally bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for power. Burke gave no hint of how the level of his governing class could be maintained. He said nothing of what education might accomplish for the people. He did not examine the obvious consequences of their economic status. Had his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of that States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in their inexperience, might have given him pause. The "obscure provincial advocates ... stewards of petty local jurisdictions ... the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation" legislated, out of their inexperience, for the world. Their resolution, their constancy, their high sense of the national need, were precisely the qualities Burke demanded in his governing class; and the States-General did not move from the straight path he laid down until they met with intrigue from those of whom Burke became the licensed champion.

Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is surely unanswerable. The things that men desire correspond, in some rough fashion, to the things they need. Natural rights are nothing more than the armour evolved to protect their vital interests. Upon the narrow basis of legal history it is, of course, impossible to protect them. History is rather the record of the thwarting of human desire than of its achievement. But upon the value of certain things there is a sufficient and constant opinion to give us assurance that repression will ultimately involve disorder. Nor is there any difference between the classes of men in this regard. Forms, indeed, will vary; and the power we have of answering demand will always wait upon the discoveries of science. Our natural rights, that is to say, will have a changing content simply because this is not a static world. But that does not mean, as Burke insisted, that they are empty of experience. They come, of course, mainly from men who have been excluded from intimate contact with the fruits of power. Nonconformists in religion, workers without land or capital save the power of their own hands, it is from the disinherited that they draw, as demands, their strength. Yet it is difficult to see, as Burke would undoubtedly have insisted, that they are the worse from the source whence they derive. Rather do they point to grave inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience. The unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack of moral insight into the problem he confronted.

There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him was the idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it, was not of the essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the purpose itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper. It never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur. We do not come to grips with the facts. What we are bidden to remember is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be. The existing order is beatified as a necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to separate out the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts in time and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do not at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.

It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the greatness of his effort. Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless to live rather as the author of some maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished implications, is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or Bentham. His very defects are lessons in themselves. His unhesitating inability to see how dangerous is the concentration of property is standing proof that men are over-prone to judge the rightness of a State by their own wishes. His own contempt for the results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless lesson in the virtue of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His disregard of popular desire suggests the fatal ease with which we neglect the opinion of those who stand outside the active centre of political conflict. Above all, his hostility to the Revolution should at least make later generations beware lest novelty of outlook be unduly confounded with erroneous doctrine.

Yet even when such deduction has been made, there is hardly a greater figure in the history of political thought in England. Without the relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the moral insight of T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties of each. He brought to the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of insight are things that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political complexity. Unquestionably, his speculation is rather that of the orator in the tribune than of the thinker in his study. He never forgot his party, and he wrote always in that House of Commons atmosphere which makes a man unjust to the argument and motives of his opponent. Yet, when the last word of criticism has been made, the balance of illumination is immense. He illustrates at its best the value of that party-system the worth of which made so deep an impression on all he wrote. He showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate great principles. He showed also that allegiance to party is never inconsistent with the deeper allegiance to the demand of conscience. When he came to the House of Commons, the prospects of representative government were very dark; and it is mainly to his emphasis upon its virtues that its victory must be attributed. Institutional change is likely to be more rapid than in his generation; for we seem to have reached that moment when, as he foresaw, "they who persist in opposing that mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men." The principles upon which we proceed are doubtless different from those that he commended; yet his very challenge to their wisdom only gives to his warning a deeper inspiration for our effort.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM

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