Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham by Harold J. Laski

H >> Harold J. Laski >> Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

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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.

It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley exerted;
certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small. Dr. Richard
Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he might have had has
been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents. His sinking-fund scheme
was taken up by the younger Pitt, and proved, though the latter believed
in it to the last, to be founded upon an arithmetical fallacy which did
not sit well upon a fellow of the Royal Society. His sermon on the
French Revolution provoked the _Reflections_ of Burke; and, though much
of the right was on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he
survived Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day,
and he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English
revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb optimism;
for the rigid _a priori_ morality of which he was the somewhat muddled
defender was less favorable to a confidence in reason. He had a good
deal of John Brown's fear that luxury was the seed of English
degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the
population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential
to the general thesis he had to make.

Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to print by
the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely popular, his
_Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty_ (1776) attained its eighth
edition within a decade. This, with its supplement _Additional
Observations_ (1777), presents a perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their
ancestry concealed. They represent the tradition of Locke, modified by
the importations of Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume,
and he takes sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has
little or nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument
is upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government, and
self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator.
Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to its last
consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public services"; laws are
"particular provisions or regulations established by Common Consent for
gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are "trustees or deputies
for carrying these regulations into execution." And almost in the words
of Rousseau, Price goes on to admit that liberty, "in its most perfect
degree, can be enjoyed only in small states where every independent
agent is capable of giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen
into public offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though
he thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize the
sacrifice of liberty involved.

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.

The _Essay on the Right of Property in Land_ (1781) of William Ogilvie
deserves at least a passing notice. The author, who published his book
anonymously, was a Professor of Latin in the University of Aberdeen and
an agriculturist of some success. His own career was distinctly
honorable. The teacher of Sir James Mackintosh, he had a high reputation
as a classical scholar and deserves to be remembered for his effort to
reform a college which had practically ceased to perform its proper
academic functions. His book is virtually an essay upon the natural
right of men to the soil. He does not doubt that the distress of the
times is due to the land monopoly. The earth being given to men in
common, its invasion by private ownership is a dangerous perversion. Men
have the right to the full product of their labor; but the privileges of
the landowner prevent the enjoyment of that right. The primary duty of
every State is the increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation
is that which has the greatest number of free and independent
cultivators. But governments attend rather to the interest of the higher
classes, even while they hold out the protection of the common people as
the main pretext of their authority. The result is their maintenance of
land-monopoly even though it affects the prime material of all essential
industries, prevents the growth of population, and makes the rich
wealthier at the expense of the poor. It breeds oppression and
ignorance, and poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative.
He points out how a nation is dominated by its landlords, and how they
have consistently evaded the fiscal burdens they should bear. Only in a
return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source of an
increase in happiness.

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.

V

Against the school of Rousseau's English disciples it is comparatively
easy to multiply criticisms. They lacked any historic sense. Government,
for them, was simply an instrument which was made and unmade at the
volition of men. How complex were its psychological foundations they had
no conception; with the single factor of consent they could explain the
most marvellous edifice of any time. They were buried beneath a mountain
of metaphysical right which they never related to legal facts or to
political possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions
of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to
investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led. They
overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy themselves
with political affairs. They made no proper allowance for the protective
armour each social system must acquire by the mere force of
prescription. Nor is there sufficient allowance in their attitude for
those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman must
of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to say, so
completely with _staatslehre_ that they do not admit the mollifying
influence of _politik_. They search for principles of universal right,
without the perception that a right which is to be universal must
necessarily be so general in character as to be useless in its
application.

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.

We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and
Priestley as representing more than an important segment of opinion. The
opposition to their theories was not less articulate than their own
defence of them. Some, like Burke, desired a purification of the
existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had no sort of sympathy with
new-fangled ideas. One thinker, at least, deserves some mention less for
the inherent value of what he had to say, than for the nature of the
opinions he expounded. Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a
reputation alike in political and economic enquiry. He represents the
sturdy nationalism of Arbuthnot's _John Bull_, the unreasoned prejudice
against all foreigners, the hatred of all metaphysics as inconsistent
with common sense, the desire to let things be on the ground that the
effort after change is worse than the evil of which men complain. His
_Treatise on Civil Government_ (1781) is in many ways a delightful book,
bluff, hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that
is all its own. He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the first
place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the second, to
explode the new bubble of Rousseau's followers. The second point takes
the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as Tucker shrewdly saw,
the theories of the school may trace their ancestry. He analyses the
theory of consent in such fashion as to show that if its adherents could
be persuaded to be logical, they would have to admit themselves
anarchists. He has no sympathy with the state of nature; the noble
savage, on investigation, turns out to be a barbaric creature with a
club and scalping knife. Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or,
as he prefers, somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that
does not mean that the actual governors can be dismissed when any
eccentric happens to take exception to their views. He has no sympathy
with parliamentary reform. Give the mob an increase of power, he says,
and nothing is to be expected but outrage and violence. He thinks the
constitution very well as it is, and those who preach the evils of
corruption ought to prove their charges instead of blasphemously
asserting that the voice of the people is the voice of God.

Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own. He does not doubt that
the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered upon them.
Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as ever George III
himself could have desired. But not for one moment would he fight them
to compel their return to British allegiance. If the American colonies
want to go, let them by all means cut adrift. They are only a useless
source of expenditure. The trade they represent does not depend upon
allegiance but upon wants that England can supply if she keeps shop in
the proper way, if, that is, she makes it to their interest to buy in
her market. Indeed, colonies of all kinds seem to him quite useless.
They ever are, he says, and ever were, "a drain to and an incumbrance on
the Mother-country, requiring perpetual and expensive nursing in their
infancy, and becoming headstrong and ungovernable in proportion as they
grow up." All wise relations depend upon self-interest, and that needs
no compulsion. If Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up,
the result would be "multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and
contracts effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal
industry encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that
mediocrity it ought to have." Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-century
before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean crustily explaining
his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had just rejected Edmund
Burke for advocating free trade with Ireland.

No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr. Johnson.
Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of gloomy
prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of the source
from which they come. He thought life a poor thing at the best and took
a low view of human nature. "The notion of liberty," he told the
faithful Boswell, "amuses the people of England and helps to keep off
the _tedium vitae_." The idea of a society properly organized into ranks
and societies he always esteemed highly. "I am a friend to
subordination," he said, "as most conducive to the happiness of
society." He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end. Whiggism was the
offspring of the devil, the "negation of all principle"; and he seems to
have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as the worst of
sins. He did not believe in the honesty of republicans; they levelled
down, but were never inclined to level up. Men, he felt, had a part to
act in society, and their business was to fulfil their allotted station.
Rousseau was a very bad man: "I would sooner sign a sentence for his
transportation than that of any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey
these many years." Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth
while was freedom in private concerns. He blessed the government in the
case of general warrants and thought the power of the Crown too small.
Toleration he considered due to an inapt distinction between freedom to
think and freedom to talk, and any magistrate "while he thinks himself
right ... ought to enforce what he thinks." The American revolt he
ascribed to selfish faction; and in his _Taxation no Tyranny_ (1775) he
defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite ground
of the necessity of subordination. He was willing, he said, to love all
mankind except an American.

Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an
acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and
fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the
letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He
knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe
under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the _Idler_ as
one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish
as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the
sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt
for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular.
There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of
the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time
was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as
elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental
questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no age
are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is
diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require
something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's attitude
would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but
where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to
contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in
a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to
look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution.

CHAPTER VI

BURKE

I

It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the
king stands outside the categories of political conflict. He is the
dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory,
is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is
largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came
to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has
passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent
widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have
secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first
twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort
of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once
more the balance of power. Nor was the effort defeated without a
struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.

And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time
highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost much credit
during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the
elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended
for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power. A
generation of corrupt practice and the final defeat of Stuart hopes had
already deprived the Whigs of any special hold on their past ideals.
They were divided already into factions the purpose of which was no more
than the avid pursuit of place and pension. Government by connection
proved itself irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also
that once corruption was centralized there was no limit to its
influence, granted only the absence of great questions. When George III
transferred that organization from the office of the minister to his own
court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his success. For more
than forty years the Tories had been excluded from office; and they
were more than eager to sell their support. The Church had become the
creature of the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was
towards benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind
of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He
had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and a
reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's first book
can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor was it obvious
that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the
great Whig families.

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