1. in_ernet_dli_2015_173929_2015_173929_Studies-In-The-English-Social-And-Political-Thinkers-Of-The-Nineteenth-Cintury

STUDIES IN THE

ENGLISH SOCIAL AND

POLITICAL THINKERS

OF THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY

BY THE REV.

ROBERT H. MURRAY, Litt.D.

VOLUME II.

Herbert Spencer to Ramsay MacDonald

CAMBRIDGE

W. HEFFER & SONS LTD.

1929

To the Most Rev. Cosmo Gordon Lang,

D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., D.Litt.

Lord Archbishop of Canterbury.

PRINTED IN ENGLAND

Contents

Chap. Page

I. Herbert Spencer and Evolutionary Politics .. .. .. .. 1

II. Sir Henry Maine and the Comparative Historical Method .. .. .. 48

III. Ruskin: Romanticist and Reformer .. 98

IV. Matthew Arnold the Poet-Critic .. .. 142

V. Seeley the Imperialist Statesman .. 185

VI. Bagehot's Seminal Mind .. .. .. 220

VII. Green's Political Idealism .. .. .. 274

VIII. Bryce's Many-Sided Outlook .. .. .. 324

IX. Maitland and Pluralism .. .. .. .. 373

X. Socialism .. .. .. .. .. .. 406

Index .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 434

Chapter I.

HERBERT SPENCER AND EVOLUTIONARY POLITICS

The first chapter of our first volume opens with a consideration of Malthus and the principle of population, and the first chapter of our second volume opens with a consideration of Darwin and the principle of evolution. It is obvious that Darwin presents us with the generalised form of the problem elucidated in part by his predecessor in thought who was in due course to stimulate him in producing his Origin of Species in 1859. For this date marks an epoch in political science nearly as much as in biological science.

Before Darwin's crowning discovery men were accustomed to the idea of a fixed form of government around which their minds might centre: after this discovery such an idea tended to vanish from political thought. There is scarcely anything common in subject-matter between More's Utopia, Bacon's New Atlantis, Campanella's City of the Sun, Morelly's Basilade, Babeuf's Society of Equals, and Cabet's Voyage to Icaria. What is common is that the authors of these Utopias contemplate a fixed form of society: their views are as static as Darwin's are dynamic. They are all seemingly able to portray the future, and the singular feature is that it closely approximates to the present in which they live.

For thinking men Darwinism very definitely ended all Utopias in which the conditions were fixed. The stationary state of Mill except perhaps in a country like China is seen to be a dream as far-fetched as More's.

Darwin used to say that no one could be a good observer unless he was an active theoriser, a circumstance that explains the failures—as well as the successes—of scientists. "I am a firm believer," so he stated, "that without speculation there is no good and original observation." As the facts accumulated under his never-ceasing industry, Darwin

1

2 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

in 1838 read his Malthus, and the Essay on the Principle of Population performed not the least of its services to mankind when it enabled Darwin to render the principles Malthus applied to men applicable to plants and animals as well. Without this Essay we might not have had the Origin of Species in 1859. The caution and the self-criticism of Darwin demanded the clearest evidence, rejecting the most welcome support if it be not flawless. With accuracy of statement went his sincerity of opinion. Yet all can seek truth and show sincerity without necessarily attaining correctness; for that, a power of logical reasoning, though no virtue, is a most necessary talent; it was a faculty that Darwin and his co-discoverer, Wallace, valued highly in themselves. Love of one's subject comes first of course, and no one can doubt the love of Darwin for geology and biology. Only because love must be first do we place truth second. Perhaps truth indeed is one facet of love; for love's self-effacement leads to that objective treatment, freed from sentiment and prejudice, which forms the very foundation of science. First of the virtues, for the man of science as for all men else, is love. Love of his fellow-creatures has led many an investigator through suffering and privation, even to his death. But without a burning love of his subject, be it the life of men, or of animals, or of stones, no man of science has achieved greatness. For the true lover the object of his affection is all, himself nothing: self-suppression is the hall-mark of the great discoverer. There are memorials to Newton and to Darwin in their own Cambridge Colleges, Trinity and Christ's respectively. It is appropriate that a plaque modelled by T. Woolner, made by Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, is on Darwin's rooms in Christ's College. A singularly beautiful statue of Newton by Roubiliac was given to Trinity College by the Master, Dr. Robert Smith, in 1750, and is now in the ante-chapel. Wordsworth, in his Prelude, detected in Newton's "silent face," as depicted in this work of art,

The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.

The scientist in the front rank requires the power of such a voyage every whit as real as that of Darwin in the Beagle.

The Figure of the Solitary

3

He must be able to live a lonely life with his idea, content to see men ignore it when it is put before them, content to believe with Kepler that if God can wait six thousand years for one to contemplate His works, the discoverer too can wait. Loneliness is the fate of genius.

The solitary is by no means a figure confined to religion: he is the type of all whose labours endure. Love of one's subject, the desire of truth, the power to lead a lonely life—these are the qualities of genius. But let us not forget hope, the hope that trampls on failure, "is baffled to fight better," and through mists of doubt presses forward to the goal.

Hope is the virtue of youth; but the truly great man possesses perpetual youth, in mind if not in body: ever ready for new ideas, ever looking at the heights. Do we always realise that Darwin's volumes on evolution were practically published after he was fifty? "The substance of the things hoped for" is faith, and this too is a necessary virtue of the man of science.

Faith assures him that what he is doing is worth while; faith gives him that singleness of purpose without which no great task was ever accomplished; faith endows him with that patience and industry which Darwin claimed as his chief qualities. On faith in the unity and meaning of creation depends that breadth of view without which few men make discoveries of fundamental importance; and surely it is "the evidence of things not seen" which kindles in the natural philosopher the fire of imagination—that "Phantasie" which the great physiologist Johannes Müller acknowledged to be "ein unentbehrliches Gut."

Darwin's Autobiography contains a vivid history of the process by which he was able to revivify "the oldest of all the philosophies—that of evolution." In 1838, thanks to Malthus, he had grasped the idea of natural selection. In 1842 he first allowed himself to write out its progress in thirty-five pages. In 1844 he enlarged this sketch into one of 230 pages. Struggle, selection, sexual selection, and variation—all were in his mind, though he attached much more weight to the influence of external conditions and to the inheritance of acquired habits than he did later. Must man be included with other animals in his quest for the

4 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

origin of species? Yes. So far back as 1837 or 1838 he collected facts on this point, and they convinced him of the "Descent of Man" from an animal, though the book with this title was not published till 1871. Early in 1859, acting on the advice of Sir Charles Lyell, he began to write out his views on the origin of species on a scale three or four times as extensive as he did in 1856. By 1856 he had sent his friend Hooker his manuscript. Swinging away from any sympathy with the theories of Buffon and Lamarck, he reached an extreme position on the work of natural selection.

In the July of that year he gave a brief sketch of his theory in a letter to Asa Gray, the distinguished American naturalist, mentioning the cardinal conceptions of the Origin of Species. The formation of species he thought almost wholly due to the selection of "chance" variations. Neither the "blind fortuity" of Empedocles nor the "progressive principle" of Aristotle is in his mind. What he means by "chance" variations is that they occur under unknown laws. At the very time that Darwin was slowly coming to his conclusions Wallace was coming to his, and on July 1st, 1858, their two papers were read together. The world of science, on the publication of the Origin of Species, began to undergo a profound transformation that has affected every department of it.

The situation reminds one of the campanile of St. Mark's at Venice in July, 1902 The guardian of the tower wanted a few inches more elbow room in his little kitchen and took away a sort of lintel in order to enlarge the passage. Next day there was a crack in the wall above, and the week after the whole campanile sat down upon itself. Nothing was changed; the same bricks and mortar were there; only the situation was different. Darwin's magnum opus rendered the whole scientific situation wholly different. The idea of natural selection had been conceived by Wells in 1813, by Patrick Matthew in 1831, and by Wallace in 1858. It is remarkable that Wells and Herbert Spencer, as well as Wallace and Darwin, based their ideas on the Malthusian principle.

There is an infinite variability in wild and domestic animals. There appears to be hardly any limit to the almost infinite plasticity and modifiability of domestic

animals. “It would seem,” said a great sheep-breeder,

speaking of sheep, “as if farmers had chalked upon a wall a

form perfect in itself, and then proceeded to give it existence.”

Granting individual variability, then, how do species arise

in nature? And how are all the exquisite adaptations of part

to whole, and of whole to environment, gradually initiated,

improved, and perfected? Here the book of Malthus comes

to our assistance. For it teaches that here and now the

world is over-populated. It is not going to be over-popu-

lated, but is actually at this moment over-populated.

Species perpetually outruns subsistence. Linnaeus reckoned

that if the annual plant had two seeds, each of which pro-

duced two seedlings in the succeeding season, and so on

continually, in twenty years their progeny would amount

to a million plants. The roe of a cod contains nearly ten

million eggs. If each of these produced a young fish, which

arrived at maturity, the whole sea must immediately

become a solid mass of codfish. There is, then, a struggle

for existence between members of the same species--not

between members of different species--and this struggle

is never-ending. This struggle is between cod and cod,

tiger and tiger, snake and snake. Homo homini lupus, so

runs the old proverb. Lupus lupo lupus, so runs the proverb

Darwin might have coined for his purpose.

The three men Darwin looked to for judgment on his work

were Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley. That is, from the angle of

geology, botany, and zoology, three men of mark were on the

side of the evolutionary hypothesis launched upon the world.

All of them had their reservations, but they cordially

accepted the main idea. Hooker did not disguise his

opinion that he thought it had been pressed too far, holding

that Darwin had ignored the view of the mutability of species

held by G. Saint-Hilaire and Lamarck. Huxley pointed

out, for instance, that the logical foundation of the Origin

was insecure so long as the experiments in selective breeding

had not produced varieties, which were more or less infertile,

and he thought that insecurity remained. In his Romanes

lecture, given in 1892, Huxley held that natural selection

failed to explain the origin of our moral and ethical nature.

Lyell shrank from accepting the Darwinian teaching, for

6 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

he foresaw its inevitable extension to the descent of man, and that was repugnant to his feelings. Ultimately, he ceased to shrink, and Darwin thought this one of the noblest acts he knew. For Lyell 'to have maintained in the position of a master one side of the question for thirty years, and then deliberately give it up, is a fact to which I much doubt whether the records of science offer a parallel.'

Sir Richard Owen was a naturalist who occupied such a foremost position in science that he had been called the British Cuvier, and he could not see his way to accept evolution. Darwin's special doctrine of natural selection he never appreciated. He attacked it with acerbity in an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1860. Darwin believed him to have inspired the hostile notice given to his book by Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the Quarterly Review of the same date. There is also reason to think that Owen proved the source of inspiration of the speech delivered by Wilberforce at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860.

The 1860 meeting of the British Association has attained a high degree of notoriety. There was another meeting of this Association at Oxford in 1894, which is sometimes forgotten. The President then was Lord Salisbury, who proceeded to attack, in the presence of Huxley, conceptions of the evolution theory. With delicate irony he spoke of the 'comforting word, evolution,' passing to Weismannism. Lord Salisbury quoted Lord Kelvin against Darwin, implying that the diametrically opposed views so frequently expressed nowadays threw the whole process of evolution in doubt. This of course irritated Huxley, who naturally considered Lord Kelvin a non-expert witness on a biological question. When the President had finished his address, Lord Kelvin proposed a vote of thanks, and he did so with genuine conviction. For he saw grave difficulties from a physico-mathematical point of view in reconciling the Darwinian hypothesis of evolution in biology with the physical data he had in his mind. Huxley contented himself with a formal speech. The triumph of 1860 was not destined to be repeated, for Lamarckism inter alia was at last coming into its own. If the shade of Sir Richard Owen or of Samuel

Evolutionary Difficulties

7

Wilberforce could have been present, how he would have chuckled at the retribution falling on his former antagonist!

Huxley enjoyed the rare good fortune of reviewing the Origin of Species for The Times, and a notice in the leading newspaper of 1860 rendered incalculable service to the new contribution to thought. Still, writing in 1887, he observes, “There is not the slightest doubt that, if a General Council of the Church scientific had been held at that time, we should have been condemned by an overwhelming majority.” The severe criticism passed by the Quarterly Review of July, 1860, rendered a notable disservice to the reception of the evolution theory.

In the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, there is a letter written by Hooker which we quote: “Huxley has sent me the proof of his contribution to the Life. I do not think it too severe. The Quarterly then held the highest place amongst first-class Reviews and was most bound to be fair and judicious, but proved unjust and malicious and ignorant. It went indefinitely beyond ‘severity’ and into scurrility, and for all Huxley says he cites abundant proof. It is not for us, who repeat ad nauseam our contempt for the persecutors of Galileo and the sneerers of Franklin, to conceal the fact that our own great discoverers met the same fate at the hands of the highest in the land of Literature and Science, as represented by its most exalted organ, the Quarterly Review.”

It is one of the ironies of the situation that in their views Darwin and Wallace did not continue to see eye to eye. The longer Wallace worked practically, the more he perceived difficulties in the way. In his World of Life he states three of the most formidable of these. The first is that the slight beginnings of new organs would be useless, and could not therefore be preserved and increased by natural selection—to which it is answered that the usual method of evolution is to make apparent novelties by the transformation or specialisation of old-established structures. The second difficulty is that new adaptations imply a number of concurrent variations—to which it is answered that time is long and variability great, and that coincident variations are demonstrably numerous in connection with both difficulties.

Professors Baldwin, Lloyd Morgan, and Osborn

8 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

have suggested that adaptive individual modifiability may serve as a life-saving screen till hereditary germinal variations in the same direction have grown strong. The third difficuity is in the excessive development of characters, such as decorations and weapons beyond the limits of utility, and the answer, we glean, is found in Weismann's ingenious hypothesis of germinal selections.

Huxley and Hooker took the field with enthusiasm when Darwin extended his theory to the descent of man. From Wallace he received no support in this matter. Wallace admitted everything in regard to the morphological descent of man, yet maintained, in a mystic manner, that something else, something spiritual, must have been added to that inherited from his spiritual ancestors. Though he urged that natural selection accounted for the evolution of man's bodily frame from the simian stock, yet from this point of view some extraneous power had inspired him with his mentality, and with a future purpose in view had provided the mere savage with a brain disproportionate to his requirements, whether compared with civilised man or with the brutes.

Darwin had plainly discovered laws of evolution in biological science, but laws are by no means plain to historians in the past. They were pragmatists to a man, and this pragmatical view of history does not lend itself to the discovery of laws of any kind. The novel with a purpose seldom reaches the high standard of the novel written solely for the insight into character possessed by the writer, and this remark applies to history. History written with a purpose simply hides whatever laws might swim into the ken of the writer. At the Renaissance the historians read their Herodotus and their Thucydides, and they read them simply for the better understanding of the politics of their own time. The seventeenth century begins to witness a change when it divides history into ancient, mediaeval, and modern. That is to say, there were real divisions in history and with the recognition of these divisions there grew up the idea that the laws of the ancient period were hardly applicable to the mediaeval, or the laws of the mediaeval to those of the modern. The eighteenth century man came

to hold that while history may repeat itself, it does so with a

difference, and this difference is always sufficient to allow

the observer to see that this repetition is not at all the

simple affair the pragmatical historian had believed. With

the eighteenth century we note the appearance of such

philosophical historians as Vico and Voltaire, Montesquieu

and Gibbon, and they all stand for natural causes as an

explanation of the annals of our race.

The pragmatical historian did not disappear in the

nineteenth century, and indeed it is safe to hazard the

prediction that he never will disappear. He has always

been with us in the past, and it seems likely that he will

continue to abide with us in any future we can discern.

Still, the historians who count in the nineteenth century

profess to be watching for causes, courses, and consequences.

Such is their formal creed, and, despite departures from it,

they practise what they profess to hold. Hegel conceived

the successive periods of history as corresponding to the

ascending phases or ideas in the self-evolution of his Absolute

Being. A philosopher before an historian, yet Hegel

succeeded in impressing the conception of historical develop-

ment on the mind of the thoughtful. He did not shake

himself quite free from the notion of a judgment of value,

a trace of the pragmatism of his day. He influenced Ranke,

and yet, in spite of this influence, Ranke boldly announced

in 1824 that his sole concern was to show how things actually

happened. It was an announcement fraught with momentous

consequences, for it meant inter alia that history must

secure freedom to proclaim truth, regardless of consequences.

Savigny made this teaching his own when he founded the

"historical school" of law, the school which discerned the

growth of law out of custom, precedent, and a hundred

other fashions as well as out of judicial decisions and parlia-

mentary statutes. In a word, in the company of Burke and

Coleridge, he insisted that society is an organism and that all

its institutions are as closely interconnected as those of an

organism. It was a great thought greatly developed, and

the works of Ranke and Savigny are of first-rate importance

in the growth of evolutionary politics.

What Ranke and Savigny had been outlining in Germany,

10 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Condorcet and Comte had been outlining in France. Condorcet's Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind suggests vistas to its readers. His aim is to show "the successive changes in human society, the influence which each instant exerts on the succeeding instant, and thus, in its successive modifications, the advance of the human species towards truth or happiness." Obviously, he writes with a purpose quite as much as any novelist, and yet he did suggest to his readers the possibility of a law-pervaded department of human activity. His key to the past is progress, and this progress is plainly discernible in the advance of knowledge. Unlike Savigny, he thrust to the one side the preponderant part taken by institutions in social development. Comte's Laws of the Three Stages helped the diffusion of the idea of this development. He fell back on the two main ideas of Condorcet. One was that the collective behaviour of the masses was a more important element in development than the great man. The other was that, as in nature, so in history, there are general laws, necessary and constant, which condition development. In the unfolding of these two ideas we meet what Comte regarded as the social-psychological point of view. To determine the social-psychological laws which control development constitutes the task of the sociologist and the historian.

It is quite obvious that Darwin determines some of the laws which control development. True, after the manner of the Cambridge scientist, he carefully confines himself to his own special work. If he refers to anything outside his sphere, his reference is always cautious and guarded. Will the higher civilised races eliminate the lower throughout the world? Yes, this is the prospect lying before man. In his Life and Letters he points out how "a struggle for existence consequent on his rapid multiplication has advanced man to his present position; and, if he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle. Otherwise he would sink into indolence, and the more gifted men would not be more successful in the battle of life than the less gifted." Here of course we are face to face with the old objection Aristotle urged against Plato's communism, that man needs a stimulus to exertion and

Natural Selection and Socialism

11

industry. Nor does Darwin in the least ignore other

factors in the contest. "Important as the struggle for

existence has been," so he writes, "and even still is, yet as

far as the highest part of man's nature is concerned there are

other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are

advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through

the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction,

religion, etc., than through natural selection; though to this

latter agency may be safely attributed the social instincts

which afforded the basis for the development of the moral

sense."

To Darwin there is no connexion between the doctrine of

natural selection and Socialism. The survival of the fittest

means competition of the strictest kind. Nor is it alto-

gether surprising to find that the Origin of Species turned

Hooker into "a jolly old Tory." The mention of Toryism

suggests to Darwin the peerage, and he takes occasion to say

that "primogeniture is dreadfully opposed to selection:

suppose the first-born bull was necessarily made by each

farmer the begetter of his stock!" Still, the peers can

choose "beautiful and charming women out of the lower

ranks," and so they deviously derive some benefit from the

principle. Accidents like the marriage of a peer to an

actress take place. Despite Condorcet and Comte, then,

we cannot arrive at general laws accounting for historical

development. The great man—and the small man—

persists in altering the destiny of the world. Chance and

coincidence also play their part. Even in the geological

world it is not strictly true that nature never makes a leap.

On the earth she has her earthquakes as well as her still

slow processes, her Etnas as well as her Jungfraus. In

times when vast forces are called into being, the eruption

of a volcano may accomplish in a week what the silent pro-

cesses of nature may not accomplish in an age.

Ranke and Savigny had outlined historical and legal

development long before Darwin, and, after Darwin, Lam-

precht had followed in their steps and in Marx's. Marx and

Lamprecht turned their attention to economic history where

perhaps the problem set by the appearance of the genius

interferes least in the whole domain of history, though the

12 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

appearance of so many great English inventors from 1760 to 1785 suggests that even in economic history we can never quite arrive at general laws independent of the accidental arrival of the inventor. The watcher on the hill, surveying the past, knows in part the meaning of a change in policy in the history of a nation, the value of a treaty; while from those who at the time plan in the plain is often hidden the issue of the policy or the treaty or the significance of the rôle men assume. Conflicting courses lie before the national leaders, and, so far as we can see, the laws Lamprecht confidently enunciates do not enable us to determine why they choose this course instead of that. He reduces—or rather attempts to reduce—history to general concepts. It is a task eminently well worth trying, but the point is, does he succeed? He argues that events show a psychical character, and that these events give rise to a phase of civilisation. This given phase of civilisation forms " a collective psychical condition" controlling the period, "a diapason which penetrates all psychical phenomena and thereby all historical events of the time." Lamprecht does not hesitate to work out a series of such phases, "ages of changing psychical diapason," and his object is to exhibit these diapasons in other social developments. Of course if he can do so, he establishes his point that these diapasons are the rule, not the exception. On principles partly Comte's and partly H. Spencer's, he shows to his own satisfaction that these ages succeed one another in a definite order, which he elaborately exhibits. The principle he perceives in these ages is that collective psychical development begins with the homogeneity of all the individual members of a society, and, through heightened psychical activity, advances in the form of a continually increasing differentiation of the individual. Lamprecht maintains that no idea can disappear without leaving behind it an effect or effects, and that all psychical life, whether in a person or in a society, means change, the acquisition of new mental contents. The new is commonly expressed in terms of the old, and must come to terms with the old, leading to a synthesis which determines the character of the new age. Accordingly, Lamprecht defines the ages of civilisation as the "highest concepts for subsuming

without exception all psychical phenomena of the development of human societies, that is, of all historical events." Granted that such concepts can be determined, it is easy for the German historian to announce that there is a special historical science which he calls "historical ethnology," and this is substantially Comte's social dynamics. •But can we subsume those highest concepts without exception? Chance, accident, and the presence of the great man alike forbid such a calm subsumption? The truth is that no matter how loudly we proclaim that history is a science, and that there are discoverable laws in it or in political science, we are confronted by all sorts of exceptions, and those exceptions go far to nullify the operation of laws either in history or in political science.

The evolutionary beatitude is, Blessed are the strong, for they shall prey on the weak. To this beatitude there are such manifest exceptions as that the strong protect the weak when ill. The mother protects her suffering child, the husband his delicate wife. What is true of the individual is also true of the nation. In the contest for the survival of the fittest, Sparta succeeded and Athens failed, and yet we owe immeasurably more to the failure than to the success. The struggle for existence tends to support the view that this is on the whole the best of possible worlds. For the fit appear in all their fitness while the unfit disappear with all their unfitness. We can if we like add another evolutionary beatitude, Blessed is the status quo, for all remain in it who deserve to be in it. Away with all forms of equality, for does not evolution sanctify inequality? In the biological world there are organisms of varying values, and why should there not be organisms of varying values in the political or the sociological world? Liberty, fraternity, and equality belong to a world which knew not what Darwin was to reveal, and in the light of the doctrines announced in 1859 this trinity possesses little validity. Socialism denies everlasting economic competition on which biology bestows its blessing. Therefore away with Socialism! Herbert Spencer accordingly tells us of "the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest" and of "the beneficent private war which makes one man strive to climb on the shoulders of another." Yet

14 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Tarde, like Brunetière, boldly disputes the application of evolution to society, holding that the development of species and the development of society by no means trace growth to the same plan. He lays considerable stress on the share taken by inventions, which by virtue of the laws of imitation—to him of paramount place and power—modify through individual to individual, through neighbourhood to neighbourhood, the psychical diapason.

If the existence of sociological or political laws is disputable, and this is fairly evident, it is at the same time clear that evolution lends its aid in throwing light on the past. The work it performs for us is not that of which Condorcet and Comte and Lamprecht dreamt, but it is rather that of which Ranke and Savigny dreamt. It supplements history and political science, and the dreams of Comte and Lamprecht fall to this modest dimension. It is open to a man like Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, to urge that the human race might gain an indefinite improvement by breeding from the best and restricting the offspring of the worst.

There is something to be said for eugenics for a fraction of one per cent. of the population, but what about the remaining 99 per cent.? It is no doubt possible to view the peerage, as Galton does, “as a disastrous institution owing to its destructive effects on our valuable races.” For the eldest son of a peer marries a wealthy heiress in order to maintain his social position, and as such an heiress is often sterile, the family disappears. As primogeniture prevents the younger sons marrying women of their own rank, the younger sons tend to remain unmarried. Yet it is possible to look on primogeniture from another angle. For it may be contended, with much truth, that primogeniture encouraged the younger sons to emigrate, and thereby to assist in the foundation of our empire.

If ever there is a Parthenon for the founders of our empire, surely there ought to be a statue erected to the legislator who passed the law of primogeniture. Nor must we overlook the point that there are no class divisions in our country such as marked the history of continental countries, and this is largely due to the working of the law of primogeniture. The younger son of a peer was with us a commoner, and his

CASTE AND NON-CASTE NOBILITY

15

interests lay with the commoners. A peer could not very

well despise commoners when all his sons save the eldest

belonged to that class. The easy transition from one class

to another served to minimise the distinctions of birth.

Macaulay lays stress on the result of this wise policy. "It

(i.e. the nobility) had none of the invidious character of a

caste," we read. "It was constantly receiving members

from the people and constantly sending down members to

mingle with the people. . . . The yeoman was not inclined

to murmur at dignities to which his own children might rise.

The grandee was not inclined to insult a class into which his

own children must descend." In France and indeed other

continental countries, the nobility formed a caste regardless

of any interest or concern for the rest of the nation. Toc-

queville draws an unforgettable picture of how the continu-

ance of the economical privileges of the French nobility

stirred up national hatred for them, and the contrast

with England is poignant.

If it is by no means easy to assess the effects of the peerage

or primogeniture, it is not a whit easier to assess the effects

of such customs as the celibacy of priests or military con-

scription. Galton, Broca, and Vacher de Lapouge con-

demn such customs, showing with a wealth of knowledge

that they assist in the sterilisation or the elimination of the

eminently fit. This inevitably tends towards a condition

of equality which is deplorable. For this equality prevents

the aristocracy of the blond dolichocephales from holding

the position and assuming the rôle which naturally belongs

to it. Nietzsche sympathised with this argument. Equality

of this sort gravitated towards the increase of panmixia, and

with this panmixia the species and society must inevitably

deteriorate. To Marx, as to Nietzsche, the source of all

progress lies in struggle. The researches of Galton and

Hansen, however, demonstrate that the aristocracy of land

and the aristocracy of business both tend to become effete,

and we thus arrive at the comforting conclusion that the

democratic movement, by breaking down class barriers, helps

--not hinders--the extremely difficult task of human

selection.

The question of clerical celibacy is by no means easy to

16 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

soive, as Galton supposes. It is of course obvious that as

priests were forbidden to marry-though Lea's Sacerdotal

Celibacy proves how impossible it was to enforce this pro-

hibition,-there was an undoubted elimination of the off-

spring of the fit. None will deny that this elimination

tended to the consequent coarsening of society. On the

other hand, the fit received remained in the seclusion of their

monastery cut off from the alarms of a warlike world. They

were learned themselves, and they preserved the torch of

learning alight in Europe when it seemed in danger of utter

extinction. Can any biologist or sociologist enter on the

creditor side the services of celibacy of the clergy to the

cause of sound learning and then enter on the debtor side the

elimination of their offspring, and, striking a balance, say

where the net gain lies? We, for our part, confess our

total disability in determining such a delicate process.

If it is not at all easy to assess the merits and the demerits

of clerical celibacy, it is not a whit easier to assess those of

military conscription. It possesses untold disadvantages,

and we should be the very last to deny them. Yet there is

the moral and educational value of military discipline.

There is truth in Shakespeare's position that war is "the

great correcter of enormous times." De Maistre urged that

"la guerre est divine par ses conséquences d'un ordre sur-

naturel ; tant générales, que particulières." In 1880 Moltke

wrote his famous letter to Bluntschli in London: "Eternal

peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream, and war

is part of God's world-order. In war are developed the

noblest virtues of mankind: courage and sacrifice, fidelity

and the willingness to sacrifice life itself. Without war

the world would be swallowed up in materialism."

A defeat in war has led nation after nation to a clearer

realisation of its duty to some of its members hitherto

neglected. The Crimean War led to the emancipation of

the Russian serfs. The Seven Weeks' War led Austria to

tear up her Concordat and liberalise her government.

The Civil War in America led to the emancipation of the

negro. The Franco-German War led to the removal of the

impurities of the Second Empire. The unification of

Germany and Italy were won on the battlefields. Nor can

The Effects of War

17

we deny that the World War led to the democratisation of

Germany fraught with consequences hidden in the womb of

time.

There is another side to the picture. The roll of honour

of the World War contains name after name renowned in the

history of our country; and families of proved worth have

perished as though they had never been. War is far from

being the biological necessity that Moltke dreamt. Darwin

regarded war as an insignificant part of natural selection.

He was too cautious not to state that he used the term

struggle for existence in a “metaphorical sense,” and that

the dominant factors in the struggle for existence, as he

understood it, were natural suitability to the organic and

inorganic environment and the capacity for adaptation to

circumstances. One species flourishes while a less efficient

species living alongside it languishes, yet they may never

come into actual contact and there is nothing in the least

approaching human warfare.

The instances of the thylacine or Tasmanian wolf, the

fiercest of the marsupials, and the dingo, a later and higher

animal of the dog family, and of the black and the brown

rat may be cited, for these two instances prove that there is

no foundation for the view that one species exterminates

another. The dingo made no war on the thylacine. The

former was better able to adapt itself to finding food and

in rearing young, and in evincing greater resisting power

to climate and disease, and the outcome was that the dingo

took the place of the thylacine. The black rat wages no

war on the brown rat. The black rat is smaller, but more

active and a better climber, than the brown, which is larger

but less active, a burrower rather than a climber. The

outcome is that the black rat is the rat of the barn and the

granary, the brown rat the rat of the sewer and the drain.

Each flourishes in the environment suited to him. In fact,

the struggle for existence simply means that one species is

more favoured by circumstances than another species;

but it does not mean that one species wages war on another

after the fashion of the human species. For this view there

is no foundation whatsoever in the facts of the biological

world.

18 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Vacher de Lapouge considers that in modern times, though wars are fewer in number, the total of victims remains still about the same, with the result that the stream of bloodshed throughout the ages remains unaffected. He attempted to estimate the victims of war for each civilised country during half a century, and found that the total amounted to nine and a half millions, while, by including the Napoleonic and other wars of the beginning of the nineteenth century, he considered that the total would be doubled. Put in another grim form, according to Lapouge, the wars of a century spilt 120,000,000 gallons of blood, enough to fill three million forty-gallon casks, or to create a perpetual fountain sending up a jet of 150 gallons per hour, a fountain which has been flowing unceasingly since the dawn of history. Lapouge, be it noted, wrote before the World War. Nor must we ignore the diminished number of births due to the fact that possible fathers were in the fighting line.

The loss due to war is not one that this generation is likely to forget. Apart from the sacrifice of human lives military conscription entails other drawbacks. It certainly breaks the habits of industrial life at the very age when it is of high importance that they should be formed. Deferred marriage with the immorality that this means, the loosening of domestic ties, the growth of military ideals on the side that leads to violence and bloodshed, the fact that human brains spend much of their efforts in devising more and more deadly instruments of destruction—these are among the horrors war inflicts on the race. Nor can we leave out of our calculations the deeply prejudicial results that conscription inflicts on the finer and more subtle natures. It debases them just as it debases less refined natures. Men come to think that as they are being prepared to fight against the enemies of their country, perhaps they may turn their arms against the enemies of their class in their own country. This is certainly an argument employed by the Syndicalists who accept M. Georges Sorel as their guide. War to him is as beneficial a part of the world’s order as it was to Moltke. For Sorel the strike is a phenomenon of war, and nowadays the only promising kind of war, provided that it embodies the proletarian violence of class struggle, “une chose très

The Effects of Education

19

belle et très heroïque," capable of saving the world from barbarism in the same way, so Sorel conceives, as war saved the world from barbarism in antiquity.

The chief apostle of evolutionary politics is Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). His family, of whom he gives a very complete account in his dull Autobiography, were chiefly notable for strong individualism in thought and action, with the natural consequence that they were radicals in politics and dissenters in religion. As J. S. Mill's father constantly stimulated the reasoning powers of his son, so Spencer's father stimulated those of his son. He persistently asked Herbert the cause of this and the cause of that, and allowed the boy to see that he valued the answers he received in reply to such questions This means that the lad formed judgments for himself upon everything, that he argued every point of difference, and that he refused to listen to authority in any form whatsoever. In the days to come there was to be a wide general agreement between the ideas of Mill, Bain, and Spencer, but three more contrasted systems of education of three boys could not readily be imagined.

Mill's was such that he narrowly escaped being a learned prig. Bain's father, like Mill's, was a Calvinist, and he held before his son the prospect that he was travelling along the road to hell. Bain was nurtured on such books as M'Gowan's Dialogues of Devils, which contained a fierce attack upon Priestley and the Unitarians, the imagination being assisted by a picture of Priestley in hell. A student of child psychology may meditate on the three systems of education of startling diversity which produced men of such eminence as Mill, Bain, and Spencer. Or are we to assume the position adopted by Sir Leslie Stephen that , when we say that a school or a system produced an able man we really mean it failed to extinguish him?

At an age when Mill was working at the classics, Spencer was reading novels in bed, and they are possibly the only books he ever read from cover to cover. His emotional nature had never been developed. He deeply enjoyed music, though it is the exception that proves the rule. What he enjoyed most of all was beautiful melody. Beethoven was his favourite composer, and he was never weary of

20 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

listening to his music. He exhibited little appreciation of sculpture or painting, and confessed that Ruskin's Stones of Venice had "disgusted" him. The past appealed to him as slightly as it did to Bentham. Neither Rome nor Florence moved him a whit more than his own country. In truth, the present fascinated him so profoundly that he could not spare time for the past.

His mind was more active than his body, and thoughts on evolution were never far from it. The perusal of Lyell's Principles of Geology had, curiously enough, turned him into a Lamarckian. In an essay on the theory of population, written in 1852, he came within sight of one of the great doctrines of Darwin. "From the beginning," he lays down, "pressure of population has been the proximate cause of progress." He proceeds to point out that "the effect of pressure of population, in increasing the ability to maintain life, and decreasing the ability to multiply, is not a uniform effect, but an average one. . . . All mankind in turn subject themselves more or less to the discipline described; they either may or may not advance under it; but, in the nature of things, only those who do advance under it eventually survive. . . . For as those prematurely carried off must, in the average of cases, be those in whom the power of self-preservation is the least, it unavoidably follows that those left behind to continue the race are those in whom the power of self-preservation is the greatest—are the select of their generation."

Spencer here recognises the eliminative and selective effect of the struggle in mankind. Why was he "blind to the fact," as he afterwards owned, "that here was a universally operative factor in the development of species"? In his Autobiography he assigns two reasons for his blindness. One was his Lamarckian prepossession that the inheritance of functionally-produced modifications sufficed to explain the facts of evolution. The other was that he "knew little or nothing about the phenomena of variation," and that he "had failed to recognise the universal tendency to vary."

Early in his career his interest in evolution had been awakened, yet his interest in politics had been aroused earlier. When twenty-two he paid a visit to his uncle,

the Rev. T. Spencer, who exercised a far-reaching effect on

his mind. His uncle was deeply interested in social questions,

and discussions took place which introduced the nephew to a

new region of thought, and introduced him at a time when

the spirit—as well as the face—of politics was undergoing a

grave change. In the forties Benthamism still stood for the

removal of government restrictions on the liberty of the

subject. The Whigs retained a measure of belief in govern-

mental interference, but the Liberals, who were gradually

being differentiated from the Whigs, were resolutely casting

such a belief to the one side. The uncle was a Liberal

thoroughly imbued with the new attitude, and he of course

placed his view before his nephew at an impressionable age

—if ever the nephew was impressionable. He had been

strongly individualistic and self-sufficient, ignorant of the

past and intolerant of the claims of authority in the present,

and was not unprepared for the teaching he received. The

Manchester School, adorned by such determined individualists

as Bright and Cobden, was in the heyday of its power.

Spencer entered heartily into its adoption of laissez-faire.

An individualist by upbringing, he remained one to the end

of his long and influential life.

It is sometimes urged that great men are a product of their

times, a position difficult to defend. It is much truer to

adopt the view that men in a low first or a high second

rank are a product of their times. If ever a man was such a

product, it was Spencer. His uncle was also a product of his

age, and he directed the attention of his nephew to politics

with the result that he wrote a series of letters to The

Nonconformist newspaper, embodying their common views in

1842. A series of twelve “Letters on the Proper Sphere

of Government” appeared, advocating a thorough-going

individualism. The State is nothing but “a national

institution for preventing one man from infringing upon the

rights of another.” It is merely a police State with no

provision for purposes of war, no restrictions on commerce,

no poor laws, no national Church or national education, no

sanitary administration. Alexander the Great asked

Diogenes what was his greatest desire on earth, and the

swift reply came that Alexander should step aside out of the

22 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

sunlight. Similarly, Spencer simply desired that the State should step aside out of the sunlight of private enterprise.

These twelve letters control the whole course of Spencerian political philosophy. As he was in the beginning of 1842, so he remained to the end of his lite in 1903 an uncompromising individualist. Had these letters never been written he informs us that Social Statics, which originated from them, would not even have been thought of. Had there been no Social Statics, those lines of inquiry which led to the Principles of Psychology would have remained unexplored. And without that study of life in general, initiated by the writing of these works, leading presently to the study of the relations between its phenomena and those of the inorganic world, there would have been no System of Synthetic Philosophy. In Social Statics, which appeared in 1850, the principles of the Spencer family are philosophised for the benefit of the public. The Corn Laws had been abolished when the author was reading—in so far as he read at all—and thinking out this his first book, and who could doubt that laissez-faire, in this case had wrought untold good to the people? Joined to this belief in laissez-faire, there was the naive belief that the laws of Political Economy were not statements in the indicative mood but in the imperative. In fact, the young author drew no distinction between a law of physical science and one of Political Economy. Ricardo seemingly drew no such distinction, and why should he? A law of Political Economy was nothing short of an ordinance of nature which resembled the laws of the Medes and Persians. Here indeed he exhibited his undoubted descent in the true Benthamite lineage. John Locke had embraced the doctrine of natural right, which travelled to America, making its appearance in the Declaration of Independence, and then to France, also making its appearance in the Declaration of Rights. In form, Bentham attacked the natural right theory, though in substance he adopted it. In turn Spencer also adopted it. He does not hesitate for a moment to declare his adhesion to the view that all men are naturally equal, that there is “the law of equal freedom,” that his aim is “the liberty of each, limited alone by the like liberty of all.” The last is the

Disappearance of Government

23

first law; and indeed "we may almost say that it is the sole law" on which scientific morality and the organisation of

society depend. Or, as he states it later in the glory of italics, "Every man has freedom to do all that he wills,

provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man," a view to which Mill was to subscribe nine years

later.

Government is necessary for the present, but it is a necessary evil, being "essentially immoral." It is necessary

because man, compelled by the increase of population to live in the social state, retains the predatory instincts of

his primitive life, and accordingly sometimes tramples on the rights of others. Government is, according to our optimist,

a passing phase. Progress is tending in all cases to less government. Take an instance. "As amongst the Bush-

men we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct." Nothing

can hinder such extinction, because the progress of civilisation means the adaptation of man to his new con-

ditions. Man possesses indefinite adaptability, and clearly "humanity must in the end become completely adapted to

its conditions." In his loftiest moments Mill was never more optimistic, and though Spencer was only thirty when

the Social Statics appeared, yet it is the message to which he offered his unfaltering adhesion.

Man must press forward, and must continue to press forward. For progress is a necessity. In spite of Rousseau,

civilisation is not artificial: it is natural. The spirit of Condorcet comes to our optimist by way of Comte, though

his argument is critical of Comte's teaching. We are bidden to contrast the houseless savages with the Newtons

and the Shakespeares. Between these extremes there are countless degrees of differences, rising from the lower to the

higher. Evil, like government, tends to disappear. For evil results from the non-adaptation of the organism to its

conditions, good from the adaptation. How can evil persist? On true evolutionary principles, evil must disappear

in time, and this holds good in the mental sphere as well as in the physical. The drunkard and the debauchee are as weak

physically as they are morally, and they are on the high road

24 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

to extinction through their vices. Struma, tubercle, and nervous disease are all iending a hand towards the pruning off such rotten branches from the tree of life. According to Spencer, "Always towards perfection is the mighty movement-towards a complete development and a more unmixed good." We must "never forget that the law is adaptation to circumstances, be they what they may. . . . Inconvenience, suffering, and death are the penalties attached by nature to ignorance as well as incompetence—are also the means of remedying these. And whoso thinks she can mend matters by dissociating ignorance and its penalties lays claim to more than divine benevolence." In fact, it almost seems as if laissez-faire is a divine as well as a human institution.

There is a certain complacency on the part of the mid-Victorians which stirs those of a later generation to active wrath. In the face of the revelation of the atrocities of the Industrial Revolution, brought home to the novel-reading public by the Disraelis and the Kingsleys, they ask, How could anyone assume a complacent tone? It is abundantly clear that Spencer did, and it is also clear that he did so in entire honesty. Evolution was a force which he seemed somehow to have personally discovered before anyone else. Nor did his discovery simply mean that he had found out its existence. He really seems to have entertained the belief that his discovery almost amounted to an act of creation. He had, as it were, called evolution into being, and by this call he had hastened the coming of perfectibility. The economists assisted him in cherishing this belief, for they indicated that laissez-faire was also to hasten the coming of perfectibility—though by another route. Nature was working by evolution and man was working by laissez-faire. The one improved the physically strong while the other killed off the morally weak. Evolution and laissez-faire were accordingly two of the most important forces working for the ultimate perfection of the race. We are to picture them as two invisible hands hovering over the garden of life and plucking up the weeds.

In the shape of the twelve Letters of 1842 or the Social Statics of 1850, the main thesis seems far away from the

thought of our generation. If their author was over

estimated in his own generation, he is certainly under-

estimated in ours. He was a typical product of his age, and

his reputation sank when it passed away. In 1884, in The

Man versus The State we meet with the same individualism

we met in 1842 and 1850. Historically and philosophically,

however, the free individual Spencer pictured never

existed in the past. The annals of primitive man record no

pre-social unit with his natural rights. The astonishing

thing is that Spencer himself wrote a special essay on "the

social organism" in 1861, which powerfully assisted in

popularising this phrase, and yet this conception never

gained admittance to the inner cell of his political thought.

Here he is indeed the very reverse of Burke who employed the

idea of the social organism though he refused to employ this

phrase, while Spencer employed this phrase and yet refused

to employ the idea lying behind it. All of us may not

assign to the State the position assigned to it by Hegel and

Fichte and the powerful school they founded, but which of

us will admit that it is simply a police State? We stoutly

deny that it is, in Huxley's phrase, anarchy plus the police-

man. Men are essentially social. The State is an organism

composed of such men, and it possesses a general will,

conceptions Spencer steadfastly refused to countenance. To

read the Social Statics requires an effort on the part of our

generation. It means passing from the corporate notion of

our days to the atomistic individualism of the Victorian age.

Nor have we overstressed the place of this book in Spencerian

thought. For in 1879, when interrupted in the regular

course of his publications to write The Data of Ethics, he

announces that he had begun to fear that health might not

permit him to reach The Principles of Ethics, the last part

of his Synthetic Philosophy. He is accordingly anxious to

state that "This last part of the task it is to which I regard

all the preceding parts as subsidiary. Written as far back

as 1842, my first essay, consisting of letters on The Proper

Sphere of Government, vaguely indicated what I conceived

to be certain general principles of right and wrong in political

conduct; and from that time onwards my ultimate purpose,

lying behind all proximate purposes, has been that of

26 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

finding for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at large a scientific basis."

If the Social Statics proved a centre of its author's thought, it also proved a centre of his life. Its publication led to his meeting G. H. Lewes and Marian Evans, known to all the world as George Eliot. Between him and her there sprang up a warm friendship, and it was at his suggestion that she commenced to write her novels. Naturally an indolent man, his indolence was increased because of his fear of his hereditary tendency to a nervous breakdown. He liked society; provided that it meant intercourse congenial to him, and George Eliot's society was certainly congenial. He described her in a letter to a friend as "the most admirable woman, mentally, I ever met." As he held marriage to be one of the most desirable consumma- tions in life, we ask, Why did he not marry her? For she undoubtedly liked him. His Autobiography affords a clue, for in it he calmly states: "Physical beauty is a sine qua non with me; as was once unhappily proved where the intellectual traits and the emotional traits were of the highest." That is one explanation, yet there may well be another. His passion for systematising and his genius for generalising exacted a price, and part of that price was a loss of spontaneity. He loved Beethoven, but did he keenly feel the passionate cry from the depths of the human heart in the Seventh Symphony? Did an aspect of life of the deepest significance yield its inner meaning to a philosopher who approached it as he approached an experiment with his foot-rule and his statistical scales? Had his emotional instincts been stronger he probably would have married George Eliot. Nor was his loss merely personal. Had his emotional instincts been stronger, they would have coloured his thought, imparting to it that quality that might have set the world aflame. Saint-Simon was surely right when on his deathbed he laid down, "Souvenez-vous, pour faire quelque chose de grand, il faut être passioné."

The growth of Spencer's thought was slow, culminating late in life. Nor did he ever force the solution of a problem. In his Autobiography he records: "On one occasion George Eliot expressed her surprise that the author of Social

THE CONCEPTION OF THE COSMOS

27

Statics had no lines in his forehead, to which he answered, 'I suppose it is because I am never puzzled.' This called forth the exclamation: 'O! that's the most arrogant thing I ever heard uttered.' To which I rejoined: 'Not at all, when you know what I mean.' And then I proceeded to explain that my mode of thinking did not involve that concentrated effort which is commonly accompanied by wrinkling the brows.' The pedigree of a thought did not interest him, and this also assisted in the preservation of his unwrinkled forehead. Plato and Kant he could* scarcely bear to read. He wrote his First Principles and his Psychology almost as if he had never had a predecessor in either subject. He wrote his Education unaware that in Émile Rousseau had given a great contribution to this subject. When he wrote his Social Statics he barely knew that Comte was a French philosophical writer. He was always an independent thinker, and yet we cannot help thinking that a virtue in some men turned to a vice in him. His early education led him to criticise all and sundry, and this critical habit prevented true appreciation of any author with whom he was in the least likely to disagree. It is easier to criticise than to construct, and Spencer might have learnt much from the remark of Comte if he had found time to read him—that one only destroys when one replaces.

Though he never read the philosophical classics, he published in 1855 his Principles of Psychology, which he brought into line with the plan of his Synthetic Philosophy in his Psychology, published in a first volume in 1870 and in a second in 1872. He assumed in his 1855 work the evolution standpoint, and as it was published four years before Darwin's Origin of Species it won scanty recognition. Before he could set himself to discover what could be known, he had to determine how knowledge originated. He accepted as his fundamental data personal identity and objective existence. Then he passed from the conception of the cosmos as a mere collection of classified particulars to the conception of the cosmos as a necessary unit, and he effected this transition by coming to the conclusion that space, time, matter, and motion are built up or abstracted from experiences of forces. Force persists. This means that the sum

28 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

total of matter and motion, by which force manifests itself to us, can neither increase nor diminish. If force came into existence and passed out of existence the universe would be chaos, not the cosmos it is. This persistence of force is also known as the conservation of energy, the great principle Joule had already discovered. In his book Spencer conceives life as a correspondence between co-ordinated internal actions and connected external actions, and from this angle he shows how mind slowly evolves out of life. He traces back the intuitions of the individual to racial experience, thus widening the old experience philosophy of Hume and Mill. He attacks idealism and defends realism, in the course of which he lays down what he calls The Universal Postulate, insisting that the test of the truth of any proposition lies in our inability to conceive its negation.

George Eliot began Romola as a young woman, and finished it as an old woman. Spencer began his Principles of Psychology as a healthy man, and he finished it as an unhealthy man. The continuous strain of thought it entailed shattered his nervous system so completely that he was never the same man. For eighteen months he was unable to work, and he was never able after to study more than three hours a day. After this terrible breakdown he never again secured a sound night's rest, and his labours were henceforth conducted under as severe physical drawbacks as Darwin's.

After Spencer had recovered to some extent from the mental prostration induced by writing his Principles of Psychology, he met with the formula in which von Baer sums up the development through which every plant and animal passes—the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity. At once he grasped the suggestiveness of this formula, and proceeded to extend it to cover the development not only of animals, but of every order of existence that develops. At last he reached the famous formula of the First Principles that "Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from a relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation."

Labours of Forty Years

29

The First Principles was published in 1862, and from 1860

to 1896 Spencer was engaged in the erection of a gigantic

structure he called his Synthetic Philosophy. For forty

years Spencer, uncheered by popular sympathy and dogged

by ill-health, persisted in his heavy labours. In early man-

hood he set himself the task of constructing a philosophy of

the universe and man. In old age he had the satisfaction

of seeing his labours completed. As he viewed the stately

edifice, now in ruins, he viewed it as his emancipation from

the fulfilment of the deep purpose of his life. Gibbon is

not the only worker to conclude his life's labour in such

calm detachment that he may meditate upon the last

sentence among the acacias in a starlit garden at Lausanne.

Yet we most of us, said Goethe, begin life by conceiving

magnificent buildings which we intend to erect, but we are

satisfied at the close of life if we have cleared away a small

portion of the ground.

The crown of permanent success fell to Gibbon, but has it

fallen to Spencer? His easy fluency, his strong confidence,

and his dogmatic Agnosticism attracted his generation, but

do they not repel ours? His scanty reading and his imper-

fect knowledge of physical facts have revealed wide gaps in

the structure he raised. Nor are we sure of the foundations

thereof. The man who gathers facts for himself is fairly well

acquainted with their limitations. The man who has facts

gathered for him—and this was Spencer's position—is not

likely to be acquainted with their limitations. The lament-

able result is that sometimes he has misunderstood his facts,

and sometimes he has misinterpreted them, and this mis-

understanding and misinterpretation have damaged the

whole building to a serious degree. The generations come

and the generations go, and Plato among the ancient

philosophers and Kant among the moderns are as eagerly

read to-day as they always have been, but who reads

Spencer to-day? His Education is of course read, but it is

simply a bye-product of his philosophy. Is his philosophy

read? No doubt every writer suffers a period of neglect,

especially if, like Spencer, he has been over-estimated. Is it

not that he is suffering from the inevitable reaction? It is much

more that this. Men are dissatisfied with the explanations

30 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

afforded by his Synthetic Philosophy. They say plainly that they are explanations that do not explain. He became an oracle to his coterie and his answers are oracular. When you come to the end of a book and endeavour to put down what solution to a problem you have discovered from his pages, you are often quite taken aback to note how little you have gained from them. It was possible to have the many-sided Leonardo da Vinci in 1700, the many-sided Bacon in 1600, the many-sided Leibniz in 1700, the many-sided Goethe in 1800, and even the many-sided Henri Poincaré--many-sided in science--in 1900, but was it really possible from 1860 to 1896 for one man to take in the whole of ever-expanding nature for his province? Be that as it may, critics so fair-minded as Professors Ward and Bowne speak their mind quite freely on the worthlessness of the Synthetic Philosophy. No one can read Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism without seeing that he regards the Synthetic Philosophy as a stupendous house of cards. Professor Bowne deems it "a compound of bad science, bad logic, and bad metaphysics."

With his expansion of Von Baer's formula in his mind, Spencer examined the evolution of phenomena of all sorts, and found that in every instance it applied. The fundamental principle is the persistence of energy. Natural objects change, adopt new forms, transform themselves, die out in word, develop, simply for the reason that energy in nature never dies. Progress consists in the passage of natural objects from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous structure. The law of all progress is the same--the evolution of the simple into the complex by successive differentiations. If we ask why progress should always take this direction--from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous--the answer is two-fold. In the first place, if a body is in a homogeneous condition, it is unstable. It is impossible, for instance, to keep a pair of scales balanced. One scale will descend and the other ascend, thus assuming a heterogeneous relation. In the second place, every active force produces more than one change, and every cause produces more than one effect. The multiplicity of resultant effects naturally converts homogeneity into heterogeneity. A violent collision shatters

HOMOGENEITY TO HETEROGENEITY

31

a homogeneous body into a mass of heterogeneous fragments.

It does more than this, for the homogeneous momentum is

spent in a group of momenta heterogeneous in both amount

and direction. A process like this holds good of all existences

whatsoever. For our own convenience we may divide

phenomena into biological, astronomical, physical, psycholo-

gical, sociological, what we will, but the process is one and

the law is one. Evolution of the parts goes along with

evolution of the whole. Evolution is more than a principle:

it is a fact to be admitted by all men.

In the growth of the world, in the genesis of science, in the

growth of the individual organism, and in the growth of the

social organism, Spencer proceeded from 1860 to 1896 to

illustrate the actual working of the fact of evolution. Take

the hypothesis of a nebular origin of the solar system. In

the beginning--so geologists tell us--our globe was a mass

of matter in a state of fusion, and was, therefore, of homo-

geneous structure and of a tolerably homogeneous tempera-

ture. Then came the successive changes into heterogeneity,

into mountains, continents, seas, igneous rocks, sedimentary

strata, metallic veins. The law holds equally good of

organism. Fishes are the most homogeneous in their

structure, and are one of the earliest productions on the

globe. Reptiles came later, and are more heterogeneous.

Mammals and birds, which come later still, are much more

heterogeneous. Contrast the European with the Papuan or,

if you like, with the Anglo-American variety or with the

Anglo-Australian variety. Contrast not men but their social

organism. Take the comparatively homogeneous organism

of the savage and take the heterogeneous one of the civilised

man. The division of labour implies advancing integration

with the latter much more than with the former. This

division of labour also indicates increasing heterogeneity

with the civilised man. In a primitive community the

tribesmen follow similar occupations with the result that

homogeneity reigns supreme. In a European community

men follow different occupations with the result that

heterogeneity reigns supreme. Or, take languages. From

the parent stem of Aryan have arisen Sanskrit, Armenian,

Greek, Teutonic, Slavonic, and all the rest of them. From

32 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

these main groups have arisen in turn differentiations which continue to form new tongues. From Sanskrit come the modern vernaculars of Northern and Western India; from Slavonic comes Bohemian, Polish, and Russian. That is, from the homogeneous Aryan proceed the heterogeneous languages of modern Europe and India.

The law of evolution with Spencer applies to every description of phenomena, and his system breaks down unless he can so apply it. All forms of existence, however diverse, pass through the series of transformations which his philosophy sets before us. Assuming for the moment that all forms of existence pass through this series, is it not possible that some new set of facts might emerge which would not conform to the law of evolution? Spencer perceived this difficulty, and found a way out of it by the stress he laid on the persistence of force. Matter was indestructible and uncreatable. We may change its form, but the total quantity of matter remains unaltered by this change. Nor can we change the quantity of energy. We may change heat to motion, we may change motion to light, and we may change light back to heat, but the sum total of energy in existence remains unchanged. Given the persistence of force, he deduced the instability of the homogeneous. Given the persistence of force, he deduced the multiplication of effects, for each part of the aggregate reacts differently to the force. Given the persistence of force, he deduced segregation. That is, in an aggregate consisting of unlike units the action of an incident force would tend to segregate or bring together those units which resembled one another, and therefore to make definite the lines of demarcation between the non-resembling portions of the aggregate. The instability of the homogeneous, the multiplication of effects, and segregation are shown to be corollaries following from the persistence of force. And from them follows the law of evolution deductively proved, as it has been inductively shown to be a fact.

Persistence of force is a sort of open sesame, and doors of difficulty fly open before it. But do they? In the revised edition of the Principles of Biology1 of 1898 its author

1 It first appeared in 1864.

GULF BETWEEN MATTER AND MIND

33

confesses: "Life in its essence cannot be conceived in physico-

chemical terms. The processes which go on in living things

are incomprehensible as results of any physical action known

to us." Consciousness, he is forced to admit, "cannot be

identified with waves of molecular motion propagated

through nerves and nerve-centres: a unit of feeling has

nothing in common with a unit of motion." Can we bridge

the gulf between matter and mind? In the last resort

Spencer simply asserts that we are here in presence of an

insoluble problem. Matter and mind are symbols of

realities which cannot be rendered into thought, manifesta-

tions of the unknowable. Yet this does not meet the

difficulty that Spencer asserts that all phenomenal exist-

ences are but specialised forms of matter and motion in the

course of their ceaseless distribution. The law of evolution

holds good with matter, but it does not hold good with

mind, and here we have the Achilles heel of the Spencerian

position. He cannot apply his evolutionary system all

round. There is a chasm between conscious life and

unconscious life which he fails to bridge. The chasm is

more deep, or at all events felt more deep, in ethics than in

biological or psychological science. The criticism of Pro-

fessors Höffding and Ward seems unanswerable. In his

Outlines of Psychology the former insists that "The suppo-

sition that a causal relation may exist between the mental and

the material is contrary to the doctrine of the 'persistence

of energy.' For at the point where the material nerve-process

should be converted into mental activity a sum of physical

energy would disappear without the loss being made good by

a corresponding sum of physical energy." The latter also

insists that "So far from accounting for all the phenomena

of evolution, the doctrine of the persistence of energy will

not account for a single one. The celestial, organic, social,

and other phenomena which make up what Mr. Spencer calls

cosmic evolution are so many series of qualitative changes.

But the conservation of energy is not a law of change, still

less a law of qualities. It does not initiate events, and

furnishes absolutely no clue to qualitative diversity. It is

entirely a quantitative law. When the energy is trans-

formed, there is a precise equivalence between the new

34 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

form and the old; but of the circumstances determining transformation and of the possible kinds of transformation the principle tells nothing. If energy is transferred, then the system during work loses precisely what some other part of the universe gains; but again the principle tells us nothing of the conditions of such transference.

Following upon The Principles of Biology came The Study of Sociology, which appeared in 1873, and the three volumes of The Principles of Sociology in 1876. In the first part of the latter work Spencer elaborated the theory of the genesis of religious ideas which finds them in the "ghost-theory." Primitive man, always uncritical, would tend to confuse his dreams with reality. Seeming in his sleep to be transported through a variety of scenes and places, and yet informed by his friends that his body all the while has been lying motionless, there would come to him the notion of a second self--of a soul, which has experiences not shared by the body Confirmatory of this belief in a second self is the explanation it afforded of his image reflected in still waters and of his shadow from which he could never escape. The independence of the body and soul being thus established, there naturally grew up the belief that the death of the body need not entail that of the soul. Accordingly when a noted warrior died, his soul still affected the welfare of his tribe, and demanded propitiation. Where this body was buried, there must be a hole in the ground, allowing the soul to come in and go out. Sometimes the people were afraid of the deceased chief, and an enormous mound would be erected over his grave in order to confine his soul securely. Food and drink would be supplied for his use. To the ancestor worship thus commenced, Spencer traced the origin of religious systems and ceremonial observances.

In an explanation like this the fallacy of a single cause requires to be borne in mind. Religious systems are by no means so uniform as the ghost-theory would seem to suggest. The difference between the cosmic philosophy of the Buddhists, the polytheism and nature-worship of the Vedic poets, the Egyptians, and the Greeks, and the ethical monotheism of the Jew calls for a recognition of modifying causes which Spencer refused to give. It is hard to credit that the

most refined spiritual conceptions, the most philosophical theology, and the most earnest and unselfish religious activity all come originally from the primitive belief in a ghost. The Study of Sociology analysed the various liabilities to perversion of judgment which dog the path of the student of social affairs. Among the idola theatri we suggest that Spencer overlooked his own biased attitude to religion.

He analysed the leading traits of the different social institutions—political, ecclesiastical, industrial, and the like, and his general result was to divide them into two main groups, those which were predominantly military and those which were predominantly industrial. With the former was to be found associated an ethically low type of character on the part of individuals, while with the latter was found to be associated an ethically high type of character. Freedom characterised the latter group, tyranny and subservience the former. Generalisations of this crude character betrayed in the most unmistakable fashion that Spencer belonged to that school of thought of which Bright and Cobden were also members.

If there is a chasm between conscious life and unconscious life, between the organic and the inorganic, there is also a chasm between the laws of sociology, as Spencer finds them, and the facts of life. He will not listen to the power wielded by the man of genius whom he seeks to reduce to the environment out of which he emerges. In chemistry the mixture of two atoms of hydrogen with one of oxygen invariably produces water, and the form of the instruments of the mixture matter not. Is this true of history or sociology, as Spencer would have us believe? In history and in sociology the method of the mixture of the atoms is more significant than the elements brought into contact. Even in chemistry oil and water do not mix. Take the sixteenth century. What misery the world would have been saved had Luther and Erasmus been as sympathetic towards each other as Luther and Melanchthon were! The characters of Luther and Erasmus could neither be assimilated nor amalgamated. Would the Reformation have been so successful had not five such men as Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer, and Knox, simultaneously appeared?

36 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Frederick the Great, who was not exactly a recluse working out the sociological laws of the universe, gives the point of view of a man of affairs when he insists that "the older one becomes the more clearly one sees that King Hazard fashions three-fourths of the events in this miserable world." Voltaire is never tired of dwelling on the small springs on which the greater events of history turn. Burke reminds us of the case of "a common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn" who "changed the face of fortune and almost of nature." Was Gibbon right in his belief that if Charles Martel had been defeated at Tours the creed of Islam would have overspread the large part of Europe? If Mohammed had been killed in one of the first battles he fought, would a great monotheistic creed have arisen in Arabia? What turn would events have taken if Alexander, the son of Philip of Macedon, had been as incompetent as Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius?

In the spring of 323 B.C., the control of the framework of civilisation from the Adriatic to the Panjab rested upon the single will of Alexander. He was snatched away, and the union, perhaps premature, of East and West passed away with him. Spencer might, however, urge that those are examples all taken from a military type of society. Let us come, then, to a later period which shares more of the industrial type.

The industrial type of society begins to appear in the sixteenth century, for it synchronises with the Reformation. What form would French art have assumed had not Charles VIII set out on his expedition to Italy, thereby making France feel the influence of Giotto, the founder of modern painting? It is easy to speak of the inevitable working out of cause and effect, as Spencer does, but is the solution quite so simple? Had Frederick the Great never lived, would Prussia have begun the war of 1740, which started the country on the career which made the World War possible? In 1878, had the bullet of Nobiling cut short the days of Wilhelm I and given his son the throne ten years before 1888, the history of Germany would have been fundamentally altered. Indeed, had Frederick the Noble lived in all probability the devastation wrought from 1914 to 1918 would never have occurred. There has been a destroying

revolution in Russia since March, 1917. There would have been a preserving revolution had Alexander I been succeeded by a ruler like himself in 1825 and not by Nicholas I. The personality of Alexander I would have effected as epoch-making a transformation as either Luther or Bismarck. Be the laws of sociology what they may, the power of personality is patent in altering, modifying, or transforming them. In the world of ghosts Spencer is willing to admit the influence of the chief, while in the world of life he is unwilling. There is a fear of the chief when he is in the other world, but is there no fear of him in this one?

Individualist as he is, Spencer more than any other thinker is responsible for the popularisation of the conception of the social organism. The comparison is as old as Plato and Aristotle, but Spencer fills in the outlines they left with masses of details. The point of view of Bentham and the Mills had been mechanical, and Spencer changed politics from the mechanical to the biological. Society is an organism, subject to well-defined laws of development, not a mere machine to be cunningly manipulated in the interests of the superior few. As an organism society is subject to the laws of growth. It has an economic root, and all political structures as well as ethical ideas are determined—not from the outside by legislation—but by the economic conditions at each particular stage. Civilisation is, in fact, a great process of adjustment whereby man's nature, physical, intellectual, and moral, develops in response to a social and industrial environment of ever-increasing complexity.

Spencer briefly expressed the conception of the social organism in his Social Statics, and he elaborated it in an essay in the Westminster Review which appeared in January, 1860. There he likened government to the central nervous system, agriculture and industry to the alimentary canal, transport and exchange to the vascular system of an animal, and pointed out that like an individual organism a society grows, becomes more complex, shows increasing inter-relations, division of labour, and mutual dependence among its parts, and has a life immense in length, when compared with the life of its component parts. He indicated in his

38 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Principles of Sociology four chief parallelisms between a society and an individual organism:

(1) Starting as small aggregates both grow in size.

(2) As they grow their initial reiative simplicity is replaced by increasing complexity of structure.

(3) With increasing differentiation there comes about an increasing mutual dependence of the component parts, until the life and normal functioning of each becomes dependent on the life of the whole.

(4) The life of the whole becomes independent with a far more prolonged nature than the life of the component parts.

Genetic history of course makes much of society as an organism, and the conception has been influential in a thousand ways, often in ways of which the advocates of causes are unconscious. The advocates of pluralism in the State, for instance, owe not a little to it. For if the State is an organism, it is plain that there may be many subsidiary organisms within it. In fact, the metaphor can be carried to such an extreme that many men recoil from it. Spencer himself was well aware of the limitations of his metaphor, and he is careful to indicate four contrasts between a society and an individual organism:

(1) Societies have no specific forms.

(2) The units of an organism are physically continuous, but the units of a society are dispersed persons.

(3) The elements of the organism are mostly fixed in their relative positions; while units of a society are capable of moving from place to place.

(4) In the body of an animal only a special tissue is endowed with feeling; in a society all the members are so endowed. The social nervous system is happily wider than the government.

Society is indeed an organism, but it is an organism which exists in the thoughts and feelings of its members to a degree which Spencer was not prepared to allow. His own emotional nature was seldom actively aroused while his intellectual nature was constantly so aroused with the outcome that his philosophy allows but little scope for the emotions. Chance and coincidence,

personality and genius, are not reducible to sheer cause and effect, and these he also conveniently ignored. T. H. Huxley once met him in the Athenaeum. Wearing a lugubrious expression Spencer remarked, "Oh, Huxley, there has been a tragedy in my house this morning." Without waiting to hear its nature, Huxley at once retorted, "Oh, I know what has happened. A beautiful scientific theory killed by one nasty inconvenient fact." The real tragedy is that Spencer persisted in expressing opinions that ignored the "one nasty inconvenient fact."

The last writing of Spencer that concerns us is The Principles of Ethics which he issued in 1879. Its first part was "The Data of Ethics" and its fourth "Justice." The contrast between empiricism and rationalism has run through the whole history of moral philosophy, but the special form the contrast has assumed has, of course, varied with the different generations. On the one side the changes have been rung on such systems as the Cambridge Platonism of Cudworth and Clarke; the moral sense or conscience of Hutcheson and Butler; and Kantianism. On the other side the changes have been rung of the purely selfish system or hedonism of Hobbes and Mandeville; Utilitarianism in its earlier form with Hartley, Paley, and Bentham; Utilitarianism in its later form with Austin, J. S. Mill, and Sidgwick; Evolutionary Ethics with Herbert Spencer and Sir Leslie Stephen.

Hitherto morality had been intimately and invariably associated with religion. Spencer divorces them, for he sheds his early Theism. There must, however, be a basis for morality, and he found the only one left to him, a basis in the theory of evolution. Accordingly, he propounds an evolutionary basis, in which he shows that all the generally recognised rules of morality might be deduced from the general doctrine of organic evolution, as he had set it forth in the Principles of Biology, of Psychology, and of Sociology. Spencer considered The Principles of Ethics to be the fine flower of his philosophy; and the most important part of it he held to be that in which he treated of "Justice." In this part was laid down in fully developed form that doctrine of the limitation of State-functions which had been the subject

40 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

of his twelve Letters. It had never ceased to interest

him, and he exhibited in "Justice" the same sturdy

individualism he had exhibited in his earliest writings.

Spencer differs from the early Utilitarians as he shifts

from their view of a mechanical conception of life to his own

of a biological. He is at one with them in thinking that the

end of life is happiness. The early Utilitarians recognised

that some lines of action conduce to happiness, but they did

not determine how and why they did so. This is the task to

which he addresses himself. Conscience to him is not a

priori or intuitive fact. It is rather the outcome of a slow

development throughout the history of the human race and

of animate life, and is thus a posteriori from the point of

view of this racial experience on which he lays considerable

stress. He defines justice as the freedom of every man to do

what he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of

any other man. It is a definition akin to the Platonic one

that justice consists in every man minding his own business

and not interfering with that of his fellows. The sentiment

of justice may be a priori to the individual, but it is a

posteriori to the race. Impartiality and freedom are the

two elements in justice on which he lays stress. He applies

his ideas to topic after topic. He disposes of the argument

that the ancestors of the present holders of land, for instance,

obtained it by force or fraud, and that therefore their

descendants may be dispossessed of it without compensation.

He points out that though private ownership undoubtedly

originated mainly in conquest, the landless of to-day are

quite as much descendants of the original conquerors as the

landed, and the landless, no less than the landless, are the

descendants of those whose lands were originally conquered.

Can we suppose for a single moment that the ownership of

land has continued ever since in one exclusive caste? Be-

sides, the community has a right to the land, not in its

present highly-cultivated condition, but in its natural

uncultivated condition. Improvements of that condition

are just subjects of private ownership, and they are vested in

the present possessors of the land. Consequently resump-

tion without compensation would be a gross act of injustice.

Finally, the owners of the land have spent vast sums on it

and have also contributed vast sums to the poor, and com-

pensation is also due on this account.

Spencer admits that a complete ethical justification for

private property cannot be given, but he asks, Can it be

given for communism? All men are not equal, and no law

of justice can declare that unequal persons shall receive equal

shares. Aristotle’s law of distributive justice remains

ethically sound, and the main difficulty is that the material

to be distributed seems to be as insufficient as Malthus

deemed it to be.

Our philosopher has no faith in the efficacy of State

interference. It has done harm in the past, and can do

nothing but harm in the present. What does it produce but

the slackening of the national fibre and the destruction of

national economy? He firmly holds to the principle of

freedom—free trade, free competition, free contract. The

Socialist, he writes, in his zeal for equality and fraternity has

forgotten the first member of the triad, liberty, and would

substitute for the tyranny against which he declaims another

tyranny not less unjust and not less disastrous.

The Principles of Ethics is Utilitarian, but Utilitarian with

a difference. Empirical ethics has progressed through three

stages. First, there was egoism, pure and simple, or

hedonism, if you will; then Utilitarianism of the older sort;

and finally evolutionary ethics. All three systems accept

pleasure or happiness as the test, though they increasingly

tend to sublimate the test. All are exposed to the difficulty

of constructing a moral pathometer which will exhibit the

helpful pleasures and the harmful pains. All have to accept

the hedonistic paradox that to gain pleasure, the sole end of

life, the best way is not to aim at it but at something else.

To get happiness you must forget it. It comes to the

emotional, imaginative natures as surely—more surely—

than it comes to the logical and ratiocinative ones. Be that

as it may, the Utilitarianism of Hartley, Paley, and Bentham

is dead and buried beyond any hope of resurrection in a

grave dug by Austin, J. S. Mill, and Sidgwick as well as by

Stephen and Spencer himself.

To the outward and visible signs of success Spencer was

wholly indifferent. He refused to accept the honours

42 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

that were pressed on him towards the close of his career.

Honorary degrees from the universities were uncoveted by

him, and he regularly declined those offered to him. Neither

encouraged by private approval nor discouraged by public

disapproval, he heroically pursued his way from 1860 to

1896. The transparent sincerity of the man is as obvious

as his utter devotion to truth. The success of his book on

Education did not seem to move him, and the financial

return it brought him also left him unmoved. Much

as he wrote about helpful pleasures, it does not seem as if he

shared them. The truth is that he had struggled so long

and so persistently against neglect that in the end this

neglect hardened his nature. The fight against adversity

and disappointment toughens the character and disciplines

the mind, but there is a price to be paid, and this price

is inability to enjoy the rewards of success—when they

at last appear. Without callousness to public opinion,

Spencer could not have carried out this thirty-six years’

task, and yet this very callousness prevented his enjoyment

of public appreciation when at length it came. The story of

Spencer is not in this respect unique. Thackeray voices the

same feeling. “When I was a boy,” remarked the novelist,

“I wanted toffee, but I had not a shilling.

Now I have the

shilling, but I don’t want the toffee.”

The originality of Spencer’s mind is obvious to all, but

with this excess of originality there accompanied it a serious

deficiency of receptivity. This appears in the notorious

fashion in which he neglected the study of the writings of

those who thought on the very subjects on which he himself

was thinking. No doubt it arose in part from his habitual

indolence. He was ever an impatient reader. “I never

could read books the cardinal principles of which I rejected.”

A book of this class, if he began it, he threw down the

moment he discovered that its leading ideas were uncongenial

to his philosophy. It is of course a highly dangerous plan,

for it means that the man who pursues it is not aware that

there are many aspects of thought with which he is entirely

unfamiliar. Men instinctively recognise this, and it is one

reason why they rule out the claims of his Synthetic

Philosophy to be a coherent, complete, fully reasoned-out

Failure of Synthetic Philosophy

43

system. It is incomplete and not fully reasoned out, though,

to be sure, no one could deny that it is apparently coherent. In

spite of the sweep of his system, its author possessed a highly

specialised mind, carrying with it all the disadvantages—as

well as the advantages—of extreme specialisation.

Facts clustered around his principles as iron filings around

a magnet. An isolated fact he could not bear: it must fall

into its due place alongside the principle bearing on the

class of facts to which it belonged. It was a prime necessity

of his mind that it must fit a fact into a class. Sir F. Galton

bears his testimony: “The power of Spencer’s mind that I

most admired was that of widely founded generalisations.

Whenever doubt was hinted as to the sufficiency of his

grounds for making them, he was always ready to pour out a

string of examples that seemed to have been, if not in his

theatre of consciousness when he spoke, at all events in an

ante-chamber, whence they could be summoned at will.”

One of George Eliot’s witticisms poked fun at his aptitude

for generalisations. He had been explaining his disbelief

in the critical powers of the salmon, and his aim in making

flies of “the best average representation of an insect buzzing

on the surface of the water.” “Yes,” came her reply, “you

have such a passion for generalising that you even fish with a

generalisation.” He fished for salmon most ardently, and he

fished no less ardently for the idea which would co-ordinate

the facts in his mind.

Fortunate in many ways, he was fortunate in the time

when his Synthetic Philosophy appeared. It coincided with

Darwin’s discovery and the public mind was in a measure

prepared for the labour of a man who employed the term

evolution before Darwin and the very phrase the survival of

the fittest before him. Optimism was an outstanding

quality of his thought as it was also of Mill’s, but before his

death in 1903 confidence on the part of the public in this

optimism was steadily abating. Men saw defects in the

industrial organisation as keenly as Spencer had perceived

them in the military organisation he decried. Nor were

men so sure as he that the military organisation had entirely

passed away. In 1903 Wilhelm II had been fifteen years on the

throne, and his speeches were not precisely of the industrial

44 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

order. The philosopher's own country had lost much of its belief in Spencerian freedom—free trade, free competition, and free contract. Men saw that while causes, courses, and consequences were potent, so too were great men who might divert these causes, courses, and consequences. Men came to think that there was more in the great man theory than Spencer allowed, and that after all Carlyle might be much nearer the truth. Originality was Spencer's, but was receptivity? A great man communicates truth, but does he not also receive truth? A story will throw light on the answer. In order to avoid any excitement Spencer carried with him a pair of ear-pads connected by a spring passing round the back of his head. Sir Ray Lankester relates how, when he was quite a young man, Spencer asked him to call to see him at the Athenaeum with a view to giving him information on biological matters. On arrival Spencer expounded to Sir Ray his own theories on the matter in question. As soon as Sir Ray began, however, to point out one or two of the difficulties, Spencer hastily closed the conversation by fitting on his ear-pads, stating that his medical advisers would not allow him to enter into a discussion. This action was parabolic. By his ear-stoppers Spencer cut himself off from the world, and at the same time the world cut itself from him.

An eclectic by nature, Spencer picked up facts here and there, and fitted them into what looked like a coherent whole. The coherence was only in appearance. In spite of his powers of generalisation the facts remained a medley. The fusion of them around principles was mechanical. Time has revealed the seams and the fissures in an artificial system of thought. There is the chasm between conscious life and unconscious, and there is the chasm between the organic and the inorganic. The mixture of absolute and relative ethics, the strengthening of the weaknesses of empiricism by the doctrine of heredity—these stones in the structure have not worn well. Under the rude action of time they are visibly crumbling away. Evolution is no longer the magic word it used to be. We want to know what evolution implies and what is the succession of creative acts which the word conceals rather than explains. Besides, he marked off a

THE UNKNOWN AND THE UNKNOWABLE

43

tract of life as the unknown and the unknowable, and this

is the very tract we are most anxious to explore. The

path to it may lie in activity, in intuition, in impulse, in the

élan of life, in what you will, but it represents something

towards which the thoughtful are turning, even if they are

turning in vain. They may be engaged in a search as

bootless as the philosopher's stone, but they will not abandon

their quest at the bidding of one who tells them that it is

fruitless. They exhibit little interest in, or sympathy with,

one who tells them that it is all an illusion. In truth,

the world has turned away from the Spencerian problems

or approaches them from another angle. We do not know

how better to describe the relation of Spencer's writings

on science, physical or political, than by comparing them to

a ruined palace which stands on the shore of Posilippo. The

building was designed on a stately plan, but was never

finished. It is beautiful in its desolation, and venerable

in its neglect. The blue sea plashes night and day upon

its foundations, and the hill above is studded with smiling

villas; but the lady for whose pleasure it was destined

never gladdened it with her presence. Thus the Spencerian

system was planned, in the magnificence of its author's hopes,

on a scale too vast for real completion. It survives, the

mighty monument of a splendid failure. The thoughts of

the ages find an echo there, and the imagination is kindled by

the majesty of its proportions. But science has chosen her

habitation elsewhere.

REFERENCES

Ammon, O. Die natürliche Auslese beim Menschen. (Jena, 1893.)

Ammon, O. Die Gesellschaftsordnung u. ihre natürlichen Grundlagen.

Entwurf einer Sozialanthropologie. (Jena, 1896 )

Anonymous (by Two.) Home Life with Herbert Spencer. (Bristol,

1906.)

Barker, E. Political Thought from Spencer to To-day. (London,

1915.)

Beare, J. I. Organic Morality; or, the Ethics of Herbert Spencer.

(Dublin, 1889.)

Boutroux, E. Religion according to Herbert Spencer. (Edinburgh,

1907.)

46 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

BownE, E. P. The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer: being an examination of the "First Principles" of his System. (New York, 1876)

Coker, F. W. Organismic Theories of the State. (Columbia, 1910.)

Duncan, D. The Life and Letters of H. Spencer. (London, 1908.)

Durkheim, E. De la Division du Travail social. (Paris, 1893.)

Eliot, H Herbert Spencer (London, 1917.)

Fischer, E. L. Ueber das Gesez der Entwicklung auf psychisch-æthischen Grunälage mit Rucksicht auf Ch. Darwin, H Spencer, u Th. Buckle. (Berlin, 1875.)

Fiske, J. Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, based on the Doctrine of Evolution (London, 1874)

Gaupp, O. L. Herbert Spencer. (Stuttgart, 1897)

Grosse, E. Spencer's Lehre von der Unerkennbarn. (Leipzig, 1890.)

Guthrie, M. On Mr. Spencer's Formula of Evolution as an exhaustive statement of the changes of the universe (London, 1879)

Guthrie, M. On Mr. Spencer's Unification of Knowledge. (London, 1882.)

Guyau, M. La Morale Anglaise Contemporaine (Paris, 1900.)

Hanslin, G. Die drei Bevölkerungsstufen. (Munchen, 1889.)

Höffding, H History of Modern Philosophy. (London, 1900.)

Huxley, L. Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley (London, 1900.)

James, W. Memories and Studies. (London, 1911.)

Lamprecht, K. Die kulturhistorische Methode. (Berlin, 1900.)

Lapouge, V. de. Les Sélections sociales. (Paris, 1896.)

Le Dantec, F Les Luttes entre Sociétés humaines et leurs phases successives. (Paris, 1893.)

Mackintosh, R. From Comte to Benjamin Kidd. (London, 1899.)

Macpherson, H. Herbert Spencer: the Man and his Work. (London, 1904.)

Maitland, F. W. Collected Papers. Vol. I. (Cambridge, 1911.)

Majewski, E. de La Science et de la Civilisation. (Paris, 1908.)

Martineau, J. Essays. (London, 1879.)

Michelet, C. L. Spencer's System der Philosophie. Spencer's Lehre von dem Unerkennbarn. (Leipzig, 1891)

Mikhailovsky, N. K. Qu'est-ce le Progrès? examen des idées of de M. Herbert Spencer. (Paris, 1897.)

Murray, R. H. Science and Scientists in the Nineteenth Century. (London, 1925.)

Pearson, K. The Grammar of Science. (London, 1900.)

Ritchie, D. G. Darwinism and Politics. (London, 1889.)

Ritchie, D. G. The Principles of State Interference. (London, 1891.)

Robertson, J. M. Modern Humanists. (London, 1895.)

Roberty, E. de. Comte et Spencer. (Paris, 1894.)

Royce, J. Herbert Spencer: An Estimate and a Review. (London, 1904.)

Schultze, F. Kant u. Darwin. (Jena, 1875.)

Seward, A. C., Ed. Darwin and Modern Science. (Cambridge, 1909.)

REFERENCES

Sidgwick, H. Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau. (London, 1902.)

Sidgwick, H. The Philosophy of Kant and other Lectures. (London, 1905)

Sorley, W. R. The Ethics of Naturalism. (London, 1905.)

Spencer, H An Autobiography. (London, 1904)

Tarde, G. La logique sociale. (Paris, 1904.)

Thomson, J. A Herbert Spencer (London, 1906)

Ward, J. Naturalism and Agnosticism. (London, 1915.)

Woltmann, L Die Darwinsche Theorie u. der Sozialismus. (Dusseldorf, 1899.)

Chapter II.

SIR HENRY MAINE AND THE COMPARATIVE

HISTORICAL METHOD

While it was reserved for Herbert Spencer to apply the

method of evolution from a scientific point of view, it was

reserved for Sir Henry Maine to apply it from a legal one.

This is all the more remarkable, as the training of the former

had been in scientific pursuits, and that of the latter in

classical. It is difficult to know how far Maine was con-

sciously influenced by Darwin, for his biography, written

by Sir M. E Grant Duff, sheds no light on this important

matter. It seems quite likely that Maine's own genius

enabled him instinctively to divine the far-reaching truth

that there were stages in the world of institutions, as there

were in the world of science, and that each stage sprang

out of the preceding one. Two of the legal luminaries of

the last fifty years are Sir Henry Maine and F. W. Maitland,

and it is regrettable that the biographies of both men are

inadequate. Sir M. E. Grant Duff's is the merest sketch,

and in it he does not seem to think that he is called on to

explore the relations between the Origin of Species and the

genesis of Ancient Law, though the former was published

in 1859 and the latter in 1861. Perhaps Mr. Fisher felt

handicapped by the fact that he was writing the life of his

brother-in-law. His book attains the high level of all his

books, but oh! that it were longer and that it possessed

more of the witty letters Maitland used to scatter with so

lavish a hand.

Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (1822-88) was a native

of Kelso. He spent his earliest years in Jersey, but family

difficulties arose and his mother, a clever and accomplished

woman, brought him up. In 1829 his godfather, Dr.

Sumner, then Bishop of Chester, and later Archbishop of

Canterbury, procured for the lad a nomination to Christ's

Hospital, and at that school he showed promise destined to

speedy performance. As an exhibitioner of Christ's Hospital

he proceeded to Pembroke College, Cambridge. The

next year he was elected Foundation Scholar of his College.

In 1842 he won the Chancellor's Medal for English verse,

the Camden medal for Latin hexameters, and the Browne

medal for a Latin ode. In 1843 he won two more Browne

medals--one for Latin ode and the other for a Greek and

a Latin epigram, becoming also Craven University Scholar.

For these prizes there was keen rivalry between him and

W. G. Clark, afterwards public orator, and their rivalry

was long remembered. In the classical tripos of 1844

Maine was Senior Classic and Clark second. The regulations

of the forties obliged candidates for the Chancellor's Senior

Classical Medal to take honours in mathematics, regulations

that vexed the soul of Macaulay. Maine, who was senior

optime, gained the Senior Classical Medal, while Clark was

again second. The victor's spirit was always willing but his

body was weak. The reading for these distinctions over-

taxed his strength. Like Spencer, he was never a strong

man afterwards, but, again like Spencer, he accomplished

an amazing amount of work. Still, he found time to

become a member of the famous "Apostles" Club," consisting

of a body of the most promising undergraduates who met

for discussion. Tom Taylor and Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam

were among his friends and contemporaries, and he con-

tributed a memorial of the latter to the Remains. Men

noted his weak health, but they also noted his sensitive

nervous energy, manifesting itself in brilliancy of intellect

and imagination.

As no fellowship was vacant at Pembroke, Maine accepted

in 1845 an invitation from Trinity Hall to become tutor

there. As he was not in holy orders, he could not hold the

Fellowship usually associated with the tutorship. A pupil,

Mr. Bristed, records: "He had the greatest dexterity in

impressing his knowledge upon others, made explanations

that came to the point at once and could not be mis-

understood, corrected mistakes in a way that one was not

apt to forget, supplied you with endless variety of happy

expressions for composition and dodges in translation."

In 1847 he resigned his tutorship on his becoming Regius

50 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Professor of civil law at the early age of twenty-five, holding this chair till 1854. In 1847 he married his cousin, Jane Maine, and was called to the bar in 1850. Although he retained his rooms in college and discharged his professorial duties, he lived chiefly in London. From the beginning of his married life he had written a little for periodicals. He was contributing to the Morning Chronicle in 1851, an organ of the Peelites, edited by a remarkable man, J. D. Cook, who gathered around him in the Saturday Review such writers as Lord Salisbury, Sir James Stephen, Sir William Harcourt, Sir Richard Owen, Goldwin Smith, Walter Bagehot, T. C. Sandars, and George Venables. A Liberal-Conservative, Maine's sympathies were evident in his writings on French and American questions. He disliked Napoleon III with all the fervour of the fifties, and he also disliked Disraeli. His leaning to moderate Liberalism extended to foreign as well as to home politics.

In 1852 the Inns of Courts founded five readerships, and instituted a sytem of examinations. Maine became the first reader on Roman law and jurisprudence. He was an able lecturer with the marked advantage of a voice "like a silver bell." His manner was as effective as his voice. He introduced his students to the Institutes of Gaius, and he also introduced them to the conceptions soon to become famous in his Ancient Law. He practised for a very short time at the Common Law Bar, belonging to the Norfolk circuit, but changed over to the Equity branch. His ill health continued, interfering during those critical early years when a practice was being built up.

Cook started the Saturday Review in 1855, and with the writers he succeeded in attracting he made it one of the most formidable organs of public opinion in the fifties. The Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review still continued their influence, but the fading power of the Benthamites was evident in the dwindling circulation of the Westminster Review. With contributors as able as Lord Salisbury and Goldwin Smith, yet Maine ranked among the ablest. Cook used to say that Maine and one other writer were the only two men he had ever known who wrote as well from the first as they ever wrote afterwards. He wrote

on all sorts of subjects suggested by Cook, sometimes reviewing books, but more often contributing leading articles. Among the latter, like Mill, he wrote in 1857 against the impending extinction of the East India Company.

To the Cambridge Essays in 1856 he contributed a characteristic paper on Roman Law and Legal Education. There he urges the value of Roman Jurisprudence as a key to the grasp of International Law. He pleads for what he was to plead all his life, the historical study of law in general and of International Law in particular—“if we fail to comprehend, first, the influence of certain theories of the Roman jurisconsults on the mind of Hugo Grotius, and next, the influence of the great book of Grotius on International Jurisprudence—we lose at once all chance of comprehending that body of rules which alone protects the European Commonwealth from permanent anarchy, we blind ourselves to the principles by conforming to which it coheres, we can understand neither its strength nor its weakness, nor can we separate those arrangements which can safely be modified from those which cannot be touched without shaking the whole fabric to pieces.”

Maitland was to dream of a day when “it will seem a wonderful thing that men once thought they could write the history of mediaeval England without using the Year Books.” In 1856 it is just as wonderful to Maine that anyone should think of interpreting International Law without using its year books which wear the form of the thoughts of such masters as Grotius. If Maitland insists that English law is English history, Maine insists that International law is European history. Blackstone had dimly grasped this truth, but Maine with his brilliant style and his incisive thought was to render it familiar to all who cared intelligently for the meaning of the past. His Ancient Law, which appeared in 1861, came as a reviving breeze over the stagnant waters of legal thought. For the dry analysis of Austin the magic of Maine substituted the warmth his intellect and his imagination kindled. We move in his book in an ample region where wide prospects open on all sides. Sir Frederick Pollock, with considered judgment, records: “For the present we may at least say, looking to our own science of

52 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

law, that the impulse given by Maine to its intelligent study in England and America can hardly be overrated. Within living memory the Common Law was treated merely as a dogmatic and technical system. Historical explanation, beyond the dates and facts which were manifestly necessary, was regarded as at best an idle ornament, and all singularities and anomalies had to be taken as they stood, either without any reason or (perhaps oftener) with a bad one. . . . A certain amount of awakening was no doubt affected by the analytical school, as Maine taught us to call it. . . . But the scientific study of legal phenomena such as we really find them had no place among us. . . . Maine not only showed that this was a possible study, but showed that it was not less interesting and fruitful than any in the whole range of the moral sciences. At one master-stroke he forged a new and lasting bond between law, history and anthropology. Jurisprudence itself has become a study of the living growth of human society through all its stages, and it is no longer possible for law to be dealt with as a collection of rules imposed on societies as it were by accident, nor for the resemblances and differences of the laws of different societies to be regarded as casual."

The influence of the publication of the Ancient Law on the private fortune of its author was decisive. At the end of 1861 Sir Charles Wood, afterwards Lord Halifax, offered him the appointment of Legal Member of the Council in India, which Macaulay had held. On consulting high medical authority, Maine "learned that if he went to Calcutta, his life would not be worth three months'" purchase. Bitterly disappointed, he declined this appointment, and William Ritchie took his place. He died in a few months, and Lord Halifax renewed his offer to Maine, which he this time accepted. He left for India in 1862, and in the event the climate proved to be thoroughly congenial to him, and he returned in 1869 a stronger man than he had left.

Maine served the last year of Lord Elgin's viceroyalty, the whole of Lord Lawrence's, and the first years of Lord Mayo's. His health stood in the way of his taking an active share in the details of bills, and in drafting them he

depended largely on Whitley Stokes, his pupil and one of

his successors. His ability was partly shown in seeing

what legislation was needed and partly in supporting the

man who had to bear the burden of responsibility for all

decisions. Sir Alfred Lyall, an experienced Indian official,

writes: “In the very sympathetic notice of Sir Henry

Maine, which appeared in the Saturday Review, it is men-

tioned that he could read a thick volume in such a way as

to appropriate what concerned him in it, while an ordinary

man read a hundred pages. In just such a swift and

penetrating spirit he seems to have read India, the sacred

literature, the ponderous histories, the innumerable volumes

of official records, and the heavy bundles of papers that

came before him as a member of the Government.” In his

Asiatic Studies Sir Alfred Lyall gives striking instances of

Maine’s penetration of the Indian spirit. He found in

Rajputana the precise practices which Maine had suggested

as a possible explanation of some scattered facts which he

had noticed in his reading. Buckle’s History of Civilisation

approached Indian problems in a far different spirit, sug-

gesting that in the scenery of India and in the food the

inhabitants ate there was a sufficient explanation of the

phenomena prevailing there. The premises and the pro-

cesses of Buckle are as wrong as those of Maine are right.

His attitude to the past differs by worlds from that of

Spencer, for Maine manufactured the phrase that “except

the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world

which is not Greek in origin.”

On his return from India in 1869 he was appointed to the

Corpus professorship of Jurisprudence just founded at

Oxford. His first course of lectures was published in 1871

as Village Communities. It was founded partly on the

facts he had observed while a legislator in India, partly on

conversation with Lord Lawrence, while Sir George Campbell

checked the conclusions, and partly on the researches

of Nasse and von Maurer. In this book he insisted on the

value of knowledge of India and of Roman law, for he was

faithful to his first legal love. To him India is “the great

repository of verifiable phenomena of ancient usage and

ancient juridical thought.” Roman law, “viewed in the

54 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

whole course of its development, . . . connects these ancient

usages and this ancient juridical thought (of India) with

the legal ideas of our own day." Nor does he omit to point

out the abiding truth of De Tocqueville's remark that the

conquest and government of India are really the achieve-

ments in the history of a people which it is the fashion to

consider unromantic. From an eastern angle Maine afforded

sidelights on the philosophy which he found decaying on

his return home. What the Hindus think of equality among

men is best gathered from a story he tells. A Brahmin

lawyer in great practice was seeking to establish himself

in the good graces of an Anglo-India functionary by en-

larging on the value of Bentham's Utilitarianism, in so far

as it placed the standard of law and morals in the greatest

happiness of the greatest number. The Englishman ex-

pressed surprise that the principle should receive such

approval in India. "No doubt," rejoined the high-caste

Hindu, after a glance around the room to assure himself

that nobody was within earshot, "no doubt, it is one

difficulty that, according to my religion, a Brahmin is

entitled to exactly five-and-twenty times as much happi-

ness as anybody else!"

In May, 1871, Maine was gazetted a K.C.S.I., and the Duke

of Argyll appointed him to a seat on the Indian Council.

He interested himself in the judicial department, but he

also cared for such matters as the selection and training

of candidates for the Indian civil service. His prescience

was abundantly seen in his opposition to the Ilbert Act

which under Lord Ripon's Government proposed to give

native magistrates jurisdiction over Europeans under

certain circumstances. In 1882 the overwhelming con-

sensus of official opinion was in its favour. Maine hoisted

the first danger signal. He called to mind the bitter con-

troversy which raged over "The Black Act" in Lord

William Bentinck's time, and privately warned Lord

Hartington who was then Secretary of State for India.

Lord Hartington put the letter in his great coat pocket,

went to Newmarket, and forgot all about it with the result

that Maine's warning never reached Lord Ripon. In

1875 Maine published another set of lectures on the Early

Facts v. Theories

55

History of Institutions, in which he interpreted the Brehon Laws of Ireland, employing Indian parallels. He studied primitive Aryan institutions on the banks of the Shannon as well as on those of the Ganges. The following year a third edition of the Village Communities was required, and to it Maine added his old paper on Roman Law and Legal Education and his Rede lecture On the Effects of Observation of India on Modern European Thought.

Maine returned to Cambridge as master of Trinity Hall in 1877, retaining his membership of the India Council but not of course the Oxford chair. In 1883 he published his Dissertations on Early Law and Custom, the last of the series he had begun in 1861. Max Müller’s translations of the sacred Books of the East deeply influenced its author. Membership of learned Societies at home and abroad fell increasingly to him. At different periods of his career he declined the Chief Justiceship of Bengal, the permanent Under-Secretaryship for the Home Office, the permanent Under-Secretaryship for Foreign Affairs, and the Principal Clerkship of the House of Commons. In 1879 he expressed his warm approval of the proposed codification of law in India. He endorsed the dictum of Macaulay: “Our principle is simply this: Uniformity when you can have it, diversity when you must, but in all cases certainty.”

He had written four essays in the Quarterly Review on the prospects of popular government, the nature of democracy, the age of progress, and the constitution of the United States, and these he sent forth in 1885 under the title of Popular Government. In the preface he informs his readers that it had long been his desire to apply the historical method to the political institutions of men as he had in his Ancient Law, and indeed as he had done in all his writings. Just, however, as he had found the path of his legal investigations obstructed by baseless theories about a law and state of nature antecedent to all laws of which history makes mention, so he found the path of his political investigations obstructed by other equally fantastic assumptions about a series of political institutions of which history makes no mention, but which a number of writers, with Rousseau at their head, have imagined to have existed in

56 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

a period antecedent to history. The political institutions

of this far-off time were conceived by those writers to

have been of a highly popular character. Maine's object

in writing this work was to examine the phenomena of

popular governments in so far as they had been registered

by those who had observed them, putting out of sight all

theories about a state of things with regard to which it

was simply impossible to know anything whatever. Lord

Morley and E. L. Godkin, the editor of the American

newspaper, The Nation, answered this sustained attack on

democracy. In a private letter of 1885 he mentioned

Morley's remarks, saying: "If there were an ideal Toryism

I should probably be a Tory; but I should not find it easy

to say which party I should wish to win now. The truth

is, India and the India Office make one judge public men

by standards which have little to do with public opinion."

There is always the tendency on the part of the bureaucratic

to turn Conservative, spelt either with a capital C or without

one. To his American critic Maine replied, and his

closing words are: "Mr. Godkin seems to think that the

only evidence worth mentioning for the duration of

democracy is that furnished by the United States, and I

think so too. He thinks, at least he gives reason for

thinking, that the prospects of scientific thought in demo-

cratic societies are very gloomy, and that also is my opinion.

We have reached these results by different routes, but the

results do not greatly differ."

On the 1887 Jubilee he contributed a masterly paper on

India to Humphry Ward's Reign of Queen Victoria. That

year he succeeded Sir William Harcourt as Whewell Professor

of International Law at Cambridge. On this subject

before he sailed for India he had written a book, but the

manuscript had been lost. Whewell had laid down the

condition that the Professor should suggest measures

tending towards the extinction of war. Maine emphasised

the forces arrayed against this consummation, the enormously

increased armies, far greater in peace than they ever were

even in the height of the Napoleonic struggle, the vast

amount of intellect which now spends itself on the perfecting

of warlike mechanism, the huge expenditure of capital

Optimism and Pessimism

57

which a single naval battle would cause, and the like. Still, there is progress. War was originally the rule, peace the exception. Prisoners were once massacred with the utmost barbarity, which has disappeared. The lecturer died in 1888, thus not surviving to witness the horrors of the World War. Slavery was once a humanitarian reform, an improvement on the massacre of the captive. Very slowly and gradually wars had been becoming less hideous, when the theological quarrels of the sixteenth century stimulated human passion to a desperate degree. The horrors of the wars of religion exercised their due effect on Grotius, leading him to produce his masterpiece. From Grotius to Vattel jurists built up the system we now know as International Law. In laying the foundations of their system they employed Roman law. The portion of it they found most useful for their purpose was the Jus Gentium originally created by the praetor peregrinus. He selected the rules of law common to Rome and to the different Italian communities which surrounded Rome. Then the Stoics identified this Jus Gentium with the Law of Nature, the law lying behind every other law and controlling every other law. Practically, it was the sum of the principles of conduct which man in society was imagined by the foremost minds in Rome to obey simply because he was man. These lectures were the last effort of the tired body, and on February, 1888, he passed away at Cannes.

Sir Henry Maine was a close counterpart of the Roman public servant who could both think and act—scholar and man of action. The very trend of his mind agreed with this resemblance, for he had that shade of antique melancholy which sprang from a conviction of the worth of this fleeting life, not from discontent with it.

Maine was a firm believer in strong government, and a man who went to India soon after the Mutiny was likely to have this belief stamped upon his mind. Like many of the believers in strong government, he was distinctly pessimistic as to its ultimate results. Most men bury themselves in the work of the day and concern themselves neither with the past nor the present. He did not belong to these, but he did belong to that company who are borne

58 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

along by sure and enthusiastic faith in the work of the

British Empire. No one had more deeply the Virgilian

feeling of "the sense of tears in mortal things." Sometimes

he felt what Lyall expressed in his Asiatic Studies. There

we read that "It may be that Asia has always been too

deep a quicksand for Europe to build upon it any lasting

edifice of morals, politics, or religion; that the material

conditions forbid any lasting improvement; that the British

legions, like the Roman, will tramp across the Asiatic stage

and disappear; and that the clouds of confusion and super-

stition will roll up again. Then, after all, the only abiding

and immovable figure in the midst of the phantasmagoria

will be that of the Hindu ascetic and sceptic, looking on

at the incessant transformation of men into gods and

gods into men."

To many a man in the Victorian age the writings of Mill

formed an epoch in his mental career, and to many a man

so did the writings of Maine. He covers the history of

society back to its dim beginnings in his own illuminating

fashion. His standpoint is broadly philosophic, his style

dignified. You are borne along the current of time, with

this lucid and just spirit by your side upholding and in-

structing you. Beside you is the patriarchal system, the

village community, the feudal system, the aristocracy, the

monarchy, the democracy, the clash of races, the rise and

fall of social systems, the conflict of nascent nationalities.

Serene you float above them all, and ever as the panorama

unrolls itself, the weighty measured unemotional voice

whispers the true meaning of the scene in your ear.

Maine applied the comparative historical method as it

had never been applied before, and this in part accounts

for the resounding success of his evolutionary ideas. He

sets before us the early and simple form of past political

societies down to their latest and most complex develop-

ments, and he also sets before us his study of contemporary

societies. We glean that mankind all over the world

is at different stages in its institutional history, and that

there is scarcely any stage in the past that does not exist

somewhere in the present. No one can expect to note

the influence of the conception of evolution in our domain

The Comparative Historical Method 59

at once. It takes time to work out the consequences of

such a revolutionary idea. The amazing matter, however,

is that we do notice it at once. For in 1861 Maine published

his Ancient Law: its Connection with the Early History of

Society and its relation to Modern Ideas. In his introduction

to his translation of it M. Courcelle Seneuil remarks that

the only French work he can compare with it is the Cité

Antique of Fustel de Coulanges. At first sight the com-

parison seems well founded, but if Maine swept the past

with a telescope Fustel de Coulanges “swept” it with a

microscope. He boasted of being the only Frenchman

who had studied every Latin text from the sixth century

B.C. to the tenth century A.D., a feat Maine was incapable

of performing. Nor could he have employed the tone of

Fustel de Coulanges who announced one day to an en-

thusiastic audience, “Do not applaud me, it is not I that

speak to you but history that speaks by my mouth.”

Maine was far too broad-minded to believe in a single cause,

and in the Cité Antique its author offered religion as the

complete interpretation of Roman civilisation.

In the Ancient Law nothing is more remarkable than the

pleasure its author evidently took in tracing back the

genealogy and kinship of law and custom, in detecting the

meaning and evolution of forms, in showing the archaic

descent of a rule that seemed essentially modern, in exposing

the recent origin of an usage that pretended to antiquity,

and in proving that the latest reform might be sometimes

no more than a revival of primitive practice. The sub-title

of the volume is never forgotten in the illuminating pages

Maine gives us. The investigation of ancient law is,

however, beset with difficulties due to the theories of men

which are no more than “a series of guesses,” the guesses of

the Roman lawyers and their modern descendants. From

Hobbes to Blackstone, men maintained that positive law

originated in the social contract, but that its chief contents

as regards property, contract, and the like, came from the

law of nature. Maine thinks that this law proved of grave

service to the Romans in their task of improving their

jurisprudence. It was a good model, but it was also a

vague and confused one. Applied in the eighteenth century

60 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

in France under the spell of Rousseau it wrought untold anarchy. Nor is the method of an analytical jurist like Austin much better. He resolves every command into the command of a sovereign. Customs provides no real exception, for what the sovereign permits he commands. Has Austin contemplated a state of society other than that of an advanced community like that of England in 1832? If he had contemplated a primitive community he would have found no such sovereign as that demanded by the Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Maine indeed suggests a relationship between Austin and Bentham akin to that between Adam Smith and Ricardo. The utilitarians, like the economists, have in their mind all the time a country like England, and the position of such a country in jurisprudence or Political Economy was wholly exceptional. Was Political Economy really a science applicable to old communities as to new? Was it not rather an analysis of the higher business applicable only to a metropolis like London? Was not jurisprudence in a like plight? Was not the Austinian analysis at bottom an analysis of the conditions the jurist found in England in 1832? So Maine is disposed to argue, and it is plain how much truth lies in his argument.

The analytic method is as much required as the historical method, for we do not belong to the school of thought which can praise Maine only at the expense of Austin. History without analysis is often mere curiosity, and analysis without history is blind. It is noteworthy from a passage in his introduction that Austin had anticipated Maine's inquiry into the history of the growth of the law of nature, and had independently arrived at the same conclusions as those which are contained in Maine's difficult chapters on the subject. On the other hand, though Maine does not recognise the necessity of analysis as expressly as Austin recognises the necesssity of history, it is obvious that the precise definitions furnished by the inquiries of Bentham and Austin supplied a starting point for all his inquiries. At the same time, Austin's belief in history receives but scanty support in his two massive volumes.

From the ninth century to the eighteenth the conception

of a social contract exercised the profoundest influence on

the political conduct of men. Two men dealt it a resounding

blow from which it never really recovered. One was Vico

and the other Montesquieu. Vico's Scienza Nuova, which

appeared in 1725, was ignored in his own day. Well might

Michelet, his translator, say that Vico wrote not for his

own age, but for that which was to dawn half a century

after his death; not for the eighteenth century, but for the

nineteenth. It was his work, as well as Montesquieu's,

to set forth the complex of moral and religious beliefs,

modified by political and physical, intellectual and social

causes, in the life of the State. Instead of the abstract

we have the concrete unfolded in all its complexity. Such

conception, and it gradually disappeared into the back-

ground of thought. But in the main we must be content

to attribute the change to one of those silent and mysterious

movements of thought of which we only feel the effects

without being able to trace them to a cause. Both Lecky,

in his History of Rationalism, and Sir Leslie Stephen, in his

English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, remark how

modes of thought pass away—and the latter adds, how

superstitions revive—without direct proof or disproof.

Beliefs draw their nourishment from the atmosphere of

thought, just as truly as plants draw theirs from the oxygen

around them. And this doubtless is the element of truth

in the common saying that certain ideas are "in the air."

The mental conditions are favourable, and the ideas spring

up and seed and multiply, like plants in a suitable soil

and climate.

With the disappearance of the contract conception there

was also a transformation, for men will not willingly part

with an old conception. Natural right has a long pedigree

behind it. Vico is as certain of this as any sixteenth

century writer. He is, however, not so certain that the

law of nature has been rightly interpreted. To him the

Diritto natural delle Genti is not stationary, but progressive:

it is a law varying with the stage of growth reached by a

given community or nation, not a law the same always,

everywhere, and for all. History, he argued, had suffered

62 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

from the habit of ignoring psychological differences, by the failure to recapture the ancient point of view. Belief in progress he adopts, though he adopts it as a spiral movement.

Vico, like Montesquieu, shows on a grand scale that customs, laws, and institutions must be judged as historical phenomena with successive stages in their evolution. Adopting the comparative method, Vico estimates these phenomena not according to an abstract or absolute standard but as concrete realities related to given times and places. He investigates their determining causes and conditions, the whole social organism to which they belong, and the whole social medium in which they subsist. Once thinkers like Vico and Montesquieu adopt the comparative method, the rise of the historical school, the development of historical method, the idea of continuity, and the rapid advance of historical science, are bound to follow. Comparative Mythology and Comparative Law are ushered in as well as a comparative view of the State. In fact, the State has a past as well as a present, and this past exercises paramount sway over the present.

In his Esprit des Lois, perhaps the greatest book of the whole eighteenth century, Montesquieu proclaims that "all knowledge is knowledge of relations." It is the view of Vico, but alas! though Montesquieu had the Scienza Nuova on his shelves, he never read it. How much there was in common between the two is evident in the eighty-sixth of the Persian Letters. There Montesquieu announces: "I have often set myself to think which of all the different forms of government is the most conformable to reason, and it seems to me that the most perfect government is that which guides men in the manner most in accordance with their own natural tendencies and indications." That is, perfection is no longer abstract, but concrete, relative. Behind Maine lie the writings of Vico and Montesquieu.

Maine boldly employs the comparative historical method. In his Ancient Law he suggests—though he certainly never says—that when he has succeeded in giving the history of a system or a theory, he has finished with it. For example, he says that "the Law of Nature has never maintained its footing for an instant before the historical method." Though

he scrupulously confines himself to facts, and is far too

cautious to commit himself to any express conclusion which

does not strictly fall within the limits of his inquiry, he

appears to feel that he has refuted the theory, or rather

all the successive theories, of the Law of Nature by tracing

their genealogy. What he says in substance is this. There

is no such thing as Natural Law, because you would not

have thought of it had it not been for the theories of

Rousseau; who adapted to his own purposes the language

current among the lawyers of his day; who inherited their

views from earlier lawyers; who, to serve a temporary

purpose, twisted certain theories of Roman Law; which

theories had at an earlier period been compounded out of

the notions of certain Greek philosophers and certain

doctrines about an older jus gentium, which meant something

altogether different from what you understand by Natural

Law.

All this may be perfectly true without proving the

conclusion. A rational conviction of an important truth

may be founded on very bad reasons. The common case

of reasonable suspicion proves this. A man may suspect

another of a crime and believe another to be guilty merely

on account of the expression of his face or the tone of his

voice, and this suspicion may turn out to be well founded.

An advocate of the Law of Nature may say to Maine. It

may be perfectly true that I should never have thought as

I do, unless Rousseau, Grotius, the lawyers of the four-

teenth century, the jurisconsults of Justinian, and the

philosophers of Greece had thought certain things before

me, but I can nevertheless give very good reasons for the

faith that is in me. I assert that Nature imposes upon

men certain laws capable of distinct enunciation, and at-

tended by distinct penalties. For example, the Law of

Nature forbids murder; and if there were no laws at all,

murder would still incur natural penalties in the shape of

disapprobation and vengeance. The manner in which I

came by this opinion has nothing whatever to do with its

truth. It is noticeable that this is practically the line taken

by Herbert Spencer in his advocacy of Natural Law and

the soundness of the historical method.

64 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Maine admits that our laws have been improved from a sense of equity, which is part of Natural Law. Nor does he hesitate to tell us that "the greatest function of the law of nature was discharged in giving birth to modern international law," which is based on three postulates. Firstly, there is a law of nature. Secondly, this law of nature is binding on States inter se. Thirdly, sovereigns are related to each other like the members of a group of Roman proprietors, to whom certain doctrines of natural law apply. Rousseausim* is so bane ful to Maine that he persists in thinking that "the theory of natural law is still the greatest enemy of the historical method." Yet it seems to us that the sense of justice, for instance, is instinctive. As the result of heredity, we are born with a predisposition to it. It appears in children with their appeal to "mine" and "thine." No doubt Rousseau grossly abused natural right, but does his abuse of it remove the use of it? We trow not. With Natural Law we can employ alongside it the teaching of history, notably the history of law and institutions, considerations of general utility, the reforms suggested by it to undergo in a slow procession their transmutation into reality, and in this slow process we can pay regard to prescription. With all these checks, which Rousseau disregarded, Natural Law bestows rights to possessors of property after a certain time, and deprives original owners of them, the most important class of case in which abstract justice and natural right have to yield to the exigencies of utility. In fact, Natural Law furnishes the stoutest defence of the rights of property we can advance.

We learn that the earliest form of society was the patriarchal family, which expanded here into the tribe and there into the village community, while a union of tribes or village communities formed a nation. Law, in this early form, was nothing else than the command of the patriarch. The first appearance of civil laws, laws proper, is in the Themistes, the awards of the patriarchal sovereign, ruling over a number of families. Like decisions given in similar cases gave rise to custom, and custom to code, like the Code of Manu, the Decemviral Code or Law of the Twelve Tables of the Romans. By degrees the patriarchs

GULF BETWEEN COMMUNITY AND LAW

65

were replaced by chiefs or kings, and the chiefs or kings by

narrow aristocracies. These aristocracies became the ex-

clusive depositaries first of the Themistos and in course of

time of rules of law. As other parts of the nation gained

power, the aristocracies were forced to publish the laws

which they had formerly kept secret, and thus we have the

origin of codes. Behind the code in dim antiquity we

perceive the figure of the patriarch. The evolution of law

is lucid, graceful, and simple, so Maine suggests, though

Maitland, to be sure, believes that this evolution from the

patriarch's command to the code is neither lucid, nor

graceful, nor simple. He is unkind enough to regard

Maine's patriarch as conspicuously modern. "He may be a

savage, but he is in full evening dress."

There is a gulf between the needs of the community and

the state of the law, and this gulf has been bridged by legal

fictions, equity, and legislation. By fictions he means

any assumptions which conceal or affect to conceal the fact

that a rule of law has undergone alteration, its letter re-

maining unchanged, its operation being modified. These

fictions are the earliest and one of the most useful of all

contrivances for stretching the old rules to meet new facts,

and are the only means which will effect that object in

times not yet ripe for equity, or for the more difficult task

of legislation. In process of time fictions are to a great

extent replaced by equity. A theory grows up differing in

details in different nations, according to circumstances,

but always involving the conception of some broader and

more reasonable system of justice than that which actually

exists. This is administered side by side with the customs

and the legal fictions, and involves a considerable discretion

on the part of the judge, be he the praetor of Rome or the

Lord Chancellor of England. Though Maine refuses to

admit it, surely here is an instance of the operation of

Natural Law. In time equity hardens into a technical

body of law. The only remedy for this lies in legislation.

The two main topics of law are property and contract,

and Maine gives an account of both. Obviously property

and contract will depend on the primitive social organisation,

and he seeks to determine what it was. He gives us two

66 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

inconsistent accounts of this early society. In one it comes

from the patriarchal family as described in the Book of

Genesis, and in the other it is the Roman family still under

the patria potestas. He identifies the patriarchal group

with the Roman family. Here we have the first political

society with the command of the patriarch as the first

form of law. This identification of the patriarchal family

with the Roman is as defective as his assumption of the

universality of the patria potestas. Nor is this an end of

his vacillation. He hovers between the conception of

family groups on the Roman model and that of the tribe

or clan ruled by customs, but directed by a chief.

The advance made by Maine is clearest if we employ his

own method. Turn to his origin of property and compare

it with that given by Paley in his Moral Philosophy. He

dismissed the whole matter in a page and a quarter. He

says that in the earliest form of society men lived alone;

and that the earliest kind of property consisted of the

product of personal labour; and that the earliest wills were

those by which men bequeathed to others the things which

they had made or collected with their own hands. Upon

this purely arbitrary foundation he founds a large part of

his doctrine respecting wills, and especially his distinction

between the testamentary power which exists by what he

calls the law of nature, and that which exists by positive

institutions merely.

Dissatisfied with the a priori notions of men like Paley,

our author seeks, like Ranke, to penetrate to what actually

happened. The tribe comes from the expansion of the

family, the single pair. Property once belonged to it

collectively, and private property springs from “the gradual

disentanglement of the separate rights of individuals from

the blended rights of the community.” Then he proceeds

to give an account of four examples of this transition—

the Highland clan, the Slav, the Hindu, and the Russian

village community. In his Early History of Institutions

he adds a second origin of property, ownership by the chief

who from the first had a separate portion of land assigned

to him, a beginning of private property. The rest belongs

to the tribe or the village community. This common

property was divided into equal portions, assigned to

separate households; and these portions were changed by

rotation to secure greater equality, or it was periodically

redivided. By degrees the memory of the common ancestry

fades away, and the community had the new orientation

of being not so much an assembly of blood relations as a

body of co-villagers. With this orientation each household

clings with increasing tenacity to the land allotted to it.

The redivisions become rarer and rarer and at last cease.

The heath and the waste land remain common, but the

rest of the tribal land has passed into private hands.

With the coming of private property there arrives the

notion that you can alienate it, and there came into existence

three modes of alienation. One plan was to classify

property into higher and lower, and of this the Roman

Res Mancipi articles which require mancipation, and

Res Nec Mancipi, those which do not, affords an example.

The English division of property into real and personal

affords another. The lower kind can be conveyed with

less formality, the Res Nec Mancipi and our personal

property. As the advantages of the lower appear, the

tendency is for the higher to be assimilated to it. The

second plan was to mark off property into classes according

to its source. One source might be alienated more freely

than another. For instance the son in Roman law might

dispose of his private acquisitions, the booty he won on

active service for instance, as he pleased. The father in

Hindu law might alienate what he had specially acquired.

The third plan was to allow the usucapio of the Romans,

the prescription of the moderns. If possession began

bona fide and if the possessor acquired his title in one of

the legally recognised modes, then undisturbed possession

for a certain number of years, varying with the kind of

property, bestowed the property upon him, curing any

defect in the original title. Justinian decreed that the

possession of land for ten years and of movables for three

transferred ownership from the original owner to the

possessor. After a civil war or a revolution the use of

prescription is of enormous value. The outcome of this

evolution Maine expresses in his well-known formula that

68 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

progressive societies "pass from status to contract," or from the condition in which each one's position is settled legally and socially at his birth, to that in which each one forms it for himself by contractual relations freely made.

In similar fashion Maine accounts for the rise of bequest and of contract It is easy, in the light of our increased knowledge, to criticise the Ancient Law. We can show that stipulation arises in a quarter quite different from that suspected by Maine. We can see that he overrated the antiquity of the Roman law and that he gave too systematic a shape to the Twelve Tables. We can discern the extent to which he ignored the fashion in which the Civil Law continued to influence mediaeval jurists and churchmen, and we can discern the need there is for restoring the Law of Nature to its true place. In fact, there are spots in the sun, though Maine is great enough to survive the spots and much else. Where the evidence in 1861 failed him, he occasionally exercised his powers of divination, and this on the whole enhances the place he has won for himself. Before his day there were Paley, Bentham, and Austin, and if we place his writings alongside theirs, there can be little doubt that Maine emerges triumphantly from the test. His Ancient Law shows, by convincing proofs, that the primitive institutions of the Highlander and the Slav, the Hindu and the Russian were in all essential respects the same, and that they had a community of usages, ideas, and beliefs; it indicates clearly that the first stages of all on the path of progress were markedly alike; and it makes plain that the grave differences of condition and fortune now seen among them are in the main due to external circumstances. Anthropologists distinguish three European stocks, the Nordic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean, and if we include Asia they can tell us of others. Maine is more anxious to point out that all races, the Highlander and the Hindu, the Slav and the Russian, belong to one human family. The general relation, not the particular, is always what arrests the attention of our author.

Nominally in his Early History of Institutions Maine is investigating the old Brehon Law of Ireland: really he is considering it in connexion with the general problems of

history and comparative jurisprudence. In the infancy

of all Aryan races law, in its present sense, has no existence;

and ancient law was tribal usage occasionally declared by

revered authority. The heroic king of the Greek clan,

the headman of the Hindu village, the elders of the Teutonic

township, the Druid priests of the Celtic sept, administered

justice in various ways; and their "sentences" simply fell

in with the customs in force among the surrounding com-

munity. Maine investigates two famous Brehon tracts,

the Senchus Mor or Great Book of the Law, compiled by

nine "pillars of Erin," under the superintendence and with

the special sanction of St. Patrick, and the Book of Aicill,

containing the wisdom of two Brehon judges. The Senchus

Mor announces that "poets and priests" of old spoke "the

Law of Nature" to the men of Erin. The Brehon tracts

share the style and the character of the Brahminical writings,

though we do not find the suttee. Christianity was the

cause of this; for according to the Senchus Mor the "bright

word of blessing" came to amend the "Law of Nature."

The ancient law of Ireland was probably a mass of Aryan

usage, owing little, if anything, to the government and

legislation of the nascent society, developed, in long past

ages, under priestly influence, and becoming at last the

special craft and appanage of a learned profession of laymen.

The Brehon Tracts, like the Brahminical Codes, have but

the faintest ideas of courts of justice, and of positive in-

stitutions of any kind; as, in the case of the most venerable

Aryan customs, their conception of the mode of doing

right is by arbitration and a consensual process. For a caste,

that was the depositary of the law, would expound it

as a revelation from on high, would dislike to commit it

to human tribunals, and would trust to its own enormous

power to secure obedience and respect for it.

The Irish tribe or sept bears plain marks of society

founded on a real or traditional relationship of blood;

and in this respect it exhibits a strong likeness to those

bodies which formed in Greece, in Rome, in India, and

among Teutonic people, the seeds and beginnings of Aryan

life. Yet in the sept we can perceive the growth of progress

upon the very pattern of other branches of the Aryan

70 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

stock; and the institution of separate property in land, one of the first conditions of civilisation, though still fettered by strange restrictions, emerges in Ireland, as in other countries, out of archaic collective ownership. The old structure of Celtic society affords proof of the ill-discerned process known as the general feudalisation of Europe; and indicates that that immense change, to which we owe much of the life of the West, may have been due, in some measure at least, to instincts common among Aryan races. From the Brehon tracts we can dimly gather that the revolution through which sovereignty, the ascendancy of certain dominant orders, and the subjection of the great mass of the people, replaced gradually, in so many countries, the old patriarchal Aryan community, was in operation in Ireland, though it was as yet only in its first development. In Celtic Ireland, as elsewhere, certain tribes emerge, attaining supremacy and gradually expanding into what we may call empire; whole tribes have been plainly reduced to vassalage, and are in a degraded and serflike condition; and in many of the dominant tribes, and even among the inferior units, we behold the chief extending his power, gaining a firmer hold on the land and the people, surrounding himself with bands of retainers-in a word, growing into a half-feudal Lord or Sovereign.

The sept was evidently a distinct organic group in the main connected by the ties of blood and claiming descent from a common ancestor; yet certainly containing 'other elements', introduced by adoption and like processes. In this respect, it showed much affinity with the Roman gens and the Hellenic house; and it was singularly like the Hindu joint family, united in kindred, worship, and estate, and one of the earliest nomads of Aryan life. The sept, however, had for ages settled on the land; the heads of households of which it was formed, and possibly even individuals in it, had acquired rights of independent ownership; and this drew a broad line of distinction between it and the joint family in which the possession was always in common; and assimilated it to a great extent to the Hindu village community and the Germanic mark, in which separate property in land is or was recognised. Still, except perhaps

in the case of the chief, the representative of the common

ancestor, the idea of individual claims to land was viewed

by the sept as an innovation, and encountered older hostile

ideas. Large portions of the territory of the sept was held

collectively in the primitive fashion; and as the tradition

of a common ownership survives in the Indian village com-

munity, and appears in the shifting severalties of the mark,

so in the sept a notion prevailed that all the members had

some joint right in the land; and this was maintained, as

to part of the land, by a process of distribution, known as

gavelkind, and perhaps by a veto of alienation, except with

the assent of the whole community. In this last respect the

sept and the Hindu joint family had one striking feature

in common. The veto of the sept on alienation implied

that the land was, in a sense, the common property of the

entire sept; but this notion did not extend, or extended

only in a low degree, to what we may call the clansman’s

peculium to what he had acquired by his own industry.

A like rule exists in the Hindu joint family.

Maine examines the question whether the inchoate

feudalisation of Ireland may not throw light on the more

advanced changes of a similar kind in other countries, and

illustrate the growth of mediaeval feudalism. He finds

that the Brehon tracts contain indications of a pregnant

sort as to the origin and position of the noble orders; they

even explain some of the means probably through which

feudalism enlarged its power; and all this certainly affords

us a fresh clue to the mysteries of an historical maze in

which every hint of a path is worth attention. How, then,

did nobility arise in Europe, and what were the characteristic

marks of it? One account of the matter ascribes it wholly

to the barbarian conquests of the Roman Empire, and to

the peculiar institutions of the victorious invaders as they

settled upon its subject provinces. According to this view,

the barbarian leaders parcelled out the territories which

had fallen to their swords, among subordinate chiefs and

retainers, who gradually became an hereditary caste,

supreme over conquered and hostile races; and nobility is

derived from these dominant orders, at least in the main

and most ancient source, its true type being august descent,

72 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

and ascendancy over masses of vassals. This description assuredly contains much truth, and accurately represents the most striking features of feudalism as it appeared on the continent; but modern research has clearly shown that it does not cover the field of inquiry. We have now the strongest reason to believe that the origin of nobility must be sought in causes of a more general kind, and that it runs up to the very first beginnings of primitive society in Aryan races. The honour given to the heads of houses, which everywhere formed the primary mould of the Aryan community, in its diverse aspects, was undoubtedly one great source of nobility; this was the patent, so to speak, of the Roman patrician, of the Greek eupatrid, of the Teutonic warrior; and it is impossible to doubt that it took its share in the development of nobility in feudal Europe, though other influences were more prominent.

The noble orders which grew up were not isolated hereditary castes; in the case of several Aryan races, they became true leaders, sometimes elective. If they were venerated for their ancient lineage, they were also remarkable for their possessions; wealth as well as birth determined their rank; and very frequently the acquisition of wealth gave its owner a right to obtain their privileges, and, in turn, to become noble. Now it is noteworthy that the Brehon tracts confirm this view of the earliest growth of nobility, and corroborate, in this respect, the testimony gleaned from the annals of Greece, of Rome, and of the German people. The Irish chief was usually of noble birth, but he was not seldom the choice of the tribe; he was the head of the tribe but still one with it; he was rich in the riches of primitive times and riches were required to maintain his position; and most curious of all, the possession of wealth enabled men even of low estate, in the old arrangements of Irish society, to attain the dignity and high place of the chief. The ancient law, expounded by the Brehons, therefore, lends new weight to deep theories of the beginnings of nobility among Aryan people, and of some of the earliest forms of it; and it increases our distrust of the purely feudal view of the origin of nobility in modern Europe. It also throws additional light on the early existence of a kind of nobility

which grew up in the later stage of feudalism, and has had

a very remarkable history. Royal power in the mediaeval

monarchies became another parent of noble privilege, and

has so continued down to our day The notion that the

Crown is the fountain of honour has long taken root in law

and opinion, though it would have seemed strange to that

proud order which had among its devices, “ante mare

undae,” “Roi je ne puis, Rohan je suis.” The first creations

of royal nobility had probably for their objects the house-

hold and personal following of the feudal sovereigns; and

Maine reminds us of what a large part these functionaries

have played in history. Nevertheless, the origin of the

household was lowly; and great as the power and rank

became of the nobility which grew out of it, the companions

were serfs and dependents.

The aggrandisement of the companions was caused by

their share in the warlike spoils of the monarch; we find,

in fact, large benefices conferred on them; and thus the

development of this order was, though a tardy, a potent

feudal influence. Maine reveals that the very same class,

in its essential features, reappears in old Celtic society.

The Irish chieftain has his companions resembling those of

the Teutonic king, and apparently of the same servile

condition; nor is it improbable, had Ireland been permitted

to grow in her own way, that these would ultimately have

become a real nobility, the feudal supporters of the supreme

ruler. The Brehon tracts give us an account of more than

one of the various processes by which Ireland was in part

feudalised, and thus illustrate the whole subject. One of

the principal modes by which the feudal lord augmented

his power was the usage through which men of humble

estate commended themselves to a greater superior, and,

in consideration of benefits of different kinds, became his

vassals, and did him homage. The benefits so conferred

were protection from outrage and oppression of class;

but they were also sometimes advances of horses and cows,

the equivalent of money; and commendation often grew

out of the ordinary relations of debtor and creditor, a fact

that reminds us of the immense influence of the Roman

patricians and the Athenian eupatrids who kept the poorer

74 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

citizens in debt. The tribal arrangements of Celtic Ireland disclose customs extremely like commendation and its result vassalage, and reflect much light on these growths of feudalism. The Irish chiefs were rich in the flocks and herds that formed the wealth of antiquity, and were usually the owners of great droves of cattle—the spoils, doubtless, of wars and raids—too numerous even for their large domains Many clansmen, therefore, stood in need of these animals; and the chief often made loans and grants of cattle to tribal or alien clansmen, who in turn became dependent on him, and were subjected to homage and rendered service This was commendation and vassalage in all essential points; and it is noteworthy that the subjection of the clansmen to the chief was in proportion to the amount of stock received, that is to the hold of the chief upon him. Maine describes this process fully, and marks the distinctions drawn between the free, the Saer-stock tenant, and the servile, the Daer-stock tenant. Any large addition to the flocks and herds of the Saer-stock tenant, made by the chief, reduced him to the position of a Daer-stock one.

The sept always contained servile and degraded classes; and these in their relation with the chief were known as Fuidhir tenants. They were the remains of the conquered and broken septs, and they were in a state of ignoble serfdom. They were the thralls and villeins of ancient Ireland, the victims of the “cuttings,” the “cosherings,” the “coyne and livery” indignantly denounced by Edmund Spenser the poet and his contemporary Sir John Davies, the lawyer. The Tudor poet and the Tudor lawyer described customs which they plainly regarded as barbarous, entirely unaware of the fact that these customs had existed in the civilised States of Europe. Spenser tells us how, on the death of a chief, the sept was wont to assemble, and “to choose in the stead of the lord deceased, not the eldest son, but the next in blood,” provided he were “the eldest and worthiest”; and tanistry, as this mode of inheritance was called, was abolished as a “lewd practice.” Nevertheless, this primitive form of succession was but a variation of primogeniture. It is not difficult to connect tanistry with

primogeniture.

THE ORIGINS OF INHERITANCE

75

primogeniture. The beginnings of society, in Aryan races, almost always show us some one house pre-eminent among the heads of the houses, which form the gens, the village, or the tribe. Its representative is supreme in the surrounding community no doubt because he is supposed to be the nearest in kinship to the common ancestor from whom the whole settlement in theory sprang This personnage is the heroic chief or king, and his august title is transmitted in his line, for the most part from father to the elder son, so long as the tradition of descent is strong, or perhaps so long as the community is not exposed to war, or other disturbing causes. By degrees, however, as the tradition weakens, as the gens, the village, or the tribe expands, and takes in foreign elements, a new principle of succession appears, especially as military or other needs require the leader to be strong and skilful, and election, not the claims of descent, decides, at least within certain limits, the devolution of the old ancestral dignity. The rights of the revered house of the hereditary ruler are still respected; the community, when it makes a choice, selects from the race which it is taught to honour, and frequently makes no choice at all, and the title is transmitted by the ancient method. The history of the descent of the crown in several countries of modern Europe shows phenomena very similar to these, and they explain the nature of Tanist succession, and how primogeniture is related to it. It is far from improbable that, in remote ages, Irish chieftaincies passed from father to son, and that primogeniture was the general rule observed. The changes, however, which, in the course of time, must have taken place in the tribe or sept, dissolving as they did, more or less, the ties of blood within these units, and, above all, the continual want, in a country torn by strife and disorder, of capacity and mature age in the chief, introduced the mode of election; and the "eldest and worthiest" of the blood of the chief would be chosen instead of the next heir, for this would be the fittest choice for the office.

It is a striking proof of the prejudice that marked their views of Ireland that the Tudor politicians did not perceive how something extremely like the custom of tanistry,

76 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

which seemed to them so barbarous and rude, had existed in civilised States in Europe. The succession to the Holy Roman Empire was elective, and yet it had always had a tendency to run in the line of certain families, and it did become the inheritance of the House of Austria So, too, in France and in England, the title to the crown passed, as a general rule from father to son; but it had been subjected, more than once, to what we may call an elective process; and the notion that the dignity must not deviate from the strict hereditary descent was by no means fixed in opinion, though it was accepted as the prevailing principle.

The very order of things which they saw around might have taught Spenser and Davies that there was nothing shocking in the mode of transmitting Irish chieftaincies; it had something in common with the conditions which gave Charles V and his descendants power, much with the reigns of the Houses of York and Lancaster, much with several Tudor settlements of the crown. Maine's verdict is: 'I do not think that the disaffirmation of the legality of Tanistry, and the substitution for it of the rule of Primogeniture, can justly be reckoned among the misdeeds or crimes of the English in Ireland. . . . Probably Sir John Davis does not speak too harshly of it when he charges it with 'making all possessions uncertain, bringing confusion, barbarism, and incivility.' The decision against the Irish Gavelkind was far less justifiable. Even if the institution was exactly what Davis supposed it to be, there was injustice in suddenly disappointing the expectations of the distant kindred who formed the sept of the last holder; but it is probable that several modes of succession are conformed under the name of Gavelkind, and that in many cases a number of children were unjustifiably deprived of their inheritance for the advantage of one.'

Maine discusses such other matters as the singular arrangement of the Irish family--known as the fivefold division--and he finds in it, and in Borough-English, an analogy to the potestas of the Roman father and the privileges of the emancipated sons. He also discusses such remedies for wrong as Distress, and he finds parallels to it in the old Roman action of pignoris capio, the Teutonic

The Analytical Austin

77

practice of taking nams, a well-known practice of our Common Law, and the sitting in dharna of Brahminical law.

The Early History of Institutions connects at point after point the Irish race with its Aryan kindred. The Brehon tracts present a striking likeness to the Brahminical codes in form and in structure; and they demonstrate, with Maine's interpretation, that the Celtic tribes had a social organisation and a social life, nay, primitive usages, ideas, and tendencies which unite them to the foremost Western nations, and to the civilisation of the Indian peninsula. They prove too that Ireland and a large part of Europe moved from a common point along the path of progress, and went for a time the same way; and they throw clear and instructive light on important phases in European history. With this guidance before us Maine regards the Irish race as a people retarded in development; but he willingly accords them a place in the famous group of mankind which includes the Roman, the Gaul, and the Teuton among its European members, and relates it to the original Aryan race from which they all are descended.

The more he employs the comparative historical method, the more Maine perceives the advantages of it, and the disadvantages of the analytical method of Austin. The concluding two chapters of his Early History of Institutions are devoted to an account of the conception of sovereignty, and in them he subjects the Austinian analysis to a hostile criticism. He reminds us of Austin's four tests for discovering the seat of sovereignty in independent States. Firstly, the sovereign is a determinate human superior. He is not necessarily a single person, but the sovereign must possess physical power. No doubt power has been in the hands of a number of people not determinate, but Austin would call such a state of things anarchy. Secondly, the bulk of the society must obey the sovereign. In 1715 the Jacobites disobeyed the commands of the sovereign, yet, in spite of this, the majority of the people obeyed, and the sovereign remained in possession of his rights. Thirdly, the sovereign must receive the habitual obedience of the bulk of the community. In Roman Catholic countries some of the inhabitants receive commands from the Pope which

78 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

they obey. This obedience is occasional, not habitual

Lastly, the sovereign is immune from the control of every

other human superior. The Indian Viceroy sounds as if

he were a sovereign, yet he renders obedience to the Cabinet

which appointed him.

Maine is anxious to show that Austin really revived the

ideas of Hobbes, giving them at the same time a fuller

examination. In his able book on The High Court of

Parliament Mr. McIlwain emphasises this point, explaining

that Austin's theory is based on the dismembered state of

the seventeenth century which of course gave rise to Hobbes's

Leviathan and his De Cive. Mr. McIlwain points out that

Austin's view is as unhistorical as the original compact

he despised. "It is a mistake," urged T. H. Green, "to

think of the state as an aggregation of individuals under a

sovereign," and this mistake Austin commits.

The assertions of analytical jurists like Bentham and

Austin then receive critical attention, and Maine finds

that the leading one is the possession of irresistible force

on the part of the sovereign or the sovereign body. Prac-

tically, they throw to the one side all the characteristics

and attributes of the Government and Society except this

one of force. Maine then proceeds to show that it is the

whole historical antecedents of each society which controls

the power of using the social force. The Austinian analysis

simply says there is a sovereign who may possess the

authority of the King of Persia, of the Athenian Demos,

of the later Roman Emperors, of the Russian Czar, and of

the Crown and Parliament of Great Britain. Maine insists

that it is the whole enormous aggregate of opinions, senti-

ments, beliefs, superstitions, and prejudices, of ideas of

all kinds, hereditary and acquired, some produced by

institutions and some by the constitution of human nature,

which determines how the sovereign of these varied types

shall exercise or forbear from exercising his irresistible

coercive power. Plainly, an analysis which omits so much

as this is an analysis of less value than has been imagined.

Custom rules men in primitive societies where the

sovereign seldom issues a conscious command. Austin is

so preoccupied with 1832 that he forgets 832 A.D. and

832 B.C., when a sovereign issuing commands through legislation did not exist. Indeed primitive society allowed no room for such a functionary. Can we bring custom under the sway of Austin's sovereign if we employ the maxim that whatever the sovereign permits he commands? We may do it with Hobbes in the seventeenth century or with Austin in the nineteenth, but can we do it with the communities Maine describes in his Ancient Law or in his Early History of Institutions? Can we conceivably bring Abraham to the state when he issued commands which the analytical jurists could call true commands? Moral force the patriarch possessed, but what irresistible force of any other order could he control? Austin thinks that it smacks of the ridiculous to apply the term sovereign to a family like Abraham's, yet out of such a patriarchal family Maine holds that law originally springs. Maine takes an Indian example. Runjeet Singh ruled despotically over the Sikhs, and the slightest disobedience to his commands would have been instantly followed by death or mutilation, yet did he ever issue a command that Austin would recognise as such? He never made a law. The rules which regulated the life of his subjects were derived from immemorial usage, and these rules were administered by domestic tribunals, in families or village communities—the very groups to which Austin refused to apply his principles. Nor is Runjeet Singh an exceptional ruler: he is a type of all Oriental communities in their native condition. What now takes place in India used to take place in Europe, and in the Middle Ages we have a condition of affairs as devoid of Austinian commands as the Sikhs. Lord Bryce does not hesitate to say that Austin has given us a theory, which is so far from being that of the normal modern State, that it is applicable to only two kinds of States, those with an omnipotent legislature, of which the United Kingdom and the late South African Republic are almost the only examples, and those with an omnipotent monarch, of which Russia and Montenegro are perhaps the only instances among civilised countries. Bryce wrote in 1901 and all these examples, except our own, no longer exist.

It is evident that Maine insists on applying everything

80 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

that goes to the making of a nation in the past, its traditions

and history, in order to determine how the sovereign can

use his power in the present He concludes that there are

grave limitations on the system of the analytical jurists.

Bentham and Austin confined their attention to the western

world, and the western world comes from the Aryan world

of the east. Aryan antiquity they left to the one side

though it is doubtful if they were conscious that they were

so leaving it. Firstly, the western world they contemplated

was one where the States were formed in a manner different

from the great empires of antiquity and from the modern

empires and kingdoms of the East. Secondly, a new order

of ideas on the subject of legislation must be conceived

as having been introduced into the world through the

Roman Empire. "Unless these changes had taken place,

I do not believe that the system would ever have been

engendered in the brain of its authors. Wherever these

changes have not taken place, I do not believe the applica-

tion of the system to be of value."

A. V. Dicey and D. G. Ritchie refine the Austinian analysis,

distinguishing between the legal sovereign and the political

sovereign. The legal sovereign is the body whose commands

are enforceable in the law courts. The King in Parliament

is such a legal sovereign. Dicey recognises behind this

legal sovereign the political sovereign, the body in the

State "the will of which is ultimately obeyed by the citizens

of the State." Dicey finds this political sovereign in the

electorate while Ritchie finds it in the public opinion or

sentiment to which the legal sovereign must in the last

resort yield obedience. According to Lord Bryce the

legal sovereign is "the person (or body) to whose directions

the law attributes legal force, the person in whom resides

as of right the ultimate power either of laying down general

rules or of issuing isolated rules or commands, whose

authority is that of the law itself." The practical sovereign

is "simply the strongest force in the State, whether that

force has or has not any recognised legal supremacy."

Mr. McIlwain holds that this distinction between the legal

and the political sovereign does little but postpone the

difficulty, for the distinction is strictly subsidiary to the

doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. He cogently shows

that this distinction is unhistorical. It tells against the

whole theory of parliamentary sovereignty as hitherto

held in England. For if the King in Parliament, or the

Government, is merely the agent of the community, which

it undoubtedly is, it cannot be sovereign, whatever legal

powers it may otherwise possess.

From criticism of the analytical jurists we pass to criticism

of Popular Government. Here our author's attitude is

quite as detached as it is in all his writings. He can link

the remotest past with the immediate present through his

use of the comparative historical method. Why should

he stop short of his own day? If he can interpret it in the

light of the past, so much the better for all of us. Such an

interpretation he gives us, but it is not an interpretation

that will readily fit into the party labels of Tory and Whig,

of Conservative and Liberal. We all know that there is a

tendency for the Liberal in office to turn Conservative

when he is faced with the difficulties of administration.

Maine improves upon this when he tells Demos that all

unconsciously he has it in him to be a worse Tory than any

of the Tories. Nor does he omit to lay stress on the cir-

cumstance that there is no necessary connection between

popular government and moral or material progress. He

is a thinker who can see in the unqualified rule of the

majority the gravest danger of stagnation. He claims

affinity with such defenders of organic development and

conservative principles as Burke in a past generation and

Sir J. F. Stephen in his own.

With a short history of popular government since its

introduction in modern times we begin, and we reach the

conclusion that history demonstrates its extremely fragile

nature. Thrice the mob of Paris has overturned the

Government, in 1792, in 1830, and in 1848. Thrice the

army has overturned it, in 1797, in 1799, and in 1851.

Thrice foreign invasion has overturned it, in 1814, in 1815,

and in 1870. Nor is the example of France unique. The

causes of this fragility are the modern military spirit and

military organisation which have often led to the overthrow

of popular government. There is also the modern growth

82 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

of irreconcilable opinions, a portent more serious now than

in Maine's day. Just before the World War we witnessed

the revolt of women against their unenfranchised condition,

of doctors who refused to work the Insurance Act, of non-

conformists who refused to pay education rates, and of

Sinn Feiners who refused one form of Home Rule and of

Ulstermen who refused another. With the rights or the

wrongs of the measures complained of, we are not here

concerned. The grave matter is that this irreconcilable

opinion manifested itself to such a degree that in the most

law-abiding country in the world there were four determined

demonstrations against statutes passed by Parliament.

Nor is there any need to point out that the General Strike

of May, 1926, was the gravest case of all. For it was

practically a revolution raised by irreconcilable opinion.

Maine notes the dangers from the mincing of the vote into

such minute fragments that the voters, if left to them-

selves, will care but little about the ballot. The results

of the successive Reform Acts of 1832, of 1867, of 1888,

of 1918, and of 1928 exhibit this to a degree that the framers

of these measures may receive a rude shock. The extension

of the franchise provides opportunity for the party-manager

with us and for the political boss in the United States.

The devices of one party will be copied by another. The

outcome is that all parties exhibit a growing likeness.

"Their opinions and the resulting policy will less and less

reflect the individual mind of any leader, but only the

ideas which seem to that mind to be most likely to win

favour with the greatest number of supporters." Maine

foresaw that this must lead to a more and more extended

franchise, ending in universal suffrage. At the same time

he bids us remember that the votes of the French returned

Napoleon I and Napoleon III to power and position.

Bismarck too has taken up the extension of the suffrage.

Nor was Disraeli the only statesman to divine the existence

of a working man who is conservative spelt whether with a

capital C or not.

We are asked to suppose the competition of parties,

stimulated to the utmost by modern contrivances of the

wire-puller, to have produced an electoral system under

Democracy v. Socialism

83

which every adult male has a vote and perhaps every adult female. At first the Radicals may reap benefit so far as the destruction of existing institutions are concerned. The result, to a far-sighted man, will be a mischievous kind of Conservatism which listens to no scientific conclusions that run counter to its prejudices—fatal to all that Liberalism conceives as progress. Certainly no one can complain that Maine is a party man. Let a competently instructed person turn over in his mind “the great epochs of scientific invention and social change during the last two centuries, and consider what would have occurred if universal suffrage had been established at any one of them. Universal suffrage, which to-day excludes Free Trade from the United States, would certainly have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the power-loom. It would certainly have forbidden the threshing-machine. It would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; and it would have restored the Stuarts. It would have proscribed the Roman Catholics with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield’s house and library in 1780, and it would have proscribed the Dissenters with the mob which burned Dr. Priestley’s house and library in 1791.”

The cases Maine readily collects in the past compel us to thought which is all the more pertinent because we can collect cases in the present. There is a possible conflict between the ideals of democracy and those of Socialism which Dicey indicates. The ideal of democracy is government for the good of the people by the people, and in accordance with the wishes of the people. The ideal of collectivism is government for the good of the people by officials who think they know what is good for the people better than the people themselves. These experts may possess this knowledge, but the people may not care for it. Take an instance. Medical men can prove that if vaccination were rigidly enforced, small-pox would disappear. The experts have a case which is quite convincing to all who care to investigate it. The Radicals of Leicester, however, will have none of it, for they set the law imposing vaccination at defiance. Take the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. It approved itself to the specialist and to all

84 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

who studied the case of the specialist; it approved itself to both Houses of Parliament, and yet it met with strenuous opposition from extreme democrats. Malthusianism in its old form and eugenics in its new form commends itself to many thoughtful men, but do the rank and file believe in either? So far, it has been hard to convince English people that the authority of the expert ought to count. It is the ideal of the Socialist, but it is not his. His ideal is a State governed by that broad common sense he freely believes that he himself possesses.

The opposition between democracy and Socialism may also arise in another quarter. The labourer likes his allotment, and he likes it all the more if it is his own. The peasant proprietor likes his holding, for the possession of it exercises the magical effect attributed to it by Arthur Young and by J. S. Mill. The feeling of the peasant proprietor is strong in Europe. It is not too much to say that the peasant proprietors of France in 1848 rallied around Napoleon because he promised protection against the Socialists. They dislike the individualism which the possession of a peasant holding engenders. Yet men of the peasant proprietor class are common in Switzerland, in France, in the United States, and are commoner than ever under the Bolshevist régime in Russia. Nor can we overlook the circumstance that in our own country the working man has saved £940,000,000 and has invested £600,000,000 in business enterprises, ranging from distributive co-operation to productive co-operation in all its manifold forms. When Socialists freely denounce savings, they come into conflict with the thrifty instincts of a far larger section of the working men than is sometimes realised.

Renan laid down that "toute civilisation est d'origine aristocratique" and that "toute civilisation est l'oeuvre des aristocrats," and Maine draws attention to this, and to the fact that Strauss—and, considering his actual part in life, this is perhaps the last opinion which might have been expected from him—held that history is a sound aristocrat. So far, at any rate, human improvement has been the work of aristocracies. The short-lived Athenian democracy, under whose shelter art, science, and philosophy flourished

The Malthusian Spectre

85

so wonderfully, was only "an aristocracy which rose on the

ruins of one much narrower. The splendour which attracted

the original genius of the then civilised world to Athens

was provided by the severe taxation of a thousand subject

cities; and the skilled labourers who worked under Phidias,

and who built the Parthenon, were slaves." Will democracy

carry on the enterprises undertaken formerly by aris-

tocracies? Basing his forecast on the history of the past,

Maine considers this eminently unlikely.

After the failure of progress and after the overthrow of

existing institutions, what then? Artisans and agricultural

labourers will use legislation "for what they are led to

believe are their own interests." They will endeavour to

distribute wealth more equally. Let them try it, Maine

says. After the manner of Malthus, he argues. "If the

mass of mankind were to make an attempt at redividing

the common stock of good things, they would resemble,

not a number of claimants insisting on the fair division of

a fund, but a mutinous crew, feasting on a ship's provisions,

gorging themselves on the meat and intoxicating them-

selves with the liquors, but refusing to navigate the vessel

to port. It is among the simplest of economical truths,

that far the largest part of the wealth of the world is con-

stantly perishing by consumption, and that, if it be not

renewed by perpetual toil and adventure, either the human

race, or the particular community making the experiment

of resting without being thankful, will be extinguished or

brought to the very verge of extinction." In support of

the truth of this proposition Maine invokes the authority

of Mill and he might have invoked the authority of Chalmers

as well. Mill was also afraid of the danger of class legislation

which Maine foresees. With Carlyle, Maine clearly per-

ceives the grave infirmities of parliamentary government.

The danger in the days to come arises just as much from

the disturbance of expectation as from the disturbance of

wealth. Bentham observed that the Turkish government

had impoverished some of the richest countries in the

world far more by its action on motives than by its positive

exactions. Pursuing a similar train of argument, Maine

thinks that the destruction of the vast wealth under the

86 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Roman Empire, one of the most orderly and efficient of governments, and the decline of Western Europe into the squalor and poverty of the Middle Ages, can only be accounted for on the same principle. This means that circulating capital is more important than fixed. A country devastated by war recovers quickly, and Mill supplies the reason. What the enemy destroys the inhabitants would also destroy by their consumption. The wealth the inhabitants reproduce would have needed to be reproduced, and would have been reproduced in any case. The fund which supports the life of the human race is not a fixed wages fund in any sense of the term. It is a dynamical fund, never a statical one. As Mill shows, everything which is produced is consumed; both what is saved and what is said to be spent; and the former quite as rapidly as the latter. The wealth of mankind is the result of a continuing process, everywhere complex and delicate, and nowhere of such complexity and delicacy as in the British Islands. Capital, as Irving Fisher insists, is a flow, not a fund, and Maine generalises wealth into a flow. Stocks and shares cannot possibly represent this flow in any true sense of the term. For all wealth is essentially dynamical, and not a little of it passes out of being as it comes into being.

In Maine's judgment Spencer's Man versus the State is an admirable volume, which shows how possible it is to revive even in our own day the fiscal tyranny which once left European populations in doubt whether it was worth while preserving life by thrift and toil. "You have only to tempt a portion of the population into temporary idleness by promising them a share in a fictitious board lying (as Mill puts it) in an imaginary strong-box which is supposed to contain all human wealth. You have only to take the heart out of those who would willingly labour and save, by taxing them ad misericordiam for the most laudable philanthropic objects. For it makes not the smallest difference to the motives of the thrifty and industrious part of mankind whether their fiscal oppressor be an Eastern despot, or a feudal baron, or a democratic legislature, and whether they are taxed for the benefit of a Corporation called Society, or for the advantage of an individual styled

DEMOCRACY A FORM OF GOVERNMENT

87

King or Lord. Here then is the great question about democratic legislation, when carried to more than a moderate length. How will it affect human motives? What motives will it substitute for those now acting on men?" There are only two sets of motives by which abundant wealth can be produced. "One is economical competition, which leads to wealth and inequality with it; the other consists in the daily task, perhaps fairly and kindly allotted, but enforced by the prison or the scourge. So far as we have experience to teach us, we are driven to the conclusion that every society must adopt one or other, or it will pass through penury to starvation."

Austin and Scherer analyse the nature of democracy as a form of government, and Maine approves of this analysis. That democracy is inevitable and irresistible would, a century ago, have appeared a wild paradox. There have been more than two thousand years of history, and at its outset monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are all discernible. Some monarchies and some aristocracies have shown themselves extremely tenacious of life. On the other hand, democracies have risen and fallen. The fathers of the American Federal Republic repeatedly betray their regret that the only government which it was possible for them to establish was one of but little stability. The view that democracy is irresistible dates from 1789, and Tocqueville's book on democracy in America is mainly responsible for the spread of this notion, yet its author looked on its approach with dread and distrust.

The test of popular acclamation is a dangerous one to be employed by the democrat, for the tyrant is just as apt to receive it as any form of democracy. The Italian republics of the Middle Ages fell before the ever-growing power and prestige of military despotic governments. "The historian of our day is apt to moralise and lament over the change, but it was everywhere in the highest degree popular, and it called forth an enthusiasm quite as genuine as that of the modern Radical for the coming Democracy. The Roman Empire, the Italian tyrannies, the English Tudor Monarchy, the French centralised Kingship, the Napoleonic despotism, were all hailed with

88 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

acclamation, most of it perfectly sincere, either because anarchy had been subdued, or because petty local and domestic oppressions were kept under, or because new energy had been infused into national policy. In our own country, the popular government, born of tribal freedom, revived sooner than elsewhere; protected by the insularity of its home, it managed to live; and thus the British Constitution became the one important exception to the 'tendency of the ages,' and through its remote influence this tendency was reversed, and the movement to Democracy began again. The Commonwealth and the Protectorate were never for a moment in real favour with the nation. The true enthusiasm was reserved for the Restoration. Thus, from the reign of Augustus Caesar to the establishment of the United States, it was Democracy which was always, as a rule, on the decline, nor was the decline arrested till the American Federal Government was founded, itself the offspring of the British Constitution. At this moment, Democracy is receiving the same unqualified eulogy which was once poured on Monarchy; and though in its modern shape it is the product of a whole series of accidents, it is regarded by some as propelled in a continuous progress by an irresistible force.

Bentham entertained a high opinion of democracy, claiming for it comparative freedom from 'sinister' interests. Bentham, like Austin, argued too narrowly from the circumstances of his generation. He saw that the French Revolution had stopped reform in England, and he argued that if you extended the vote you extended at the same time the opportunity for the disappearance of these interests. Every man follows his own interest as he understands it, and the part of the community which has political power will wield it for its own objects. The remedy obviously is to transfer political power to the entire community. It is impossible that they should abuse it, for the interest they will try to promote is the interest of all, and the interest of all is the proper end and object of all legislation.

The praise Bentham gives to democracy Maine shares with monarchy, particularly in its most absolute forms. The Roman Emperor cared more for the general good of

the vast number of societies subject to him than the aris-

tocratic Roman Republic had done. The popularity of

the mediaeval kings, who broke up European feudalism,

arose from their showing to all their vassals a far more

even impartiality than could be obtained from petty feudal

rulers. Nor is this the only way to meet Bentham. Maine

meets him also by drawing attention to his "low view"

of human nature. Maine thinks quite otherwise. "The

fact is that under its most important aspect, he greatly

overrated its intelligence. He wrongly supposed that the

truths which he saw, clearly cut and distinct, in the dry

light of his intellect, could be seen by all other men or by

many of them. He did not understand that they were

visible only to the Few—to the intellectual aristocracy.

His delusion was the greater from his inattention to facts

which lay little beyond the sphere of his vision. Knowing

little of history, and caring little for it, he neglected one

easy method of assuring himself of the extreme falseness

of the conceptions of their interest, which a multitude of

men may entertain. 'The world,' said Machiavelli, 'is

made up of the vulgar.' Thus Bentham's fundamental

proposition turns against himself. It is that, if you place

power in men's hands, they will use it for their interest.

Applying the rule to the whole of a political community,

we ought to have a perfect system of government; but,

taking it in connection with the fact that multitudes include

too much ignorance to be capable of understanding their

interest, it furnishes the principal argument against

Democracy."

The critic of democracy occupies a strong position when

he points out that of all forms of government, democracy

is by far the most difficult. Its difficulty lies deep in human

nature and the causes which determine human volition.

For in spite of such phrases as the general will, the will of

the people, and the like, a very large proportion of the

multitude cannot have a will unless on the simplest and

most definite issue. What the people really do is to accept

the will of another, the party leader or the local politician, the

newspaper of wide influence or the newspaper of narrow

influence. Maine then examines the share taken by party

90 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

and, above all, the party leader. Such a leader has altered the form of bribery. It used to take the form of corrupting the individual: it now takes the form of corrupting the class. This leader not merely corrupts the pockets of the people: he also corrupts their intellect. He puts before them vague general propositions which they loosely accept. This bad mental habit has "seriously enfeebled the French intellect. It is most injuriously affecting the mind of England, and it threatens little short of ruin to the awakening intellect of India." Mill argued that the possession of the vote exercised an elevating effect morally and an educational effect intellectually, and Maine argues that the very reverse effects are produced. In fact, he does not dissent from what Carlyle pointed out as the result of universal suffrage, "infinite amenability to beer and balderdash." No doubt Mill recognised the evils which Maine indicates, and he offered as remedies plural voting and the representation of minorities, but these two remedies appeal but faintly to Maine. He has a remedy to offer. It is to adopt some of the American securities against haste in legislation. The Americans possess a rigid constitution, for it is in writing. Ours is a flexible constitution, and the procedure for a measure affecting a parish is the same as for a measure affecting the vital interests of the State. Maine is of opinion that we should distinguish between ordinary legislation and constitutional legislation, and require for the last special legislative procedure with the object of securing caution and deliberation. The alternative is drift to "a type of government associated with terrible events,— a Single Assembly, armed with full powers over the constitution, which it may exercise at pleasure. It will be a theoretically all-powerful Convention, governed by a practically all-powerful secret Committee of Public Safety, but kept from complete submission to its authority by obstruction, for which its rulers are always seeking to find a remedy in some kind of moral guillotine."

Our age is supposed to be the age of progress, though Maine questions if it is a permanent phase. The mass of mankind hates it, and he supports his view by appealing to western peoples, and of course to the entire Mahommedan

VARYING IDEALS

91

world, the coloured races of Africa, the countless myriads

of Chinese, the vast majority of the millions of Hindus.

Apparently, in the eastern world only the Japanese can

tolerate it. The majority of mankind agree with the attitude

of the punkah-puller. An English lady advised him to

improve his position. "Mem sahib," he replied, when he

at last succeeded in grasping her meaning, "my father

pulled a punkah, my grandfather pulled a punkah, all my

ancestors for four million ages pulled punkahs, and, before

that, the god who founded our caste pulled a punkah over

the great god Vishnu. I a punkah-wallah for ever!" The

thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is

no new thing under the sun.

The civic ideal of the classical world, the monastic ideal

of the early Middle Ages, the chivalrous ideal of the later

Middle Ages--these are written so plainly on the pages of

history that no one can ignore them. Each in turn passes

away, and we are interested in the causes of the passing.

The inquirer of to-day perceives the altered ideal, and he

naturally desires to note the trend of events when an ideal

is translated into action. In a word, he assumes that there

must be progress. The idea of progress, however, is wholly

modern, and was inconceivable before the sixteenth century.

Maine remarks that men fail to understand how exceptional

are the conditions of western society, and he insists that the

progressive conception underlying them is one of recent

growth.

Most of us to-day are inclined to regard progress as a matter

of course. Knowledge expands, we say, and there is no

reason why it should not continue to expand indefinitely.

This was not the view of the Greeks, who, for the most

part, conceived on the contrary the possibility of a process

of deterioration, a cycle or a succession of cycles. The

majority thought that there had been a Golden Age, but

that was long past. Moreover, there seems to have been

the feeling that the age in which they lived was distinctly

dull. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules once existed Plato's

Atlantis; it is now lost to the sight of men in the depths of

the sea. In it innocence and happiness reached the highest

possible stage; the utmost man can expect is to return,

92 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

however distantly, to this stage. What George Meredith

called the rapture of the forward view was denied to the

Greek writers.

A look at the conflagration in which civilisation has been

burning for tour years renders it easy for us to hold that

development includes retrogression. There are many side-

currents as well as the main stream of evolution. There is

no scientific reason forbidding a return of the glacial period

and a spread of polar climatical conditions over the whole

globe again. The man of the ancient world no doubt had

reasons other than these. He inherited the natural love of

mankind for old associations, and he inherited the sense of

reverence. The old, simply because it was old, must be

better than the new. If he was obliged to strike out a

new path, he diverged as little as he could from the old

and tried one. It is impossible for a country, especially

a primitive one, to effect an entire break with the past.

Perhaps the greatest of all breaks with the past was the

French Revolution, and yet in its ideals it entertained a

return to Roman republican virtue, or to the simplicity

of the natural man.

The great service Copernicus rendered to mankind was the

conception of the perpetual motion of this world. Motion

there is in the worlds above, and incessant motion is in

the worlds beneath. Petrarch is sometimes called the first

modern man, and on the literary side a case may be made

out for him. He was, however, as blind as Dante to the

forces around him which made for political and scientific

progress. What was fatal to the poem of Dante was the

work of Copernicus. There was no longer possible any

distinction between the heavens and the earth. True, the

earth became a heavenly body, but for all time to come

the substance of that heavenly body was precisely the same

as that of the earthy. It was no longer possible to entertain

the belief that the stars influenced the destiny of man, for

their motions obeyed the same laws as that of the globe

we inhabit. Four generations after Copernicus, Blaise

Pascal could say, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces m'effraie.”

The first modern man was the astronomer, the first to

allow the scientific conception of Descartes. It was barely

possible to conceive the idea of progress before the sixteenth

century. For the doctrine of continuous change has for

its basis the notion of the unity of mankind; it envisages

the tribes, the cities, the nations as so many members of

a great family. It assigns to each of them a providential

rôle in the immeasurable career in which humanity advances.

Now not only were these underlying truths unknown to

the classical and mediaeval worlds; the members thereof

were profoundly anti-pathetic to them. The discovery of

printing, the impossibility of another Völkerwanderung,

the greater ease of international relations, all combine to

reject a system by which Machiavelli condemns the human

race to eternal oscillations between truth and error.

All the ardour of a Mazzini inspires Condorcet's Sketch

of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind.

From the revolutions of the past he seeks guidance for the

Zeitgeist of that under which he was living. Turgot

believed in evolution, while Condorcet believed in revolution.

There are, in Condorcet's opinion, ten ages in the growth

of civilisation. Nine of them he describes, and the tenth

concerns the future. He is not fair to the past, especially

to the past history of institutions. In spite of this, he holds

that there are no limits to the possibilities of progress. No

one can understand the future who has not a firm grasp

of the past. He observes that slavery has disappeared,

and he concludes that war must follow in its train. He

manifests grave anxiety for the plight of the rank and file.

There is to be equality of the sexes, and there are to be

facilities for the multitude. Turgot is concerned to point

out that, brilliant as the official society of the classical world

was, the masses were barbarously treated. He rightly

brings out the point that it was reserved for Christianity

to render practical the Ciceronian conception of the equality

of men by teaching the sons of the gentle and simple in its

schools. When the lord of the manor and his serf knelt

at the same altar to receive the consecrated bread, the

seeds of emancipation were sown. Progress had been

regarded as largely intellectual, whereas Condorcet and

Turgot emphasise the fact that it is social. All schemes for

the amelioration of the people go back to these two thinkers.

94 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

The belief in the current notion of the perfectibility of human nature is evident in Condorcet's view that the backward peoples will attain to the condition of France and the United States, for no people is condemned never to exercise its reason.

Bury characterises the two distinct types of theories of progress. "The one type is that of the constructive idealists and socialists, who can name all the streets and towers of 'the city of gold' which they imagine as situated just round a promontory. The development of man is a closed system; its term is known and within reach. The other type is that of those who, surveying the gradual ascent of man, believe that by the same interplay of forces which have conducted him so far, and by a further development of the liberty which he has fought to win, he will move slowly towards conditions of increasing harmony and happiness. Here the development is indefinite; its term is unknown and lies in the remote future. Individual liberty is the motive force, and the corresponding theory is liberalism; whereas the first doctrine leads to a symmetrical system in which the authority of the State is preponderant, and the individual has little more liberty than a cog in a well-oiled wheel; it is not his right to go his own way."

Though Fourier, Saint Simon, and Comte attempted to ascertain the causes of progress, they signally failed. Fourier and Saint Simon dreamt of industrial socialism. It is a dream, an impressive dream, of the importance of Labour in the world. The two theories of progress still remain, and we are all familiar with them. There is no need to show that Darwinism increases the value of the second type.

Evolution discredits all attempts to assign to the future a fixed form. Is not progress confined by the limitations of the human faculty? Is the boundary to which this faculty extends capable of indefinite approach? Laue at Munich, De Broglie at Paris, and Bragg in London have been passing X-rays through crystals and getting effects by reflexion from planes of molecules in the crystals which very nearly reveal to us the individual molecule in its fixed position in the crystal. The X-rays appear to be of exceeding small

THE LIMITS OF RESEARCH

95

wave-length—perhaps 18,600 times less than that of light—and we have already a further instrument which shows that

no finality in this direction need be expected. We may realise the atom itself in some way, though we may not

be able to detach and handle it. That it has a material

existence seems as probable as anything we know.

The limits of research, then, are very hard to define.

When we get (apparently) to the bottom of material struc-

ture, synthesis may begin, and we may build up from

atoms structures that have natural properties and repeat

natural things. Is it hopeless to look forward to the

construction of the very complex molecule of protoplasm?

and, if it can be done, will it live? In truth there is no limit

to research save that imposed by our senses. Our material

senses must be affected in some way by the matter that is

the subject of our research. What our eye is unfitted to

see may perhaps convey some sensation to smell or hearing,

or may be so enlarged by our artifice that its image (which

is, in the last resort, all that we ever see) shall become

appreciable.

These are no idle speculations, for such a keen observer

as Lord Balfour discerns progress in the modern alliance

between pure science and industry. It would seem that

the Labour Party regards nationalisation as a great step

in progress. Socialism provides the ideal solution. The

pity is that paper schemes, which inaugurate an age of

bliss, have never been adjusted to the actualities of the

world as it exists. The vision of the Golden Age lay in

the past for the men of antiquity, and, for the most part,

for the men of the Renaissance. It began to lie in the

future for Descartes and the men he moulded. Science,

which has altered so much, has also altered the value of

the dogma of progress. Evolution will not hear of finality.

"But if we accept the reasonings," inquires Bury, "on which

the dogma of Progress is based, must we not carry them to

their full conclusion? In escaping from the illusion of

finality, is it legitimate to exempt that dogma itself? Must

it not too submit to its own negation of finality? Will not

that process of change, for which Progress is the optimistic

name, compel 'Progress' too to fall from the commanding

96 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

position in which it is now, with apparent security, enthroned?

Εσσετε ἡμἀρ ὅταν . . . . A day will come, in the revolu-

tion of the centuries, when a new idea will usurp its place

as the directing idea of humanity. Another star, unnoticed

now or invisible, will climb up the intellectual heaven, and

human emotions will react to its influence, human plans

respond to its guidance. It will be the criterion by which

Progress and all other plans will be judged. And it too will

have a successor."

Maine used to insist that, though the invasions of the

barbarians smashed up the shell of the Roman Empire,

yet they saved Europe from falling into the comatose

condition of China. The conception of progress may one

day be replaced, but the student of the past must remember

what it has accomplished. He bears in mind that, when

the ideas of the Renaissance filtered down to the ruled as

well as to the rulers, the thoughtful saw with Montaigne

that it was putting a high price on your opinions to burn

a man for not holding them. The growth of the idea of

progress is fundamental to a consideration of the reasons

why toleration did not advance rapidly, a point to which

Maine repeatedly returns. It is clear that, if truth progresses,

it is not reasonable to burn men who may hold a different

conception of it from that held by their judges; for the roots

of persecution grow from the idea that a corporation can

possess complete truth. If there is a steady movement

to increasing knowledge, persecution becomes out of the

question. Had this truth been grasped in the sixteenth

century, how much misery might have been averted!

But for the next century and a half the sword and the

stake were the arguments employed. In Germany there

was the Thirty Years' War, in France the Wars of Religion,

and in England the scaffold for the orthodox and the un-

orthodox alike. The belief in some forms of progress may

well be a delusion, yet, as R. L. Stevenson profoundly

remarked, "the actual is not the true." What is true in

fact is not necessarily true in imagination. A belief in

progress wrought the silent and mysterious change which

rendered the stake obsolete, and for this we should feel

everlastingly grateful.

REFERENCES

Brino, G. Il governo popolare e la sovranità popolare secondo due ultimi pubblicazion di E. (or rather H. J.) Sumner Maine e P. Ellero. (Milano, 1887.)

Brown, W. Jethro. The Austinian Theory of Law. (London, 1906.)

Bryce, Lord Studies in History and Jurisprudence. (Oxford, 1901.)

Bury, J B. The Idea of Progress. (London, 1920 )

Darette, M. Mémoires de l'Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. 1891.

Evans, H. O. Theories and Criticisms of Sir Henry Maine. (London, 1904.)

Fisher, H. A L. Paul Vinogradoff A Memoir (Oxford, 1927.)

Flint, R. The Philosophy of History (Edinburgh, 1874 and 1893.)

Graham, W. English Political Philosophy. (London, 1914.)

Grant Duff, Sir M. E. Sir Henry Maine. (London, 1892.)

Inge, W. R. Outspoken Essays. Second Series (London, 1922.)

McIlwain, C. H The High Court of Parliament. (New Haven, 1910.)

Merriam, C. E. History of the Theory of Sovereignty since Rousseau. (New York, 1900.)

Murray, R. H. Erasmus and Luther. Appendix, The. Conception of Progress in Classical and Renaissance Writers. (London, 1920.)

Pollock, Sir F. Oxford Lectures (London, 1890.)

Smith, A. L. Frederick William Maitland. (Oxford, 1908.)

Vanni, I Egli Studi di Henry Sumner Maine e le dottrine della Filosofia del Diritto Verona, 1892.

Vinogradoff, Sir P. The Teaching of Sir Henry Maine. (Oxford, 1904.)

Zocco-Rosa, A. Discorso Commemorativo pronunziato nella Grande Aula della R. Università di Catania il 16. (Gennaio, 1892. Catania, 1892.)

Chapter III.

RUSKIN: ROMANTICIST AND REFORMER

Herbert Spencer and Sir Henry Maine applied evolution to the sociological and the legal conceptions of the State respectively. The State was to them an organism, and their view of its functions was not widely differing. Ruskin in his teaching after that dividing year in his work, 1860, substantially assumed that the State was an organism. He is as aristocratic in his ultimate attitude to democracy as either Spencer or Maine.

Like Maine, John Ruskin (1819-1900) was of Lowland Scots family, and proud of the fact. Carlyle, Scott, and Stevenson were also Lowland Scots, a race eloquent and emotional, fiery and restrained. Not only was Ruskin Scots by descent, but the writers who directed his mental energies were also Scots—from Scott to Lord Lindsay, from Principal Forbes to Thomas Carlyle. Ruskin used to speak of himself as “a son of the Manse,” but he was a son only in the third generation. His Aunt Jessie was of the ascetic temperament. “I never can be thankful enough,” added her nephew in after years, “for having seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force.” His mother shared this temperament, and Ruskin records, “I have seen my mother travel from sunrise on a summer’s day without once leaning back in the carriage.” The only toys in the nursery were a bunch of keys and a box of bricks. She imparted to her son a thorough knowledge of the Bible, a fact that conceals part of the secret of his style. Before his third birthday he repeated to his mother the whole of the 119th Psalm. He also had to learn the whole of “the fine old Scottish paraphrases.” To this discipline he attributed the cultivation of his ear and his sense of style.

Father and mother gave their son unbounded affection which he returned in abundant measure The clash of the two generations was to affect the three, but what household does it not affect? His father, a man of ample means, meant him to be a Bishop, just as Bentham's father meant him to be Lord Chancellor. Fortunately for the world, the wish of neither father was gratified, at least not in the sense meant, though Bentham left a more enduring name than most Lord Chancellors and Ruskin than most bishops. Yet Ruskin was always an overseer of souls with a diocese more extensive than any the Church of England could give him and on wider lines than even Anglicanism. The father felt the pang and the pathos of the unrealised wish, and the son also felt it. It was "an exquisite piece of tragedy altogether," owned the son on his father's death, "the loss of a father who would have sacrificed his life for his son, and yet forced his son to sacrifice his life to him, and sacrifice it in vain."

The Romantic spirit was manifest in the lad not only in the masters he acknowledged but also in those he refused to acknowledge, for we are moved by repulsion as much as by attraction. If his mother taught him religion and the Bible, his father taught him romance and Scott, Dante and Shakespeare, Don Quixote and Byron. He was as unconsciously influenced by Coleridge as he was consciously influenced by Carlyle. Newman and Pusey moved him, but they moved him by repulsion. It is not always an easy task to reconcile the diverse elements within us. The Hebraistic and the Hellenic elements were united within him, and yet in the clash between them, combined with their reconciliation, lies no little of the secret of the wonderful work he was to do. If art was beauty, art was also life, and therefore a call to action. He sought peace and ensued it, yet he was ever a fighter. He spent himself lavishly for others, yet practised no austere self-renunciation. St. Francis and Tolstoi made the complete surrender he refused to make. A Puritan of Puritans, he is also a great interpreter of the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. The critic of the Renaissance, he is also the man to proclaim that in Titian and Velasquez art reached perfection. The

100 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

champion of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, he is not afraid to pronounce that the Pre-Raphaelites are all more or less affected by morbid conditions of intellect and temper. If art is the fine flower of life, "that in which the hand, head, and heart of man go together," he also enunciates the view that "the period in which any people reached their highest power in art is that in which they sign the warrant of their own ruin." A man who was essentially a Christian, he has "never yet met with a Christian whose heart was, as far as human judgment could pronounce, perfect and right before God, who cared about art at all." The prophet of Socialism, he yet taught that its doctrines were false and even deadly. Clearly, Ruskin was a man who entertained but little belief in that bugbear of the Englishman, consistency. He was taunted with the diverse views he put forth at different times upon the same questions. His answer was that the problems of life are mostly polygonal, and "for myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times."

Freedom of thought Ruskin knew, even as a lad. In a lecture given at Woolwich, he recalled an incident of his early childhood which his mother was fond of telling him. "One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea-urn, which was boiling merrily. It was an early taste for bronzes, I suppose; but I was resolute about it. My mother bade me keep my fingers back; I insisted on putting them forward. My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said: 'Let him touch it, Nurse.' So I touched it,—and that was my first lesson in the meaning of the word Liberty. It was the first piece of Liberty I got, and the last for some time for which I asked for."

From childhood's days Ruskin loved mountains and the sea, and he naturally loved the Lake district, ultimately making his home at Coniston. The first event in his life, so he tells us, was the sight of Friar's Crag on Derwent Water, and in after life he described this spot as "one of the three most beautiful scenes in Europe." His father wrote: "He has just gone from a hurried dinner to the sunset

which he visits as regularly as a soldier does his evening parade." To him mountains were cathedrals of the earth.

In Praeterita he tells us: "A very few years,—within the hundred,—before that, no child could have been born to

care for mountains, or for the men that lived among them, in that way. Till Rousseau's time there had been no

'sentimental' love of nature; and till Scott's, no such apprehensive love of 'all sorts and conditions of men,' not

in the soul merely, but in the flesh. St. Bernard of La Fontaine, looking out to Mont Blanc with his child's eyes

sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna; St. Bernard of Talloires, not the lake of Annecy, but the dead between

Martigny and Aosta. But for me, the Alps and their people were alike beautiful in their snow, and their humanity;

and I wanted, neither for them nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any spirits in heaven

but the clouds." The love that the mountains and the cathedrals called out of him, he called out of other people.

He has done for the Alps and the cathedrals of Italy and France, for Venice and Florence, what Byron did for

Greece. In his old age a child came to see William Blake. He put his hand on her head and blessed her, saying,

"May God make the world as beautiful to you, my child, as it has been for me." The wish of Blake came true in

Ruskin, for he made the world as beautiful to us as it had been to himself. Alone of his pleasures, the love of nature

never left him. When he was showing his Turners in his bedroom to a visitor, he said, "When I die, I hope that these

may be the last things my eyes will rest on in this world." His wish was gratified. He loved art, but he loved nature

even more. For he held, "You will never love art well till you love what she mirrors better."

A present received on his thirteenth birthday he looked back as determining the main tenor of his life. In 1832 his

father's partner in the wine trade gave the boy a copy of Rogers's Italy with Turner's vignettes. His life work as an

interpreter of Turner dates from the hour his gaze fastened on the vignettes, and he at last succeeded in doing for

Turner what Carlyle did for Cromwell. His father chose to be his own traveller for the selling of his fine sherries,

102 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

and every summer drove in a leisurely fashion in a carriage with his wife and son. If there was a fine picture to be seen in any mansion by the way, he took his son to see it. The travels were extended from Britain to the Continent. At fifteen Ruskin saw the Alps from Schaffausen for the first time, and felt that inward glow known only to the true mountain lover. No doubt he missed the discipline of a public school, but think of his gains, the storing of his imagination and his intellect while the organs were limber. The Ruskins travelled through Europe at the rate set by a great roomy carriage—not at the rate set by a motor—fitted with every device to ensure comfort, stopping towards sunset at the best of inns, where the best of rooms, the choicest of meals and wine, awaited the travellers. No wonder that Ruskin came to detest the railway and all its works. Who would not, after his experience? “I had certainly more passionate happiness,” owned Ruskin in recalling his travels in 1833, “of a quality utterly indescribable to people who never felt the like, and more, in solid quantity, in those three months than most people have in all their lives.” The carriage could not spoil scenery, but the railway both could and did. He never objected to main lines of railways, but he forcibly objected to branch ones, in the Lake district, for example, where the viaducts, the embankments, and the ugly buildings which—why, no one knows—are the inevitable accompaniment of the station deface the landscape.

Among his schoolfellows at a day school at Camberwell there were the sons of Colonel Matson of Woolwich. They sometimes invited Ruskin to their home, and in the Colonel, “I saw,” he says, “such calm type of truth, gentleness, and simplicity as I have myself found in soldiers and sailors only, and so admirable to me that I have never been able since those Woolwich times to gather myself up against the national guilt of war, seeing that such men were made by the discipline of it.” No one was to write more burning or more memorable words than his on the duty of patriotism and the sacredness of soldiership. “You have put yourselves,” so he told the cadets at Woolwich, “into the hand of your country as a weapon. You have vowed to strike

when she bids you, and to stay scabbarded when she bids

you: all that you need answer for is that you fail not in

her grasp." In Unto this Last he was also to say: "The

consent of mankind has always, in spite of the philosophers,

given precedence to the soldier. And this is right. For

the soldier's trade is not slaying, but being slain. This,

without well knowing its meaning, the world honours it

for. The reason it honours the soldier is because he holds

his life at the service of the State. Our estimate of him is

based upon this ultimate fact, of which we are well assured,

that put him in a fortress breach, with all the pleasures of

the world behind him and only death and his duty in front

of him, he will keep his face to the front; and he knows

that his choice may be put to him at any moment, and has

beforehand taken his part, virtually takes such part con-

tinually, does, in reality, die daily."

In January, 1837, Ruskin drove down to Oxford with

his mother and entered into residence at Christ Church.

On true Coleridgean lines he loved Plato far more than

Aristotle, for he was a born Platonist, and his Platonism

left the deepest influence on his social schemes. "I owe

more of the general tone and form of my political thoughts

to Aristophanes," he said, "than to any other writer,

living or dead." He read the pass course with a strong and

steady intelligence, and Dean Kitchin thinks that Lord

Salisbury, Lord Dufferin, and Ruskin were three men on

whom this course produced excellent effects. He rose

with the sun, and before breakfast made notes of a few

verses of the Bible, which he read in Greek and Latin as well

as in English. The constant study of the Bible coloured

his thought every whit as much as his style. According

to Turner, "I know of no genius but the genius of hard

work," and this was always the gospel of Ruskin. As a

young man, as a middle-aged man, and as an old man

he was an incessant worker who spared no pains. To

Ruskin's father the publisher came one day exhibiting a

thickly scored final revise and explaining that continuance

in such practices would absorb all the author's profits.

"Don't let my son know," said the old gentleman, "John

must have his things as he likes them; pay him whatever

104 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

would become due, apart from corrections, and send in a separate bill for them to me.'

In 1843 appeared the first volume of Modern Painters, of which a second appeared in 1846, a third and fourth in 1856, and a fifth in 1860. 'I say with pride,' he wrote in his epilogue to the second volume, 'which it has become my duty to express openly, that it was left to me, and to me alone, first to discern and then to teach, so far as in this hurried century any such thing can be taught, the excellency and supremacy of five great painters, despised until I spoke of them—Turner, Tintoret, Luini, Botticelli, and Carpaccio. Despised—nay, scarcely in any true sense of the word known.' Murray declined to publish for Turner.' Now it is perfectly plain that Ruskin did not discover Turner in the same sense as he discovered Tintoret. Turner had become a Royal Academician twenty years before Ruskin was born. He was famous and wealthy before Modern Painters ever appeared. What Ruskin effected for him was to rescue his art from misunderstanding. Many had praised Turner, but it was reserved for Ruskin to praise him on right lines, lines which gave the artist that keenest of joys, the joy of complete understanding. If the author did not do full justice to Claude, he certainly did justice to Claude's pensive grace, the beauty of his skies and the charm of his clouds.

Wordsworth read the first volume, and regarded its author as 'a brilliant writer,' a verdict with which Tennyson, Sir Henry Taylor, the Brownings, and Miss Mitford concurred. 'Hitherto,' wrote Charlotte Brontë, 'I have only had instinct to guide me in judging of art; I feel now as if I had been walking blindfold—this book seems to give me eyes. I do wish I had pictures within reach by which to test the new sense. Who can read these glowing descriptions of Turner's works without longing to see them? . . . I like this author's style much; there is both energy and beauty in it. I like himself, too, because he is such a hearty admirer. He does not give himself half-measure of praise or vituperation. He eulogises, he reverences with his whole soul.' 'Ruskin seems to me,' she wrote at a

later time," one of the few genuine writers, as distinguished

from book-makers of the age. His earnestness even amuses

me in certain passages; for I cannot help laughing to think

how the utilitarians will fume and fret over his deep, serious

(and as they will think), fanatical reverence for Art. That

pure and severe mind you ascribe to him speaks in every

line. He writes like a consecrated Priest of the Abstract

and the Ideal." As a seer George Eliot came to regard the

author. "I venerate him," she acknowledged, "as one of

the great teachers of his day. The grand doctrines of truth

and sincerity in art, and the nobleness and solemnity of

our human life, which he teaches with the inspiration of a

Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a

promising way."

Matthew Arnold cited a passage in Modern Painters as

marking the highest point to which the art of prose can

ever hope to reach. Tennyson was asked to name the

six authors in whom he found the stateliest English prose,

and they proved to be Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Jeremy

Taylor, De Quincey, and Ruskin. Much as the poets

admired the new book, the artists were as ardent in ex-

pressing their admiration. Among them were Holman

Hunt, William Morris, Burne-Jones, Leighton, and Millais.

If there was an artistic message in Modern Painters, there

was also a social message which was to be emphasised in

1860 as it was not in 1843. In the judgment of Ruskin—and

who knows his mind better?—there is a development

of his teaching to be found in his five most representative

works, and he states explicitly in Fors Clavigera what it is.

"Modern Painters taught the claim of all lower nature in

the hearts of men; of the rock, and wave, and herb, as a

part of their necessary spirit life; in all that I now bid you

to do, to dress the earth and keep it, I am fulfilling what

I then began. The Stones of Venice taught the laws of

constructive art, and the dependence of all human work

or edifice, for its beauty, on the happy life of the workman.

Unto this Last taught the laws of that life itself, and its

dependence on the Sun of Justice; the Inaugural Oxford

Lectures, the necessity that it should be led, and the

gracious laws of beauty and labour recognised, by the

106 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

upper, no less than the lower, classes of England; and

lastly, Fors Clavigera has declared the relation of these to

each other, and the only possible conditions of peace and

honour, for low and high, rich and poor, together in the

holding of that first Estate, under the only Despot, God,

from which, whoso falls, angel or man, is kept, not mythically

nor disputably, but here in visible horror of chains under

darkness to the judgment of the great day: and in keeping

which service is perfect freedom, and inheritance of all

that a loving Creator can give to His creatures, and an

immortal Father to His children."

The second volume of Modern Painters awakened

appreciation of the Primitives and aroused a fuller know-

ledge of Giotto and Tintoret. Ruskin insisted on the

balanced sanity of Giotto's intellect, the broad humanity

of his temper, his power of entering into the heart of a

subject, and his amazing faculty of dramatic presentation.

In his History of Aesthetic Bosanquet is as enthusiastic as

Charlotte Brontë, for he records his verdict that 'it is not

too much to say that he, like Winckelmann, has given

the mind a new organ for the appreciation of beauty.'

The artist, as Plato told us long ago, has many functions.

His it is to teach and enlighten the State, to make life

beautiful, and to draw the soul insensibly into harmony

with reason. But, among them all, none is assuredly

greater than the mission which he has received from heaven

to keep alive the sense of a world that is out of sight, and

to show how the troubled waves of human life may dimly

reflect the beauty and mystery of God. This is what

Ruskin was to do. This has been the master-passion of

his life, this the gleam which he has followed along earth's

dark and perilous ways. Like the Knights of Arthur's

Round Table he has sallied forth on a divine quest, and his

feet have never faltered in the search after truth and beauty.

The Seven Lamps of Architecture appeared in 1849. These

lamps were truth, beauty, power, sacrifice, obedience,

labour, and memory; and to each of these ideas to be

represented in stone, he devoted a chapter of ingenious

enthusiasm and enthusiastic ingenuity. This book is

significant in the study of architecture, and it is perhaps

BEAUTY IN LIFE AND IN ART

107

even more significant in national history, for its author was among the first to set forth the meaning of a great building and its relation to the autobiography of a nation.

"No man of feeling," acknowledges Frederic Harrison of the peroration to The Lamp of Sacrifice, "who has in him the echoes of this funeral sermon, can stand before a great mediaeval cathedral without being conscious that it has gained for him a new meaning, a sublimer pathos."

Ruskin began his career by discussing morality, industry, religion, and humanity in order to lead us up to a higher sense of beauty in art. But with all the fervour of his nature Ruskin held that beauty in art must lead on to beauty in life. This view he held in 1849 or 1851 though not nearly as much as he did in 1860. The implicitness of the forties and fifties is the explicitness of the sixties. For the real truth is that he began by preaching to us a higher sense of art in order to lead us up to a nobler understanding of morality, industry, religion, and humanity.

Whether he addressed Eton boys or Woolwich soldiers, whether he lectured Oxford undergraduates or Manchester working men, the condition of England was uppermost in his mind, and his chief object was the best means of securing bread and butter—and beauty—for its multitudes. In his attitude to party he stood as detached as Maine. If he were convinced that laws or institutions oppressed the poor, he was almost a Radical. If doctrines of liberty and equality were advanced, he was almost a Conservative. Fundamentally, he was a conservative. His father was a Tory of the old school, and an admirer of Disraeli. In 1852, half a century before his time, Ruskin favoured a graduated income-tax and a super-tax on large incomes, and he also favoured free trade. He advocated a system of universal suffrage combined with what came to be called Disraeli's "fancy franchises." Every man was to have his vote, but votes were to be weighed as well as counted, and he laid special stress on property and education.

He urged that education should include natural history, religion, and the elements of politics, and that it should be national. In his Latter-Day Pamphlets Carlyle had pleaded on behalf of similar principles, and Ruskin was his faithful follower.

108 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Gladstone dropped the remark to Ruskin that "Sir Walter had made Scotland." Ruskin inquired as to the meaning of the phrase, and Gladstone recounted the amazing contrast between the means of communication in Scotland before Sir Walter wrote compared with the present day, mentioning the number of coaches that were now conveying masses of happy trippers up and down the Trossachs. Ruskin's face had been deepening with horror, and at last he could bear it no longer. "But, my dear sir," he broke out, "that is not making Scotland; it is unmaking it!"

He read More's Utopia in 1858, and thought "What an infinitely wise—infinitely foolish—book it is! Right in all it asks—insane, in venturing to ask it, all at once—so making its own wisdom folly for evermore; and becoming perhaps the most really mischievous book ever written—except Don Quixote." For More satirised and Cervantes laughed at the past, and he could bear neither the satire nor the laughter. He had confessed in 1856: "I am by nature and instinct Conservative, loving old things because they are old, and hating new ones merely because they are new. If, therefore, I bring forward any doctrine of Innovation, assuredly it must be against the grain in me; and this in political matters is of infinite importance."

Still, Carlyle continued to affect his thought, and Past and Present deeply touched him. He began to feel that if the doctrines of the political economists were not the doctrines for his master, neither were they the doctrines for him. He continued this warfare with the economists which he conducted with greater precision of attack than Carlyle, and the result was that he humanised the whole subject. Huxley had thought that evolution was a sufficient master-key to the processes of nature, but he altered his mind. In his Romanes lecture he urged that "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step, and the substitution of it for another, which may be called the ethical process, the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions that exist, but of those who are ethically the fittest." As Huxley added ethics to evolution, so Ruskin added ethics to political economy, for

the economy of man requires it just as much as the economy

of nature.

Ruskin was never afraid to attack, and he was never

afraid to defend. He took up the cause of the Pre-

Raphaelites, Rosetti, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones and

Millais, and demonstrated that the same motives of sin-

cerity impelled them and Turner. All alike were opposed

to the Academical School who worked by rule-of-thumb,

and the championship of Ruskin proved a turning-point

in the fortunes of the Pre-Raphaelites. Men sometimes

forget that he was as ready to champion lost causes as

Matthew Arnold himself. They remember that he looked

down on Rembrandt, despised Constable, and belittled

Whistler. If his blame was unjust, so too was his praise,

for he was wont to bestow it on insignificant water-colour

painters who happened to attract him. Artists stood

agasp to note that he appreciated Kate Greenaway and

depreciated Whistler, who stood out in his day as the

Impressionists stand out to-day. In spite of his defects, of his

limitations if you will, in spite of his caprice and prejudice, he

possesses power of illumination and grasp of general artistic

ideas, but these ideas must be related to life. Art should

express man's spirit, should speak to men, and should stir

them by its noble appeal. This is true of the whole aesthetic

aspect of life, as true of architecture as of art. There must

be “in this magnificently human art of architecture, some

equivalent expression for the trouble and wrath of life, for

its sorrow and its mystery . . . mighty masses of shadow

mingled with its surface.” Accordingly he, the Puritan,

constituted himself the High Priest of the Gothic Revival.

From 1851 to 1853 appeared the three volumes of The

Stones of Venice which gave Carlyle and countless others

such heartfelt joy. The change wrought by the author is

evident if we turn to the letter Gibbon wrote his stepmother

in 1765: “Of all the towns in Italy, I am least satisfied with

Venice. Objects which are only singular without being

pleasing produce a momentary surprise which soon gives

way to satiety and disgust. Old, and in general, ill-built

houses, ruined pictures, and stinking ditches, dignified

with the pompous denomination of canals, a fine bridge

110 Social and Political Thinkers in 19th Century

spoilt by two rows of houses upon it, and a large square decorated with the worst architecture I ever saw.

The main ideas in the three volumes are as far-reaching in the social as in the artistic sphere. "The chief purpose," he wrote to Count Zorzi, "with which, twenty years ago, I undertook my task of the history of Venetian architecture, was to show the dependence of its beauty on the happiness and fancy of the workman, and to show also that no architect could claim the title to authority of magister unless he wrought at the head of his men, captain of manual skill, as the best knight is captain of armies." So it had been, he found, in Venice-in the days of the sound health and sound strength of the Republic. So must it be in modern States if sound health and sound strength were to return. True art, so he believed, can only be produced by artists; true freedom is the freedom of the soul. "There might be more freedom in England though her feudal lords' lightest words were worth men's lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line." The chapter containing these words, Ruskin declared in 1854, was "precisely and accurately the most important in the whole book." In the last volume of Fors Clavigera, written in 1877, he testified, "The Stones of Venice taught the laws of constructive art, and the dependence of all human work or edifice for its beauty on the happy life of the workman." Nor can we omit the moving conclusion of the chapter on The Lamp of Sacrifice. "All else for which the builders sacrificed has passed away-all their living interests, and aims, and achievements. . . . But of them, and their life, and toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those grey heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honours, and their errors; but they have left us their adoration." Clearly The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice belong to the same building.

Ruskin maintained that there was a close connexion

between the good painter and the good man, a position

he qualified in 1859 when he pointed out: "I do not say

in the least that in order to be a good painter you must be

a good man; but I do say that in order to be a good natural

painter there must be strong elements of good in the mind,

however warped by other parts of the character." Is art

a function of national morality? History lends but scanty

support to this view. The pictures of Perugino, Titian,

and Tintoret were painted in societies corrupt to the core.

Let any reader turn to the autobiography of such a sensualist

as Benvenuto Cellini or let him turn to the life of Raphael.

It is quite possible, from the Ruskinian angle, to produce

works which might come from heaven at the very period

with works which might come from hell appear. Bunyan

is contemporary with Wycherley. Among the noblest

buildings ever raised by man, and those which have exerted

the most potent influence on after ages, we must count

the Parthenon, the Pantheon at Rome, the Church of St.

Sophia at Constantinople, and St. Paul's in London. Frederic

Harrison points out that the Parthenon was nearly con-

temporary with the comedies of Aristophanes and the

sophists of Athens—not with Marathon and Aeschylus.

The Pantheon was nearly contemporary with the satires

of Juvenal and the epigrams of Martial. St. Sophia was

built by the husband of the Empress Theodora; and St.

Paul's was building in the era of Charles II and James II.

Were all these sublime masterpieces of architecture what

Ruskin desiderated, "the production of a faithful and

virtuous people"? Surely Harrison is right in drawing

attention to the circumstance that they synchronise with

some of the most scathing satires upon personal and social

corruption that survive in Greek, Latin, Byzantine, and

English literature.

The social message of The Stones of Venice appeals to

us to-day more than the artistic, yet to the reader in the

fifties the latter was the more pregnant. Catholicism,

Roman and Anglican, had been associated with the Gothic

Revival, and now Ruskin associated it with Protestantism.

In the true spirit of the Reformation, he asserted that

Gothic was for all buildings quite as much as for churches.

112 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

"It was one of the purposes of The Stones of Venice," so he spoke in his inaugural Lectures on Art at Oxford, "to show that the lovely forms of cathedral domes and porches, of the vaults and arches of their aisles, of the canopies of their tombs, were every one of them developed in civil and domestic buildings." Nor is it amiss to hint that the Byzantinism of the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Westminster is traceable to Ruskin's vindication of St. Mark's from the charge of barbarism.

Spencer was a recluse, but never was anyone less so than Ruskin. His father's wealth left him free to pursue the manifold activities of his life, and he pursued them with all the ardour of his nature. Thought was not enough for him. He longed to do as well as to write. He was not content to talk about the happiness of the working man: he desired to contribute to it. Accordingly in 1856 he was on the staff of F. D. Maurice's Working Men's College. He taught art with the object not of helping working men to "get on" and "rise out of their class," but with the object of improving themselves by satisfying the needs of their mental and spiritual natures. To a Royal Commission of 1857 Ruskin gave his aims. "My efforts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter." A working man asked for a subscription towards publishing a volume of his poems. "Certainly not," was the reply, "Mr. Ruskin would set poets to work, not working-men to rhyme." For four years he was one of the main inspiring forces in the College, and then he resigned. He gave Maurice his reasons: "It is not from any failure in my interest in this class that I have ceased from personal attendance. But I ascertained beyond all question that the faculty which my own method of teaching chiefly regarded, was necessarily absent in men trained to mechanical work, that my words and thoughts respecting beautiful things were unintelligible when the eye had been accustomed to the frightfulness of modern city life." In fact, we are coming closer to the year 1860 when he more definitely altered his attitude to life. Beauty in art he witnessed, but he wanted to witness beauty in life, in the life of all.

Unity of Thought

113

His Political Economy of Art appeared in 1857. In the spirit of Spencer he compared the body politic to a farm or a household, in which the rule should be co-operation, not competition; and in this body each member should be set to the work most proper for him. His theory of government was paternal, if not semi-feudal. The State was to be a model employer, furnishing a standard to which the arts and crafts should conform. In particular, the State should more fully educate the people, and provide for the veterans of industry comfortable homes. In fact, there were to be "Soldiers of the Ploughshare as well as Soldiers of the Sword!"

Classical Political Economy in 1857 had attained the height of its power. Laissez-faire and the Manchester School had not fallen before the fierce invectives of Disraeli, Carlyle, and Kingsley. Ricardo and Mill still reigned supreme, if challenged. Mill's Political Economy had appeared in 1848, the Das Kapital of Marx in 1868, Jevons's Theory of Political Economy in 1871, Menger's Grundsätz der Volkswirtschaftslehre in 1871, and Cairnes's Leading Principles in 1874. Marshall had not begun to study economics seriously till 1867, and Ruskin was his predecessor by at least ten years.

With consummate art Sir Edward T. Cook begins the second volume of his fine biography of Ruskin with the year 1860, the year when the art critic seemed to assume the new rôle of social seer. There is the temptation to regard the year 1860 as possessing the same significance in Ruskin's life as the year 1850 in Carlyle's but it is a temptation that must be resisted. Sir Edward attended in 1877 a lecture of Ruskin when he was Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, and he gives us an account of it. The subject of the course to which the lecture belonged had been first announced as landscape painting; but it never much mattered what Ruskin's lectures were called, and the course was in fact an informal commentary at large upon his books and teaching. From 1845 to 1860, he said, he had gone on writing with more or less public applause; and then in 1860 people saw a change came over him, of which they highly disapproved. For fifteen years precisely his writings had been thought

114 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

praiseworthy; and for fifteen years precisely, thought the reverse. "These volumes on my left" (turning them round and pushing them from him) "are the volumes of Modern Painters which were praised; this volume on my right is the one which changed praise into blame. I got a bound copy of the fifth volume of Modern Painters at St. Martin's in the summer of 1860, and in the valley of Chamouni I gave up my art-work and wrote this little book" (taking it up in his hand)—"the beginning of the days of reprobation. But it is written in a better style; it is the central work of my life; and it contained at once the substance of all that I have had since to say." The little book was Unto this Last, the 1860 volume.

The stages in the evolution of Ruskin's thought are plain. He set out as a critic of painting, coming to the conclusion that art, if really fine, must be the representation of realities of beauty and must be pursued in the spirit of delight. He proceeded as a critic of architecture, finding it to be the reflection of national character, and the secret of Gothic lying in the happy life of the worker. He advanced to the study of economics, perceiving in the stately edifice erected by Ricardo and Mill foundations shaking at their base. How could the organism called society flourish when unregulated competition existed? There was no true body, for was it not given over to material and mechanical ideas? How could these ideas co-exist with happy art or happy workers? He confessed, "I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like . . . because of the misery that I know of." He had taught in the Working Men's College, "as a byework to quiet my conscience, that I might be happy in what I supposed to be my own proper life of art-teaching." He was utterly unable so to quiet his conscience. Social evils, he sorrowfully owned, were not to be cured by individual remedies. At each stage in the growth of his mind he had been called mad. He was mad in the estimation of the dilettanti when he defended Turner. He was mad in the opinion of the architects when he lauded Gothic. He was mad in the judgment of the economists when he tried to humanise their science. "He has a bee in his bonnet," observed a

friend to H. J S. Smith the great mathematician. "A bee!

a whole hive of them! But how beautifully they hum!" was Smith's answer.

The forerunner of Ruskin was not Ricardo but Blake.

To Blake Gothic was the only architecture which lived.

As Ruskin said that little else but art was moral, so Blake said that no one but an artist can be a Christian.

Blake's central thought is reaffirmed by Ruskin, only that the one speaks in terms of morality, the other of religion.

"To subdue the passions, which is thought so often to be the sum of duty respecting them, is possible only to a proud dullness; but to excite them rightly, and make them strong for good, is the work of the unselfish imagination." The writer of Unto this Last worked in the spirit of Blake's lines:-

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

We hasten to add that if Blake gave voice to the need for reform, Ruskin gave it form.

Movements such as those for the preservation of commons, the protection of footpaths, the limitations of rural advertisements, the consecration of land to a National Trust, and access to mountains are decidedly traceable to the successor of Blake.

Nor does he fail to advocate the necessity for fair rents, fixity of tenure, and compensation for improvements.

"For property "belongs to whom proper"; "The land to those who can use it." He upholds free trade, but objects to the price of labour being fixed by competition; he is in favour of gratuitous and compulsory education; he wishes to see the aged poor pensioned by the State, the unemployed supplied with work, and the incurably lazy and vicious placed in government workshops or colonies.

A deep-seated distrust of democracy runs through all his teaching.

The people, he is convinced, cannot help themselves; and it is to the goodwill and intelligence of the governing classes that we must look for any permanent reform of the social order.

While he perceives and condemns the failure of our upper classes in the past, with Coleridge and Carlyle he firmly

116 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

believes that true progress can only be attained by a moral

appeal to the heart and intelligence of individual members,

the heroes if you will. He advocates honest production,

just distribution, and wise consumption, the last a matter

particularly overlooked by the classical economists. In his

zeal for his three great reforms we may smile, if we please,

at his diatribes against machinery and railways: we may,

if we like, call his dreams Utopian. Yet if to-day, as a

nation, we think less of gain and more of justice and

benevolence, if we realise our responsibilities and apply

ethics to social questions, it is largely owing to the man

who was denounced as mad in the sixties. His protest was

delivered with less noise and fury than that of his master

Carlyle, but it was the more precise and definite in its

character, and has proved more fertile in lasting benefit

to the public weal.

In an Oxford lecture of 1877 there is a parable. Ruskin

was expatiating, as was his wont, on the vandalism of the

modern world. On an easel beside him was a water-colour

drawing of Leicester by Turner. "The old stone bridge is

picturesque," he said, "isn't it? But of course you want

something more 'imposing' nowadays. So you shall have

it." And taking his paint-box and brush he rapidly sketched

in on the glass what is known in modern specifications

as a "handsome iron structure." "Then," he continued,

"you will want, of course, some tall factory chimneys,

and I will give them to you galore." This he proceeded

to do in like fashion. "The blue sky of heaven was

pretty, but you cannot have everything, you know."

And he painted clouds of black smoke over Turner's

sky. "Your 'improvements'," he went on, "are marvellous

'triumphs of modern industry,' I know; but somehow they

do not seem to produce nobler men and women, and no

modern town is complete, you will admit, without a gaol

and a lunatic asylum to crown it. So here they are for

you." By this time not an inch of the Turner drawing

was left visible under the "improvements" painted upon

the glass. "But for my part," said Ruskin, taking his

sponge, and with one pass of the hand wiping away those

modern improvements against which he had inveighed in

The Prophet Spurned

117

so many volumes— “for my part, I prefer the old.” Yes, he preferred the old, but the old was to be informed by the spirit of Unto this Last. He was content to move slowly, yet surely. “Man’s fruit of justice ripens slow.” Law lags behind public opinion, but Ruskin was among the forces that perceptibly quickened public opinion. The moral impulse in the man mastered the audience that listened to his voice, and in the end it mastered the audience that read his writings

The generation of the sixties was wayward and perverse, and refused to listen to the voice of the prophet. His father and his friends could not grasp the inwardness of the message he delivered so vehemently to the political economists. Rage at the waywardness and the perverseness of a stubborn generation consumed him, and in a letter of 1862 he gives vent to it. His friends had been counselling him to moderate the force of his expressions, but, like Carlyle, he felt utterly unable to do so. “Those expressions,” he replied, “may do me harm, or do me good; what is that to me? They are the only true, right, or possible expressions. The Science of Political Economy is a Lie,—wholly and to the very root (as hitherto taught). It is also the Damnedest, —that is to say, the most utterly and to the lowest pit condemned of God and his Angels—that the Devil, or Betrayer of Man, has yet invented, except his (the Devil’s) theory of Sanctification. To this ‘science,’ and to this alone (the professed and organised pursuit of Money) is owing All the evil of modern days. I say All. The Monastic theory is at an end. It is now the Money theory which corrupts the Church, corrupts the household life, destroys honour, beauty, and life throughout the universe. It is the Death incarnate of Modernism, and the so-called science of its pursuit is the most cretinous, speechless, paralysing plague that has yet touched the brain of man-kind.” So he wrote in 1862, and so he thought in 1860.

None of Ruskin’s historical researches pleased him so much as his discovery of an early inscription on the Church of St. Giacomo di Rialto. “There are none of the rewarding accidents of my life,” he acknowledged, “in which I take so much pride.” Ruskin attached this inscription, in a note,

118 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

to a new edition of Unto this Last, and it runs thus, "Around

this temple let the merchant's law be just, his weights true,

and his contracts guileless." It is another form of his plea

for honest production, just distribution, and wise con-

sumption. As in The Political Economy of Art, so in Unto

this Last he urges that society is an organism The cir-

culation of wealth in a nation resembles that of blood in the

natural body, and he presses this analogy down to minute

particulars.

True work meant the production of the means of life;

every one ought to take some share in it, according to his

powers; some working with the head, some with the hands;

but all alike acknowledging idleness and slavery to be

immoral. As in The Crown of Wild Olives, he holds that

justice demands that equal energy expended should bring

equal reward. Was it just that incomes should be equalised?

By no means, for some are sure to be more diligent and saving

than others. Some work involves a great preliminary

expenditure of energy in qualifying the worker as con-

trasted with the unskilled labourer. "There is no wealth

but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and

of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes

the greatest number of noble and happy human beings;

that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of

his own life to the utmost, has also the widest influence,

both personal and by means of his possessions, over the

lives of others." The emphasis passes from beauty to

truth, from wealth to welfare. The needs of the body

stand paramount. "Government and Co-operation are in

all things the Laws of Life; Anarchy and Competition the

Laws of Death."

Our author pleads for wise consumption, for fair dis-

tribution, and for a more thoughtful direction of labour,

and he continues his plea: "And if, on due and honest

thought over these things, it seems that the kind of existence

to which men are now summoned by every plea of pity and

claim of right, may, for some time at least, not be a luxurious

one; --consider whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury

would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our

sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world.

Economic Laws

119

Luxury is indeed possible in the future--innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold. Raise the veil bodily; face the light; and if, as yet, the light of the eve can only be seen through tears, and the light of the body through sackcloth, go thou forth weeping, bearing precious seed, until the time come, and the kingdom, when Christ's gift of bread, and bequest of peace, shall be 'Unto this last as unto thee'; and when, for earth's severed multitudes of the wicked and the weary, there shall be holier reconciliation than that of the narrow home, and calm economy, where the Wicked cease--not from trouble--but from troubling--and the Weary are at rest.'

The political economists assumed that their maxims were laws like those of the Medes and Persians, and Ruskin boldly called this assumption in question. The law of supply and demand incurred his particular aversion. He gave reasons for his aversion when he declared that 'In a community regulated only by laws of demand and supply, but protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and godly person.'

Owen had advocated the wisdom of high wages, and he had justified his wisdom by his results. Ruskin followed, all unknowingly, in Owen's track, reaching a far wider audience in the end. The toiler was no mere machine: he is, if a machine, one whose motive-power is a soul, and on this aspect of the toiler he concentrated his attention. Nor is it wrong to trace to Unto this Last the growing recognition of the soul in co-operation, co-partnership, profit sharing, bonuses, progressive wages, and the like. The chapter on The Roots of Honour placed all the stress on

T

r

120 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

social service, not on profits for employer of wages for employed, as the industrial motive.

Ruskin's books on art met with a ready sale. The 1862 edition of Unto this Last consisted of a thousand copies, and ten years later it was still not exhausted. For a generation it was an unspent force. In the seventies Ruskin re-issued it on his own account, and the rate of sale for the following thirty years was two thousand a year. In 1906 there was a large number of Labour Members, and a journalist asked them what work influenced them most, and Unto this Last appeared most frequently on their lists. In his preface the author stated in seven propositions "the worst of the political creed" to which he wished his principles to lead, and this no doubt influenced the Labour Members. The reforms he indicated were:

(1) National Schools for the young to be established at Government cost and under Government discipline over the whole country.

(2) Every child to be taught, further, some trade or calling.

(3) In connexion with these technical classes, Government workshops to be established, at which, without any attempt at establishing a monopoly, "good and exemplary work should be done, and pure and true substance sold."

(4) Any person out of employment to be set forthwith to work at the nearest Government workshop.

(5) Such work to be paid for at a fixed rate in each employment.

(6) Those who would work if they could, to be taught. Those who could work if they would, to be set to penal work.

(7) For the old and destitute comfort and home to be provided.

The mad man of 1860 is the sane man of to-day, for with the exception of the third all the others, in whole or in part, have been adopted. The third too sees recognition in the position the State assumes as a model employer and we see it in the extension of the anti-adulteration laws. Elementary and technical education, the first and second points, have long ago been adopted. The establishment of a Labour Department with all that it means, the occasional establishment of municipal relief works, and the operation

Political Economy Attacked 121

of the dole are all steps towards the fourth point. The setting up in certain industries of Wages Boards and the increasing adoption, by the central and municipal authorities, of the principle of fair wages or Trade Union wages realise the fifth. The first part of the sixth is also realised, but is the second part? Old Age Pensions have done much towards the last point. In fact, in the sixties these seven propositions were immoderate whereas to-day they are moderate. The distance we have travelled from the immoderation of the sixties to the moderation of the twenties is a measure of the power Ruskin wields over all of us, a power all the greater since it has passed into the life of the nation.

The assault on Political Economy was renewed in 1862 in Munera Pulveris. In it he subjected to an able analysis the conception of wealth, a conception which takes "dust for deity," leading men to "gather dust for treasure." Fierce opposition sprang up, but Ruskin was greatly cheered by an encouraging letter from Carlyle who received an equally encouraging letter from Erskine of Linlathen. Carlyle wrote in 1862: "I have read, a month ago, your First (article) in Fraser, and ever since have had a wish to say to it and to you, Euge macte nova virtute. I approved in every particular; calm, definite, clear; rising into the sphere of Plato (our almost best), wh.in the sphere of MacCulloch, Mill & Co. is a mighty improvement. Since that, I have seen the little green book, too; reprint of your Cornhill operations,—about ⅔ of wh.was read to me (known only from what the contradict.of sinners had told me of it);—in every part of wh.I find a high and a noble sort of truth, not one doctrine that I can intrinsically dissent from, or count other than salutary in the extreme, and pressingly needed in England." Erskine was "thankful for any unveiling of the so-called science of political economy, according to which, avowed selfishness is the Rule of the World. It is indeed most important preaching—to preach that there is not one God for religion and another God for human fellowship—and another God for buying and selling—that pestilent polytheism has been largely and confidently preached in our time, and blessed

122 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

are those who can detect its mendacities, and help to disenchant the brethren of their power."

The encouragement of Carlyle gave fresh stimulus to the endeavours of Ruskin to win social justice. With Owen he realised that this was more far-reaching than any electoral reform which was absorbing the efforts of both the political parties in 1867. He had met Thomas Dixon, of Sunderland, a corkcutter by trade, a man with "the ingenuous simplicity of a child and the tender sympathetic heart of a woman." He was a working-man after his heart, and intercourse with him suggested that it was well worth while to develop the thoughts in Unto this Last and Munera Pulveris. He wrote letters to Dixon, and these he gathered into a volume in 1867 which he entitled Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne : Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work. In it he denied that Political Economy was entitled to the adjective: to him it was mercantile economy. Its very basis contemplated man as an isolated factor in the commonwealth, whereas he insisted that he was a corporative factor. The economic man contemplated by Ricardo was a being whose sole motive was gain, one who bought in the cheapest market and sold in the dearest. In order to arrive at such a conception, it was vital to strip this man of his love of religion and of his love of country. He was, in fact, a mere outline of a man. Ruskin pours forth his soul in a comparison of classical Political Economy to "a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons." On the strength of this comparison "It might be shown . . . that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the reinsertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones,

and constructed of interesting geometrical figures with

death's-head and humeri, successfuly proves the incon-

venience of the reappearance of a soul among these cor-

puscular structures."

We should be slow to maintain that the character and the

consistency of Ruskin's writings are an article of the faith,

and yet as we turn to The Stones of Venice, Unto this Last,

Time and Tide, and the Inaugural Oxford Lectures we

note this sameness of character and consistency of purpose.

The Stones of Venice laid down "the dependence of all

human work, or edifice, for its beauty, on the happy life

of the workman." In Unto this Last he laid down "the

laws of that life itself, and its dependence on the Sun of

Justice." In Time and Tide he laid down the laws of work

which make up life. In Oxford he continued his teaching

in preaching the necessity that such life "should be led,

and the gracious laws of beauty and labour recognised, by

the upper, no less than the lower, classes of England";

and, finally, "it is simply one part of the practical work

I have to do in Art-teaching," he said in Fors Clavigera,

"to bring somewhere (the conditions of fine art) into

existence." No doubt there is an evolution in this thought,

though we are more impressed by its character and con-

sistency throughout.

In his writings he is always anxious to bring out the

Pauline truth that no man liveth to himself. If the work-

man is an individualist and if the employer is also one,

where is the goodwill which means so much to the success

of a business? Your Adam Bede works for wages, but he

also works for pride in his labour. Take this away, and

how long will a business last? The relations of a colonel to

his men are not based on the elimination of the social

affections. Why, he asks, does the soldier receive more

honour than the manufacturer or the merchant? Because

the latter acts in the spirit of the political economist. When

in Durham Westcott was stopped by a manufacturer who

asked him, "Why, my lord, are we business men not ranked

with professional men?" Swift came the answer, "When

a merchant will die for his workman as a doctor will for

his patient, then you will be held in the same honour."

124 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

It is an answer that would have delighted Ruskin. For one of the firmest articles in his creed was that the riches of the State will be greatest where there are Captains of Industry working under a code of unselfish honour. Of course he knew quite well that there were such Captains, but were there enough of them to transform the relation of employer and employed not into the cash-nexus which Carlyle decried but into social service? It is significant that the title of the first chapter in Unto this Last is The Roots of Honour.

The individual is not at bottom a unit: he is a member of society. He creates wealth, but he does not create it wholly for himself: he cannot do so. Yet wealth is not the main matter, which is rather the persons who make it. He pleads: "Since the essence of wealth consists in power over men, will it not follow that the nobler and the more in number the persons are over whom it has power, the greater the wealth? Perhaps it may even appear, after some consideration, that the persons themselves are the wealth—that these pieces of gold with which we are in the habit of guiding them, are, in fact, nothing more than a kind of Byzantine harness or trappings, very glittering and beautiful in barbaric sight, wherewith we bridle the creatures; but that if these same living creatures could be guided without the fretting and jingling of the Byzants in their mouths and ears, they might themselves be more valuable than their bridles. In fact, it may be discovered that the true veins of wealth are purple—and not in Rock, but in Flesh—perhaps even that the final outcome and consummation of all wealth is in the producing as many as possible of full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures.

... In some far-away and yet undreamt-of hour, I can even imagine that England may cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose; and that, while the sands of the Indus and adamant of Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave, she, as a Christian mother, may at last attain to the virtues and the treasures of a Heathen one, and be able to lead forth her Sons, saying, 'These are my Jewels'."

What is wealth? Does Political Economy define one of its fundamental terms? Ruskin finds, to his surprise, that it does not define it. This he had urged in Unto this Last, and he urged it in Munera Pulveris, and in his urgings in the latter he writes: 'The most reputed essay on the subject which has appeared in modern times, after opening with the statement that 'writers on political economy profess to teach, or to investigate, the nature of wealth,' thus follows up the declaration of its thesis—'Every one has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth'. . . . 'It is no part of the design of this treatise to aim at metaphysical nicety of definition.' . . . And Mr Mill contentedly proceeded, as if a chemist should proceed to investigate the laws of chemistry without endeavouring to ascertain the nature of fire or water, because every one had a notion of them, 'sufficiently correct for common purposes.'

'Metaphysical nicety, we assuredly do not need; but physical nicety, and logical accuracy, with respect to a physical subject, we as assuredly do. Suppose the subject of inquiry, instead of being House-law (Oikonomia) had been Star-law (Astronomia), and that, ignoring distinction between stars fixed and wandering, as here between wealth radiant and wealth reflective, the writer had begun thus: 'Every one has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by stars. Metaphysical nicety in the definition of a star is not the object of this treatise'; —the essay so opened might yet have been far more true in its final statements, and a thousand-fold more serviceable to the navigator, than any treatise on wealth, which founds its conclusions on the popular conception of wealth, can ever become to the economist.'

The fault he finds in Mill he does not commit himself. He offers us his own definitions—wealth, 'things in themselves valuable'; money, 'documentary claims to such things'; riches, 'the relation of one person's possessions to another'; value, 'the life-giving power of a thing, which involves usefulness and the capacity to use it; cost, 'the quantity of labour required to produce a thing'; and price, 'the quantity of labour which the possessor of

126 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

a thing will take in exchange for it." He disowns Ricardo,

and yet what is there more essentially Ricardian than his

definitions of cost and price? Consciously we feel certain

he had not imbibed these notions from Ricardo, but sub-

consciously they came ali the same from him.

Ruskin was to meet the Duke of Argyll in the future.

The Duke found things very well as they are, and Ruskin

found them very ill. He eagerly desired to remould "this

sorry scheme of things nearer to the heart's desire." With

an air of triumph the Duke concluded, "You seem to want

a very different world, Mr. Ruskin." "Yea, verily a new

heaven and a new earth, and the former things passed

away." Yet there was nothing of the "leveller" about

the reformer. Indeed he attacked Gladstone as assuming

this rôle. He said to the Liberal leader, "You see you

think one man is as good as another, and all men equally

competent to judge aright on political questions; whereas

I am a believer in an aristocracy." And straight came the

answer from Gladstone, "Oh dear, no! I am nothing of the

sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle--

the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inequalitarian,"

a confession which Ruskin greeted with intense delight,

clapping his hands triumphantly. Order and reverence,

authority and obedience, these watchwords of Conservatism,

are ever on his lips, these ideas ever present in his mind.

Radical and revolutionary doctrines, as he interprets them,

conflict with these watchwords, and accordingly he denounces

such doctrines. With Carlyle he scornfully repudiates

liberty and equality as the very negation of order and

government. In the fifth letter in Fors Clavigera he asks

for: "No liberty, but instant obedience to known law and

appointed persons; no equality, but recognition of every

betterness and reprobation of every worseness." When

Eyre put down the revolt of the negroes in Jamaica in

1865 with a strong hand, he was prosecuted. He found

friends in Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, and Tennyson, and

enemies in Mill, Huxley, Thomas Hughes, Herbert Spencer,

and Goldwin Smith.

If Plato desired to see the philosopher act as king, in

his spirit Ruskin in Time and Tide pleads for his king, the

THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY

127

captain of industry, who is to fulfil in the industrial age what the baron fulfilled in feudalism. The employer of labour could be a captain, a king, in our day, the leader and the helper of his fellow-men. For surely the function of commerce was not to prey upon society but to serve society. Once more the ideas of Coleridge were awake in Ruskin. For Ruskin, like Coleridge, advocated the preservation of class distinctions and the fixing of the status of all. Is he, then, against equality, equality of opportunity? Decidedly not. The land, the capital, the power to use the land and the capital, go to him who can use them to the advantage or the weal of all. Special aptitude in all, high or low, must be sought for and employed on behalf of the community. "If indeed no effort is made to discover, in the course of their early training, for what services the youth of a nation are individually qualified; nor any care taken to place those who have unquestionably proved their fitness for certain functions, in the offices they could best fulfil—then to call the confused wreck of social order and life, brought about by malicious confusion and competition, an arrangement of Providence, is quite one of the most insolent and wicked ways in which it is possible to take the name of God in vain." Such is the plain teaching of Time and Tide.

There is, then, to be equality of opportunity, nevertheless there are "unconquerable differences in the clay of the human creature." There are differences, some due no doubt to class yet others due to ability, and he lends his support to class differences which he attributes to a natural as well as to a social reason. There is Platonism in all his writings, and it is as evident in Time and Tide as in any other part of them. If the upper classes possess rights, they equally certainly possess duties, and Ruskin is most anxious to set forth their duties. Noblesse oblige is an idea never out of his mind, and he presses it on the landlord, the employer, and the bishop respectively. Society required reconstruction, but the reconstruction must be on Platonic principles—assigning to each man his due place, and requiring from each man the fulfilment of his duties. "In heaven," according to Plato, "there is

128 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

laid up a pattern of such a city: and he who desires may behold it, and beholding, govern himself accordingly. But whether there really is, or will be, such an one, is of no importance to him, for he will act according to the laws of that city and no other." So Ruskin acted, and he found that his acts at home brought him into touch with Maurice and the Christian Socialists and abroad with the Roman Catholic Socialist party and the State-assisted industrial societies which Schultze-Delitzsch favoured. The Golden Age for Ruskin was not coming to-day or to-morrow, but it surely was coming, and it was his part to hasten its advent.

We all know that our author persuaded his undergraduate hearers at Oxford to embrace the gospel of labour, and men laughed in 1874 at the amateur diggers on the Hincksey road. Among them were Arnold Toynbee and Alfred Milner, beautiful and devoted spirits who served their generation faithfully, Toynbee for a short time and Milner for a long one. They felt in their lives the principle of noblesse oblige, and the world, forgetful as it is, will not lightly forget their splendid lives. "I tell you," so Ruskin announced at the close of one of his lectures, "that neither sound art, policy, nor religion can exist in England until, neglecting, if it must be, your own pleasure-gardens, you resolve that the streets which are the habitations of the poor, and the fields which are the playgrounds of their children, shall be again restored to the rule of the spirits, whosoever they are, in earth and heaven, that ordain and reward, with constant and conscious felicity, all that is decent and orderly, beautiful and pure." These words fell on appreciative ears, and to them we can trace the Universities' Settlements and Public School Settlements in London and other cities.

It is easy—and profitless—for the economist who is merely a man of thought to criticise Ruskinian teaching which is based on feeling for the under dog. If East and West are never to meet, according to Rudyard Kipling, till the judgment seat, it almost seems as if the man of thought and the man of feeling were in a similar predicament. Yet Ruskin brought his due contribution to the man of thought. He taught him that man is a being who belongs

to an organism, and that there is more in society than a

fortuitous collection of its members together. If Political

Economy is to treat of man in society, it must be more

than merely mercantile: it must be really political. What

Spencer and Maine had essayed in one fashion, he essayed

in another. If their thought is evolutionary, so is his.

If they look forward to anything but the present framework

of society, his outlook is not unlike. We made progress in

the past, and if the Platonic—and the Ruskinian—con-

ception of society prevails, there is every reason to think

that this progress will continue.

There are spots in the sun, and we shall be the last to

contend that the classical economists were wrong and it

was reserved for Ruskin to set them aright. True, the

times were out of joint, and he is quite as determined as

Hamlet to set them aright. If he effected advance when

he humanised Political Economy and when he insisted,

with Huxley, on the due place of the ethical motive, he

surely went astray when he denounced the whole process

of lending capital as unproductive, when he denounced

usury in general and Bishop Fraser in particular for up-

holding the lawfulness of interest, and when he asserted that

there should be no profit in the loan of capital. It is quite

easy to pick holes in what he taught—if we forget the

mighty power he exercised over civic and national politics.

A friend criticised Marlborough before Bolingbroke who

was no friend of the greatest general we ever possessed.

Bolingbroke's reply was, "He was so great a man that I

forget his errors." Ruskin is an influence, and as such we

endeavour to estimate him.

The weal of all is the motive uppermost in the mind of

our romanticist and reformer. It is not in his nature—

even if it were in his power occasionally—to adjust his

outlook to the very varying one of the Conservative or the

Liberal. In 1869 he wrote a letter on his lecture at Woolwich

on the future of England: "That there are two great parties

in the state—the Radical and Conservative—that I have

thought over their respective wishes, and that they have

two opposite watchwords, which are both right—and only

right together—namely:—Radical, 'Every man his chance.'

130 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Tory, 'Every man in his rank.' I shall ask leave of my audience to make myself a Thorough Radical for the first half-hour, and to change into a Thorough Tory in the second." The extension of the franchise, from his angle, meant but little, and in 1881 he said, "So far from wishing to give votes to women, I would fain take them away from most men," and he would take them away on Platonic grounds.

Ruskin was a candidate in 1880 for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University. The Conservative Club supported him against John Bright. He warned the undergraduates at the outset that though he was "the staunchest Conservative in the British Islands," yet he held advanced opinions on land and rent which no Conservative Club would sanction. As the contest proceeded, he was increasingly asked to declare himself more definitely, and he did. He wrote: "What in the devil's name have you to do with either Mr. D'Israeli or Mr. Gladstone? You are students at the University, and have no more business with politics than you have with rat-catching. Had you ever read ten words of mine with understanding you would have known that I care no more either for Mr. D'Israeli or Mr. Gladstone than for two old bagpipes with the drones going by steam, but that I hate all Liberalism as I do Beelzebub, and that, with Carlyle, I stand, we two alone now in England, for God and the Queen."

Plato and Aristotle believed in slavery because the produce of the slave left the citizen free to devote his time to the problems of the City State, and both Carlyle and Ruskin were imbued with this spirit which they conceived could not emanate from the mass of mankind. The great man, the hero, call him what you will, must retain the leadership of men. Give each man his place in society, and then let him discharge his duty in his place. In an ideal government the clergy and the civil officers shall unite to rule, each supporting and correcting the other, "the clergy hallowing all worldly policy by their influence, and the magistracy repressing all religious enthusiasm by their practical wisdom."

Ruskin's autobiography appears in Fors Clavigera, and

it is as discursive as his lectures at Oxford. In January,

1871, he commenced the series of monthly letters called

Fors Clavigera, and in these letters he pours out his im-

patience with the past and his patience in believing that

a new heaven will surely come. Not a little of Fors was

written under stress of deep emotion. His first marriage

had been a failure, and on its dissolution his wife had

married Millais. He met Rose La Touche as a mere child,

and grew to love her with all the passion of his lonely-

nature. She accepted him, and the disparity in age sug-

gested a three years' probation. He was as content to

wait as Jacob of old, and the years seemed to him but a

few days for the love he bore her. Difficulties came.

She was an Irish girl with an Evangelical outlook on religion,

and the lapse of her lover from orthodoxy distressed her

sensitive nature. Her mind was tortured by doubts and

despairs, which stand out in her Clouds and Light. One of

the pieces reveal her attitude:-

I would look back upon my life to-night,

Whose years have scarcely numbered twenty-two;

I would recall the darkness and the light,

The hours of pain God's angels led me through;

Out of His love He orders all things right,

I, slow of heart, would feel that this is true.

I, in those years, have learnt that life is sad,

Sad to heart-breaking did we walk alone.

I, who have lost much which I never had,

Yet which in ignorance I held mine own,

Would leave the clouded past, its good and bad,

Within His hands to whom all things are known.

Ruskin's deep love for her was to realise all the pangs of

hope deferred, and alas! doomed to disappointment. His

heart ached to have her at his side. "You," he once wrote

to Susan Beever, "expect to see your Margaret again, and

you will be happy with her in heaven. I wanted my Rosie

here. In heaven I mean to go and talk to Pythagoras and

Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I shan't care a bit for

Rosie there, she needn't think it. What will grey eyes and

red cheeks be good for there!" An interval of unclouded

happiness came before the end, but the storms of life were

too much for the frail body, and she passed away in May,

132 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

1875. His heart was buried in her grave. Sir E. Cook tells us: "Ruskin's love-letters to Rose are not in existence. Communicative, expansive, un-reticent though Ruskin was, his literary executors felt that these letters, though perhaps the most beautiful things he ever wrote, were too sacred for publicity. A letter from Rose to him which he specially valued he used to carry in his breast-pocket between plates of gold. After her death, he kept them all—his to her, and hers to him—in a rosewood box. On a day in autumn, Mrs. Severn and Professor Norton took them to the woodland garden, above Brantwood, and gave them to the flames. A wind was blowing, and one letter fluttered away from the pyre. It was written from Brantwood, when Ruskin was first settling in his new home, and in it he wonders whether Rosie will ever give him the happiness of welcoming her there. But she never came to Brantwood. The garden, lake, and shore which became so dear to Ruskin were left without any memory of her presence, though often, as it seemed to him, graced by her spirit." Like Shakespeare and Milton, Burke and Cervantes, and so many of the greatest, Ruskin's only ultimate descendants are his books.

The storm and stress through which Ruskin was passing is evident in Fors. In Praeterita he says, "I wonder mightily what sort of creature I should have turned out, if instead of the distracting and useless pain, I had the joy of approved love, and the untellable, incalculable motive of its sympathy and praise. It seems to me that such things are not allowed in this world. The men capable of the highest imaginative passion are always tossed on fiery waves by it." To his ineffable pain he himself had been long tossed on these fiery waves, and yet has it not proved to be to the deep pleasure of the world? For we can only give what we feel, and because Ruskin had been stirred to the depths of his nature by his passion for Rose La Touche he gave more to the world than otherwise he could have given. Mill sorrowed for the loss of his wife, and out of his sorrow there came that emotional blend with reason which profoundly moved his readers. On the other hand, because Spencer never felt deeply he was unable to communicate any deep feeling to

others. The Icelandic proverb is true. "What a happy

world it is, and how happy it is for the sorrow in it." Sorrow

with his shovel mines the heart. But he is surely a cunning

workman. He deepens the channels whereby happiness

may enter, and hollows out new chambers for joy to abide

in, when he is gone.

The influence of Carlyle is plain in the pages of Fors

Clavigera, and in it he notably follows the exhortations of

Past and Present. If he follows them, he follows them with

a difference. The master's work was generally destructive,

seldom constructive. The disciple's was both destructive

and constructive. The work of destruction is visible in

the criticism of the nineteenth century which colours the

whole book. Material progress had been acclaimed by the

Victorians, and Ruskin asks, What is it really worth?

The submarine cable had been acclaimed as a triumph

of mechanical skill, but Ruskin asks, What messages does

it convey? Similarly, the extension of the railway system

had been acclaimed. Ruskin demands, Is it any real

advantage that "every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell

in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell in Buxton"?

On the constructive side the old remedies of trade guilds,

a State Church, and a paternal government are urged, and

urged with a vehemence which betrays signs of the emotional

crisis through which he had been passing. The tyranny of

capital, we gather, is the old sin of usury. Why does not

Bishop Fraser denounce it? The commercialist spirit is

rampant. Why does not his clergy denounce it? Past

and Present had shown what Church and State did execute

in the Middle Ages. Why do not Church and State execute

something—or somebody—now?

The spirit of construction is present in Fors Clavigera:

so too is the spirit of destruction. Carlyle was pleased,

and in 1871 he wrote:-

'Dear Ruskin,

This 'Fors Clavigera' Letter 5th, which I have just finished reading,

is incomparable; a quasi-sacred consolation to me, which almost

brings tears into my eyes! Every word of it is as spoken, not out

of my poor heart only, but out of the eternal skies; words winged

with Empyrean wisdom, piercing as lightning,—and which I really

184 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

do not remember to have heard the like of. Continue, while you

have utterance in you, to give them voice They will find and force

entrance into human hearts, wheresoever the 'angle of incidence' may

be, that is to say, whether for the degraded and inhuman Block-headism we, so-called 'men have mostly now become, you come in

upon them at the broadside, at the top, or even at the bottom Euge,

Euge—Yours ever,

T Carlyle."

Fors Clavigera bore witness to constructive work when it

recorded the doings of the St. George's Guild. It was

composed of holy and humble men of heart who were to

reclaim land for food production. Floods were to be averted

and fens to be drained. The landlords were to be "men of

independent fortune, deroting gifts and ingenuity to the

service of the Guild, and owing their lordship to the fact

that they could work as much better than their labourers

as a good knight than his soldiers." The labourers were to

be "young people bred on old estates"; the commandants

over them, "veteran soldiers"; for Ruskin had "observed

constantly in historical readings the beneficence of strict

military order in peace, and the justice, sense, and kindness

of good officers acting unrestrictedly in civil capacities."

Rents were to be fixed, and for the most part they would

return to the land in the shape of improvements. The

Master was to govern the Guild with supreme and dictatorial

powers. Under him were the Marshals, officers over great

districts. Next to them came the Landlords. Under them

came the Comites Ministrantes, Companions of the Guild

who spent themselves in public service. Under them came

the Comites Militantes, Companions of the rank and file,

working as land-agents, tenant farmers, hired labourers,

or tradesmen. Last of all came the Comites Consilii,

companions pledged to St. George's Vow and giving tenths

of their income to the Guild, but living their own lives and

not resident on St. George's lands. Dress in all classes

would be determined by the rank in which each lived.

There would be no idle rich, no oppressed poor. Luxury

would be realised, but it would be luxury for all. Landladies

would wear beautiful clothes, and peasant women would

carry their wealth in gold and silver ornaments for their

hair. There would be model schools and museums on

every estate, and each cottage would have its Shepherd's

library and pictures, selected for it by the Master. In fact,

the Golden Age was to return, and under St. George's Guild

our country would once more become the Merrie England

it had long ceased to be.

Such was the dream. An Owen might have put some of it

into operation in a New Coniston, but Ruskin's gifts did not

allow him to turn the ideal into the real. The scheme

dwindled into a few Companions with some cottages in

Wales, twenty acres of partly cleared woodland in

Worcestershire, a few bleak acres in Yorkshire, and a single

museum. Rose La Touche had passed away in 1875, and

as the dream of his own happiness faded away, he also

began to perceive that the prospects of his Guild were also

fading away. His reason for a time gave way, and at this

we do not greatly wonder. The sense of failure and of

disappointed hopes, privately and publicly, weighed heavily

upon him. What made him mad, he used to say in late

years, was not his work, but the feeling that nothing came

of it. Moses is not the only man to stand on Mount Pisgah

to see the promised land with his eyes and to feel that he is

not destined to cross over to possess it. The days of allot-

ments, afforestation, small holdings, industrial villages,

and garden cities was not as yet, but who shall say how

much the vision of St. George's Guild contributed to their

realisation? Browning is right. There shall never be one

lost good. There is pathos in the story of his courtship

of Rose La Touche. There is also pathos in the feeling

that he was never to know how deeply his message had

taken root in the land he loved with such devotion. He

has lifted the art and the architecture of England to a higher

level. He has opened our eyes to the divine loveliness of

the world of nature, and has taught us anew that beauty

leads up to God. The wreath of the village tailor bore the

words, "There was a man sent from God, and his name

was John." He has spoken to us, as George Eliot testified,

with the inspiration of the old Hebrew prophets, and his

burning words have quickened the national conscience to

a new sense of duty and justice to all. His Sursum corda

has not been uttered in vain.

136 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Tolstoi regarded Ruskin as the greatest Englishman of

his time, and there is a singular parallelism between the

two men. They were prophets with a message for the

nineteenth century, and, like the prophets of old, their

message was an agony to them. The Puritanism of their

character is evident to all, though there is an asceticism in

Tolstoi never to be found in Ruskin. They lived to a great

age, and ended in the gloom of hopes shattered in private

and in public. Their writings are full of details, which

if related by anyone else would seem tedious or absurd,

but which as they tell them, have an inexplicable significance

working upon our minds like the great passions and events

of tragic poetry and by a process which, if it is slower, is

surer. They are constantly moved to emotion by the

details of life, and this emotion is never sentimental. Neither

Tolstoi nor Ruskin forces it for the purposes of his art;

he does not affect any preternatural sensibility or sagacity.

Neither attempts to conceal his prejudices; and though they

may interrupt the narrative for a time, they do not pervert

it. Both were at times prone to colour their verdict on

books by their opinion of authors. Both acted on the

maxim “Nulla dies sine linea,” and recorded in common-

place books not only events and conversations, but also

resolutions and prayers. Both used to crystallise reflection

by pithy and pointed sentences. Both boasted considerable

self-confidence in matters where they were not always

more competent than those to whom they honestly dictated.

The Philistines could quarrel with each on the ground of

eccentricity. Each owned no immunity from crotchets,

and their teaching has thereby lost the full strength of its

appeal. There are in Tolstoi’s War and Peace and Anna

Karenin a dislike of doctors and philosophers, and an

absurd, though fashionable, theory of Napoleon’s career.

But these are not more prominent than the prejudices to

be found in the works of other great writers, as, for instance,

Milton; and with Tolstoi and Ruskin they are, on the whole,

harmless because they are isolated and do not affect the

judgments pronounced on the great mass of mankind or

their sympathy with them.

The message of the two writers came home to men partly

through its truth and partly through the circumstance

that they were consummate artists in language. Tolstoi

hated and despised art, and Ruskin experienced its repulsion

as well as its attraction, realising to the full the opposition

between art and Puritanism which is one of the permanent

antinomies of life. Swinburne has said that there is no

possible truce between art and Puritanism; and Tolstoi's

later life seems to prove that he is right. For Tolstoi

was the greatest of modern Puritans, and by his Puritan

standard he condemned War and Peace and Anna Karenin.

Yet both men maintained that art ought not to be a thing

apart: it was an essential factor in the life of all. Their

writings are voluminous because, like all prophets, they

delivered their message because necessity was laid on them.

Both came to think little of literature in comparison with

preaching. They alike advocated the gospel of labour by

their example as well as by their precept. They seem to have

experienced life with the calm of a philosopher as well as

with the sensibility of a poet. Their knowledge of all

kinds of affairs is immense, and they never display it as if

they had acquired it for the purposes of their art. Their

sense of brotherhood impelled them to reject commercial

competition and profit-seeking as destructive of the true

spirit of the workman. They inevitably leant to the country

and its freer life rather than to the town with its machine-

made civilisation. The cry, Back to Nature, is common to

both, and both were, consciously and unconsciously, deeply

stired by the influence of Rousseau.

Tolstoi and Ruskin conceived that it was the duty of

man to do the best he can, though Ruskin feels that it is

scarcely our lot to try to do what we cannot. There is a

moral obligation on all moral teachers to discover the best

that man can do, not to set impossibilities before him, and

to tell him that, if he does not follow them, he is damned.

For impossibilities, because they are impossibilities, are

wrong. Our problem is not to discover what we ought to

do if we were different, but what we ought to do, being

what we are. There is no end to the beings we can imagine

different from ourselves; but they do not exist, and there-

fore we cannot assume that they would be better than we

138 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

are if they did exist. With them we have to assume a

whole reality that is not; and that reality, since it is a

figment of our minds, would probably be inferior to the

reality that is. For there is this to be said in favour of

reality: that we have nothing to compare it with. Our

phantasies are always incomplete, because they are phan-

tasies; and reality is complete. We cannot compare their

incompleteness with its completeness. So the beings we

imagine different from ourselves are incomplete. The

Bolshevists perhaps have tried to be the beings that Tolstoi

imagined; but they remain in reality as it is, and they

cannot, in that reality, perform the impossibilities that he

demanded of them.

The resemblances between Tolstoi and Ruskin are striking,

but so too are the differences. Tolstoi never saw that

government and all institutions are not impositions but

growths, except where one nation conquers and tyrannises

over another. Ruskin saw this. There may be, and

always is, evil in government and institutions; but it is

not the evil only of a few governors; it is not the result of

a conspiracy; it is the evil of a whole society expressing

itself in institutions or in the working of them. The

Russian Government was corrupt because corruption is a

vice of the Russians, not because it was government. In

Russia the natural man is corrupt, not merely the unnatural

rulers; and so it is with the vices of government everywhere,

as Ruskin noted. Where they persist, it is because the

people consent to them, not because government in itself

is evil. The evil remains when the government is removed.

As you read Tolstoi and Ruskin you feel that life is not

to be judged by its pleasures or pains, nor by any ordinary

standard of failure or success. It has some unseen goal,

and men are moved by some unknown force towards it,

and by inexplicable passions when they think of it. Though

the Russian and the Scotsman cannot tell us what this

goal is or the force that draws us towards it, yet each

writer is constantly and steadily aware of both. It is the

peculiarity of their genius that they combine this mystical

consciousness of what life desires to be with a vast curiosity

and knowledge of what it is. Mystics are apt to be

impatient of the routine of life, of everything in which the

purpose of life, as they conceive it, is not clear and strong.

Yet Tolstoi and Ruskin have sought for that purpose with

a scientific ardour and patience, not only in their own mind

or in the noblest works of God and actions of men, but also

in all that men do when they seem to be the slaves of

circumstance and of their own habits, errors, and appetites.

The great tragic poets show us the glory of life triumphing

even in death. Tolstoi and Ruskin do what is even harder

and more comforting. They show us the glory of life

triumphing in the midst of its own failures and squalor

and wearisome routine. If they bring knowledge to the

world, they also bring the world to knowledge.

Men grow and change with experience, and the greatest

never cease growing and changing. But with all growth

there is some decay and loss. We know truths when we

are young that we lose in middle age; for the change of

experience, as it forces new truths upon the mind, obliterates

old ones from it. And the keener this experience the more

complete is this process. Did any men that ever lived

experience more keenly than Tolstoi and Ruskin? We

know from the story of their lives that the events of the

mind were to them like battles; and they always threw

the whole force of their will and intellect into them. For a

long time they seem to have lived almost blindly, turning

eagerly from one experience to another, trying one kind

of life after another like a child in its make-believe. Yet

it was never make-believe for them, for there was in them

the unconscious principle which made them determined to

experience all things before they came to their own con-

clusion upon life. And so each of their experiences possessed

a cumulative power, and they profited by them all. As

with the greatest so with the least of men--each goes his

own narrow way, however vociferous of applause or of

contempt the phantom spectators of this world may be;

however urgent the viewless witnesses of another. A man

takes up his candle, and in its clear but baflling light must

push his way through the darkness of life's corridor past

every hindrance, stopping his ears as best he can against

fear and the conflicting voices, towards the glimmer of the

140 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

window at the far end, only to stand at last confronting

in the dark glass, against the deeper darkness of the night

without, his own weary and haunted face; bravely aware

that even the candle that has been his guide and comrade

must be extinguished before he can see beyond--so, out of

their courage and sacrifice, stand the figures of Tolstoi

and Ruskin.

References

Bardoux, K. Le Mouvement idéaliste et social dans la Littérature anglaise au XIXe Siècle. John Ruskin. (Paris, 1900.)

Benson, A. C. Ruskin·A Study in Personality. (London, 1911 )

Bosanguet, B. The History of Aesthetic (London, 1892.)

Broicher, C. John Ruskin u sein Werk. (Leipzig, 1907.)

Brunhes, J. Ruskin et la Bible. (Paris, 1901.)

Burne-Jones, Lady Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. (London, 1904.)

Chevrillon, A Nouvelles Etudes Anglaises. (Paris, 1910.)

Collingwood, W. G. The Life and Work of John Ruskin. (London, 1900 )

Cook, Sir E. T. Studies in Ruskin. (Orpington, 1890 )

Cook, Sir E. T. The Life of Ruskin. (London, 1911.)

Cook, Sir E. T. Literary Recreations. (London, 1918.)

Froude, J. A. Carlyle. History of his Life in London (1834-81). (London, 1884.)

Geddes, P. John Ruskin, Economist. (Edinburgh, 1884 )

Harrison, F. Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and other Literary Estimates. (London, 1899.)

Harrison, F. John Ruskin. (London, 1902.)

Herkner, H. Ruskin, als Sozialreformer. (Berlin, 1900.)

Hobson, J. A. John Ruskin, Social Reformer. (London, 1898.)

Hunt, Holman. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. (London, 1905.)

Kitchin, G. W. Ruskin in Oxford and other Studies. (London, 1904.)

Mackail, J. W. Life of William Morris. (London, 1899.)

Maitland, F. W. Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. (London, 1906.)

Maurois, A. Etudes anglais (Ruskin and Walde). (Paris, 1927.)

Maurois, A. Quatre études anglais, de Ruskin à Wilde. (Paris, 1927.)

Meynell, Mrs. John Ruskin. (London, 1900.)

Milsand, J. L'esthétique anglais. (Paris, 1864.)

Ritchie, Mrs. Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning. (London, 1892.)

Robertson, J. M. Modern Humanists. (London, 1895.)

Sizeranne, R. de la. Ruskin et la Religion de la Beauté. (Paris, 1897.)

REFERENCES

141

Smart, W. John Ruskin. His Life and Works. (Manchester, 1880 )

Spielmann, M. H. John Ruskin. (London, 1900.)

Walston, Sir C. The Work of Ruskin. (London, 1894.)

Whitehouse, J. H., Ed. Ruskin Centenary Addresses. (Oxford, 1919.)

Whitehouse, J. H., Ed. Ruskin the Prophet, and other Centenary Studies (London, 1920 )

Williams-Ellis, A. The Tragedy of John Ruskin. (London, 1928.)

Chapter IV.

MATTHEW ARNOLD THE POET-CRITIC

Thomas Arnold is known to ail the world through Dean Stanley's penetrating biography and through Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days. Mr. Lytton Strachey has immortalised the bands and the gown and the "slightly puzzled look" of the headmaster. He has sketched the career of the teacher with inimitable irony, and yet does he explain how the curious being he describes moved his generation? A man's influence is not so lightly divorced from his personality as Mr. Strachey imagines.

The root interest in all the Arnolds lies in religion which was destined to wear in the second and third generations widely differing forms. Mrs. Humphry Ward was a granddaughter, and her Robert Elsmere differs from The Case of Richard Meynell almost as much as Thomas Arnold differed from his sons Matthew and Thomas. Thomas Arnold, senior, and Matthew were schoolmasters in different fashions. In the father the theologian and the historian ascended the pulpit, in the son the poet and the critic. Perhaps the son did not exhibit the solemnity and the energy of the father. Nor was the message they delivered precisely the same, though if we allow for the Zeitgeist we wonder if the difference between what the father spoke to his age is so very different from what the son spoke to his. In their earnestness, and in their essential Puritanism there is no marked difference. They displayed a perception of beauty rare everywhere, though of course less so since Ruskin's day. They loved nature and they loved travel. They were full of as strong sympathy for all that was lovely and of good report in our modern social movements and of as strong "antipathy to all that was unlovely and of evil report. No doubt the son showed more sweetness and light, more Hellenic intelligence, the father more fire and strength, more Hebraic zeal. The son cared more for the weal of the middle classes: witness his attacks on them delivered in the spirit of "faithful are the wounds of a friend." The father cared more for the weal of the working classes: witness his

Arnoldian Confidence

143

attitude of horror to the outcome of the Industrial Revolution. With ruffled—and unruffled—courage they faced difficulty after difficulty hindering the delivery of the message laid on them to convey to their countrymen. They did valiant battle in the cause they felt to be right with their whole heart and soul, and the father, if not the son, would have cheerfully gone to the stake for the opinions headvanced with such fearlessness.

Thomas Arnold and Matthew stood aloof from the Oxford Movement which the former viewed with undisguised hostility. They insisted on the value of the connexion between Church and State, which, in divers fashions, meant so much to them. It is the function of Church and State, though from a different point of view, to be instruments and organs of this ideal. So thought the father and so thought the son. There may not, there must not, be any separation between them; the State needs for its moral ends the religion of the Gospel, and the Church can exercise its educating influence over the nation only within the constituted forms and regulations of the State, the Christian State. Father and son showed their countrymen the possibility of reading the Bible with honest human eyes freed from the discolouring glasses of dogmatic presuppositions. The latitudinarianism of Thomas Arnold gave as dire offence to his generation as that of Matthew gave to his. Pfleiderer regards the father as the pioneer of free theology in England, and the son in this respect undoubtedly continued the labour of his father.

The complete confidence that Thomas Arnold and Matthew showed in themselves is very remarkable, and it goes far to explain the power they wielded over their respective generations. Both were men of ideals rather than men of ideas. If the father shines most as a teacher, the son shines most as an interpreter. Both were amateurs, in the best sense of the term: the father was an amateur in history, the son in theology. Yet Matthew Arnold is in thorough agreement with Adolf Deissmann of our generation when he pleads in his generation that the letters of St. Paul should be read like the papyri unearthed in Egypt by Grenfell and Hunt. Josiah Wedgwood used to wander through his pottery, demolishing with his cane all the creations which

revealed the slightest flaw. So Thomas Arnold and Matthew wandered through the literary and historical, the theological and political, creations of their respective generations, demolishing with their powerful pens the faulty creations they encountered.

As educationalists father and son believed with keen conviction in the classics as the groundwork of a liberal education, though of course the classics were not to be taught in a wooden and mechanical fashion. Both were humanists in the Renaissance meaning of the term when education meant the drawing forth the whole powers of a boy or a man.

To the father in his school at Rugby the boy is a moral being and the school a human society, and the teaching is to train the intelligence and inform the mind and, above all, to touch the springs of character. To the son as an inspector of schools or as a publicist the citizen is a moral being and his country a human society, and the teaching is to train the intelligence and inform the mind and, above all, to touch the springs of character.

Trust the boy, was the watchword of the one. Trust the citizen, was the watchword of the other. Liberalism in politics is common to both, though their Liberalism was almost as moderate as that of Ruskin himself. In truth, Matthew Arnold and his father were prophets every whit as much as Tolstoi or Ruskin, men whose missions were to interpret the higher possibilities, responsibilities, and duties of the life of the school and the life of the city respectively.

Father and son grasped truth which subtler men missed through their sheer honesty and singleness of heart and mind, through their sheer impatience and imprudence. They evinced a deep-seated belief in a power that makes for righteousness, and with it they also evinced a sincere appreciation of piety.

The son recognised the beauties of Bishop Wilson's Sacra Privata and St. Thomas à Kempis's Imitatio Christi just as warmly as his father. Both were absolutely convinced that the world cannot live on physical science only, important as it undoubtedly is, and that it needs other knowledge besides that of inductive science, and that as a condition thereof it must have religion.

True, the religion of the son—or rather the theology—differed

seriously from that of the father, though we require to bear

in mind the two very different generations in which their

lot was cast. If Matthew Arnold had professed the theology

of his father, it would have been cant. Henry Drummond

was once asked to define cant, and he did so. “ There is a

religion for a young man and there is a religion for an old

man. If the young man professes the religion of the old

man, that's cant.” If the son professes the theology of the

father, that's also cant. The theology of Thomas Arnold

and his son differed: their religion was closely alike. Their

enthusiasm for reform in Church and State does not assume

a popular form.

With both the first question is, How of

your own temper? Is it serene, under complete control?

How of your judgment? Is it capable of right decision?

Is there no lurking desire or bias which hampers its con-

cision and precision? Lying behind all the questions which

Thomas and Matthew Arnold raise, we feel conscious of the

Weltschmerz, the world pain, which broods over their writ-

ings, and is apparent in the deepest mind of both. They

feel this Weltschmerz not cautiously and conservatively but

acutely and even audaciously. Right stoically they bore

their own pain and their own disappointment, but they were

no Stoics where the pain of the world was concerned. We

cannot think better or more truly of the two men than

Matthew Arnold has himself taught us to think of the high-

hearted Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, with whose inner life

he has so much in common. “ We see him just, wise, self-

governed, tender, thankful, blameless, yet with all this

agitated, stretching out his hands to something beyond—

Tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore.

Matthew Arnold (1822–88) was the eldest son of his father,

Thomas Arnold, senior. Thomas Arnold, the father of

Mrs. Humphry Ward, was a younger brother of Matthew.

As he quaintly called himself, Matthew was his “papa's

continuator.” He was not only the son of his father, but

he was also the godson of his father's friend, the author of

The Christian Year. Matthew migrated with his family to

Rugby in 1828 on his father's appointment as headmaster

of the school. His mother was a woman of remarkable

character and of no less remarkable intellect, with whom

146 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Matthew kept up to the day of her death both a sympathetic and affectionate correspondence. In 1830 he returned to his birthplace, Laleham, near Staines, where he was the pupil of his paternal uncle, the Rev. John Buckland. His father was a Wykehamist who entertained a high belief in his old school, and accordingly he sent Matthew to Winchester in August, 1836. Dr Arnold thought "a period at Winchester would do his boys no harm"; and he sent "Mat" and "Tom" to be under Dr. Moberley. In that transparently sincere narrative, Passages in a Wandering Life, Tom affords us glimpses of his brother's boyhood. "Mat," he says—and it is quite in keeping with this after life—"always talked freely," and once, when at breakfast with the headmaster, spoke, in the presence of another bigger and stronger boy, of his form-work as being rather easy. The result was that Dr. Moberley increased its amount, and the sequel to this was that the other boy and his companions naturally "took it out" of Mat after school. At the same time, he distinguished himself by gaining the Queen's Medal—it was the year of her accession—for a recitation, and he chose Byron, his favourite poet, the favourite of most youthful poets of that time. As a boy at Winchester he used to visit Keble at Hursley.

In August, 1837, Matthew was removed from Winchester to Rugby, where he lived in his father's house, and lived at the most strenuous and stimulating school of the day. According to Dean Stanley, Arnold was "the elder brother and playfellow of his children." Matthew, devoted as he was to his father, rather viewed him in the light of a good man intent upon the salvation of others. In Rugby Chapel the son so regards his father:

If, in the paths of the world, Stones might have wounded thy feet, Toil or dejection have tried Thy spirit, of that we saw Nothing; To us thou were still Cheerful, and helpful, and firm. Therefore to thee it was given Many to save with thyself; And, at the end of thy day, O faithful shepherd! to come, Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.

Arnold's Set

147

Arnold remained attached to his father, and when he passed away in 1842 this devotion by no means ceased. For just as in the days of her widowhood Queen Victoria tried everything by what Prince Albert would have thought, so Matthew dwelt upon what his father would have thought of things if he had been alive. His father read but one poem of his, Alaric at Rome, which he recited in Rugby School in June, 1840. The motto from Childe Harold prepared the reader for its Byronic character.

In 1840 he won an open scholarship at Balliol, and in 1841 a school exhibition. Oxford was then in the throes of the Oxford Movement which influenced Mark Pattison and J. A. Froude deeply, and left Arnold and Kingsley unmoved. Tennyson's set at Trinity, Cambridge, is ever memorable in In Memoriam, and yet the Balliol set of Arnold's day is not unworthy of comparison. Among them were E. M. Goulburn, Stafford Northcote, A. H. Clough, Frederick Temple, J. D. Coleridge, James Riddell, Edwin Palmer, Theodore Walrond, F. T. Palgrave, William Sellar, Henry Smith, and Alexander Grant. The bidding prayer asks for "persons qualified to serve God in Church and State," and surely they were to be found on this bead-roll. Of Dr. Arnold's old pupils at Balliol, Stanley had become a Fellow of University and Clough a Fellow of Oriel. Among Arnold's inner circle of friends were J. D. Coleridge, afterwards Lord Chief Justice of England, and J. C. Shairp, afterwards Principal of the United College, St. Andrew's. The vignette portrait of Arnold by the latter is well known:

So full of power, yet blithe and debonnair, Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay, Or, half a dream, chaunting with jaunty air Great words of Goethe, catch of Béranger: We see the banter sparkle in his prose, But knew not then the undertone that flows, So calmly sad, thro' all his stately lay.

One who knew him well wrote of him: "His perfect self-possession, the sallies of his ready wit, the humorous turn which he could give to any subject he handled, his gaiety, exuberance, versatility, audacity, and unfailing command of words, made him one of the most popular and successful

148 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

undergraduates that Oxford has ever known." His brother

Tom, who went up to Oxford in the autumn of 1841, gives a

similar account, and we remember that for the next three

years the brothers were together. "During these years,"

writes Tom, "my brother was cultivating his poetic gift

carefully, but his exuberant versatile nature claimed other

satisfactions. His keen bantering talk made him something

of a social lion among Oxford men; he even began to dress

fashionably. Goethe displaced Byron in his political

allegiance; the transcendental spells of Emerson wove them-

selves around him; the charm of an exquisite style made him

and long kept him a votary of George Sand."

Oxford left indelible traces on the mental nature of Newman

and Gladstone, of Thomas Arnold and Matthew. To the

latter she was ever dear as the "home of lost causes, and

forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible

loyalties." His was the Oxford of William Turner's paint-

ings and Ingram's views. No mean suburbs interposed

between him and the country all around the city of the

dreaming spires, and his passion for it finds free expression in

The Scholar Gypsy and in Thyrsis. In 1885 he wrote: "I

got out to Hinksey and up to the hill within sight of the

Cumnor firs. I cannot describe the effect which this land-

scape always has upon me: the hillside with its valleys, and

Oxford in the great Thames valley below." Until the

nineteenth century Oxford had produced few poets, but in

the last half of the century she is really rich. As Tennyson

won the chancellor's medal for English verse with Timbuctoo,

so Arnold won the Newdigate with a poem on Cromwell. He

belonged to "The Decade," a small debating society, where, as

Coleridge tells us, they "fought to the stumps of their

intellects." A poet, a debater, a social personage, Arnold

neglected the schools. Like his friend Clough, he took in

1844 but a second class at the final examination for Classical

Honours. The next year he more than redeemed his failure

by winning a Fellowship of Oriel, where just thirty years

before his father had been a Fellow. Among his colleagues

at Oriel were Church and Burgon, Fraser and Buckle, Earle

and Clough.

Arnold returned to Rugby, and taught classics to the fifth

form. His father's successor was Tait and Tait's successor was,

after Benson, to be Temple. The last two became Archbishops

of Canterbury, and who can say what fate held in store for

Thomas Arnold had he lived? He was forty-six only when

he died. Many years afterwards, at a dinner given at Balliol,

Matthew Arnold, with characteristic irony and urbanity, con-

trasted Tait and himself as types of the Balliol man who had

succeeded and the Balliol man who had failed in life. Be

that as it may, Arnold began at Rugby his long connection

with education, which only ceased in 1886, two years before his

death. He loved nature, whether at Rugby or Laleham,

and loved her with a devotion akin to Wordsworth's. In

1848 he wrote to his mother: "It was nearly dark when I left

the Weybridge Station, but I could make out the wide sheet

of the grey Thames gleaming through the general dusk as I

came out on Chertsey Bridge. I never go along that

shelving gravelly road up towards Laleham without interest,

from Chertsey Lock to the turn where the drunken man lay.

To-day, after Morning church, I went up to Pentonhook,

and passed the stream with the old volume, width, shine,

rapid fulness, 'kempshott' and swans, unchanged and un-

equalled, to my partial and remembering eyes at least."

Though a poor shot he liked shooting. "Need I say that I

am passionately fond of the Colchian bird," he writes in one

of his letters.

Much can be said on behalf of patronage, at least when

bestowed by a man so discerning as Lord Lansdowne. He

had introduced Macaulay to the House of Commons, and he

also introduced Arnold to public life. In 1847 he was Lord

President of the Council, and he appointed Arnold his private

secretary. The effects of the year 1848, the year of re-

volutions, is apparent in the first of Arnold's sonnets, addressed

To the Hungarian Nation. In England he sees the riots of

March, 1848, and is convinced that "the hour of the hereditary

peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has

struck," and thinks that a five years' continuance of these

institutions is "long enough, certainly, for patience, already

at death's door, to have to die in." He pities "the armies

of the homeless and unfed," though he resents the "hot,

dizzy trash which people are talking" about the Revolution.

150 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

England is "not liveable-in," yet will a Government of the Chartists usher in the millennium? Abroad he is as convinced in 1848 as he was all his life that "the French are the most civilised of European peoples," a view which his high opinion of Renan and Sainte-Beuve steadily strengthened. The fall of the French monarchy is likely to produce social changes with us, for "no one looks on, seeing his neighbour mending, without asking himself if he cannot mend in the same way." He notes "a wave of more than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing to break over us." The thoughts of a young man are long thoughts, and these are the thoughts of Matthew Arnold at twenty-five. The first interest of Tennyson is England while Arnold's and Browning's is the whole world, though Arnold was more European than Browning.

Browning is convinced that apparent failure is never more than apparent: his optimism sustains him amid the difficulties and the disappointments of the world. Arnold feels the sense of a thwarting destiny. He follows nature as Wordsworth follows her, and he loves, as the Lake poet loves, her; yet he never feels the calm hopefulness that Wordsworth feels. In a note to Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyám a Persian tale is quoted. "A thirsty traveller dips his hand into a spring of water to drink from. By-and-by comes another who draws up and drinks from an earthen bowl, and then departs, leaving his bowl behind him. The first traveller takes it up for another draught, but is surprised to find that the same water which had tasted sweet from his own hand, tastes bitter from the earthen bowl. But a voice—from heaven, I think—tells him that the clay from which the bowl is made was once man; and, into whatever shape renewed, can never lose the bitter flavour of mortality." Such seems to be the attitude of Arnold. Nature tastes of human destiny; and in that destiny there is something akin to bitterness or at least melancholy.

Tennyson was to sing to men that nature sacrifices the individual to the type, and that an unfriendly environment can strangle the type. Does Arnold, except perhaps in the sonnet In Harmony with Nature, ever complain of her? There is no denunciation of her laws, which he is prepared

to accept without question. We have no rights against her,

though we have duties towards her and mankind. In

Bacon's spirit, we learn that if we conquer nature, we do so

by obeying her.

We mortals are no kings

For each of whom to sway

A new-made world up-springs,

Meant merely for his play;

No, we are strangers here; the world is from old.

He felt as few felt the Zeitgeist. When men tell the bead-

roll of Mill's disciples, they uncommonly omit his name,

yet it deserves inclusion. Arnold stood far away enough from

the French Revolution of 1789, though too close to that

of 1848, to look back upon it and its effects critically. It

had shattered the old world of privilege and inequality,

and what sort of new world had come into being? The

year 1789 had indeed shattered the old world hopelessly.

On the other hand, he did not stand far enough away to see

what was to be the nature of the new world which must

arise from its ruins. He was

Standing between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born.

Where was the power that promised to make all things new?

What delayed its coming? Arnold looked around him for

any force capable of reconstructing society. The age

just past had been powerful in destruction, powerless in

construction and creation. Macaulay was at ease in Zion

because of the material progress of the age. Browning

was convinced that "God's in His heaven," and therefore

"all's right with the world." Arnold was unable to share

the optimism of either the historian or the poet. The old

order has changed, but it has not, in spite of Tennyson,

given place to the new. Here lies the secret of Arnold's

melancholy, his loneliness.

His first volume of poems was The Strayed Reveller, and

other Poems (1849). Among the other pieces were that

great poem The Forsaken Merman, Mycerinus, To

a Gipsy Child, Resignation, and the sonnets To a

Friend, praising Homer, Epictetus, and Sophocles, and

Shakespeare. His first volume was a very remarkable

152 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

one, and yet the public was not in the least conscious of its appearance, and the discouraged author soon withdrew it from circulation.

In 1851 Lord Lansdowne appointed Arnold inspector of primary schools, a post he was to retain for thirty-five years. This appointment made possible his marriage to the girl he loved passionately, Frances Lucy Wightman.

A devoted son, he was a devoted husband and father, and his letters certainly prove that the sweetness and light he diffused abroad he also diffused in his own family circle.

The idol of his friends, he was also the idol of his family. He found his work sufficiently laborious, though we do well to remember that another Wordsworthian, F. W. H. Myers, deliberately chose to become an inspector on the ground that it afforded him the maximum of free time for private research and writing.

Myers, however, was appointed in 1872, and the intervening twenty-one years since Arnold's appointment had rendered the post distinctly less onerous. This is plain from the fact that Myers was able to take a house at Cambridge while Arnold could do nothing of the kind.

In his first general report for the year 1852 we learn that his district included Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Stafford, Salop, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick, Leicester, Rutland and Northants., Gloucester, Monmouth, all South Wales, most of North Wales, and some schools in the East and West Ridings.

Of course this amazing range is due to the fact that he inspected the schools of dissenters exclusively, for to 1870 the Anglican and Roman Catholic schools were excluded. Nor must we ignore the fact that for almost twenty years of his life the people he met most often were nonconformists.

In fact, he was obliged to frequent Salem Chapel, not Barchester Towers. On his resignation in 1886 he feelingly said: "Though I am a schoolmaster's son, I confess that school-teaching or school-inspecting is not the line of life I should naturally have chosen.

I adopted it in order to marry a lady who is here to-night, and who feels your kindness as warmly and gratefully as I do. My wife and I had a wandering life of it at first.

There were but three lay-inspectors for all England. My district went right across

Irksome Duties

153

from Pembroke Dock to Great Yarmouth. We had no home. One of our children was born in a lodging at Derby, with a workhouse, if I recollect aright, behind and a penitentiary in front. But the irksomeness of my new duties was what I felt most, and during the first year or so it was sometimes insupportable.

Once the feeling of irksomeness disappeared, he threw himself into his duties with chastened hopefulness. In January, 1879, he wrote, "I think I am gradually making an impression about public secondary education." The rate of progress was at a glacier's pace. "This reform interests me," he acknowledges, "as the first practicable of those great democratic reforms to which we must, I believe, one day come. And they call me a bad Liberal, or no Liberal at all!" In August, 1879, his mood is sober, for he feels obliged to own: "I more and more learn the extreme slowness of things, and that though we are all disposed to think that everything will change in our lifetime it will not. Perhaps we shall end our days in the tail of a return current of popular religion, both ritual and dogmatic. Still, the change, for being slower than we expected, is none the less sure."

Compare this with a letter he wrote to his sister in 1851: "The aimless and unsettled, but also open and liberal state of our youth we must perhaps all leave, and take refuge in our morality and character; but, with most of us, it is a melancholy passage, from which we emerge shorn of so many beams that we are almost tempted to quarrel with the law of nature which imposes it on us. I feel this in my own case, and in no respect more strongly than in my relations to all of you. I am by nature so very different from you, the worldly element enters so much more largely into my composition, that, as I become formed, there seems to grow a gulf between us which tends to widen till we can hardly hold any intercourse across it. But, as Thomas à Kempis recommended, frequenter tibi ipsi violentiam fac . . . so I intend not to give myself the rein in following my natural tendency, but to make war against it till it ceases to isolate me from you, and leaves me with the power to discern and adopt the good which you have and I have not." In his daily round through school after school he confessed that he

154 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

met men and women with duties and responsibilities,

private and public, at least as irksome as his own, and he

freely owned that their example helped him to check and

control his natural tendency.

Arnold was a man widely read in literature both modern

and ancient. He had the Bible as perfectly at his fingers'

ends as Ruskin himself. Throughout his life his "unap-

proachable favourites" were Sophocles and Homer, while

Hesiod was "a Greek friend to whom he turned with

excellent effect." He was familiar with English literature

and with all that was best in Italian, French, and German,

elevating Goethe to a lofty rank. His Note-Books attest the

width of his interests and the comfort they afforded him.

The study of classics and modern literature formed the

basis of the educational system he advocated, at any rate

for the public schools. Science and mathematics were

also to be studied, but he did not hesitate to avow his opinion

that "for the majority of mankind a little of mathematics

goes a very long way." What did it profit a boy to know

that "when a taper burns, the wax is converted into car-

bonic acid and water"? What did he not lose when he had

not read the last book of the Iliad, or the sixth book of the

Aeneid, or the Agamemnon? He listened with impatience

to the teachers who deduced our descent from "a hairy

quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably

arboreal in his habits." If a lad was really scientific in his

bent, by all means let him learn science; but for the majority

of boys he plainly believed that the classics and literature

were likely to confer more lasting benefit on them. His

mind comes out in a letter he wrote in 1868: "An admirable

English mathematician told me that he should never recover

the loss of the two years which after his degree he wasted

without fit instruction at an English University, when he

ought to have been under superior instruction, for which the

present University course in England makes no provision.

I dare say he will recover it, for a man of genius counts no

worthy effort too hard; but who can estimate the loss to the

mental training and intellectual habits of the country, from

the absence-so complete that it needs genius to be sensible

of it, and costs genius an effort to repair it-of all regular

THE SOLITUDE OF THE SOUL

155

pubic provision for the scientific study and teaching of any

branch of knowledge.'

In October, 1852, appeared Empedocles on Etna, and

other Poems, by "A," and its reception was as cold as that

of its predecessor. Arnold withdrew it from circulation be-

fore fifty copies had been sold. Among the other poems

were some of his best verse, including much of Switzerland

and Faded Leaves, A Summer Night, Stanzas in Memory

of the Author of "Obermann," and Memorial Verses.

In 1853 came the first series of his Poems and two years later

the second series. New Poems also appeared in 1867, and

with their appearance he ceased to write poetry. True, to

the end of his life he wrote occasional verse, but with the

exception of Westminster Abbey they did not add much

to his reputation. His 1849 and his 1852 volumes met with

a reception that saddens the heart, but with the later ones he

stepped into the proud position of being second only to one,

Tennyson. Gauss's motto in mathematics, pauca sed

matura, was his in poetry.

If solitude is required for the travail of the soul, assuredly

it is required for the expression of the muse. How could

Arnold have solitude in the midst of the bustle and confusion

of his incessant journeys across half England? No doubt

Scott and Southey secured it, but look at the price they

paid! If they are exceptions, they are the exceptions that

prove the rule. Besides, he was so much irritated by the

dissenters he met that tranquillity of mind was rarely possible

to him. His pessimism did not allow him to indulge in that

direct energy and that passionate fervour conspicuous in

Tennyson. Nor did his interests lie in the present to the

same extent as those of his great contemporary. He had

constant recourse to antiquity for subject and method. He

exalted Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, and Dido as

eternally interesting, asserting that the famous poems of the

nineteenth century "left the reader cold in comparison with

the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the

Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido." In the

preface to the poems of 1853 Arnold insists that poets must

seek their inspiration in the past, for action is the only theme

of poetry, and it is in the past alone that action is found.

156 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Art is objective; when this is forgotten, as it is by modern poets, all work is hopelessly vitiated. The choice of a good subject is indispensable, for without a worthy theme success is unattainable. That is to say, he establishes the rules of classic composition as the Medean laws of poetry for all times and all conditions; he ignores the differences between ancient Hellas and modern England, takes the classics for his masters, and, in deference to their decisions, consistently excludes Empedocles on Etna from his republished poems.

His conduct is magnificent, but is it war? The public thought it was not. Unmoved by the attitude of his readers-or rather of his want of readers-he solved the aesthetic, problem confronting him in the same fashion. He insisted that for the moral problem he required calm, patience, endurance, acceptance of fate, submission to the omnipotence of unrelenting law, and this is but to state the aesthetic problem in terms of the moral one. He was in not a few respects a Stoic, and Stoicism is a creed that requires attention.

The world has never been an easy place in which one discharges one's duty, yet there are times of special stress, and it is remarkable that if we glance at such seasons of stress as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the middle of the nineteenth century we find Stoicism re-emerging. These were all times when the religious sanctions of morality no longer exercised unquestioned authority. Stoicism then makes its due appeal to the autonomy of conscience, its peremptory command to live by law and to follow nature, and its exalted sense of duty. In what Renan calls its frénésie de renoncement, its resolute protest against self-indulgence and self-seeking, it endeavours to counteract the corroding effects of modern scepticism and cynicism in private and public life. True, in some of its aspects, it reflects the hopelessness and world-weariness which sees in modern progress only “an endless advance by endless effort, and, if need be, by endless pain.” The same pessimistic tendency sees in evolution nothing but a long series of cycles of death and revival, of endless mutations inconstant progression. Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe,

tout se refait. Yet, in strange contradiction with this, there

is the unalterable conviction too of a perfection in nature, of

harmonious development according to law, and of a wistful

outlook towards a distant goal.

At the Renaissance Montaigne reads Plutarch "since he

speaks French" (i.e. in Amyot's translation), and sees in

Seneca a kindred soul, "ondoyant et divers" like himself;

and he speaks of the works of these writers as "the prime

and cream of Philosophy." At the Reformation, as Lord

Acton reminds us, Erasmus esteemed Seneca more highly

than any Christian divine, saying of him, "If you read him

as a heathen, he wrote like a Christian; if you read him like

a Christian, he wrote like a heathen." Seneca was the

favourite reading of Zwingli and Calvin, and indeed the

first work of the latter is an edition of the De Clementia.

We all know that Leibniz accuses Spinoza of having revived

Stoicism in his ethics. From Stoicism Rousseau and "The

Saints of the Encyclopaedia" learnt their own glorification

of nature; and from it the leaders of the French Revolution

derive their stern severity in applying its principles to

political life. In the Prelude Wordsworth speaks like a

Stoic of "The calm existence that is mine When I am worthy

of myself!" thus exhibiting the continuity of its influence.

In its modern form Stoicism has become, to use Amiel's

expression, "the last resource of doubt," the evangel of

those who have lost their faith in the supernatural. There

is nothing of the libido moriendi of the old Stoicism. There

is no fear of final extinction, yet some would say with

Eléonore de Condé, "It is not for us to desert the garrison."

On these grounds Carlyle declined to commit suicide. J.

Addington Symonds, speaking of the need of a deep firm

faith to escape from the misery of scepticism, writes: "In

these difficulties I fall back on a kind of stoical mysticism—

on the prayer of Cleanthes, the proem of Goethe's 'Gott und

die Welt,' the phrase of Faust, 'Enibehren sollst du, sollst

entbehren,' the almost brutal optimism of Walt Whitman's 'I

cry to the Cosmos, Though thou slay me, yet will I trust in

thee.' Can a religion be constructed out of these elements?

Not a tangible one, perhaps; nothing communicable to

another heart. But a religious mood of mind may be

1.58 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

engendered for the purpose of living not ignobly." Symonds who died with a little volume of prayers, originally given him by his mother, by his side, had placed on his tombstone the epitaph, consisting of his own translation of the following lines from the hymn of Cleanthes:

Lead Thou me, God, Law, Reason, Motion, Life!

All names for Thee alike are vain and hollow.

Lead me, for I will follow without strife,

Or if I strive, still must I blindly follow!

A French writer living in the time of the Terror tells us that before that event he was repelled by the gloomy tone of Seneca's writings, but that he began to read him with much relish, as affording comfort during the worst days of revolutionary tyranny. In the same way F. W. H. Myers, in his essay on the disenchantment of France, written in 1888, quotes a passage from Bourget in which the latter refers to the class of savants whose stoical candour and personal virtue are beyond doubt, yet who express the utter hopelessness of science in its inability to answer the questionings of the mind, or to satisfy the cravings of the heart. He also points to Renan as a remarkable example of disenchanted optimism which can scarcely be distinguished from the pessimism of the ideologists, who, in the presence of the irresistible and irresponsible forces of nature, uncontrolled by a higher power, despair of finding a solution of the mystery of the universe. A few hours before his death Renan said to his wife: "Be calm and resigned; we undergo the laws of nature of which we are a manifestation. We perish, we disappear, but heaven and earth remain, and the march of time goes on for ever." Sainte-Beuve, Arnold's ideal critic, says of himself that on attaining what he had hoped in life, and as it approached its termination, "I sought to arrange my existence with quietness and dignity." His aim is to cultivate "a good healthy solidity," and with steady dutifulness to perform the necessary functions of existence, to face the facts of life fairly and fully.

Men seek for composure and ethical fortitude amid the restlessness of our existence. So seeks Arnold, and he expresses his quest in the following lines written in Kensington Gardens:

MODERN STOICISM

159

Calm soul of all things! make it mine

To feel, amid the city's jar,

That there abides a peace of thine

Man did not make, and cannot mar.

The will to neither strive nor cry,

The power to feel with others, give

Calm, calm me more! nor let me die

Before I have begun to live.

The paramount idea dominating him is the high sense of duty, an idea which the Stoics introduced into European ethics. Duty, the "stern daughter of the voice of God," is that which the modern poet of nature appeals to in order to calm "the weary strife of frail humanity." This duty is not imposed by authority from without, but is the following-up of the rational impulse of the mind in harmony with the cosmic order. It means the unreserved acknowledgment of the sovereignty of conscience. For self-subjection is a means to an end, and that end the attainment of moral freedom. Happiness consists in virtuous activity. Here modern Stoicism differs from ancient. Marcus Aurelius tendered the advice: "Spend your brief moment then according to nature's law, and serenely greet the journey's end, as the olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bear it, and giving thanks to the tree which gave it life." The Stoicism of our day demands a deeper sense of human solidarity and altruistic duty as distinguished from public beneficence. It asks for a higher conception of the dignity of labour, due to the change in the moral and social atmosphere wrought by Christianity. Stoic benevolence and Christian philanthropy join forces by an adaptation of Seneca's principle to modern needs, "Homo sacra res homini." Stoicism and Christianity endeavour to realise the ideal of Zeno who dreamt of a commonwealth where all shall be as one fold under one shepherd, "where men should not be separated by cities, states, and laws, but all should be considered as fellow-citizens, partakers of one life, and the whole world, like a united flock, should be governed by one common law."

The modern Stoic lays deep stress on self-development, but it is self-development for social ends, and this is quite clear in the teaching of Arnold. The individual is a member of

160 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

the social organism, so he would have held in common with Spencer, Maine, and Ruskin. He would have emphasised just as much as Ruskin that we live for others in order that we may live in others. The service of man stands out paramount. Yet surely A. Sabatier is right to ask the question, What does Christian law become without the sentiment of love, without the impulse of mercy, but a sort of moral Stoicism rigid and severe? Stoicism lacks the emotional motive which Christianity supplies, thereby melting and mellowing its harsher features. What F W. H. Myers says of Stoicism in his essay on Marcus Aurelius is true still, that it "prescribed the curbing and checking of those natural emotions which Christianity at once guided and intensified by her new ideal." Arnold himself has shown that the peculiar charm pervading the meditations of the Stoic Emperor consists in their being "suffused and softened by something of this very sentiment whence Christian morality draws its best power."

Stoic Arnold was and to his Stoicism we owe his devotion to duty and to the weal of others. This is as manifest in his poetry as in his prose. In his poetry there is hint after hint of his life of the soul, The Buried Life, which gives its name to one poem and makes its presence felt in so many others-the life which we enter into too seldom, without which

Each will have one anguish—his own soul which perishes of cold.

His poetry, then, told something; but it was not till after his sudden death when his daughter published his Note Books. that all who care may read his secret. There is a sonnet among his poems called Austerity of Poetry. It tells the story of Jacopone da Todi's bride, suddenly killed in all her springtime of beauty and splendour, and found to have worn, under the silks and satins, next her skin, a robe of sackcloth:

Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay, Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground Of thought and of austerity within.

Such was Arnold himself as revealed in his Note Books. In them, like other men, he recorded his engagements, and in them, unlike other men, he also recorded texts and sayings

which he wished to think about and remember. It is

characteristic of him, of the "outside" of him which always

remained "young, gay, radiant," that, as his daughter tells

us, he "used to say, half jokingly, that if anyone would

ever take the trouble to collect all the extracts from various

writers which he had copied in his notebooks, there would

be found a volume of priceless worth." For the most part

they relate to the inner life of the poet, the sonnet's "hidden

ground of thought and of austerity within." The man of

letters is evident in quotations of maxims of efficiency from

Turgot, of equality from Georges Sand, and of the saying of

Goethe, often repeated: "The act of producing is itself a

pleasure and its own reward." The man of religion, to our

surprise, is far more evident that the man of letters, and this

not occasionally but throughout the notebooks.

In the notebooks there is the coincidence that he had

written in the space given to the Sunday on which he died

April 15th, 1888, the text from Ecclesiasticus: "Weep bitterly

over the dead, as he is worthy, and then comfort thyself:

drive heaviness away: thou shalt not do him good, but hurt

thyself." For the Sunday after his burial he had quoted

another significant text from Ecclesiasticus: "When the

dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest; and be comforted

for him when his spirit is departed from him." The thought

of death, then, was with him, as it was with many Stoics.

What was far more often in his thoughts than death was

life and the difficulty of living it well and wisely for himself

and for others. He quotes repeatedly from the Bible,

and his quotations are some of the texts making most

demand upon man. With Schopenhauer he implicitly

compares and contrasts Stoicism with Christianity. Schopen-

hauer compares it with the teaching of Christ, "that noble

figure, containing the greatest poetic truth and depth of

meaning, standing before us in perfect virtue, holiness, and

loftiness, though at the same time under conditions of the

highest form of suffering." True, religion is morality

touched with emotion, but must not the emotion be founded

on a person? So Arnold seems to think in his Note Books, if

not in his other writings. In the notes in 1878, for instance,

we find nearly half of them are taken from the Bible or the

162 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

Imitatic Christi, and some of the rest from such writers as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Bishop Wilson.

There are sayings or ethical maxims from the Psalms or Proverbs, but the bulk of the quotations are not of this order. Some texts he repeats year after year, or several times a year, and among them are these. "If any man will come after Me let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me. How shall we that we are dead to sin live any longer therein? Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into His death?"

And the former of these two, perhaps the most often repeated of any, is headed The Secret. So he chooses time after time from the Imitatio Christi such texts as: "The more each of us dies to himself, the more he begins to live to God. . . . If we were more dead to ourselves and less involved in things of earth, we should be better able to taste things that are divine. . . . There is no other way to life and to true internal peace except the way of the Holy Cross and of daily dying."

It is clear that Arnold did not find it easy to live the Stoic life—who indeed does?—and that Christianity, conscious or unconscious, came to his assistance. On Good Friday he naturally examines himself even more severely. His note for Good Friday, 1868, is "By means of death for the redemption of the transgressors." Above it he placed this prayer from the Imitatio Christi: "Would that but for one day we could live well in this world!" He had not fled from the world, and he wanted to live well in it, and to live well meant the practice of Stoicism, but it meant a Stoicism suffused and softened by Christian morality.

The moral feelings of the poet as well as his intellectual instincts incline him to the classical school. From his father he had inherited his moral ardour and sterling honesty, the lofty didactic impulse which breathes an earnest, serious air through all his poetry and indeed through all his writings. In his views of life, of death, of necessity, of fate, of equanimity, of the relations of man with nature, he was in sympathy with the classical world rather than with modern conditions of existence. The Middle Ages attracted him,

for he thought that Tennyson had not done justice to them.

In a letter to Sir M. E. Grant Duff, to whom he wrote some

of his best letters, he acknowledges that "One is from time

to time seized and irresistibly carried along by a temptation

to handle political or religious or social matters directly;

but, after yielding to such a temptation, I always feel myself

recoiling again and disposed to touch them only so far as

they can be touched through poetry." Under the influence

of his Stoic Christianity he increasingly yielded to the

temptation, and the recoil became gradually less.

He thought Tennyson "deficient in intellectual power."

He thought that he himself had perhaps "less poetical

sentiment than Tennyson, less intellectual vigour and

abundance than Browning, but more of a fusion of the two

than either," and, above all, that he "had more regularly

applied that fusion to the main line of modern develop-

ment." The main line of development in the first half of the

Victorian age was certainly not to be found in Arnold, and

was equally certainly to be found in Tennyson. No poet

of that age was more sympathetic to the new outlook

created by evolution than Tennyson, and it is not too much

to say that Arnold held himself studiously aloof from science

and all that it meant to the mid-Victorians. He never

perceived that the epoch-making book of 1859-61 was not

Essays and Reviews, not even Renan's Vie de Jésus, but

Darwin's Origin of Species. Officially, as an inspector of

schools, Arnold recognised the due place of science, but

privately it occupied but a lowly position in his thoughts.

His Note Books betray the existence of religion, but they do

not betray the existence of science or record any contempla-

tion of its mysteries. Indeed he thought Lord Salisbury a

dangerous young man because he advocated the larger

introduction of Natural Science into Oxford.

A Cambridge man, Henry Sidgwick felt to the full the

changes made in the conception of the universe by a son of

his own University, Darwin. Sidgwick records his view of

In Memoriam, of "its unparalleled combination of intensity

of feeling with comprehension of view in dealing with the

deepest needs and perplexities of humanity." He proceeds

to inform us: "In the sixties I should say that these deeper

164 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

issues were somewhat obscured by the discussions on

Christian dogma, and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. One

may recall Browning's reference to this period—

The Essays and Reviews debate

Begins to tell on the public mind,

And Colenso's words have weight.

During those years we were absorbed in struggling for

freedom of thought in the trammels of an historical religion;

and perhaps what we sympathised with most in In Memoriam

at this time, apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of

'honest doubt,' and, generally, the forward movement of the

thought. Well, the years pass; the struggle with what

Carlyle used to call 'Hebrew Old Clothes' is over. Freedom

is won, and to what does Freedom bring us? It brings us

face to face with atheistic science; the faith in God and

Immortality, which we had been struggling to clear from

superstition, suddenly seems to be 'in the air'; and, in seeking

for a firm basis for this faith, we find ourselves in the midst

of the 'fight with death' which In Memoriam so power-

fully presents."

The "march of mind," the "steamship and the railway

and the thoughts that shake mankind," the "happy sails

that bear the Press," the "parliament of man, the federa-

tion of the world"—these are to be found in Locksley Hall,

The Princess, and the lines on the opening of the 1851

Exhibition, and Arnold passes them all by. Tennyson

strikes the note of Imperialism in a fashion that came home

more to men's hearts than any attempt of Carlyle had ever

done. If Arnold mentions the dominions overseas, it is to

speak of them as more the children of the Philistines than

his own folk at home. The extension of the franchise,

the emancipation of woman, the universal application of our

parliamentary system, free trade, a free press, and a free

Church in a free State, nationality, the unification of the

State—these are the burning topics of the day, and they

are the very topics that Arnold summarily dismisses. The

reaction against Liberalism was in full swing in the seven-

ties, and Arnold shared it, but so too did Tennyson, Ruskin,

and Dickens.

There are affinities between the poet's position and that of

Disraeli. Both of them were phrase-makers, and their

phrases caught the ear of the public. The resemblance

between them, however, cut much more deeply than that.

As Disraeli offered opposition to the Manchester school, so

did Arnold. As Disraeli offered opposition to the merely

material and mechanical advance of England, so did Arnold.

It finds expression in the famous apostrophe to England as

"the weary Titan" in the lines on Heine's Grave. There

is a passage in Sybil on the stock utilitarian argument of

"cheaper silk stockings" which is echoed in Culture and

Anarchy. The ideas of both on "pouvoir sans savoir,"

"natural rights," the proper position of the middle classes are

the same. Arnold's attitude to our aristocracy and the

lofty place he assigns to our monarchy are also the same as

the statesman's. Both bewail the ignorance of their country-

men. If Disraeli compares our golden youth with the Greeks

who read no books and lived chiefly in the open air, Arnold

compares them with "young barbarians all at play." To

Arnold "the world of ideas is the possible, the future," and

Disraeli went further and called ideas "divine." The need

in our midst of a "root" for such ideas Arnold ascribes

to "the want of flexibility of our race." Disraeli and Arnold

were sound Europeans, if not cosmopolitans, though the

latter leaned to the creed of Young England, as interpreted

by the former, more than is commonly realised, and indeed

much more so than Tennyson. Arnold and Disraeli recog-

nise as characteristic of the community British justice,

British honesty, British good humour. Yet Arnold is not

afraid to touch incidentally in his Irish essays, what Disraeli

emphasised throughout our foreign relations and our Irish

ones as well, on one of our grave shortcomings, our failure to

put ourselves in the place of alien races. The Englishman

on the whole lacks imagination, the power to visualise things

unseen, and what he does not see he does not feel. Why,

then, should others feel it? Under such a circumstance, he

thanks God that he is not even as this foreigner:

For it's greatly to his credit,

And he himself has said it,

That, in spite of all temptations

To belong to other nations,

He remains an Englishman.

166 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

The quality of insubricity is the last one we can attach to Arnold. His travels abroad gave him perhaps too high an impression of the worth of the foreigner as compared with his own countrymen. In 1858 he "thinks there cannot be a moment's doubt" that the French will beat the Prussians even far more completely than they are beating the Austrians.

Lord Cowley, our ambassador at Paris, "entirely shared" his conviction that "the French will always beat any number of Germans who come into the field against them, and never be beaten by any one but the English."

Arnold secured the first outstanding recognition of his poetry in his election by Convocation to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. He spoke to men with the conviction that he occupied a chair which proved for him to be a real cathedra. He had a pulpit and naturally he preached from it. He had published The Strayed Reveller, Empedocles, and the first and the second series of his Poems, and he was torn in two directions. Was he to deliver his message for the future in poetry or prose? Was he to be a critic of literature or was he to be a critic of politics and religion?

His classical interests and his Stoicism were pulling him in opposite directions. It is at least significant of the struggle that his first book, after his election to the chair of poetry, was on England and the Italian Question, which saw the light in 1859. It was published seven years before Prussia waged war with Austria and eleven years before she waged war with France, and in it Arnold records his impressions: "Prussia is a great power only in name . . . Prussia, with neither territory nor population enough for her support as a great military power, can only have a large efficient army at the expense of having her finances in ruin. She sensibly chooses to have her finances in prosperity. But her army, therefore, is a shadow. In her regular forces she has not a man who has served three full years. The majority of her landwehr are respectable married citizens, fathers of families.

To require such troops to repel a charge of Zouaves would be as reasonable as to make this demand of the Marylebone Vestry. French military men know this perfectly well. They speak with great respect of the Austrian army. 'C'est une belle armée,' they say of the Austrian army, 'mais elle est

THE GREAT CRITIC

167

malheureuse'; or the Prussian army they say, 'C'est une garde nationale.'" The motto on the title-page of this pamphlet

is from the Vulgate, Sed nondum est finis.--'But the end is not yet." The end was not in 1866 or in 1871 or even in

1919, and this pamphlet did contain the prophecy that Alsace must always be French.

Classical interests prevailed when he published in 1861 his three lectures On Translating Homer, and in them he lays

down luminously the general principles of translation. He overrates Clough as much as he underrates Pope whom he

dismisses with Bentley's scornful remark. The test to which he subjects a translation is to offer it to men who know

Greek and appreciate poetry, and he suggests such men as Dr. Hawtrey of Eton, Dr. Thompson of Trinity, and Mr.

Jowett of Balliol. Arnold believed as passionately as Tennyson or Gladstone, Lang or Bury, in the unity of

Homer, which Jebb finds incredible. The newer generation of critics, however, are finding this unity quite credible.

It certainly is a case where one is prepared to trust a poet like Tennyson rather than any critic, however eminent.

The two great series of Essays in Criticism appeared in 1865 and in 1868, and it is to these two volumes that their

author owes his real recognition with a wide audience. Between 1830 and 1860 there was a fine critical school in

France which included such men as Michelet and his friend Quinet, Gautier and Villemain, Merimée and Nisard, and,

above all, Sainte-Beuve. In England there had been Dryden's Essay on Dramatic Poesy, Johnson's Lives of the

Poets, and, best of all, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, not to speak of the work of Hazlitt and Lamb. At last a worthy

successor to them appeared, and showed an astonished generation what a great critic might accomplish for it. No

doubt he still tended to overrate foreign literature as compared with our own, He ranks French and German litera-

ture before our own in 1861 when France possessed only Victor Hugo and Germany not a single writer of the calibre

of Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray, Dickens and not a few others. He was even able to write in 1867

that "our only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the German" when there was not a single poet in the front rank

"

77

168 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

save Heine, and he was not a Christian but a Jew. Undoubtedly Arnold does not feel for a single instant that it's greatly to his credit that he remains an Englishman, for, so far as literature was concerned, he might have been a Frenchman or a Prussian.

The preface to the first series contains the moving address to Oxford: "Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" As Mark Pattison showed, the Oxford of 1865 was not so free from intellectual strife as in Arnold's undergraduate days. He asks the question to which he had his own answer ready: "And yet, steeped in sentiment, as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen."

Had Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin and Amiel been English, we should not have heard so much about them in the Essays in Criticism. In his essay on Heine Arnold first uses the word Philistine, which assumes so active a rôle in his philosophy. He praises Burke whose good fortune it has been to be as much praised by posterity as he was in his own day. The bent of Burke's conservatism is compatible with a hatred of injustice so strong that it has been his mission to bring equal comfort to Liberals as to Tories. Arnold gives us a spirited summary of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza's treatise on Church and State. The sympathy with Marcus Aurelius betrays at every turn the Stoicism that marked our critic. The Emperor remains, in Arnold's eyes, "the especial friend and comforter of all clear-headed and scrupulous, yet pure-hearted and upward-striving men, in those ages most especially that walk by sight, not by faith, and yet have no open vision; he cannot give such souls, perhaps, all they yearn for, but he gives them much; and what he gives them they can receive." The essayist brings out not a little of the persistent influence of Stoicism and its undiminished fascination for the noble-minded of any creed

THE POET TURNED POLITICIAN

169

or no creed, in almost every age or country of the civilised

world.

With the stress that modern Stoicism lays on duty and

especially on noblesse oblige, Arnold found himself in

increasing sympathy. When Browning asked him why

he wrote no more poetry, he replied that he could not

afford it. This may have been a reason, but there were

deeper ones. He met Disraeli, and he referred to Disraeli's

abandonment of literature for politics. "Yes," replied the

statesman, "one does not settle these things for one's self,

and politics and literature are both very attractive; still,

in the one, one's work lasts, and in the other it doesn't." He

went on to say that he had given up literature because he

was not one of those people who can do two things at once,

but that he admired most the men like Cicero, who could.

Arnold, like Disraeli, could not do two things at once, and he

turned from poetry to politics. Arnold once said of

Goethe:

He took the suffering human race,

He read each wound, each weakness clear,

And struck his finger on the place

And said, Thou ailest, here and here!

Our political physician allotted a similar rôle to himself, and

from the end of the sixties, like Ruskin at the beginning of

the sixties, he prescribed for the complaints he diagnosed.

To him "the citizens of a State, the members of a society,

are really 'a partnership,' as Burke nobly says, 'in all science,

in all art, in every virtue, in all perfection.' Towards this

great final design of their connexion, they apply the aids

which co-operative association can give them." His general

point of view is quite plain. He is as detached from the

pure party angle as Ruskin himself, though to both men

politics is a science at once "noble and true." Arnold no

doubt exalts it to a higher position than Ruskin can possibly

do. It is the chief of all sciences, "because it deals with this

question for the benefit of man not as an isolated creature,but

in that state 'without which,' as Burke says, 'man could not

by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his

nature is capable'—for the benefit of man in society.'

Man is a member of an organism, and his main need is that

170 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

the whole body of society should come to live with a life worthy to be called human, and corresponding to man's true aspirations and powers. This, the humanisation of man in society, is civilisation. The aim for all of us is to promote it, and to promote it is above all the aim for the true politician.

Not even Coleridge was a truer disciple of Burke than Arnold. Civilisation, he contended, is humanisation. But what is civilisation? Is it material and mechanical progress? Perish the thought! A society is civilised when its members live a humane, a moral, a cultured life. To him as to Burke the foundation of society is basically spiritual. Intellect and knowledge, conduct and beauty, social life and manners—all go towards the making of the citizen. "These are the means towards . . . civilisation; and the true politician, who wills the end, cannot but will the means also. And meanwhile, whether the politician wills them or not, there is an instinct pushing it to desire them and to tend to them, and making it dissatisfied when nothing is done for them, or when impediment and harm are offered to them; and this instinct we call the instinct of self-preservation."

Mankind is to advance to a fuller humanity, and, English-man as he is, Arnold is willing to allow that this advance can take place on widely differing lines. In ancient times the Hebrews and the Greeks pursued their own paths, and in modern times the French, the Germans, and the Italians pursued theirs. The Hebrews advanced along the line of religion, and laid almost exclusive stress on conduct; the Greeks advanced on the parallel lines of intellect, science, and beauty. The French advanced along the line of social life and manners; the Germans advanced on the power of knowledge; and the Italians on their aesthetic faculty. Now in throwing out these ideas Arnold acted as a far-reaching influence, and through his principles he stirred up society to think that it was at least possible that its constitution was not quite so sound as its members believed. In effect, he permeated society with solvents of current conventional ideas, and these solvents transformed men's minds more than they realised. The particular remedies he proposed might in practice be as ineffectual as Ruskin's were in his day, but were they ineffectual with the rising generation?

The Humanising of the Citizen

171

He was as insistent as Ruskin that all our political reform was mere machinery. What was vitally wanted was social reform, the humanising of the citizen. What Ruskin was accomplishing in his fashion, Arnold was also accomplishing in his, and their ultimate aim was undoubtedly not the improvement of any kind of machinery, mechanical or electoral, but the improvement of man himself.

For the aristocracy of other countries his appreciation was strictly bounded, but for that of his own country it was unbounded. He mixed with it all his life from the days when he served Lord Lansdowne as private secretary, and from what he wrote in 1859 he never departed. “I desire to speak of it with the most unbounded respect. It is the most popular of aristocracies; it has avoided faults which have ruined other aristocracies equally splendid. While the aristocracy of France was destroying its estates by its extravagance, and itself by its impertinence, the aristocracy of England was founding English agriculture, and commanding respect by a personal dignity which made even its pride forgiven. Historical and political England, the England of which we are all so proud, is of its making.” Such a boast is true, for the landlords of the south and east wrought that revolution in agriculture in the eighteenth century which is comparable, in some respects, to the revolution in industry the manufacturers of the north and west wrought. It is significant, too, to note that in his admiration of the share taken by our aristocracy he is in the line of succession to Coleridge, Disraeli, and Ruskin.

His opinion of the middle class was as low as his opinion of the aristocracy was high. He used to declare that his feeling towards his brethren of the middle class was that of St. Paul towards his brethren of Israel: “My heart’s prayer for them is that they may be saved,” but admittedly the process was a difficult one. Strait was the gate and narrow was the way for them. In 1882 he declared his views with the utmost plainness. “Suppose we take the figure we know so well, the earnest and non-conforming Liberal of our Middle Classes, as his school and his civilisation have made him. He is for Disestablishment: he is for Temperance; he has an eye to his Wife’s Sister; he is a member of the local

172 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

caucus; he is learning to go up to Birmingham every year to the feast of Mr. Chamberlain. His inadequacy is but too visible

The contrast between the aristocracy and the middle class is plain, and he draws it. "The lower class see before them the aristocratic class, and its civilisation, such as it is, even infinitely more out of their reach than out of that of the middle class; while the life of the middle class, with its unlovely types of religion, thought, beauty, manners, has naturally, in general, no great attraction for them either. And so, too, they are thrown back upon themselves; upon their beer, their gin, and their fun." It is a tragedy which appals him every whit as much as it appalled Ruskin. Was Arnold was as far-sighted as Disraeli in foreseeing that the Liberalism was not likely to be realised by any Reform Bill, for he discerned the existence of the conservative working man. A Liberal of this type--and it was far from an uncommon one--forgot those elements which went to the humanising of the voter, and this to Arnold was the vital matter. His Stoicism is continually cropping up.

Society possesses spiritual foundations--if it is likely to last. He believes in a national Church, the Church of England, and he believes in national schools. He affirmed that religion was the sweetest and the strongest element in the world, and he affirmed with Burke that without it there could be no perfect culture, no complete civilisation. "The Sadducees," he confessed with sorrow, "are our friends the philosophical Liberals, who believe neither in angel nor spirit but in Mr. Herbert Spencer." In his lectures on the Epistle to the Romans Bishop Gore acknowledges: "Life in Christ Jesus, Christ living in me--there can be no question that these beautiful phrases which, if St. John's witness be true, represent the teaching of Christ Himself, express also what was most central in St. Paul's idea of Christianity. It was the great merit of Matthew Arnold's St. Paul and Protestantism that it recalled the fact to notice in ordinary educated circles. Recent scientific study of St. Paul has gone in the same direction." In his Last Essays on Church and Religion Arnold owns: "I know of no other Establishment

The Binding Quality of Culture

173

so reasonable. Churches are characterised, I have said, by their great men. Show me any other great Church of which a chief actor and luminary has a sentence like this sentence, spledidide verax, of Butler's:— ‘Things are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we wish to be deceived?’ To take in and digest such a sentence as that is an education in moral and intellectual activity. And, after all, intensely Butlerian as the sentence is, yet Butler came to it because he is English, because at the bottom of his nature lay such a fund of integrity.'

The message of Culture and Anarchy, his greatest prose work, appeared in 1869. In the preface its author refers to the “undesirable provincialism of the English Puritans and Protestant Nonconformists.” In place of it he preaches his favourite doctrine of “sweetness and light,” a phrase he borrows from Swift. Swift used it of the bees because they make honey and wax. Arnold transferred it to the operation of culture which would, if it could, “make reason and the will of God prevail.” He contrasted with it the motto of the “Nonconformist” newspaper: “The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”

Where culture is present there is liberty: where it is absent there is license, the license of anarchy. There is unity at home, and there is the prospect of unity abroad. Through culture the humanised citizen becomes an implicit member of a world community. Long before the war Eduard Zeller, the German historian, expressed the opinion: “It is questions of power and advantage, it is prejudices and ambitions, which divide the peoples; what unites them is the culture of ideal interests, morality, art, science, educa- tion. In this domain they can unfold all their powers without hostile collision; here they have all common aims, while the widest scope is left for their individual genius in conceiving and executing them.” Long before Zeller, Arnold delivered the same message. Long before Arnold, Wordsworth delivered this message. Indeed Wordsworth and Arnold approach, from opposite sides, the ideal of law and liberty which answers to the deepest instincts of our mind. The pillar of Wordsworth's politics is order, the

174 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

pillar of Arnold's is liberty; Wordsworth's order is not despotism but the spontaneous activity of the hive; and Arnold's liberty is not anarchy but self-discipline, the self-discipline of the Stoic. Conceive national greatness in terms of power or territory or wealth, and how can the conception of a commonwealth of nations ever emerge? Another nation is a possible rival with power to be transferred, territory to be taken, wealth to be acquired. Conceive, as Arnold implores us to conceive, national greatness in terms of culture, mental and moral, and is not the whole situation transformed? The commonwealth of culture is possible, nay probable. Another nation is a possible rival with culture to be absorbed, with enlightenment to be received, and received all the more eagerly because the national standpoint will give it a milieu not our own. Nations, in truth, are no longer rivals, but complementary each to the other in the many-sided pattern woven by the whole of humanity. The love of each man for his country is as Mazzini insisted, transformed. For patriotism, to the Italian seer, is only the most definite expression of a man's love for all the nations of the world. As Edith Cavell acknowledged, patriotism is not enough. Something more is needed. It is the sense that all nations belong to a community where the smallest of them as well as the largest can make its due contribution to the civilisation of the whole world.

Arnold rose to a lofty height in 1869 when he insisted that "there is of Culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it-motives eminently such as are called social-come in as part of the grounds of Culture, and the main and pre-eminent part Culture is then properly described as not having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure

PROTEST AGAINST MECHANISATION 175

knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing

good. . . . There is no better motto which it can have

than these words of Bishop Wilson: 'To make reason and the

will of God prevail.'

In Friendship's Garland Arnold urges that "what unites

and separates people now is Geist," and the spread of Geist

inevitably makes for conciliation, and Culture and Anarchy

developes the same conception. In the latter we read: "The

great men of culture are those who have had a passion for

diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of

society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of

their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all

that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional,

exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the

clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining

the best knowledge and thought of the true, and a true source,

therefore, of sweetness and light."

Material and mechanical devices will never diffuse Geist.

In the soulless labour of millions who work the exquisitely

elaborate machinery Arnold saw an enslavement of the

spirit to mechanism. If we travel from the England of

the sixties to the Germany of our own day, the same protest

is being made. In drama Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser

utter in the twentieth century what Arnold uttered in the

nineteenth. In Kaiser's powerful play, "Gas," we have a

vivid portrayal of the mechanisation of industry. "Gas"

stands as the symbol of money. Machine-made industry

produces money for the capitalist who uses up the men who

run the plant. The hero, son of a multi-millionaire, has

succeeded in manufacturing a gas more powerful than all

known fuels. The whole world besieges him for it. Alack!

there is a terrific explosion in which many of the hands

perish. The rest strike, and there is a serious shortage of

gas. The inventor bethinks himself of solution of his

troubles. But is there any? The formula he employed

was quite correct, and in the manufacture of the gas nothing

went wrong. Suddenly the solution flashes upon him. The

formula for the gas was not wrong, but the process was

fundamentally wrong, for it mechanised men. "Away with

the Machine, and discover Man! The millions of men

173 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

mechanically used up to produce it!" Such is the message

Kaiser dramatically delivers. Nor is there any difference in

the drama of Toller save that perhaps it touches us more

closely. For Toller takes not the manufacture of gas, but

the manufacture of lace in Nottingham. Before the

Industrial Revolution it was made on the domestic system

which left the operatives human beings, not hands in a

factory. The lace-machines came, and with their coming

man began to be mechanised. He is in process of being

devoured and consumed by the insatiable demands of

industry. Count Keyserling, an aristocrat who has travelled

around the world in search of spirituality, professes to have

found it in India which as yet is not mechanised. He sums

up Chicago as the city where machinery has mastered man,

its creator but really its creature. According to Count

Keyserling, "it is not that the machine kills man, but that it

reduces all that is spiritual to material, all that is organic

to mechanical, terms, by showing that without soul, cultural

interests, or emotional cultivation, it is possible to live a

full and busy life." Where the machine comes there is

chaos. It is the message of Arnold, as it is the message of

Kaiser, of Keyserling, and Toller, that this chaos must become

cosmos. This chaos, however, is not hopeless and un-

mitigated anarchy: it is chaos that longs to be cosmos if

the Arnolds of a past or a present generation stand any

chance of an audience for their summons of mankind from

mechanisation to spiritualisation.

In St. Paul and Protestantism ; with an Introduction on

Puritanism and the Church of England Arnold in 1870 con-

tinued his interpretative mission. His object is to prepare

the way for all to the unity of a broader and more compre-

hensive Church than has ever yet been formed, and inevitably

he manifests his dislike for those who defend existing

divisions. This dislike concentrates itself around the non-

conformists. He is convinced that these denominational

bodies, placing their centre of coherence on Pauline dogmas,

are proceeding on an assumption essentially wrong and

mischievous. A vision arises before him of a time when

differences in discipline, in modes of worship, and even in

speculative doctrine, shall not only be tolerated in separate

THE MAINTENANCE OF CULTURE

177

communities, but borne with, and even welcomed, within the limits of the same community—welcomed, because thus alone can we provide for the various requirements of the individual temperaments, and welcomed because all shall have learned that it is not always best for themselves to have their own prepossessions gratified and flattered and exaggerated. Arnold criticised theology: he never criticised religion, and his own life was fundamentally religious. He held for himself—and he held it for mankind as well—that "not to break one's connexion with the past in one's religion is one of the strongest instincts in human nature," and it was an instinct too strong for him to attempt the task. A Church Establishment is expedient for man, and it is expedient for the organism of which he is a member. With Tocqueville he discerns in the power of religion the required counterpoise to the weakness of democracy. "Men want religion," so he urges in his Higher Schools and Universities in France "a rule and sanctions for conduct which enlist their feelings; and the actual forms of Christianity are approximations to this. And men want it public and national, to prevent religion, the proper source of all solidity and union, from being precarious and divided. Hence the national churches," which he defended with all the passion of his soul. In his present book he pleads in the same strain: "But surely the moment we consider religion and Christianity in a large way as goodness, and a Church as a society for the promotion of goodness, all that is said about having such a society before men's eyes as a city set upon a hill, all that is said about making the Gospel more and more a witness to mankind, applies in favour of the State adopting some form of religion or other—that which seems best suited to the majority—even though it may not be perfect; and putting that forward as the national form of religion."

The maintenance of culture is a function of an Established Church on which he lays considerable stress at all times. He points out that "the fruitful men of English Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who were trained within the pale of the Establishment—Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A generation or two outside the Establishment and Puritanism produces men of national mark no longer." True, yet Arnold

178 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

forgets that no other result was possible for generations as nonconformists were excluded from the two ancient universities, and the newer ones had not sprung into existence in 1870. Nor does he take into account that such prelates in the Church of England as Creighton and Tait, the greatest archbishop of the nineteenth century, came of Nonconformist parentage. The truth is that culture gravitates to the Church of England. Creighton and Tait left nonconformity because it was uncongenial to their ideals, and they joined the Church of England because it was congenial to them. Arnold was at bottom right when he insisted on the importance of Geist. The spirit of separation is due less to doctrinal differences than to a frame of mind. The ethos of a community attracts one type while it repels another.

Literature and Dogma, which appeared in 1873, continues the author's task of enlightening the public. Dogma is minimised and religion is maximised. The attractiveness of this Arnoldian solution at first sight is very strong, and it has been the refuge of many who have sought in Christian work the satisfaction they could not find in Christian thought. Cannot a man, they ask, serve his generation according to the will of God without troubling himself with so many conflicting theories? Is not the life after all the main thing? The religion we learnt at our mother's knee is unmixed with dogma—Can we not keep that and let dogma go? And as with the individual, so with the Church. Does not history, they ask, show what a failure dogma has been as a basis of union, how impossible it must always be to mould men's thoughts to a single type? Can there not be substituted for it something broader—a union, for instance, in Christian beneficence, a kind of co-operation in social Christianity? There is something surely attractive in this solution. Yet though it may be best for some individuals, to thinking men and to the Church in general it can give only temporary satisfaction. For the human mind is such that it will inquire; and neither in the individual nor in the Church could Christianity flourish for any length of time without producing a corresponding doctrine. “Religion,” in the judgment of Lord Salisbury, “can no more be separated from dogma than light from the sun.”

The Plan of Dogma

179

The Zeitgeist is evident in Literature and Dogma. We ask with its author, What is the proper place of doctrine in religion? Is it primary or secondary, essential or accidental, immutable or mutable? Can we define it, as Arnold asks us, as the theory of religion and so relegate it to that inferior position which most people give to theory as compared with practice? For in all the activities of our human life there does appear to be this twofold aspect. We find everywhere theory combined with practice and for every art a corresponding science; but as a matter of fact it is the practice which produces the theory and not the theory the practice. The pre-historic savage knew nothing of the law of specific gravity when he launched the first canoe; and men conversed with one another for ages before the need was felt for formulating the laws of language. It is the practice, then, which produces the theory; but, we hasten to add, the theory generally reacts on the practice which produced it. For there is no doubt whatever—to take the same examples—that a modern steamship could not be constructed without a theoretical knowledge of hydrostatics or a poem of Arnold composed without conscious reference to the laws of grammar.

Is it the same with religion? Does the practice come before the theory or the theory before the practice, or instead of saying sharply which comes first,—are we to admit the action of each on the other? After all the discussions which have been held on this question, the truth seems to be that there is a certain intellectual element in our religion from the very first. There are a few essentials of knowledge without which no man can become or be a Christian. But as for the great mass of doctrine, as Arnold perceived, it comes second both in point of time and importance. The order is still that of the Master, “If any man will do his will he shall know of the doctrine.” We may even go farther and say that for the great majority—these are the people of whom our author was thinking and for whom he was writing—the place of minute and sharply defined doctrine is taken first and last by those vague and dumb impressions, the Geist, which form such a powerful factor in all departments of human life. It is, therefore, becoming

180 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

more and more clearly recognised that the great question is not to lay before men a set of minute doctrines, however good, to which they must bring themselves into allegiance by whatever effort—the great matter is rather to bring men into a condition of life in which they can corroborate these doctrines from their own experience. There is certainly need of dogma: there is a Christian truth in Christianity—only instead of placing it all at the outset the greater part of it is to be placed at the end. Instead of deriving the Christian life from it, it is itself largely the product of the Christian life. In great part it is the special work of the intellect reflecting upon the life already existing, examining its foundations, its nature, and its elements. That life contains as one of its factors an intellectual element, an irreducible minimum, at least, of doctrine, is manifest; and so far we admit that doctrine is primary. Yet these ideas, really indispensable to the existence of the religious life, are relatively few in number. By far the greater part of theology consists in the work of the intellect on these primary ideas and on life in general, and, so far as this is the case, we must hold that doctrine is not primary but secondary, not essential but accidental. It may be urged that this division opens the way to all kinds of extravagance in which each man settles for himself how much it is necessary and how much is optional; but perfect identity of belief is impossible in any case and if a few fundamentals be agreed on—you may call them religious ideas if you will—the more purely abstract and theological ideas, which have little effect on the religious life, may be safely left to take care of themselves.

To Arnold if the State is to be maintained, the Church is to be maintained, and he accordingly felt the congruity—not the incongruity—of his labour in writing his Mixed Essays in 1879. In them he writes with keen insight on democracy and equality. In his survey of democracy he revises the views of the political economists on the dislike of State action, setting forth reasons for considering that there is no need of jealousy of such action. England had been governed by an aristocracy up to 1832, or, indeed, to 1867, and this aristocracy had governed in the grand style. Its

day, however, has passed. Now “democracy is trying to

affirm its own essence; to live, to enjoy, to possess the world,

as aristocracy has tried, and successfully tried before it.

Ever since Europe emerged from barbarism, ever since the

condition of the common people began a little to improve,

ever since their minds began to stir, this effort of democracy

has been gaining strength; and the more their condition

improves, the more strength this effort gains. So potent

is the charm of life and expansion upon the living; the

moment men are aware of them they begin to desire them,

and the more they have of them the more they crave.”

Once more he urges the power of social life and manners

as one of the great elements in humanisation, and once

more he urges that unless we have cultivated it we are

incomplete. It is a promoter of equality, and indeed it is by

the humanity of their manners that men are made equal.

His essay on equality also takes the form of an able—if

elaborate—argument against freedom of bequest, an idea

enjoying the hearty support of Mill. Men object, Certainly

equality will never of itself alone give us a perfect civilisation.

Arnold agrees and asks, But with such inequality as ours,

is not a perfect civilisation impossible? The effects of

inequality have been the creation of “an upper class

materialised, a middle class vulgarised, a lower class

brutalised.” Besides, there has arisen that intellectual

estrangement between classes which he considers truly deplor-

able. He is anxious that the three classes should combine in

order to form a strong State. The multitude alone can effect

but little. Turn to his verdict on it: “It lacks principle,

it lacks persistence; if to-day its good impulses prevail,

they succumb to-morrow; sometimes it goes right, but is

very apt to go wrong. Even a popular orator, or a popular

journalist, will hardly say that the multitude may be trusted

to have its judgment generally just, and its action generally

virtuous. It may be better, it is better, that the body of the

people, with all its faults, should act for itself, and control

its own affairs, than that it should be set aside as ignorant

and incapable, and have its affairs managed for it by a

so-called superior class, possessing property and intelligence.

Property and intelligence cannot be trusted to show a sound

182 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

majority themselves; the exercise of power by the people tends to eduate the people. But still, the world being what it is, we must surely expect the aims and doings of the majority of men to be at present very faulty; and this in a numerous community no less than in a small one.

Equality is desirable on the ground of civilisation, but not on the ground of natural right which he detests as heartily as Bentham himself. The great utilitarian could not write more frankly than Arnold on this subject "Peasants and workmen have no natural rights at all," so he states, "only we ought instantly to add that kings and nobles have none either. If it is the sound English doctrine that all rights are created by law and are based on expediency, and are alterable as the public advantage may require, certainly that orthodox doctrine is mine. Poverty is created and maintained by law. It would disappear in that state of private war and scramble which legal society supersedes. Legal society creates, for the common good, the right of property, and for the common good that right is by legal society limitable. That property should exist, and that it should be held with a sense of security, may be taken . . . as a settled matter of expediency." In true Stoic spirit, he concerns himself much more with duties than rights.

His Irish Essays of 1882 approaches the land question in the spirit of Maine. Arnold's remedy for the agrarian trouble, the root cause of the discontent in Ireland, was the institution of a Commission which should inquire into the conduct of the landlords who recognised that property carried duties no less than rights and those who recognised nothing of the sort. The latter he proposed to expropriate. With Burke he would endow all the religions of Ireland and would supply good schools. To Home Rule he offered his vehement opposition, partly because he desired cohesion instead of disintegration and partly because he disliked Gladstone. Though his Irish Essays nominally deal with the theme suggested by their title, Arnold discusses topic after topic which had appeared in his other writings. For instance, his denunciation of natural right is once more in evidence.

He had paid many visits in Europe, and at last in 1883 he paid a visit to the United States where he was, with true

Stoic to the End

183

American hospitality, warmly greeted. He gave a course of lectures which were well attended and badly delivered. He observed the people and their institutions attentively, and concluded that there was that close union between the classes he so much desiderated. Was the "human problem" solved with equal success? By this problem he meant the problem of civilisation, and of course civilisation meant "humanisation in society." In this respect he pronounced the United States defective. In some respects his verdict anticipated that of Count Keyserling. On his return home he issued his Discourses in America in 1885, the book, so he told George Russell, of all others by which he should most wish to be remembered. Once more he analyses the multitude, finding the majority always wrong, the remnant always right. The old Stoic element in him re-appears. If Marcus Aurelius represented the remnant in Rome, Isaiah represented the remnant of Israel, Plato the remnant of Athens. The small City-State—for the Jew regarded Jerusalem as his centre—contained this remnant, but did the huge population of the United States?

The remnant counts, and it counts because it can produce Isaiah, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius. No doubt there is a tinge of sadness and resignation in their aspirations, for all alike found duty by no means easy to fulfil. In the midst of the whirlpool of life all alike felt the need of religion. They sought for a higher ideal to lend direction and force—this is of the last importance—to the movement for self-repression and unselfish devotion to the common good. It is also true of Arnold, whose inner life, as revealed in his Note Books, bears ample testimony to his quest of the power of turning the ideal into the real. Not a few Stoics failed to effect this transformation, and he was determined not so to fail. The morning of his death he worshipped in Sefton Park Church, Liverpool, where John Watson, well known as the novelist, Ian Maclaren, preached. Arnold was deeply impressed by the sermon on the Cross of Christ, and remarked that he had rarely been so affected by any preacher as Watson.

One of the hymns sung was:

When I survey the wondrous Cross

On which the Prince of Glory died.

184 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

Arnold when he came home repeated the lines, and declared the hymn to be the finest in the English language. "Yes," he went on, "the Cross remaineth, and in the straits of the soul makes its ancient appeal."

References

Bickley, F. L. Matthew Arnold and his Poetry (London, 1911)

Birrell, A. Res Judicatae (London, 1892.)

Brooke, S. A. Clough, Arnold, Rossetti, and Morris. A Study. (London, 1910.)

Brownell,*W C Victorian Prose Masters. (London, 1902.)

Dawson, W. H. Matthew Arnold and his Relation to the Thought of our Time. (London, 1904.)

Dixon, W. M. The Republic of Letters. (London, 1898)

Fitch, Sir J. Thomas and Matthew Arnold. (London, 1897.)

Galton, A. Two Essays upon Matthew Arnold, with some of his letters to the author. (London, 1897.)

Grant Duff, Sir M. E. Out of the Past. Vol. I. (London, 1903.)

Hudson, W. H. Studies in Interpretation. (London, 1896.)

Hutton, R. H. Literary Essays. (London, 1871.)

Hutton, R. H. Essays on some of the modern Guides in matters of Faith. (London, 1887.)

Hutton, R. H. Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers. Vol. I. (London, 1894.)

Kelso, A. P. Matthew Arnold on Continental Life and Literature. (London, 1914.)

Kingsmill, H. Matthew Arnold. (London, 1928)

Lund, T. W. M. Matthew Arnold. The Message and Meaning of his Life. (London, 1888.)

Merrick, J. B. Matthew Arnold and Goethe. English Goethe Society. Vol. IV. (London,1828.)

Paul, H. W. Men and Letters. (London, 1901)

Paul, H. W. Matthew Arnold. (London, 1902.)

Russell, G. W. E. Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-88. (London, 1895.)

Russell, G. W. E. Matthew Arnold. (London, 1904.)

Saintsbury, G. Corrected Impressions. (London, 1895.)

Saintsbury, G. Matthew Arnold. (London, 1899.)

Saintsbury, G. A History of Criticism. Vol. III. (Edinburgh, 1904.)

Stephen, Sir L. Studies of a Biographer. Vol. III. (London, 1898.)

Swinburne, A. C. Essays and Studies. (London, 1875.)

Tovey, D.C. Reviews and Essays on English Literature. (London,1897.)

Walker, H. The Greater Victorian Poets. (London, 1895.)

Ward, T. H. The English Poets. Vol. IV. (London, 1894.)

Warren, T. H. Essays of Poets and Poetry. (London, 1909.)

Watson, W. A. Gospels of Yesterday. Drummond, Spencer, Arnold. (London, 1888.)

Worsfold, W. B. The Principles of Criticism. (London, 1897.)

Chapter V.

SEELEY THE IMPERIALIST STATESMAN

On the surface, no men could be more unlike than Matthew Arnold and Sir John Seeley, yet underlying the superficial differences there are fundamental resemblances. Each man was a poet, though of course there is no comparison between the poetry of Arnold and that of Seeley, yet what the former was to poetry the latter was to history. Both expressed unbounded faith in the commonwealth of culture, and both set themselves resolutely to humanise civilisation.

What Sainte-Beuve and Renan meant to the poet, Calderon and Goethe meant to the historian. They were moralists rather than theologians, but moralists who manifested keen interest in social questions and their solution. What Philistinism meant to Arnold secularity meant to Seeley. Each, in divers fashion, attempted to reconcile the Hellenic ideal of self-development with the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice.

Their attitude to politics was detached, for though both professed to be Liberals yet their form of Liberalism was not such as to commend itself to Gladstone. Politics was to each of them religion in another form and vice versa. Their natures rendered them keenly alive to the poetry of history, realising in the pageantry of the present the politics of the past. No doubt their views in theology did not commend them to the orthodox, yet over orthodoxy each exercised a revivifying power.

They believed, with all their heart and with all their head in the connection of Church and State, and indeed neither man could conceive of the permanent existence of the State apart from religion. The State exists, and continues to exist, but how can it do so without the Church to sustain it? The writings of Seeley and Arnold rest upon the fundamental assumption that there is a natural religion, and that there are a hundred ways of attaining the truth about religion. The student of literature like Arnold or the student of history like Seeley is just as likely

180 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

to arrive at truth in religion as any professed theologian. Both belittled dogma to an undue extent, yet if one had lived in a day when a philanthropist like Shaftesbury could speak of Seeley's Ecce Homo as 'the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of hell,' one might feel that the protest of Arnold and Seeley against the orthodoxy of the sixties was seriously required. The works of both men have so become part of the spirit of the age now that we are apt to forget what manner of men our grandfathers were.

Sir John Robert Seeley (1834-95) was born in London. He was the third son of Robert Seeley, the publisher, a man of strongly marked mental and physical energy. The father belonged to the order of Clapham churchmanship, and his publications were mainly confined to books setting forth the ways and works of evangelicalism. A decided churchman, he published a volume of essays in 1834 in defence of Church Establishment, and he was one of the founders of the Church Pastoral Aid Society. With Lord Shaftesbury he exerted himself vigorously in supporting the factory bills. In 1860 he published his work on The Greatest of the Plantagenets, Edward I, and he successfully defended that monarch against the strictures of Hume and other historians, and he also set forth the title of our English Justinian to the rank of greatness. In not a few respects the thought of the father reminds us as much of the son as the thought of Thomas Arnold reminds us of his son Matthew. From his father Sir John inherited his habit of thinking about religion and his devotion to history.

At an extremely early age J. R. Seeley learnt to read and to read widely. He went first to school under the Rev. J. A. Barron at Stanmore. The headmaster taught reading for reading's sake, and he communicated to his pupil his own love of English literature. There the lad learnt to care for Milton and Pope, and learnt to care with what proved a lifelong devotion. On leaving Stanmore he attended the City of London School, then under Dr. Mortimer, whose pupils were winning scholarships at the Universities. Mortimer's administrative ability combined with his genial manner attracted many boys to his school, and in 1861 he had the unique distinction of seeing two of his scholars

respectively senior classic and senior wrangler at Cambridge. Charles Kingsley read privately with him for ordination. A precocious boy, Seeley was encouraged to read too hard. He worked so well that he entered the sixth form when little over thirteen. His two elder brothers were in the sixth at the same time, the eldest—afterwards a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge—being captain of the school. There are advantages in a day school, but among the grave drawbacks one certainly is that little time is spent on games. Seeley was kept so busy at home in the preparation of his lessons that his only form of exercise was the daily walk between Bloomsbury and Cheapside. His health suffered so severely that he was obliged for a time to leave school and to give up all work. The tragedy is that, like Darwin, he never recovered his health, and insomnia dogged his steps.

Seeley spent a year with the family of the Rev. F. Fitch, Vicar of Cromer. Forced to give up his classics, he resumed his reading of English literature. In later life he delighted in recalling this year of enforced idleness, for he owed, so he said, to it most of his knowledge of English literature. There is a deep truth in the saying of Töpfer that a year of downright loitering is a desirable element in a liberal education. Such an element was entirely unknown to Seeley at any other period of his life. To toil terribly was part and parcel of his character. He seldom had a margin in his life of hurried—and unceasing—thought. He had read through Paradise Lost four or five times before he had left school.

In 1852 he went up to Cambridge, entering the university as a scholar of Christ’s College. Among his contemporaries at his own college were Calverley, Besant, Peile, Skeat, and Sendall. Able as these men undoubtedly were, he was reckoned one of the ablest. In conversation he exhibited already the analytical skill and epigrammatic expression which continued to characterise him. He had a faculty for pricking bubbles which he exercised as freely as Walter Bagehot. He spoke but seldom at the Union, but when he spoke he secured attention. He read classics with Robert Burn, and afterwards with Shilleto, but he was engrossed with the matter of his classical authors than with

188 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

their manner. Even as an undergraduate the philosophical and historical contents of his authors moved him far more than any graces of style. His ill-health continued, and he was forced to defer his degree for a year. He graduated in 1857 when his name appeared with three others, at the top of the Classical Tripos. Academic distinctions do not prove everything, as the cases of Arnold and Newman attest, but they prove something. Lord Goschen was once asked the good of first classes. "Perhaps they're not much good. Still, I should like to mention that out of twelve of my colleagues in the Cabinet, eight are first classes." The gaining of a good degree reveals to a man that he possesses powers which are above the average, and there is nothing an able young man requires so much as confidence in himself. Well as Seeley had done in the Tripos, he did better in the competition for the Chancellor's Medals when he came out senior medallist.

Christ's College elected him a fellow in 1858, and for two years he held a classical lectureship. In 1859 he published, under the pseudonym of John Robertson, a volume of poetry entitled David and Samuel ; with other poems, original and translated. This volume contains a poem on the call of David, versifications of several psalms, and a series of sketches, chiefly monologues, of Nero, William the Silent, the Prince of Orange in 1672, and others. As Arnold was always interested in religion and poetry, so Seeley was always interested in religion and history, and when both turned to theology there is much in common in their writings. The personal and the dramatic element in the religion of both is more marked in early life than in late. It is noticeable that in his first volume Seeley selected all his subjects from the Old Testament.

In 1859 he left Cambridge in order to teach under his old headmaster, Dr. Mortimer, and for the next four years he was chief classical assistant. In 1863 he was appointed professor of Latin in University College, London, as successor to the curiously unorthodox brother of Cardinal Newman, Frank. Here he remained for six years, but the publication of Ecce Homo in 1865 revealed to the public that his mind had been as much engrossed by religion and

Morals and Politics

189

politics as by the classics. Ecce Homo and The Expansion of England caught the attention of the English-speaking public, and in fact took it by storm. All the world read Ecce Homo, and of course it received a first-class advertisement by the persistent attacks of the orthodox. It was published anonymously because Seeley felt certain that his father would dislike it, and out of consideration for his susceptibilities Seeley kept the secret till his father was dead. Ecce Homo came at a time when there was a marked and vigorous investigation of things sacred. Essays and Reviews appeared in 1860, Colenso's work on the Pentateuch in 1862, Renan's Vie de Jésus in 1863, and Strauss's shorter Leben Jesu in 1864. In the days before the Synoptic problem had been barely broached, with the intuition of genius Seeley placed the strength of his survey of the life and work of Jesus Christ in St. Mark's Gospel, the earliest of the four. In the union of morals and politics he characteristically finds the marks of Christianity. He lays stress on the circumstance that Christ came to found a society, and he investigates the conditions of membership in Christ's kingdom. Baptism is a condition, and baptism means cleansing with fire, and fire means warmth. How can warmth cleanse? "The answer is that moral warmth does cleanse. No heart is pure that is not passionate; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic." He, just as much as Arnold, seeks for the power which enables men not merely to live, but to live well. Historical parallels appear continually, and in the hands of Seeley they teach much. John the Baptist was like the Emperor Nerva. Socrates holds his place in history by his thoughts and not by his life, Christ by His life and not by His thoughts. In sundry ways and divers fashions the author directs our attention mainly to the Christian society he seeks to analyse. This is as clear in his Natural Religion, published in 1882, as in his Ecce Homo.

Lives of Christ have thrown so much emphasis on the God-man that His mission has been left to the one side. Seeley comes in to redress the balance, and the redressed it so drastically that we do not altogether wonder at the scoffs of the scornful. Thanks to Seeley, we to-day can read the Bible in the light of the illumination he gave to it,

190 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

and we see how national and political religion almost neces-

sarily is. The State is the dominating thought in his

philosophy, and he tells us that he received this thought

from the Bible. For the Bible reveals the knowledge of

the past, and bestows insight on its course. To Father

Joseph, the confidant of Richelieu, "ordinary history is

like the face of a clock; we see the hands that move and

mark the time, but not the wheels and secret springs

whereby it goes." Seeley saw these wheels and springs in

his Bible. "But I may say in one word that my ideas,"

so he owns in the preface to his Natural Religion, "are

Biblical, that they are drawn from the Bible at first-hand

and that what fascinates me in the Bible is not a passage

here and there, not something which only a scholar or

antiquarian can detect in it, but the Bible as a whole, its

great plan and unity, and principally the grand poetic

anticipation I find in it of modern views concerning history."

Theologians regard Christ as a moralist who spoke with

authority. In Seeley's judgment the Greek philosophers

spoke as moralists and spoke with authority. To our

historian what differentiates Him from all others is that

He was a moralist who spoke with authority and who also

founded a society. What notably characterises Chris-

tianity is this marriage of morals and politics henceforth

never to be divorced by your Machiavellis or by anyone

else. The older prophets had contemplated a race, the

Jews, whereas Christ contemplates humanity forming a

society which recognises no racial, social, and political

distinctions. From the very first this society was organised,

and baptism was the mode of admission to it. Seeley is

careful to emphasise the story of Nicodemus as an illustra-

tion of the high place He assigned to baptism. This

Christian society is bound together by an esprit de corps,

"by a passion of the same nature as patriotism without its

exclusiveness." The enthusiasm for humanity, the love of

man in man, is as outstanding a feature of Seeley's thought

as Arnold's.

Our philosopher turns to the pages of history as well as

to the pages of the Bible, and in both he finds confirmation

of his views. People who forget that religion is political

RELIGION AND THE STATE

191

as well as private "do not see that the Holy Roman Empire

of the Middle Ages is to Rome just what the Christian

Church is to Judaism, that it is the resurrection of a fallen

nationality in an idealised shape." Then he pursues this

train of thought. "Look almost where you will in the

wide field of history, you find religion, whenever it works

freely and mightily, either giving birth to and sustaining

states, or else raising them up to a second life after their

destruction. It is a great state-builder in the hands of

Moses and Ulfilas and Gregory and Nicholas; in the ruder

hands of Mohammed and many another tamer and guide

of gross populations down to the Prophet of Utah it has

the same character, the same too in the hands of the almost

forgotten Numas and propagators of the Apollo-worship

who laid the foundation of Roman and Greek civilisation,

and of the pilgrim fathers who founded New England. In

the East to this day nationality and religion are almost

convertible terms; the Scotch national character first awoke

in the adoption of a new religion and afterwards expressed

itself more than once in national covenants; the Reformation

itself may be represented as coming out of the German

national consciousness, and it has been proposed to call

the various forms of Protestantism by the collective name

of Christianity. Lastly, in Christianity itself, in Romanism,

and partly also in Mohammedanism, we see religion in the

form of an aggressive or missionary nationality bringing

foreign nations into a new citizenship."

Whether Seeley reads his Bible or his history, it is out of

his power to avoid drawing a moral. Let your historian

proceed as skilfully and as scientifically as he pleases--

and Seeley is as anxious about his science as about his

skill--there must be a moral to the tale unrolled before the

reader. As Seeley conceives history as a science, he also

conceives it as an art. It must, if it is to be of service to

us mortals, anticipate the future. In his Expansion of

England he enforces this point. There is a fatalism which

leads us to take for granted Turgot's famous parallel between

colonies and fruit. As the fruit drops off the tree when

ripe, so our colonies will leave us when the proper time comes.

God forbid, cries out Seeley. If we acquiesce in this parallel,

192 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

we do so because of three misunderstandings. There is

the misunderstanding of the special infiuences at work

in the war of American Independence; there is the mis-

understanding of the characteristics of modern English

colonisation; and there is the misunderstanding of the fact

that time has brought us into a period of "greater political

magnitude and higher numbers" and swifter communications.

Parallels are valuable, but we must see to it that they are

real parallels, and, above all, we must not misread their

inner meaning.

It is the business of the historian to interpret the past.

He unrolls the story of society in its many acts and scenes,

the organism casting off outworn functions and taking to

itself fresh ones as needs arise. So the historian is sent to

deliver us "from the bewilderment and horror which the

past excites, when we open its records at random." Unless

rightly guided in this fashion, the unhappy reader may

come to a conclusion of the worth of history too Gibbonian

for Seeley's taste. The Church, in bygone days, enabled

her members to discern the secret wheels and springs by

which history moves. She displayed "a grand outline of

God's dealings with the human race, drawn from the Bible

and the Church doctrine, a sort of map of history was

possessed by all alike. Are we sufficiently aware what

bewilderment must arise when this is no longer the case,

when these old outlines grow unserviceable, but no new

map is furnished?

The spirit of Burke and Coleridge is alive in the man

who argues that "All old philosophers knew that the fabric

of the State rested ultimately upon a way of thinking, a

habit of opinion, a 'discipline,' which was a thing so delicate

and easily deranged that in the opinion of some of them

new tunes coming into vogue might be enough to cause

a revolution." So thought Plato, and so thought Seeley.

The new tunes of science in general and biology in particular

have come, and they have introduced everywhere a sceptical

condition of mind. With Bagehot we listen to the argument

that "yet if such scepticism became practical, if large

communities came to regard every question in politics and

law as absolutely open, their institutions would dissolve,

The Moralisation of History

193

and science, among other things, would be buried in the

ruin." Religion, so the argument runs, is and always has

been the basis of societies and states. "From history,"

so our author is convinced, "we learn that the great function

of religion has been the founding and sustaining of states.

At this moment we are threatened with a general dissolution

of states from the decay of religion," an argument which

we are destined to hear tolerably often in the immediate

future.

In his Lectures and Essays, published in 1870, their author

asks the Church to moralise the history of England. No

doubt the history of the kings of Israel reveals the hand of

God in history, but does not the history of the kings of

England fulfil this purpose? Surely the lives of Milton or

Gordon have their contribution to make towards the under-

standing of God's way in the past. To him religion may wear

three forms. It may wear the form of devotion to an ideal of

human conduct. Then it will be Christianity. It may

wear the form of devotion to an ideal of physical beauty.

Then it will be the religion of art. It may wear the form

of devotion to the unity of nature. Then it will be science

or theism. His Natural Religion attempts to show that

even if the creeds of the Churches became wholly incredible,

yet what is vital in religion will remain. Its author still

testifies that science is insufficient unless science is religious,

and in fact that religion is "the principle by which alone

life is redeemed from secularity and animalism."

Between Ecce Homo and Natural Religion the philosophy

of Goethe had come to influence Seeley powerfully. Standing

aloof, like Fontenelle, from the great causes that throbbed

through the world of his day, Goethe looked on not un-

moved, but drew aside from the swift-flowing current.

When a man stands on the summit of the Wetterhorn the

meadows and houses below become unsubstantial mist.

Goethe saw from a height, but--this is the tragedy of it--

he saw dimly. This quality failed to impress Seeley who

was a statesman engrossed in the affairs of his country.

He was, however, impressed by another quality of Goethe's,

and that was his seriousness. In Goethe Reviewed after

Sixty Years, in 1893, in fact, Seeley dwells on this. "Of

194 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

all imaginative writers, Goethe is perhaps the most serious; not the most solemn, nor the most passionate, nor the most earnest, but the most serious. He is absolutely bent upon grasping and expressing the truth; he has no pleasure in any imaginations, however splendid or impressive, which he cannot feel to be true; on the other hand, when he feels that he is dealing with the truth, he seems to care little, and sometimes to forget altogether, that it is not interesting." It was the work of Goethe to chasten German taste by setting up the canons of classical antiquity and by recalling literature from the clouds to the solid ground of experience. The patriotism of Seeley is undoubted, and yet he cannot help thinking that it was better for the world for Goethe to be a man of culture than to be a patriot breaking his heart because Napoleon was overrunning his country. "Culture is more than half politics," such was the maxim by which Goethe lived, and such was the maxim by which Arnold and Seeley in their day, and Kaiser and Toller in our day, would have us live.

Natural Religion never captured the world-wide audience reached by Ecce Homo, and the reason is quite plain. The gospel of culture, as preached by Seeley and Arnold, is devoid of personality. Seeley despised Napoleon who could have taught him the place of personality. For the French genius insists that it was not the Roman legions that conquered the Gauls, but Caesar. It was not the Carthaginians that made Rome tremble, but Hannibal. It was not the Macedonian phalanx that penetrated to India, but Alexander. It was not the French army that reached the Weser and the Inn, but Turenne. It was not the Prussians soldiers that for seven years defended Prussia against the most formidable Powers in Europe; it was Frederick the Great. Arnold and Seeley now and then forget that it is only through personality that we move men. The eloquent ending of Ecce Homo demonstrates this, and it demonstrates how far Seeley had travelled from Gibbon's fifteenth chapter. Turn to it. "The achievement of Christ, in founding by His single will and power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other achievement which history records. The masterpieces

of other men of action are coarse and common in

comparison with it, and the masterpieces of speculation

flimsy and insubstantial. When we speak of it the common-

places of admiration fail us altogether. Shall we speak of

the originality of the design, of the skill displayed in the

execution? All such terms are inadequate. Originality and

contriving skill operated, indeed, but, as it were, implicitly.

The creative effort which produced that against which, it

is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail, cannot be analysed.

No architects’ design were furnished for the New Jerusalem,

no committee drew up rules for the Universal Commonwealth.

If in the works of Nature we can trace the indications of

each calculation, of a struggle with difficulties, of precaution,

of ingenuity, then in Christ’s work it may be that the same

indications occur. But these inferior and secondary powers

were not consciously exercised; they were implicitly present

in the manifold yet single creative act. The inconceivable

work was done in calmness; before the eyes of men it was

noiselessly accomplished, attracting little attention. Who

can describe that which unites men? Who has entered

into the formation of speech which is the symbol of their

union? He who can do these things can explain the origin

of the Christian Church. For others it must be enough to

say, ‘the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed.’ No man

saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen

crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets:

no man heard the clink of trowel and pickaxe: it descended

out of heaven from God.”

Ecce Homo remains the most remarkable of all the

writings of Seeley, and it made its way into circles but little

suspected as under the influence of its author. The notion

of the independence of religion has done much to quiet

those to whom a generation ago the very name of science

was anathema; and the historical study of the Bible is

allowed to-day where thirty years ago higher criticism and

infidelity were convertible terms. Seeley, however, pushes

this notion of independence too far. The real distinction

between scientific and religious truth should not be carried

to the length of complete separation; and a middle course

can surely be found between the older view that the

196 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

testimony of the Spirit to the Bible debars us entirely from criticism and the view of Seeley—which is that of Ritschl

—that our deep conviction of its worth renders us absolutely indifferent to critical results. For if religion is to retain

the dignity of embracing a general view of the world, it must come to some terms with science other than a complete

separation; if its historical character is to be guarded it cannot be altogether independent of historical facts or of that

criticism which discusses them.

In 1869 Seeley married Mary Agnes, eldest daughter of

Arthur Phillott. While on his honeymoon he received a

letter from Gladstone offering him the Regius Professorship

of Modern History at Cambridge, then vacant through the

resignation of Charles Kingsley. In his thirty-fifth year

Seeley received the work congenial to a man of his tempera-

ment. For he was as admirable a lecturer as he was a

writer, contriving to invest everything he said with the

impress of his personality. An old pupil, Mr. J. R. Tanner,

records his impressions of his professor. He owns: “His

old pupils used to say that Seeley’s lectures were, at any

rate, an education in lucidity and thoroughness—virtues

which they were accustomed to claim as specially charac-

teristic of the university in which he was, for a quarter of

a century, Regius Professor. . . . He would take pains to

travel to the same conclusion by several roads in order to

make it irresistible. Lines of argument, however different,

converged inevitably upon the same point. The result

was that one of the greater objects of the teacher was

secured, and it became impossible for his scholars to mis-

understand or to forget what he was teaching them. They

left the lecture-room feeling that though other departments

of knowledge might be affected by the process of the suns,

the conclusions of the Regius Professor of History were

established upon adamantine foundations. This note of

dogmatism was in all Seeley’s professorial utterances.

Personally reserved and reverent, when he spoke ex cathedra

it was with no uncertain sound. Even in its published

form The Expansion of England begins with the words,

‘It is a favourite maxim of mine,’ and those who were

accustomed to hear him lecture will recollect the autocratic

phrase, 'according to me' Yet this dogmatism appeared

as the natural expression of an austere and dignified per-

sonality, and it was impossible that it should ever be

resented. The professor had studied all the sources, and

had arrived at certain results ; why should he make a pretence

that he did not himself believe in them?" This monarchical

manner sat as well upon Seeley in the University of Cam-

bridge as it sat upon Fustel de Coulanges in the University

of Strasbourg.

Seeley did not confine himself merely to lecturing to large

classes of undergraduates. He held weekly classes for the

purpose of discussing political and historical questions with

advanced students. At first they were real "conversational

classes," though latterly they turned to a sort of monologue,

in which the professor took his class through a regular

course of political science which to him formed the back-

bone of history. According to Mr. Tanner "The subject was

political science studied by way of discussion, and discussion

under the reverential conditions that prevailed resolved itself

into question and answer—Socrates exposing the folly of

the Athenians. It was mainly an exercise in the definition

and scientific use of terms. What is liberty? Various

definitions of the term would be elicited from the class and

subjected to analysis. The authors of them would be

lured by a subtle cross-examination into themselves ex-

posing their inconsistencies. Then the professor would

take up his parable. He would first discuss the different

senses in which the term had already been used in literature.

. . . From an examination of inconsistent accounts the

professor would proceed to the business of building up by a

gradual process, and with the help of the class itself, a

definition of his own. . . . It was not told us on authority

as something to remember, but we assisted ourselves at

the creation of it. Thus it became a possession to be

enjoyed with a title analogous to the title of authorship.

It took an hour to define liberty, but the leisurely process

had the highest educational value"

As the income of his chair was small, and as his marriage

brought his fellowship to a close, Seeley was compelled to add

to his income by lecturing in London and the chief provincial

198 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

towns of the north and of Scotland. These lectures added to his growing reputation, and he collected them in his

Lectures and Essays, which he issued in 1870. The most noteworthy of these is his analysis of the fall of the Roman

Empire, of Milton, and his inaugural lecture at Cambridge. Freeman coined the phrase that history is past politics

and politics present history, but it is the phrase that accurately represents Seeley's mind. History was the school

of statesmanship, and it was his business to make statesmen or, at any rate, to make statesmen possible. History was

not for him the hero-worship it was for Carlyle, for hero-worship was a doctrine of despair of society, a sign of

pessimism. If history was not the story of heroes, neither was it a series of biographies of men, however great. History

was not the story of art or society, nor was it even the story of religion, though it was intimately bound up with religion.

History was, in fact, the history of the State. Hence 'our University must be a great seminary of politicians.' For

the statesman 'the indispensable thing . . . is a knowledge of political economy and of history.' 'Politics are vulgar

when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to

practical politics.' When the Historical Tripos was established at Cambridge he infused into it a strong political

element which has persisted down to the appointment of Mr. Trevelyan to Seeley's chair. This element was so

dominant that it led to a protest from Sir George Prothero who pleaded that history might be studied for its own sake.

The atmosphere of Cambridge assisted Seeley's efforts, for the very Bidding Prayer, used in the University Church,

asks that 'there never may be wanting a supply of persons duly qualified to serve God both in Church and State, ye

shall pray for a blessing on all places of religious and useful learning.'

All history was at bottom political science to Seeley, and he naturally dwelt particularly on international history,

the relation of State to State. In spite of his classical training he devoted most of his attention to the last three

centuries, and in his lectures he steadily kept in view Great Britain as a member of the European States-system, a

position which, he contended, many historians ignored. With them civil and constitutional history replaced the international attitude which Seeley invariably assumed. The World War revealed to us how much solid truth there is in this attitude which with our professor was part and parcel of his outlook. The three volumes of The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy are a post-war production, and they are three volumes that Seeley would warmly have welcomed. He lectured on English foreign policy in the eighteenth century, international history from the sixteenth century, the wars of Louis XIV, and Napoleon, and in such lectures he was able to impress on the members of his class that broad-minded conception of our history which has been grievously neglected.

While still professor of Latin at the request of Oxford University Press he had begun an edition of the first decade of Livy, but all that ever saw light was the first book which appeared in 1871. In an introduction the editor shows his familiarity with German research and his admiration for German scholarship. He rejects the traditional history because of the conflicting nature of the different accounts, and he suggestively accounts for the growth of this traditional history. Fortunately for modern history, though less so for ancient, an anonymous benefactor increased the stipend of his chair, and the Cambridge University Press paid Seeley in advance for the book on the statesmanship of Stein on which he was engaged. The result was that he was able to give up his lecturing outside Cambridge and to devote himself wholly to his investigations into Prussian history. The three volumes on The Life and Times of Stein appeared in 1878, and with scholars, if not with the public, they at once gave their author the position of one who had made a real contribution to learning. Pertz had compiled a life of the great statesman which successfully hid his claims to greatness, claims which Seeley amply revealed till Lehmann’s three volumes gave us his exhaustive—but not exhausting—biography. It is a tenable thesis that the best history of any land is generally the work of a foreigner, and the massive volumes of M. Halévy and of Seeley go far to attest its truth. Carlyle’s Frederick the

200 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Great would belong to the same class as those of M. Halévy and Seeley were it not so much disfigured by its hero-worship, a tendency to which Seeley never fell a victim.

Dedicated to Reinhold Pauli, and with a quotation from Goethe on the back of the title-page, The Life and Times of Stein is written in the spirit of Ranke, an historian whom Seeley heartily admired. The two photographs most conspicuous in his drawing-room were those of Ranke and Goethe, his chief masters among modern men. The place of the State is duly indicated amid the details of the history of Prussia from 1806 to 1822. Stein stands for the national State, Napoleon for the universal, and Seeley loves the former State as much as he loathes the latter. Dislike of the universal State is combined with detestation of Napoleon, whose genius he simply could not appreciate. Seeley abhorred his policy and he abhorred the motives behind his policy. A publicist like Bluntschli can date the modern era from the characteristically Prussian date of 1740 when Frederick the Great makes his bow on the European scene. For Seeley, however, the transformation of Prussia into a modern State dates from the epoch-making labours of Stein, whom he, following Hausser, compares to the "god-like" Turgot. In fact, there was a revolution with violence in France which had accomplished little. There was also a revolution without violence in Prussia which had accomplished much. The work of Stein stands out, and so too does the work of Fichte whose admirable Addresses to the German People stirred their patriotism to its very depths. The foundation of the University of Berlin, the educational tasks of the Humboldts, the austere personality of Niebuhr, and the reform of the army by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau all appear. There is no lack of insight into character, though it is plain that Seeley felt nowise attracted to the biographical aspect of his subject now or indeed at any other time. Ideas always fascinate him, and he is at his best in showing that there was a revolution in Germany from 1806 to 1813, and the root cause of this revolution lay in the opposition to Napoleon as a sheer despot. The battle of Jena inaugurates a new epoch in

Concrete Causes

201

European history, the epoch of nationalities. We learn

that "The three principal wars of Prussia, since her great

disaster (at Jena), those waged in 1813, in 1866, and in

1870, have a character of greatness such as no other wars

have. They have, in a manner, reconciled the modern

world to war, for they have exhibited it as a civilising agent

and a kind of teacher of morals."

Seeley had pronounced history the school of statesman-

ship, and so it stood revealed in his biography of Stein.

He put contemporary history above past history, a view

which declares war on the position that to-day is not only the

child of yesterday but of all the yesterdays. He valued

past history, not as a storehouse of great deeds or great

warnings, nor as a portrait gallery of great men, nor for its

poetical and dramatic interest, but as a guide towards action

in the present and judgment in the future. If not directly

practical, it was apparently worthless. Naturally he

included in its definition the old position of "philosophy

teaching by examples," which agrees with the conception

of Thucydides, though he carefully confined it to its bearing

on the politics of to-day and to-morrow. The difficulty

is that the professor who adopts Seeley's attitude may

cross the thin line dividing the statesman from the politician.

It was not a difficulty to him, though we wonder what

Gladstone's feelings were when he found that the man he

had appointed Regius Professor of History was opposing

his Home Rule policy as stoutly as Arnold. To our

professor this policy stood for the disintegration of the

Empire, a perfectly tenable position, but to men in the

eighties, especially if they were Liberals, it might well seem

that Seeley professed not history but Conservative politics.

Doubtless he would have asserted--what was perfectly

true--that he approached the problem of Home Rule for

Ireland purely as a man of science.

He was concerned with the explanation of historical

phenomenon, and causes he must investigate. These

causes, however, must be perfectly concrete. A succession

of plagues, which means the failure of the human harvest,

determines the downfall of the Roman Empire, and a

succession of marriages the rise of the Hapsburgs.

202 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Tocqueville assigns subtle suggestions for the fall of the French monarchy. "Well," according to Napoleon, "do you know the cause of the fall of the Bourbons? It was the battle of Rossbach." Seeley perceives the concreteness of this answer which entirely harmonises with his mode of thought. Yet he holds with Bury that history is a science, though we must not forget the remarkable confession of the latter that "I know for myself that on days when I am a determinist I look on history in one way, and on days when I am an indeterminist, in quite another." Proclaim as loudly as we please the doctrine that history is a science, yet every historian approaches its lock with his own bunch of keys. The main ward in Seeley's key was the outstanding position of the State.

Seeley had surveyed the Prussian State and he had surveyed the British State, in his lectures, but he had surveyed both from the international angle. This angle became of paramount worth when he set himself seriously to consider not merely Great Britain but the Greater Britain into which it had expanded. Obviously the Colonial Office was one thing in the days of Napoleon and Stein, and quite another in the eighties. In the former time the Mother Country told the colonies what they should do, and they for the most part obeyed. No doubt the American Colonies proved an awkward exception to this rule. It was becoming clear that the colonies were growing up into the position of daughter nations which must be consulted, and Seeley felt it incumbent upon him to examine the inner meaning of The Expansion of England, and he published his book in 1883. Few serious historical works have attained so speedy a success or have influenced so powerfully the destinies of our race. In fact, the only books comparable to it are the weighty writings of Admiral Mahan on Sea Power, and they approached Imperialism from one angle just as Seeley approached it from another. When Lord Rosebery offered Seeley the honour of knighthood he laid particular stress on the imperialistic strain of his works, and it was specially appropriate that the knighthood should be that of St. Michael and George, the order of our Empire. It is fitting that St. Paul's Cathedral, the parish church of

the British Empire, should be the home of this order, uniting

Church and State in the manner which gave Seeley such

deep-seated pleasure.

The connection between the separation of the colonies

from the Mother Country and the policy of laissez-faire is

sufficiently obvious. If the cry was “Hands off business,”

it was easy to extend it to “Hands off the colonies.”

Besides, emancipation was the natural and indeed inevitable

destiny of the colonies. From 1850 to 1870 such was the

dominant feeling. The voice of Carlyle was the voice of a

man crying in the wilderness. On the lines indicated by

Cornewall Lewis, the Regius Professor of History at Oxford,

Goldwin Smith, used his brilliant pen on behalf of those

separatist tendencies which were in keeping with the

Manchester School. Sir Charles Dilke shared the views of

this School, and yet his Greater Britain, which described his

travels around the Empire in 1866-67, was a book which

played its due part in shattering separation. He dismisses

with gross contempt such arguments for the retention of

the colonies as that they give the Mother Country a monopoly

of their trade, that they add to her strength, and that they

afford an outlet for emigration. Like Cornewall Lewis and

Goldwin Smith, he does not believe that they confer any

prestige on England. He does, however, hold other

positions in which he anticipated Seeley. He believes that

there is a provinciality of mind in England, and the colonies

tend to preserve his country from that insularity which he

disliked quite as much as Seeley. Moreover, the union of

the colonies with us brings us a step nearer to the virtual

confederation of our race, a prospect as pleasant to him as

it was to Seeley. There is much virtue in a good title, and

the title of Dilke’s book, Greater Britain, went some distance

towards impressing his ideas on his readers. Nor must we

forget that he applied his title to include the United States,

believing with an American historian of our day, Mr. Beer,

that its separation from England was temporary, due to

temporary circumstances. In 1890 Dilke published his

Problems of Greater Britain, and in it we see that the work

of his early book was done. In the meantime Seeley had

made his outstanding contribution in 1883, and Froude,

204 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

by the magic of his style, had led his readers farther along

the imperialistic path.

The end of the sixties marks the turn of the tide. The

anti-Colonial school, headed by Bright, Cobden, and Goldwin

Smith, witnessed the wane of their influence. For one

thing, the weakness of the Manchester School was visible

at home in the factory, and it was easy to conclude that

because it was weak at home it was also weak abroad.

The argument that trade follows the flag was urged re-

peatedly, and there is much virtue in repetition. "What

I say three times is true," cried the queen in Alice in

Wonderland, and what is said thirty times three must be

true. The colonists, too, it was discovered with surprise,

were attached to home, which even to those who had never

left their own colony meant England. The laying of the

cable across the Atlantic and the development of steam led

to an ease in communication unknown before the Victorian

age. Europe, moreover, was travelling towards the union

of small states into larger. Cavour unified Italy in 1861

and Bismarck Germany in 1871. If there was union in

Europe, why should there not be union among ourselves?

The tide was flowing in this direction in the late sixties.

The Liberals were in power to 1874, and it was popularly

believed that Gladstone was anxious to get rid of the colonies.

In 1869 Lord Granville owned that he "would be exceedingly

sorry to see England deprived of all her colonies, but

England would never attempt to retain them by brute

force." The next year Gladstone declared: "There ought

to be nothing to preclude the hope when the growth of a

colonial possession is such as to make separation from the

mother country a natural and beneficial result, that that

separation so far from being effected by violence and blood-

shed might be the result of a peaceable and friendly trans-

action. Surely it is a great object to place, if possible, our

colonial policy on such a footing, not for the purpose of

bringing about a separation but of providing a guarantee

that, if such a separation should occur, it should be in a

friendly way." On the other hand, a Conservative statesman

like Sir Stafford Northcote expressed in 1869 his belief that

the bulk of the people were by no means in favour of

dismemberment. The views of Carlyle and his disciple Ruskin

were beginning to prevail, and this is attested by the

agitation in 1869 and 1870 in favour of State-aided emigra-

tion of the unemployed to the Colonies. Ruskin holds up

colonial expansion as a task worthier of England than

materialism and mammon-worship, and his attitude un-

consciously influenced not a few. Many had advocated

Imperialism, but they had been men without power or

position. Carlyle and Ruskin had both, and so too had

Froude and W. E. Forster, the Liberal statesman. Froude

appeals to Disraeli and the Conservative party, for he believed

with Carlyle and Ruskin that the colonial question was one

which the aristocracy is best fitted to solve. Froude, even

more than Dilke, anticipates Seeley's ideas, for he urges

the changes wrought by the annihilation of distance through

steam and electricity, the vital necessity of considering

the colonies as much integral parts of England as the

English counties, and the belief that the future belongs to

powers with a greater territorial extent than merely those

of Western Europe. Schemes of federation begin to be

propounded, and by the early seventies it is quite clear

that the tide has very definitely turned.

Office lay two years ahead of Disraeli when in 1872 he

bestowed his blessing on Imperialism. His speech then

initiated that intimate connection between Conservatism

and Imperialism which of itself was almost enough to drive

his rival Gladstone even more completely into the opposite

camp. In 1872 Disraeli announced that the three great

objects of the Conservative party were the maintenance of

English institutions, the preservation of the Empire, and

social reform. On the second of these points he proclaimed

that "If you look to the history of this country since the

advent of Liberalism—forty years ago—you will find that

there has been no effort so continuous, so subtle, supported

by so much energy, and carried on with so much ability

and acumen, as the attempts of Liberalism to effect the

disintegration of the Empire of England. And, gentlemen,

of all its efforts, this is the one which has been the nearest

to success. Statesmen of the highest character, writers of

the most distinguished ability, the most organised and

206 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

efficient means, have been employed in this endeavour.

It has been proved to all of us that we have lost money

by our colonies. It has been shown with precise, with

mathematical demonstration that there never was a jewel

in the Crown of England that was so truly costly as the

possession of India. How often has it been suggested that

we should at once emancipate ourselves from this incubus!

Well, that result was nearly accomplished. When those

subtle views were adopted by the country under the plausible

plea of granting self-government to the colonies, I confess

that I myself thought that the tie was broken. Not that

I for one object to self-government; I cannot conceive how

our distant colonies can have their affairs administered

except by self-government.

"But self-government in my opinion, when it was con-

ceded, ought to have been conceded as part of a great policy

of Imperial consolidation. It ought to have been accom-

panied by an Imperial tariff, by securities for the people of

England for the enjoyment of the unappropriated lands

which belonged to the Sovereign as their trustee, and by a

military code which should have precisely defined the

means and the responsibilities by which the colonies should

be defended, and by which, if necessary, this country should

call for aid from the colonies themselves. It ought, further,

to have been accompanied by the institution of some

representative council in the metropolis, which would have

brought the colonies into constant and continuous relations

with the Home Government. All this, however, was

omitted because those who advised that policy—and I

believe their convictions were sincere—looked upon the

colonies of England, looked even upon the connexion with

India, as a burden upon this country, viewing everything in

financial aspect and totally passing by those moral and

political considerations which made nations great, and by

the influence of which alone men are distinguished from

animals.

"Well, what has been the result of this attempt during the

reign of Liberalism for the disintegration of the Empire.

It has entirely failed. But how has it failed? Through the

sympathy of the colonies for the Mother Country. They

have decided that the Empire shall not be destroyed, and

in my opinion no Minister in this country will do his duty

who neglects any opportunity of reconstructing as much

as possible our colonial Empire, and of responding to those

distant sympathies which may become the source of in-

calculable strength and happiness to this land."

The statesman-novelist had spoken, but Tennyson had

before him announced in his verse the glory of Imperialism,

the unity of our race in its very variety. He regarded the

Empire as a deep-rooted tree which sustains and nourishes

its flourishing branches, while in turn the branches lend

support and vitality to the stem. A patriot always, the

diary of his wife attests that in 1870 he was growing

interested in Imperial unity and the means of accomplishing

it by federation. In 1872 in the epilogue to Queen Victoria

which he added to the new edition of the Idylls of the King

he spoke plainly his thought on the school of separatists:

And that true North,1 whereof we lately heard,

A strain to shame us “keep you to yourselves;

So loyal is too costly! friends—your love

Is but a burden: loose the bond and go.”

Is this the tone of empire? hers the faith

That made us rulers? this, indeed, her voice

And meaning, whom the roar of Hougomont

Left mightiest of all peoples under heaven?

The loyal to their crown

Are loyal to their own far sons, who love

Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes,

For ever-broadening England, and her throne,

In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle,

That knows not her own greatness: if she knows

And dreads it we are fall'n.

What the poet wrote in 1872 the statesman-novelist

spoke in 1872, and the conjunction of the two bestowed

a marked impetus on the flowing tide of Imperialism.

Four years later in Harold Edward the Confessor dimly

sees the Imperialistic vision rise before his eyes. In 1852

Tennyson had written Hands all Round, and he had written

it in denunciation of France and a declaration of friendship

with America. But in 1882 he transformed it:

To all the loyal hearts who long

To keep our English Empire whole!

1 Canada.

20S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

To all our noble sons, the strong

New England of the Southern Pole!

To England under Indian skies.

To those dark millions of her realm!

To Canada whom we love and prize,

Whatever statesmen hold the helm.

Hands all round!

God the traitor's hope confound!

To this great name of England, drink my friends,

And all her glorious empire, round and round.

To all our statesmen so they be

True leaders of the land's desire!

To both our Houses, may these see

Beyond the borough and the shire!

We sailed wherever ship could sail.

We founded many a mighty state,

Pray God, our greatness may not fail

Thro' craven fears of being great.

The Exhibition of 1851 was meant as a contribution towards the peace of mankind. The Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886 was held the year before the first Jubilee of Queen Victoria, and was as imperialistic in tone as that of 1851 had been cosmopolitan. In 1851 the Manchester School had been dominant, but in 1886 there was none to do it reverence. Tennyson's feelings are again plain in the poem he wrote on Imperial unity in 1886:

Sharers of our glorious past,

Brothers, must we part at last?

Shall we not thro' good and ill

Cleare to one another still?

Britain's myriad voices call,

Sons be welded each and all,

Into one imperial whole,

One with Britain, heart and soul!

One life, one flag, one fleet, one throne!

Britons, hold your own.

The ground for The Expansion of England had been prepared, and it was distinctly felix opportunitate vitae. Its author had given it as a series of lectures in 1881–82, though according to Oscar Browning its leading idea was conceived at Pontresina in 1879. Mr. Tanner informs us that the romantic story of the growth of our empire was first told in a Cambridge lecture-room, and told in such a

Seeley's Moderation

209

way as to stir the pulses of the dullest undergraduate among

the audience. Seeley's conception of our empire was the

conception of a poet as well as an historian. To him it was

a "world-Venice":-

The sea is in the broad, and narrow streets,

Ebbing and flowing.

In history we may see with Ranke "was eigentlich

gevesen ist," or with Lamprecht "was eigentlich geworden ist,"

or with C. F. Lehmann Haupt "das Gewordene als Wer-

des verstehen." With Seeley, as with the last historian,

it was his duty to envisage the facts as a process. It

grades with the Crocean doctrine of the reality of history

as the reality of mind acting and always active.

There is no undue exaltation of our countrymen shown by

Seeley. "When we look at Europe from a distance we shall be

tempted by the ethnological fallacy, we shall attribute the

political success of Englishmen exclusively to 'English

political capacity,' or to the 'quiet perseverance,' the

'common-sense,' or the 'natural moderation' of the Anglo-

Saxon in distinction to all other races. It is, no doubt, hard

to reject the doctrine that we are better than other people

when it presents itself in the form of a grand inductive law,"

and Seeley loved laws and generalisations. Nor is there a

touch of the Jingo in the whole book. He does not for

a single moment endorse the Nelsonian view that one

Englishman can beat three Frenchmen and an incalculable

number of browns and blacks, reds and yellows. In fact,

from first page to last there is not a trace of hubris. In

the magic hands of Macaulay the building of our Indian

Empire by your Clives and your Warren Hastings is a

romance which quickens the blood, but in the hands of

Seeley our wonder is lessened though our interest in the

process is correspondingly increased. He draws a sharp

line between the white colonies and India, the possession of

which, he declared, increases our responsibilities but not

our power. Nor does he fail to point out that "Bigness is

not necessarily greatness. If by remaining in the second

rank of magnitude we can hold the first rank morally and

intellectually, let us sacrifice mere material magnitude."

We had conquered and peopled half the world, declared

210 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Seeley, in a fit of absence of mind, and even now we had not ceased to think of ourselves as a race inhabiting an island off the northern coasts of Europe. There was a provinciality of mind in our historians which must be altered. The key to the eighteenth century lies in the hundred years' war between France and England, and both countries fought for a prize of incalculable worth, the headship of the colonial world. The main struggle of England, so he envisaged it, from the time of Louis XIV to the time of Napoleon was for the possession of the New World. It was one of these large generalisations he loved. Unlike many who love generalisations, he worked out his with a wealth of convincing evidence. Seeley and Darwin had both been members of Christ's College, and it is singular to note the attraction generalisations possessed over the historian and the biologist, and no less singular is the meticulous attention each bestowed on these details which are vital to the driving home of any thesis with overpowering conviction. Sound requires atmosphere, and there was the atmosphere in the public mind in which the voice of The Expansion of England could be heard, and heard it was throughout the length and the breadth of the Empire. Within two years of its publication, eighty thousand copies were sold. In 1884 Lord Morley wrote a carping criticism of the Expansion, detecting danger in it. For to this Liberal Seeley appeared as one of the founders of a new school of Imperialism celebrated by poets like Henley and Kipling as well as by and Milner, Oxford and Haldane, Grey and Joseph Chamberlain. "Nobody expected Canadian regiments to storm the Redan side by side with the English soldiers. Nobody hopes to see Australians or New Zealanders volunteer for service out of their own country," so declared Lord Thring in 1865. "Australia has militiamen, but who supposes that they can be spared in any numbers worth considering for long campaigns, and this further loss and dislocation

? Supposing for the sake of argument, that Australia were represented in the body that decided on war, though we may notice that war is often entered upon even in our own victorious days without preliminary consent from

HOSTILITY TO NAPOLEON

211

Parliament, nobody believes that the presence of Australian representatives in the imperial assembly that voted the funds would reconcile their constituents at the other side of the globe to paying money for a war, say, for the defence of Afghanistan against Russia, or for the defence of Belgian neutrality," so declared Lord Morley in 1884. Let the battlefields of Europe and in particular the slopes of Gallipoli attest how far Australians were prepared to die in defence of Belgian neutrality. The truth is that Morley conceived, in the spirit of Manchester, that our empire was united, if it were united, by community of interest, whereas Seeley conceived it as bound together by community of race and religion.

In The Expansion of England he had inevitably been preoccupied with the hostility of Napoleon, and in 1885 he published his unsympathetic sketch of this amazing genius. Vandal holds that Napoleon codified the Revolution. "Il ne crée pas le progrés, il l'enregistre et le fixe, le stabilise. En lui l'ardente matière se concréte sous forme solide, indestructible ; par lui en cette partie la Révolution se fait bronze et granit." This is a point of view Seeley could never reach. To him Napoleon was a man destitute of originality, whose one idea was to regain the old French Colonial Empire from England. He takes as low an estimate of Napoleon's statesmanship as Taine. The finest and the fullest survey of Napoleon's many-sided labours is to be found in Meredith's four Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History, and the gulf fixed between Seeley and him is unbridgeable. Seeley asks questions, and he also answers them. How far was Napoleon assisted by circumstances? How far were his ideas his own? How far did his peculiar character affect the destinies of France? He answers that Napoleon was shaped as well as favoured by circumstances; that if his armies were at first victorious, it was because they were inspired not by the personal idea of liberty which meant so much to Seeley, but by the greatness of France; that if we praise his institutions we must remember that he borrowed his despotism from the Jacobins, his Concordat and his nobility from the monarchy, his system of civil liberties from the men of 1789; and that, in a word, he was heir of

212 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

the Revolution. The thesis of The Expansion of England is repeated. We learn that "the special and peculiar work

of Napoleon is that colossal attempt to conquer England by conquering Europe" in his desire to regain the French

colonies. Nor did he ever know when he came to the street called Stop. Bismarck always realised when he came

to that street, but Napoleon seemed incapable of so doing. He should have held his hand at latest in 1805. Seeley

points out that by the invasion of Spain and Portugal, Napoleon prepared the way for the independence of South

America, and we are invited to consider this independence as the chief result of his career. The Growth of British

Policy, which appeared in 1895, is as international a piece of work as any Seeley has given us. It was based on forty

manuscript volumes of extracts copied from the Record Office and other sources, and this is but an example of the

thoroughness with which he worked. In this book he carefully traces our place in the European States-system

from the instability of its religious and dynastic phases to the relative stability of its commercial phase. Three great

rulers accomplished this transition, and they are Elizabeth, Cromwell, and William III. The greatness of Elizabeth,

lies not so much in what she did as in what she left undone, in "her wise parsimony of action." She refused to contract

a foreign marriage, which might have made her realm tributary to Hapsburg or Valois; she refused to go to war

with Spain for fear of kindling in a fresh blaze the embers of religious strife; she refused to ask Parliament for money;

and, last of all, she refused to name her heir. Froude drew a discouraging picture of the woman: Seeley drew

an encouraging one of the stateswoman, declaring "that if, in her own language, she was married to that generation

of Englishmen, we may add, that she is the mother of all generations that have succeeded."

Gardiner and Seeley agree in pronouncing the policy of the Stuarts dynastic. Cromwell was the true heir of the

Queen, for he pursued the same national policy. Our historian is as blind as Carlyle to the financial embarrass-

ments which would have wrecked the Protector's policy—if he had lived longer. Seeley discerns and exposes his

Imperialism, and we are asked to consider Cromwell not as a mere parliamentarian or even as a party leader but as the man who united the British Isles, the Sulla or the Bismarck of our policy. If Elizabeth gave the falling Spanish monarchy a blow, Cromwell gave it the knock-out. Elizabeth had raised England to the position of the great Protestant power, the Stuarts had constantly lowered her from this position to which Cromwell restored her, and it was reserved for William III to complete the labours of his two great predecessors. In his brilliant analysis Seeley never for a moment ignores the share taken by religion. We are asked to note the difference between the monarchical and conservative tendencies of Lutheranism and the popular and rebellious ones of Calvinism. Nor are we allowed to gaze at William III as if the causes of the 1688 Revolution were largely English. Macaulay approaches it from this angle, whereas Seeley, with Klopp, approaches it from the angle of foreign policy. The dynastic connections of the Stuarts are all important, for it was his family connection that lent a French tinge to the policy of Charles II and to that of his brother. Had it not been for, say, their mother, they might have preferred the safety of Austrian amity which meant Romish amity as well. Seeley supplies the background to the Popish Plot of Oates, and sees it in the growth of French militarism under Louvois and the aggressions of French Roman Catholicism under Madame de Maintenon. For the figure of Oates we discern that of Louis XIV as he signs the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Our historian supplements these conclusions in his Introduction to Political Science, which Sidgwick saw through the press in 1896. There Seeley explains that the Restoration of 1660 looms larger in his eyes than the Revolution of 1688, and he proves his point conclusively. The Revolution did not establish Parliamentary Government, for the Long and Cavalier Parliaments had done so. Nor did it diminish the royal power, for the Restoration had done so. Seeley reveals the diplomatic unity of Europe as no one save Ranke has revealed it, and yet we feel with his survey of our foreign policy, as indeed we feel with Ranke's surveys of foreign policy, that too much is attributed to the designs

214 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

of the diplomatist. Still, it is the glory of Seeley that he created foreign policy as a department of history. "While we have," he writes, "entered early into the conception of constitutional history, and have seen in this department first a Hallam and then a Stubbs, we have scarcely yet perceived that Constitutional History requires the History of Policy as its correlative." Such was the correlative he supplied.

His Introduction to Political Science is his last work, and in it we are conscious once more of the conception of the State as a great organic reality, the inspiration of the higher life which manifests itself in religion, in literature, and in a hundred other fashions. "Who can describe that which unites men? . . . Who can describe exhaustively the origin of civil society?" In his slender volume our author essays this task, and performs it suggestively. If he reviews the beginnings of the Roman State, he takes occasion to remind us that "The legends of Numa Pompilius and of Epimenides; the ancient priesthoods, more ancient commonly than purely secular institutions; many survivals, such as the Amphictyonic Confederation and the Comitia Curiata,—all these indications in Greek and Roman history, and others quite similar in the histories of other states, lead us to conclude that of states it may be said, as the poet has said of individuals, 'Heaven lies about them in their infancy'."

He admits that the history of the last two centuries show that in Europe the State disentangles itself from the particular institution of the Christian religion with which it has been connected. Men speak of community of interest and community of race, but Seeley never forgets the community of religion.

The two books of Seeley's which manifest least unity, a quality generally pervading his writings, are The Life and Times of Stein and The Introduction to Political Science. Obiter dicta in the latter set one thinking, but it is certainly difficult to glean from it a coherent idea of political science. Seeley announces "I should like to meet the man who would venture to tell me plainly that it would have been safe to introduce toleration in the great European states earlier by a century than it was introduced; that, for

instance, it might have been introduced into England under Elizabeth, or that Philip II might have introduced it into Spain, or the House of Valois into France." The reason of course is that an earlier introduction would have grievously hindered the unity of the State. Incidentally, there are two fine lectures on conceptions of liberty. The world of 1895 is revealed in the observation: "What would become of conversation among us if there were no Parliament? We should all be struck dumb. This is often explained by saying that the Englishman is a political animal, and King Louis Philippe used to say that the French would not have so many revolutions if they could learn the English habit of talking politics after dinner."

Seeley emphasises the importance of the Restoration of 1660, for he is well aware that every restoration is at bottom a revolution. This importance lies in the permanence of Parliament. He refuses, however, to date the decline of the influence of the monarch before the middle of the eighteenth century. Nor will he allow that George I and George II lose power because of the presence of Walpole unless you are prepared to argue that the monarchy declined, instead of gaining enormously in power, under Richelieu and Mazarin.

It was in keeping with the interests of Henry Sidgwick that he edited the last work of Seeley, his colleague at Cambridge. He himself was primarily a moral philosopher who followed Mill with the many qualifications suggested by his subtle mind. In 1891 his Elements of Politics appeared, and in 1903 posthumously his Development of European Polity. The two works usefully supplement each other, for the historical element present in Seeley's Introduction and indeed in the Development of European Polity is conspicuous by its absence in the Elements of Politics. In the last book we are continually aware that its author has a case in mind which is applicable to the argument he is unfolding, but as it is not precisely applicable he refrains from its use. In its first part he analyses the principles on which legislation should be based in a well-ordered community, and which should regulate the relations of the State with foreign powers. In the second part, which

216 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

is almost of equal length with the first part, he describes

the methods and instruments of government in a civilised

country, detailing the duties of the legislature, the executive,

and the judicature respectively. In both parts he seldom

employs induction from the political experiences which

history records, as Seeley was so prone to do. On the other

hand, he usually employs the deductive method, though it

is a deductive method not so much checked by experience

as Mill's was. The opening words of The Expansion of

England are: "It is a favourite maxim of mine that history,

while it should be scientific in its method, should pursue a

practical object." It is quite surprising in Sidgwick's book

to note how often we meet with such sentences as "I am

inclined to think," or "I am of opinion." Not that the

writer was in the least egotistic, but it is the natural outcome

of the fashion in which he sets down his conclusions. If

Mill's Representative Government is apt to suggest the con-

ditions of thought and legislation in 1861, Sidgwick's Element

of Politics is also apt to suggest similar conditions thirty

years later; yet if Darwin ever taught anything he certainly

taught that there is no finality in politics.

With Mill we find that Sidgwick admits that the ultimate

criterion of the goodness of law, and of the actions of

government generally, is their tendency to increase the

general happiness. This happiness is to include not only

the human beings who are actually living but those who are

to live hereafter. Happiness may be promoted by a policy

of laissez-faire or one of paternal legislation. Apply we

laissez-faire as rigidly as we please, yet we come to what

he terms the individualistic minimum. We may try to

limit the interference of the government in the ordinary

affairs of life, yet such interference is inevitable in contracts,

property, and the personal safety of each member of the

community. Sidgwick sanctions the enforcement of contracts,

the maintenance of property, the prevention of wrongdoing,

and the appointment of a public prosecutor. He believes

that the principle of individualism is applicable to adult

males but not to children or in all cases to women. If

Socialism means the substitution of common for private

ownership, of governmental for private management of

THE INTERNATIONAL IDEAL

217

the instruments of production in all important departments of industry, he is opposed to it.

Sidgwick applies the Utilitarian test in foreign as in domestic politics. The achievement of the greatest happiness of the greatest number will normally be attained by a system of laissez-faire. According to him "the ultimate standard of right governmental conduct (is) the general happiness of all the human beings concerned, and not merely the interests of one particular State." Here we are travelling from the national to the international ideal. In practice, however, he is not slow to admit that his principle cannot be universally applied. In cases of "high-handed aggression"—we may instance Germany in Belgium in 1914—"where the assailant is clearly in the wrong I think that any powerful neighbouring State—even if its own interests are not directly threatened—ought to manifest a general readiness to co-operate in forcible suppression of the wrong.

. . . Unless we suppose that the mere exercise of superior force is kept under some check by the fear of intervention of other States against palpable injustice, war between States decidedly unequal in strength will hardly retain its moral character at all. . . . And I think that co-operation to prevent wanton breaches of international peace is the best mode of preparing the way for the ultimate federation of civilised States, to which I look forward. But in the present state of civilisation it would, I think, be a mistake to try to prevent wars altogether in this way. We may hope to put down by it palpable and high-handed aggression, including perhaps the refusal to submit minor points to arbitration; but it is not applicable where there is a conflict of reasonable claims, too vague and doubtful to be clearly settled by general consent, and at the same time too serious to be submitted to arbitration."

If anyone takes the trouble—and the exquisite pleasure he will reap will be his reward—to read the biography of Henry Sidgwick, he will find a man close to our ideal of the thinker. Every sentence of his writing illustrates the familiar slowness and cautiousness in method combined with a sincerity of spirit so constant and so intense that the heart of it may almost be heard throbbing as the words are read.

219 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

Characteristic of Sidgwick, it is also, we like to think, the very quality which made him so typically English a thinker.

Our love of truth is not intellectual, but moral; the virtue of the gentleman rather than that of the man of science.

The typical Englishman among our men of letters is Samuel Johnson. But Johnson is not the typical English thinker,

because he was not primarily a thinker at all. For the thinker all questions are open. For Johnson, however,

many questions—the wisdom of the English constitution for instance, the wickedness of the Whigs—were closed.

"Quieta non movere," the policy of not questioning the actual system of things but making it somehow workable,

may be the wisest for the majority of men. But it cannot be the method of the thinker or inquirer. And it was not

the method of those who are most typical of English thought, especially Joseph Butler, the most typical of all. No one

was so like Butler in the nineteenth century as Henry Sidgwick. There is of course more play of intellect in

Sidgwick—a play which sometimes goes so far as real humour—and there is far less of that sorrowful earnestness

as of a prophet calling to a perverse generation which is so frequent a note in Butler. But there is the same visible

and audible sincerity, the same resolute and persistent will to give its fair weight to every objection and never to say one

syllable more than the truth allows. Such a spirit in science, political and other, would change the tone and temper of

the twentieth century, turning it into a brotherhood of men striving for the whole truth and turning aside from

making this brotherhood into the sheerest of rivalry of nation with nation. The common aims and the common

interests of all thinkers and scientists, whatever their nationality, ought to bind them into a commonwealth of

culture.

REFERENCES

Bodelsen, C. A. Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism. (London, 1924.)

Bradley, F. H. Mr. Sidgwick's Hedonism. (London, 1877.)

Doyle, J. A. Essays on Various Subjects. (London, 1911.)

Gazeau, J. L'Impérialisme anglais: son évolution. Carlyle, Seeley, Chamberlain. (Paris, 1913.)

219

REFERENCES

Gooch, G. P History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century.

(London, 1913 )

Gooch, G P Germany and the French Revolution. (London, 1920.)

Hayward, F. H. The Ethical Philosophy of Sidgwick. (London,

1901 )

Morley, Lord. Miscellanies Vol. III. (London, 1892 )

Rein, A Sir John Robert Seeley Eine Studie ueber den Historiker.

(Langensalza, 1912 )

Ruggiero, G de La formazione dell' Impero britannico. (Brescia,

1925.)

Sidgwick, A., and Sidgwick, E M. Henry Sidgwick, (London,

1906.)

Stedfeld, G F. Ueber die natiirliche Auffassung der Englander.

Eine Studie. zu dein Buche : " Ecce Homo" von einem

ungenannten Verfasser. (Berlin, 1869.)

" The Heart of the Empire." (London, 1901 ) See Gooch's essay on

" Imperialism."

Chapter VI.

BAGEHOT'S SEMINAL MIND

Walter Bagehot was one of the outstanding imaginative intellects of the nineteenth century. He was a man of wide culture, of fine sensibility, and of ready intellect. His criticism has been fragmentary, but it has been fruitful. The contributions he makes to thought, rich, ample, and suggestive as they are, have all the characteristics of his outwardly uneventful but inwardly eventful life. In literary criticism and in biography, in political philosophy and in political economy, he drove the shaft deep and gave us samples of the wealth of ore lying in their confines. Although he worked these mines at irregular intervals and passed rapidly from the one to the other, yet, by their leavening and quickening activity, he bestowed an amazing stimulus on thought. The reader felt entranced by the ideas unfolded before him, the subtlety of their suggestiveness, the wealth of their insight, and the far-reaching nature of this suggestiveness and insight. Bagehot was so full of views that it was a relief to him to part with some portion of them to others. After a dawn of unsurpassed promise and performance, he prematurely passed away at fifty-one, carrying with him an originality of outlook seldom equalled and never surpassed. His life had never been calm outwardly, saddened as it was by the madness of his mother to whom he was passionately attached. Nor had it been calm inwardly, for it was animated by deep-seated and never resting intellectual and imaginative forces. The strength of his character and unique individuality is evident in all his writings. His world was not our every-day working world, but one created out of his own inner consciousness. No other publicist, not even Maine or Seeley, has been an initial

220

influence, a generative influence, on so many readers. Like

('oieridge, he possessed the rare quality of fecundating

thought in others, to whom his works came as a revelation.

No English prose is nearer to that of Goethe in its power of

sweeping the reader aiong, with or without his consent, till

he is left wondering what it is that has seized hold of him.

Beyond most, Bagehot opened to our mental gaze vast and

varied fields of reflection, and invoked illuminating and

thickly-crowded thoughts.

His rank is with Coleridge or Arnold, and as with them, we

may draw a line between the active or practical genius and

the passive or speculative. It is a distinction Bagehot

had in mind when he laid down: "Certain minds, the

moment we think of them, suggest to us the ideas of sym-

metry and proportion. Plato's name, for example, calls up

at once the impression of something ordered, measured, and

settled; it is the exact contrary of everything eccentric,

immature, or undeveloped. The opinions of such a mind are

often erroneous, and some of them may, from change of

time, of intellectual data, or from chance, seem not to be

quite worthy of it; but the mode in which those opinions are

expressed, and (as far as we can make out) the mode in

which they are framed, affect us, as we have said, with a

sensation of symmetricalness. . . . We may lay it down as

the condition of a regular or symmetrical genius, that it

should have the exact combination of powers suited to

graceful and easy success in an exercise of mind great

enough to task the whole intellectual nature.

On the other hand, men of irregular or unsymmetrical

genius are eminent for some few peculiarities of mind, have

possibly special defects on other sides of their intellectual

nature, at any rate want what the scientific men of the

present day would call the definite proportion of faculties and

qualities suited to the exact work they have in hand."

Our critic is not for a single moment laying stress on an

external attitude, for in the development of his thought he

anticipates the point of view worked our by Jung in his

Psychological Types. Bagehot proceeds: "Possibly it may

be laid down that one of two elements is essential to a

symmetrical mind. It is evident that such a mind must

222 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

either apply itself to that which is theoretical or that which is practical, to the world of abstraction or to the world of objects and realities. In the former case the deductive understanding, which masters first principles, and makes deductions from them, the thin ether of the intellect—the 'mind itself by itself'—must evidently assume a great prominence. To attempt to comprehend principles without it is to try to swim without arms, or to fly without wings. Accordingly, in the mind of Plato, and in others like him, the abstract and deducing understanding fills a great place; the imagination seems a kind of eye to descry its data; the artistic instinct an arranging impulse, which sets in order its inferences and conclusions. On the other hand, if a symmetrical mind busy itself with the active side of human life, with the world of concrete men and real things, its principal quality will be a practical sagacity, which forms with ease a distinct view and just appreciation of all the mingled objects that the world presents—which allots to each its own place, and its intrinsic and appropriate rank "

Once he states principles Bagehot, unlike Sidgwick, is always anxious to apply them. To him Chaucer affords an example of the second type of regular genius, as he himself affords another, and then concludes: “ Eminence in one or other of these marking faculties—either in the deductive abstract intellect or the practical sagacity—seems essential to the mental constitution of a symmetrical genius, at least in man. There are, after all, but two principal all-important spheres in human life—thought and action; and we can hardly conceive of a masculine mind symmetrically developed which did not evince its symmetry by an evident perfection in one or other of those pursuits, which did not leave the trace of its distinct reflection upon the one or other, or its large insight upon the other of them.”

Shakespeare attests how difficult it is to mark off men into the type of practical seeing sagacity or of deductive practical intellect. Perhaps he has more of the former than of the latter, and perhaps we ought to say that all men of genius belong to both types, and that according as one or other type prevails, so we regard them. The practical seeing sagacity was Bagehot's and all his writings afford proof of it.

THE COUNTRY BANKER

223

Walter Bagehot (1826-77) was born at Langport, an old-fashioned little town in the heart of Somersetshire. There he lived and there he died, and there he conducted his business as a banker. In the Middle Ages Langport was important enough to return two members to Parliament, until the burgesses petitioned Edward I to relieve them of the expense of paying their members. This economy and open indifference to patriotic pretensions pleased Bagehot, who used to boast of it to his friends as a note of true political sobriety The town then was a close corporation with a portreeve of its own, and a long sober constitutional history. The importance of Langport and its commercial prosperity are due to its being the first ford from the mouth of the river Parret. It is close to Glastonbury and Sedgemoor, and Chatham's old home, Burton Pynsent, is not far away. The great spaces of uninterrupted air and sky of the West Country always appealed to Bagehot, whose affections were closely bound up with them. Its delightful natural beauty turned his poetic longings to Wordsworth, and its innate conservatism tinged his political thought.

At Langport in 1772 Vincent Stuckey established the bank variously known at Stuckey's Bank, the Somersetshire Bank, and the Bristol and Somersetshire Bank. Thomas Watson Bagehot, Walter's father, married a niece of Vincent Stuckey, and thus became connected with this bank, becoming its vice-chairman. It was one of the earliest joint-stock banks in the country, and in time it had fourteen branches. Thirteen banks became amalgamated with it, and this meant it stood in a position of commanding importance in the West Country. Till it amalgamated with Parr's Bank in 1909, it enjoyed the privilege of issuing notes, and its note issue was, after the Bank of England, the largest in the country. Chatham was at least once driven to borrow from it. In 1909 its deposits amounted to nearly £7,000,000 and its capital to £1,751,000.

The Stuckeys and the Bagehots dominated Langport and its neighbourhood for a hundred and fifty years after the middle of the eighteenth century. Walter Bagehot used to explain his family by dwelling on the characteristics of these two families, and set out how each supplied traits

224 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

wanting in the other. The Stuckey nature was shrewd and wilful, sociable and hospitable. The Bagehot nature was intellectual and cultured, dignified and retiring. Both natures blended in Walter Bagehot. His mother, Edith Stuckey, was as voracious a reader as her son was to be The bond between mother and son was an unusually strong one, and the son in the days to come refused the office of Finance Minister to the Council of India in order to be with his mother during her attacks. There was this element of tragedy in his life which he felt intensely. “Every trouble in life is a joke compared to madness,” so he used to think.

If the home was to be an anxious one, for the lad it was a home of love. Its atmosphere was steeped in religion—in a variety of outlook in religion, for his father was a spiritually-minded Unitarian and his mother a convinced Church-woman. Burke enjoyed a similar diversity of views, and it promoted that width of outlook which was distinctly desirable on the part of one who was to be a thinker. A governess taught Walter at home till he entered Bristol College, where he remained from 1839 to 1842. On entering it he took up classics, mathematics, German and Hebrew, and his progress was as rapid as Seeley’s. At Bristol lived Dr. Prichard, his mother's brother-in-law, who wrote a book on Races of Men which was to leave its mark on Bagehot's outlook on life. Over two hundred letters passed between the son and his father and mother while he was at school at Bristol. In these letters the father treats his son more as a younger brother, writing inter alia on Peel and communicating to his son his own ardour for Free Trade. Walter attended scientific lectures given by Dr. Carpenter, and at Clifton he met such men as Carpenter, Prichard, and Symonds, father of the historian of the Renaissance. The conversation of these men set the lad thinking about many subjects that never swim into the ken of the average public school boy. The races of mankind, their physical history, the additions to such subjects then being made by the traveller—these came his way before he was sixteen, and subconsciously influenced his mind. Seeds were sown in it which were destined to bear fruit in his writings.

BAGEHOT AND HUTTON

225

T. W. Bagehot objected to the doctrinal tests then in force in the two ancient universities, and accordingly his son entered University College, London, in 1842. There he had the rare good fortune to meet as a fellow undergraduate Richard Holt Hutton, and the two became friends for life.

In an article on Oxford reform Bagehot wrote out of his undergraduate days: "So, too, in youth, the real plastic energy is not in tutors, or lectures, or in books 'got up,' but in Wordsworth and Shelley, in the books that all read because all like; in what all talk of because all are interested; in the argumentative walk or disputatious lounge; in the impact of young thought upon young thought, of hot thought on hot thought; in mirth and refutation, in ridicule and laughter; for these are the free play of the natural mind, and these cannot be got without a college." Undergraduates are influenced by other undergraduates rather than by their professors, and Bagehot and Hutton exercised a marked power each on the other.

They both delighted in discussing their subjects of study, and Hutton relates how on one occasion they "wandered up and down Regent Street for something like two hours in the vain attempt to find Oxford Street," so absorbed were they in debating "whether the so-called logical principle of identity (A is A) was entitled to rank as a law of thought or only as a postulate of language."

The nature of the friendship between Bagehot and Hutton was like that between Carlyle and Mill while it lasted. Bagehot, like Carlyle, grasped truth with the intuition of genius while Hutton, like Mill, worked his way to it with thorough thought. The bond between the two men was intellectual, and when the intellectual bond was strengthened by the tie of religion, it was unbreakable.

After Bagehot's death Hutton wrote in a letter to the sister-in-law of his dearest friend: "You remember that sonnet of Wordsworth's Bagehot was so fond of, beginning—

Surprised with joy, impatient as the wind

I turned to share my rapture—oh! with whom?

It often comes back upon me now when I have something I want to talk to him about, and I remember I shall never hear his step coming up my stairs again."

226 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

Bagehot grew up in a religious atmosphere, and his religion meant everything to him. He used to say when it was a question of abolishing religious teaching in schools "It is one thing to have a dogmatic religion implanted in children from their babyhood, however less dogmatic their views may become as they grow up to be men and women, and quite another to bring up children without any religious creed at all. We have yet to see what a nation would be like whose men and women had never had any religious training whatever given to them as children." It was a point of view Matthew Arnold would urge, and it is a point of view by no means out-of-date. In his essay on Bishop Butler Bagehot writes: "In every step of religious argument we require the assumption, the belief, the faith, if the word is better, in an absolutely perfect Being; in and by whom we are, who is omnipotent as well as most holy; who moves on the face of the whole world, and ruleth all things by the word of His power. If we grant this, the difficulty of the opposition between what is here called the natural and the supernatural religion is removed; and without granting it, that difficulty is perhaps insuperable. It follows from the very idea and definition of an infinitely perfect Being, that He is within us as well as without us—ruling the clouds of the air, and the fishes of the sea, as well as the fears and thoughts of men; smiling through the smile of nature as well as warning with the pain of conscience—‘sine qualitate, bonum ; sine quantitate, magnum ; sine indigentia, creatorem ; sine situ, praesidentem ; sine habitu, omnia continentem ; sine loco, ubique totum ; sine tempore, sempiternum ; sine ulla sui mutatione, mutabilia facientem, nihilque patientem.’ If we assume this, life is simple; without this, all is dark."

Hutton tells us that within the last two or three years of his life, Bagehot spoke on one occasion of the Trinitarian doctrine as probably the best account human reason could render of the mystery of the self-existent mind. Nor is it possible to divorce his religious from his political thought. The union of the two peeps out in many ways. His wife thought it required great grace to be a nun or a monk. To what other person in the world—except Bagehot—would it occur that one way to meet this argument was to appeal to

the early Utilitarian system? He writes: "If it means simply retiring from the world and living a life of contemplation in one place, I do not think there are many things easier and pleasanter. It is completely realising the laissez-faire system of grappling with the evils of the world. Every one knows on a small scale how easy that is. That bodily penance is considered by most men easier than the everyday work of duty is quite evident from the history of all religions. Then Catholics would say that to live a life of prayer was difficult. But it is surely not so difficult as to live in the world a life of prayer and labour also."

Bagehot was a personal author who reveals not a little of his character to the discerning reader. Is anyone more impersonal than Shakespeare? Yet Bagehot boldly asserts that it is quite possible to know our greatest dramatist. He points out that "to a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature. It is not enough to have opportunity, it is essential to feel it. Some occasions come to all men; but to many they are of little use, and to some they are none." He instances Guizot who had not this experiencing nature, and he also instances Macaulay, though how he could instance the historian, who profited so much by his stay in India, we cannot divine.

He tells us that Macaulay's "mind shows no trace of change. What he is, he was; and what he was, he is. He early attained a high development; but he has not increased it since; years have come, but they have whispered little; as was said of the second Pitt, 'He never grew, he was cast.' The volume of speeches which he has published place the proof of this in every man's hand. His first speeches are as good as his last, his last scarcely richer than his first. He came into public life at an exciting season; he shared of course in that excitement, and the same excitement still quivers in his mind. He delivered marvellous rhetorical exercises on the Reform Bill when it passed; he speaks of it with rhetorical interest even now. He is still the man of '32. From that era he looks on the past."

Bagehot's own nature was essentially experiencing. He enjoyed the rare good fortune of constant intercourse with Hutton, a man whose nature was so different from his own.

228 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

each in fact supplying the deficiencies of the other. Nor is it

possible to dissociate the effects of his mother's illnesses on the

growth of his character. In his biography his sister-in-law,

Mrs Russell Barrington, emphasises this point. She thinks

that his sorrow tended to ripen all that was distinguished

in his character, and stimulated, rather than suppressed, his

intellectual forces. The necessity of having to face the

inevitable, without loophole for hope, to acquiesce in the

necessity without flinching; to learn through experience the

deeper secrets of life in which mysteries are so closely inter-

woven with realities, was the very training which matured

exceptional qualities in a finely wrought nature. Among the

fruits of this experience, she believes, were a dispassionate

equilibrium of judgment, a wide sympathy with, and

tolerance towards, those who are maimed by any of the

various evils which befall humanity; above all, a diffidence

in asserting that any conclusive methods, any hard or fast

theories, can rectify such evils. The intellectual interests

of the young man were aroused, and so too was his emotional

existence, which his constant care of his mother stirred to its

very depths.

At the age of twenty-one he experienced a phase of

morbidity and melancholy for which he found the exact

description in a passage from Keats's Preface to Endymion,

which runs thus: 'The imagination of a boy is healthy, and

the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a

space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the

character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition

thick-sided.' What he had been taught to think and what

he had taught himself he had come to feel, and his feelings

turned his thoughts into vigorous activity. College regula-

tions obliged him to study the Greek philosophers, together

with Hume, Kant, J. S. Mill, and Sir William Hamilton. But

he was never a man to be confined within narrow regulations.

He read Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge,

Martineau, and Newman, but, above all, Wordsworth and

Newman. Nor could he bear the attitude of the Edinburgh

Review to the romanticism or the mysticism of Coleridge

and Wordsworth, Scott and Shelley. Bagehot, as befits

a Liberal, praises its Whig views, but the praise gradually

changes to blame. “A clear, precise, discriminating intellect shrinks at once from the symbolic, the unbounded, the indefinite. The misfortune is that mysticism is true. There are certainly kinds of truths, borne in, as it were, instinctively on the human intellect, most influential on the character and the heart, yet hardly capable of stringent statement, difficult to limit by an elaborate definition. Their course is shadowy; the mind seems rather to have seen than to see them, more to feel after than definitely apprehend them. They commonly involve an infinite element, which, of course, cannot be stated precisely, or else a first principle -an original tendency-of our intellectual constitution, which it is impossible not to feel, and yet which it is hard to extricate in terms and words. Of this latter kind is what has been called the religion of nature, or, most exactly, perhaps, the religion of the imagination. This is an interpretation of the world. According to it the beauty of the universe has a meaning, its grandeur a soul, its sublimity an expression. As we gaze on the faces of those whom we love . . . as a charm and a thrill seem to run along the tone of a voice, to haunt the mind with a mere word; so in nature the mystical sense finds a motion in the mountain, a power in the waves, and a meaning in the long white line of the shore, and a thought in the blue of heaven, an unbounded being in the vast, void air, and

Wakeful watchings in the pointed stars.

There is a philosophy in this which might be explained, if explaining were to our purpose. But be this as it may, it is certain that Mr. Wordsworth preached this kind of religion and that Lord Jeffrey did not believe a word of it. His cool, sharp, collected mind revolted from its mysticism; his detective intelligence was absorbed in its apparent fallaciousness; his light humour made sport with the sublimities of the preacher; his love of perspicuity was vexed by its indefiniteness; the precise philosopher was amazed by its mystic unintelligibility. Yet we do not mean that in this great literary feud either of the combatants had all the right or gained all the victory. The world has given judgment. Both Mr. Wordsworth and Lord Jeffrey have

291 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

received their reward. The one had his own generation,

the laughter of men, the applause of drawing-rooms, the

occurrence of the crowd; the other a succeeding age, the

fond enthusiasm of secret students, the lonely rapture of

lonely minds. And each has received according to his kind.

If all cultivated men speak differently because of the exist-

ence of Wordsworth and Coleridge, if not a thoughtful

English book has appeared for forty years without some

trace for good or evil of their influence, if sermon-writers

subsist upon their thoughts, if 'sacred poets' thrive by

translating their weaker portion into the speech of women,

if, when all this is over, some sufficient part of their writing

will ever be fitting food for wild musing and solitary medita-

tion, surely this is because they possessed the inner nature-

'an intense and glowing mind,' 'the vision and the faculty

divine' But if, perchance, in their weaker moments the

great authors of the Lyrical Ballads did ever imagine that the

world was to pause because of their verses, that Peter Bell

would be popular in drawing-rooms, that Christabel would

be perused in the City, that people of fashion would make

a handbook of the Excursion, it was well for them to be

told at once that this was not so. Nature ingeniously pre-

pared a shrill, artificial voice, which spoke in season and

out of season, enough, and more than enough, what will ever

be the idea of the cities of the plain concerning those who

live alone among the mountains; of the frivolous concerning

the grave; of the gregarious concerning the recluse; of those

who laugh concerning those who laugh not; of the common

concerning the uncommon; of those who lend on usury con-

cerning those who lend not; the notion of the world of those

whom it will not reckon among the righteous. It said, 'This

won't do!' And so in all time will the lovers of polished

Liberalism speak concerning the intense and lonely

prophet."

The private misfortune of Bagehot turned out to be of

advantage to the public. Only a man who had experienced

much could write as he wrote. Newman's Parochial Sermons

he seems to have had by heart, and two of them, The In-

visible World and the Greatness and Littleness of Human Life,

are constantly in his thoughts. He may write about the

ASCETICISM V. PLEASURE

231

state of the money-market or about the growth of the

British constitution, yet ever

From the soul's subterranean depths upborne,

As from an infinitely distant land,

Come airs and floating echoes

of eternity. Yet he shrinks from Newman, and he shrinks

from him for reasons all his own. “To finish about Newman,

I do not think his want of self-consciousness can be the

reason for his wanting precise moral convictions. Arnold,

who was not self-conscious, had very precise notions of dut:e

I think in Newman’s case the reason is that his int?llecon,

more subtle than his sense in discriminating: he c?ve him

ceive finer shades of feeling and motive than his cont?o her,

will confidently estimate.”

That there was an ascetic element in Bagehot’s natu?ou

undoubted, but it is sometimes forgotten that asceticism ?e

quite compatible with pleasure, and indeed makes for the

deeper enjoyment of pleasure. In his essay on Macaulay, he

sympathises with the old English Cavalier, and there was

an element of it in himself. “Talk of the ways of spreading

a wholesome Conservatism throughout the country . . .

as far as communicating and establishing your creed is con-

cerned, try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs

is to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the

present state of things is to enjoy that state of things. Over

the ‘Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight;

there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the ‘regular

thing,’ joy at an old feast.” Nor can we omit to mention the

fact that he was as devoted to the chase as any Cavalier

could be: hunting was the only sport he really cared for.

In his early writings there is the elasticity of youth combined

with the feeling of the fresh wind of the field, as though he

had been thinking in the saddle, for he characteristically

uttered the remark, “There is no time for quiet reflection

like the intervals of the hunt.”

Bagehot took his B.A. degree with the mathematical scholar-

ship in 1846 in the university of London, and his M.A. degree

in 1848 with the gold medal in mental and moral philosophy

and political economy. Then he began to read law in the

232 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

chambers, first, of Charles Hall, afterwards Vice-Chancellor Sir Charles Hall, and Quain, afterwards Mr. Justice Quain. He liked both men personally, but he did not like law with the exception of the art of special pleading. He always professed to regret the abolition of special pleas. "The only thing I ever really knew," he once wrote, "was special pleading, and the moment I had learnt that, the law reformers botched and abolished it." He was called to the bar in the summer of 1852, nevertheless he had made up his mind to abandon law and join his father in his shipowning and banking business at Langport.

Arthur Clough had become Principal of University Hall, will ever, and Bagehot was much in his society from 1848 to si Hutton records his opinion that Clough was "the an ir who had, I think, a greater intellectual fascination for divilterer Bagehot than any of his contemporaries." The chief gr.ement in this fascination for Bagehot was that he had as a r poet rediscovered, or at least realised, as few before him, the enormous difficulty in finding truth. The subtle scepticism of Clough was obvious, yet Bagehot's faith combined with his experience of life enabled him to resist it. The influence of Arnold and Newman wrought untold harm upon Clough, so Bagehot judged. Clough was "one of Arnold's favourite pupils because he gave heed so much to Arnold's teaching; and exactly because he gave heed to it was it bad for him. He required quite another sort of teaching: to be told to take things easily; not to try to be wise overmuch; to be 'something beside critical'; to go on living quietly and obviously and see what truth would come to him. Mr. Clough had to his latest years what may be noticed in others of Arnold's disciples—a fatigued way of looking at great subjects. It seemed as if he had been put into them before his time, had seen through them, heard all which could be said about them, had been bored by them, and had come to want something else."

Arnold had flattered himself that he was a principal opponent of Newman, yet Bagehot shows how the teaching the poet had received at Rugby, by removing the "happy apathy" of the common public school boy, exposed him all the more sensitively to Newman. "The doctrinal teaching

which Arnold impressed on the youth about him was one personal to Arnold himself, which arose out of the peculiarities of his own character, which can only be explained by them. As soon as an inquisitive mind was thrown into a new intellectual atmosphere, and was obliged to naturalise itself in it, to consider the creed it had learned with reference to the facts which it encountered and met, much of that creed must fade away.

Bagehot had been abroad in 1844 when he warmly admired the paintings of Rubens, The aesthetic side of his nature was not so highly developed as the intellectual, and he made a compact with his sister-in-law, Mrs. Russell Barrington, that he should give her intellectual and she give him artistic enjoyment. The very year of his death he said to her, "You must take me to hear Joachim; I think I might understand Joachim." Just before the end he also said, "You must take me to see Watts—I should like to see the outside of the person who does these things." He was in the habit of attending George Eliot's gatherings on Sunday afternoons at The Priory, St. John's Wood. He recognised the value of William Morris's art, and he had his London house furnished and decorated by his firm.

Before settling down at Langport he spent some months in Paris, and was living there at the time of the coup d'état in December, 1851. He wrote a set of letters for The Inquirer in the course of which he stoutly supported the military violence of Napoleon III, eulogised his character and that of the Roman Catholic Church, attacked the freedom of the press, and, above all, maintained that France was wholly unfit for parliamentary government. At all costs the political fabric must be kept together, and to keep it together Bagehot was willing to sacrifice progress and good government. The French are quick-witted and vivacious, the English slow-witted and stupid, and accordingly free institutions cease to flourish with the former whereas they flourish with the latter. He insists that "the first duty of society is the preservation of society. By the sound work, of old-fashioned generations, by the singular painstaking of the slumberers in churchyards, by all dull care, by stupid industry, a certain social fabric somehow exists; people

234 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

contrive to go out to their work, and to find work to employ

them actually until the evening; body and soul are kept

together,—and this is what mankind have to show for their

six thousand days of toil and trouble." You cannot

improve the living by political change, so he maintains,

unless you contrive to regulate change to a slow and sober

pace, quiet, almost insensible, like that of the growth of grain.

If you cannot do that, perhaps it is better to hold steadily

to the old present ways of life, under a strong, unshaken,

unquestioned government, capable of guidance and com-

mand. With him, as with Burke, politics are viewed in the

light of time and place, and time and place must be related

to national character. For, despite all the nonsense

talked about national character, Bagehot retains unshaken

his belief in it. "I need not prove to you," he goes on,

"nor need I try your patience with a likeness of it: I have

only to examine whether it be a fit basis for natural freedom.

I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be

about the most essential mental quality for a free people

whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a

large scale: it is much stupidity."

There is nothing paradoxical in this verdict in favour of

stupidity, as Bagehot explains it. The susceptibilities of his

countrymen might have been wounded had he not with lively

art compared their character with the Roman, "the great

political people of history. Now is not a certain dullness

their most visible characteristic? What is the history

of their speculative mind? A blank. What their litera-

ture? A copy. They have not left a single discovery in

any abstract science, not a single perfect or well-formed work

of high imagination. The Greeks, the perfection of human

and accomplished genius, bequeathed to mankind the ideal

forms of self-idolising art; the Romans imitated and ad-

mired. The Greeks explained the laws of nature; the

Romans wondered and despised. The Greeks invented a

system of numerals second only to that now in use; the

Romans counted to the end of their days with the clumsy

apparatus which we still call by their name. The Greeks

made a capital and scientific calendar; the Romans began

their month when the Pontifex Maximus happened to spy

out the new moon. Throughout Latin literature this is the perpetual puzzle—Why are we free and they slaves?—

We praetors and they barbers? Why do the stupid people always win and the clever people always lose? I need not

say that in real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled. You'll have more wit, and better wit, in an Irish street-row

than would keep Westminster Hall in humour for five weeks. . . . These valuable truths are no discoveries of mine. They

are familiar enough to people whose business it is to know them. Hear what a douce and aged attorney says of your

peculiarly promising barrister. 'Sharp? Oh! yes, yes: he's too sharp by half. He isn't safe, not a minute, isn't

that young man.' 'What style, sir,' asked of an East India Director some youthful aspirant for literary renown, 'is

most to be preferred in the composition of official despatches?' 'My good fellow,' responded the ruler of Hindostan, 'the

style as we like, is the Humdrum.'

In 1852 Bagehot definitely relinquished the bar and joined the staff of Stuckey's Bank. His account of the

coup d'état enabled him to realise the extent of the ideas welling up in his mind. For he spawned ideas and wrote on

Hartley Coleridge, Shakespeare—the man, Cowper, the first Edinburgh reviewers, Shelley, Macaulay, Béranger, and

the like. These articles were generally published in the National Review, though some appeared in the Prospective

Review. In 1858 he gathered them into a volume, and published them with the title Estimates of some Englishmen

and Scotchmen, and it met with as little success as M. Arnold's poetry. This is really surprising, as it contains

some of the best work he ever did. Was the title against the book? We can hardly think this. Besides, the essays

had already appeared in two reviews, and surely the public that first read them would care to possess them in book form.

In the days to come it met with success when republished as Literary Studies. To the student of literature these essays

reveal the presence of a creative mind, of a man who looks at authors in his own way, and communicates his views of

them in a fashion impossible to mistake for that of any other man. The self-confidence he displayed in banking arose out

of his intuitive power of seizing the main issues of a question.

236 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

The self-confidence he displayed in criticism arose out of the same source. Nor was he in the least eccentric in his judgments in banking or in literature. Of Lord Stanhope he wrote admirably that he had "the cautious scepticism of true common sense," and shrank from "wonderful novelties." This was his own frame of mind. His excursive imagination and his vivid humour strengthened—not weakened—his sound judgment. An original mind like his could play with paradox, but his good sense confined this play within rigid limits. Yet, as Aristotle says of Plato, he made a "new cut" into things, piercing to their very marrow. Such essays as those on Hartley Coleridge, Bishop Butler, and the first Edinburgh reviewers reveal this "new cut" into politics as well as into literature. Indeed we are by no means sure that they do not give us his ultimate creed more clearly than any of his formal writings.

The article on Butler naturally discusses religion, and yet by a transition peculiar to the author we feel that in the background of the Bishop's thought there is his attitude to the State as well as to the Church. If Bagehot reveals the man, he also reveals the statesman. If he reveals the weakness of Hartley Coleridge, he does so out of his own emotional experience, realising full well that life is ever a tragedy to those who feel. If he reveals Shakespeare as a man, he also combines with this revelation his own attitude to democracy. No one who merely knows The English Constitution knows to the full the attitude of its author to democracy, and in his article on Shakespeare, of all places, he elects to give it to us. He makes out the dramatist's political views, and he makes them out from the historical plays. Shakespeare, we learn, accepted, like everybody else, the constitution of his country. The Wars of the Roses had exposed the weaknesses incident to a controverted succession and a selfish aristocracy. "Yet they had not repelled, and had barely disconcerted, our conservative ancestors. They had not become Jacobins; they did not concur—and history, except in Shakespeare, hardly does justice to them—in Jack Cade's notion that the laws should come out of his mouth, or that the commonwealth was to be reformed by interlocutors" in act four, scene two of King

Henry VI. Bagehot proceeds: "An audience which,

bona fide, entered into the merit of this scene, would never

believe in everybody's suffrage. They would know that

there is such a thing as nonsense, and when a man has once

attained to that deep conception, you may be sure of him

ever after. And though it would be absurd to say that

Shakespeare originated this idea, or that the disbelief in

simple democracy is owing to his teaching or suggestions,

yet it may, nevertheless, be truly said, that he shared the

peculiar knowledge of men—and also possessed the peculiar

constitution of mind—which engenders this effect. The

author of Coriolanus never believed in a mob, and did something towards preventing anybody else from doing so But

this political idea was not exactly the strongest in Shake-speare's mind. We think he had two other stronger, or as

strong. First, the feeling of loyalty to the ancient polity of

this country—not because it was good, but because it existed.

In his time, people thought no more of the origin of monarchy

than they did of the origin of the Mendip Hills. The one

had always been there, and so had the other. God (such

was the common notion) had made both, and one as much as

the other. Everywhere, in that age, the common modes of

political speech assumed the existence of certain utterly

national institutions, and would have been worthless

and nonsensical except on that assumption. This national

habit appears as it ought to appear in our national dramatist.

A great divine tells us that the Thirty-nine Articles are

'forms of thought'; inevitable conditions of the religious

understanding; in politics, 'kings, lords, and commons' are,

no doubt, 'forms of thought,' to the great majority of

Englishmen; in these they live, and beyond these they never

move. You can't reason on the removal (such is the notion)

of the English Channel, nor St. George's Channel, nor can

you of the English Constitution, in like manner. It is to

most of us, and to the happiest of us, a thing immutable, and

such, no doubt, it was to Shakespeare, which, if any one

would have proved, let him refer at random to any page of

the historical English plays."

The second peculiar tenet which we ascribe to his political

creed, is a disbelief in the middle classes. We fear he had

238 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

" no opinion of traders " Bagehot then points out in his

own fashion why Shakespeare entertained so little belief in

the trading class and so much belief in a tempered and

qualified polity.

The love of literature is evident in his estimate of Shake-

speare: so too is his love of politics. Throughout life, books

brought a healing balm to him. He never smoked, and

when, as a youth, a friend told him that his cigars cost him

£30 a year, Bagehot exclaimed, " But imagine how many

books that would buy!" Still, he hunted and his hunters

cost a good deal. The hum of hunting—as well as the hum

of business—sounds through all his writings. He speaks

of business—in the serious way a banker would, but this

seriousness in his case is distinctly tempered with amuse-

ment. " An inexperiencing mind," he called Macaulay's: his

own was certainly an experiencing mind drawing on

everything in which he was interested—and in what was he

not interested? Science was not outside his ken, and he at

once grasped the political implications of Darwin's Origin

of Species.

A banker and a shipowner, Bagehot inevitably attached

a high place to property. To him it was a test of character,

political and other. " If it has been inherited, it guarantees

education; if acquired, it guarantees ability." He was a

Liberal, but he was as detached in his Liberalism as Arnold.

He confessed that he was " between sizes in politics," a

confession Lord Acton was also to make. He stood as

a Liberal for Bridgwater in 1866, and when he lost the

election he consoled himself with the reflection that parlia-

mentary work would not have suited him. Of this we

are by no means sure, for he certainly would not have given

up to any party—Liberal or other—what was meant for

mankind. We question if the wear and tear of the House of

Commons would have proved too much for his sensitive

organisation, for the wear and tear of business did not prove

too much for it.

Like Burke, he was wedded to the past, and its influence

is always present in his writings. He would have

allowed more changes in the constitution than our greatest

political philosopher, yet his feeling was to effect change

slowly and after long discussion. He would allow public

opinion to ripen on all alteration. "And the reason is, that

all important English institutions are the relics of a long

past; that they have undergone many transformations; that

like old houses which have been altered many times, they are

full both of conveniences and inconveniences which at first

sight would not be imagined. Very often a rash alterer

would pull down the very part which makes them habitable,

to cure a minor evil or improve a defective outline." Here

we feel the accent of the true conservative. Conservatism

wears many forms. Consider, for instance, the conservatism

of Mill and Tocqueville, Cornewall Lewis and Bagehot. Mill

was a conservative only so far as conservatism was forced

upon a mind essentially radical and even revolutionary,

imbued with a profound faith in abstract principles leading

far beyond universal suffrage to Socialism. He was so

forced by the danger which he foresaw to individual liberty

and unfettered intellectual freedom from the ascendancy

of mere numbers. Upon this point he agreed with Toc-

queville, though upon nearly every other their views were as

opposite as their character and experience. Tocqueville's

conservatism sprang from his wide observation of Europe

and America and from his bitter disappointment with France.

The conservatism of Cornewall Lewis was that of a pro-

foundly sceptical instinct, of practical cautious incredulity.

Bagehot's was the conservatism of middle-class thought and

business experience.

He saw that we deify the king in sentiment as we once

deified him in doctrine. It is of course an illusion, but one

that "has been, and still is, of incalculable benefit to the

human race." The "theatrical show of society" impresses

the popular imagination; and the "climax of the play is

the Queen." There is an ingrained conservatism present in

the bulk of the people, and with this conservatism they

combine a deference to society which is of the last importance.

An incident that happened to him during the Crimean War

he narrated with great gusto to Hutton. "The Somerset-

shire view," he wrote, "of the chance of bringing the war

to successful conclusion is as follows:—Countryman: ‘How

old, zir, be the Zar?’—Myself: ‘About sixty-three.’—

240 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Countryman: 'Well, now, I can't think however they be to take he. They do tell I that Kosshia is a very big place, and if he doo goo right into the middle of 'n, you could not take he, not nohow.' I talked till the train came (it was at a station), and endeavoured to show how the war might be finished without capturing the Czar, but I fear without effect. At last he said, 'Well, zir, I hope, as you do say, zir, we shall take he,' as I got into the carriage." Bagehot realised quite as much as Newman that man is more moved by a person than by a principle, and he saw the necessity of this as vividly as Seeley. The tendency to deify the king is still present, and perhaps present all the more because he is familiar to the people in a hundred ways his ancestors never were. Means of communication enable him to move all over England, his face is to be seen in the topical budget of the cinema, and the pictorial papers illustrate his doings as well as his goings. In all these ways he is a living person to his subjects as even Queen Victoria never was, and while there are many sources of the loyalty to the Crown we feel that the realisation of his personality is among them. The Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 attest the place in the affections of her subjects Queen Victoria won, and the loyalty she won has been maintained and even increased by her son and her grandson. The British Empire is held together to-day by the active principle of loyalty to a common sovereign. The pageantry of procession on the part of royalty also plays its part. "Why," Bagehot would say, "should they not give the poor the indulgence of enjoying the show?" That they enjoy the show has been repeatedly proved, and this enjoyment of the show forms a feature of modern life. Bagehot recognised the great value in aristocratic atmosphere, provided the aristocrats recognised that they had duties as well as rights. He inherited something of it in the blood of the Bagehots and the Stuckeys. Did he not possess the influence of an atmosphere in his own person? True, the "deferential" England he knew has vanished from the ken of men, but if it has vanished one way we feel by no means certain that it has not returned in another. It is an undoubted fact that the personal influence of the sovereign since the days of Queen Victoria has increased, and is

Parliamentary Prestige

241

increasing, and there is not the least outcry that it ought to be diminished. Compare—or rather contrast—the popularity and the prestige of Parliament in Bagehot’s day and to-day. Compare—there is no necessity to contrast—the popularity and the prestige of the Crown in Bagehot’s day and to-day.

Mrs. Russell Barrington gives an amusing description of Bagehot’s first visit in 1857 to Claverton Manor, the home of her father, the Right Hon. James Wilson, Financial Secretary of the Treasury, and afterwards Finance Member of the Council in India. Bagehot wanted to write for the Economist which Wilson had founded in 1843, but his visit had an additional result. Wilson had six daughters and no son, and Bagehot instantly won the hearts of the girls by comparing their German governess to an egg. “From that moment he rose in our eyes from the status of a political economist to that of a fellow-creature. He became one of us It was something strangely new, delightful, and nutritious that he brought into our lives.” The intimacy grew, and Bagehot and Miss Wilson were married in April, 1858. Her diary, from which her sister, Mrs. Russell Barrington, constantly quotes, shows how fully Mrs. Bagehot shared her husband’s friendships with the most interesting people of the day, and how true and loyal a comrade she was to him in all his occupations until his death in 1877. A sketch by Mrs. Russell Barrington shows Mrs. Bagehot at the time of her marriage as a woman of striking intelligence as well as beauty, with large expressive eyes and features of great regularity and refinement. She lived to be eighty-eight, and her husband’s span of years was only fifty. What has political thought not suffered by the irreparable calamity of his early death! Yet influence of a life like his is not to be measured so much by its length in action as by its intensity in thought. Our sense of his premature loss is all the keener as we read Sir Robert Giffen’s estimate: “Mentally, Bagehot was at his best when he died, and he looked forward to many years of happy toil, both in finishing the Economic Studies and other work beyond. So far from becoming absorbed in economic science as he grew older, though his later writings happened to be almost all economic, Bagehot to the last gave me the impression of only passing

242 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

through one mental stage, which being passed through he would again leave political economy behind. To his historical and descriptive account of English political economy he was likely enough to have added a history of political ideas, or at any rate some other work of general philosophy, which had necessarily more attraction for him than the ordinary topics of political economy.

The Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen had not been received with favour, and this of course made its author all the more gratified when M. Arnold wrote that the article on Shelley and "one or two others . . . seem to me to be of the very first quality, showing not talent only, but a concern for the simple truth which is rare in English literature as it is in English politics and English religion." This was what Arnold thought of them in magazine form in 1856, but the public did not share his appreciation. In 1859 Bagehot wrote on Parliamentary reform, and his article won the commendation of Robert Lowe and gave him that position in the inner circle of political life which was henceforth his. The view he adopted was that though every class should be represented in the councils of the nation, yet by unduly lowering the franchise you commit an injustice towards the class whose interests would thus be represented, owing to the enormous majority of the poorer class. The only purpose for which a vote is useful is representation. Each class, from the highest to the lowest, should possess representation, but no class should possess domination. Bright sought a guarantee that his class should be included in representation, but did he seek a guarantee that other classes, hitherto unrepresented, should be included? Bagehot did seek for the inclusion of these classes, and he was to plead in 1865 that representation was not right, and did not look right, if the labourers had no representatives in Parliament.

Lord Melbourne used habitually to ask, "Can't you let it alone?" Bagehot was sufficiently of this way of thinking to adopt a similar attitude to most questions. If the stupidity or the solidity of the English won his admiration, their energy in politics won nothing of the sort. Here he followed one who meant much to him, Sir George Cornewall

THE NEED OF LEISURE

243

Lewis, and Sir George was distinctly sceptical of the benefits conferred by legislation. He keenly perceived that if you cure an evil by a measure, you are just as likely as not to give rise to another evil, and on striking a balance the policy of laissez-faire commended itself to his cautious judgment.

If Bagehot brought himself to approve of the Irish Land Bill, he brought himself with hesitation. If his father-in-law was Finance Member of the India Council, yet he would not have been sorry if we could give up that vast continent we call India. True, we had other colonies, but might we not be better without them? The Duke of Wellington once criticised a peer in a speech in the House of Lords. 'I regret,' he remarked, 'that the noble lord's education has been vastly in excess of his powers of taking advantage of it.' Bagehot seemed to think that our possessions—and our legislation—were vastly in excess of our powers of taking advantage—for their benefit—of them. What we really required was leisure to take thought for our present and our future policy. Fresh possessions and fresh legislation were depriving us of this leisure. He quotes from the poetry of his friend Clough what was the motto of his own political creed:

Old things need not be therefore true,

O brother men, nor yet the new;

Ah, still awhile, th' old thought retain,

And yet consider it again.

We cannot feel sure that Bagehot was right in his attitude. The English are provincial to a degree, and their Empire renders them at least this benefit that it remedies this provinciality of outlook. They are compelled, even against their will, to look abroad, and this look abroad is of inestimable advantage to themselves and indeed to the human race. Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers, and so we might have become had it not been for the Government of India which successfully redeems us from this taunt. For this Government forms one of our title-deeds to the esteem of humanity.

The National Review came to an end in 1864, and was replaced the next year by the Fortnightly Review under the editorship of Lewes, with whom George Eliot lived, and of

244 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

John Morley. The historian of English rationalism in the nineteenth century, Mr. Benn, rightly attaches importance to attacks on theology in the new periodical, attacks that marked the signal change passing over thought in the seventies. The Fortnightly Review first appeared on May 15th, 1865, and the first chapter of Bagehot's English Constitution headed its list of contents. The last chapter came out in it on January 1st, 1871. In 1872 he wrote a lengthy introduction to the second edition, explaining the difficulty he experienced in endeavouring "to sketch a living Constitution—a Constitution that is in actual work and power. The difficulty is that the object is in constant change." His method of meeting it was "to keep the original sketch in all essentials as it was first written, and to describe shortly such changes either in the Constitution itself or in the Constitution compared with it, as seem material."

Among the many merits of The English Constitution is the outstanding one that it broke away from its legal aspect, as laid down by Blackstone, and concentrated on its actual working. Since he wrote his essay on parliamentary reform in 1859 he knew the inner circle of the leading statesmen, and this intimacy lent actuality to all that he wrote. Le beau monde still governed le monde. With the rulers of this world he was on those terms in which he either knew them or knew about them. If he did not know one of them personally, he was yet familiar with the type of man he was. Nor did he disdain any more than Lord Acton the rumours and the stories then current about the Prime Minister and his Cabinet or the leading members of the Opposition. All this intimate knowledge he had the happy knack of conveying to his readers, contriving to make them feel that they were listening to him, as Hutton might have listened, after dinner. He inspired men with that reverence for the past, that confidence in the present, and that faith in the future which characterised himself.

The accepted literary theory of the constitution was Montesquieu's with its insistence on the separation of the legislative, the executive, and the judicial powers. This accepted theory Bagehot at once swept away, for what he insisted on was the union of all three. The influence of

Our Unitary Constitution

245

Montesquieu through Blackstone came to a conclusion as Bagehot demonstrated the essentially unitary nature of our constitution, and this unitary nature is carried into effect by the Cabinet which acted as a "hyphen." The work of the Prime Minister and of the Cabinet, their control of expenditure, and indeed even then of legislation, the relations of the two front benches--these and a hundred other matters were explained in such a fashion that one almost came to the conclusion that Bagehot was simply throwing additional light on what one knew already. The truth of course is that one did not know it already: he was the first to set it down. We glean that we have not a "mixed" constitution, with separation of powers, but that the United States certainly has. In fact, England is a republic with an hereditary President, the United States a monarchy with an elective King. In the background we see--though dimly--the figure of our Queen, and our author sets down the dignified and the efficient parts of the constitution. The Cabinet is of course the efficient, and the Queen the dignified, and one of the most illuminating parts of the book is that in which the share taken by the dignified parts is inimitably explained. We do well to remember that even Bagehot did not discern all that the monarch might accomplish. Prince Albert had died in 1861, and till the coming of Disraeli to power in 1874 the Queen seemed to be what she was called, the widow of Windsor. She lived in retirement, and before her letters were published it was difficult to believe that she was as active behind the scenes as she undoubtedly was. Her activity was not before Bagehot as it is before us, and he did not live to witness the Jubilees of 1887 and especially 1897, which demonstrated what a wonderful hold she possessed over the affections of her people abroad quite as much as at home. Take a story told by Mr. Le Sueur, the biographer of Rhodes. He was at Fort Usher, in the Matoppos, and one day a large number of natives, led by Babyan, came in and asked that a certain missionary who had just come to Rhodesia might be hanged. Mr. Le Sueur asked why, and was told that the missionary had described a great "'n Koos Pezulu," who was supreme over the earth, and had asked them if they knew what he meant. One immediately

246 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

replied, "u' Lawli" (Lawley, the administrator). He was told he was wrong "Umiamule M. Kunoji" (Rhodes), said another; but the missionary said, "No; some one greater than Rhodes." Then Babvan, with an air of confidence, pro-nounced "i' Queeni" (the Queen). "No," said the mission-ary, "some one even greater than the Queen." "U'Yama-gna" (you liar) cried Babyan, and the natives rose in a body to have the missionary hanged. Bagehot lived before the heyday of Imperialism which, so far as he saw it, he rather mistrusted. Accordingly, it is not surprising that he never discerned that our monarchy constitutes one of the strongest of all the links that bind our daughter nations to ourselves. Yet the potency of personality of the sovereign appealed to him as it never appealed to Seeley.

It is hard to realise the attitude of their subjects to such sovereigns as George IV and William IV, though we frankly confess that as we motor about England we are constantly surprised at the number of inn signs in honour of both sovereigns. No one, however, who has read the memoirs relating to their reigns can doubt of the contempt and dislike into which George IV and William IV deservedly fell. The change wrought by Queen Victoria is hardly credible to anyone familiar with the attitude of, say, The Times to her two predecessors. What the Queen began has been con-tinued by Edward VII, by George V, and by the present Prince of Wales. No one can doubt that Edward VII spent himself, and that George V and his son spend themselves on behalf of their country in a manner that moves us all. The dignified parts of the constitution assume a rôle for which not even Bagehot has prepared us. True, he does explain that a family on the throne brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of ordinary life. "We smile at the Court Circular; but remember how many people read the Court Circular! Its use is not in what it says, but in those to whom it speaks. They say that the Americans were more pleased at the Queen's letter to Mrs. Lincoln than at any act of the English Government. It was a spontaneous act of intelligible feeling in the midst of confused and tiresome business. Just so a royal family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events."

The principle of evolution fitfully appears in the English Constitution In his Physics and Politics he was to apply

this principle with so much skill and success, and yet he allowed it but slight weight in the natural selection which

operates so powerfully upon the character of hereditary princes and aristocracies. Why did he draw his illustrations

of the working of constitutional monarchy so exclusively from the past, especially from the examples of George III

and William IV, ignoring the experience of Queen Victoria's reign? Why did he ignore the deep and, for the most part,

wholesome influence exerted in European politics by Leopold I, William I and Prince Albert? We know, for

instance, that one of the last letters Prince Albert altered avoided what seemed inevitable, war with the United States

in 1861. Germany owes much to Bismarck, and she owes Bismarck to William I. Italy owes much to Cavour, and she

owes Cavour to Victor Emmanuel. Bagehot believes that Parliament is wiser than the average sovereign, but he

scarcely lays enough stress on the fact that a prince is exempt from the influence of party, whose action in a crisis

of national fortune has been occasionally disastrous. Bagehot dwells almost exclusively on the unfavourable incidents

of a royal education .He overlooks the direct and indirect influences which are brought to bear from the very cradle

on an hereditary prince—the sense of responsibility, the consciousness of a great position, the familiarity with the

gravest interests, a youth passed under the tuition of the ablest masters, which secure for the future sovereign a moral

and intellectual training unequalled in its excellence. The effect of that training we see in our own royal family. A

prince of fair abilities, with such a training and such a knowledge of the men with whom he is necessarily brought

into contact, possesses every means of knowing, at least as well as Parliament, who are the competent and trustworthy

statesmen and diplomatists, generals and admirals. His continuous experience of politics, legislation, and govern-

ment, his access, notably in foreign affairs, to wider and more impartial sources of information, lend to his counsels

an authority which no prudent or thoughtful Prime Minister will disregard. For the prince looks at affairs from a

248 STUDIES IN ENGLISH POLITICAL THINKERS OF 19TH CENTURY

higher point of view, with a broader survey of a rule, and a criticism of motives upon its enactment.

The King's name is used too much for a small power. The law is too mere an abstraction, the votes of Ministers represent too much party feeling, excite too much antagonism, to command the prompt obedience, the loyal reverence, the enthusiastic support which is rendered to the name of the sovereign. Nor can we overlook the certainty which personal sovereignty gives, the absence of a moment's possible doubt on which side is the supreme arbiter, sure to be backed by nine-tenths of the physical forces of society. The royal name possesses power over the passions of the enlightened as well as over the ignorance of the unenlightened. The omnipotence of Parliament or the Cabinet, even when, in the belief of half the nation, a parliamentary majority represents a minority of the people, is due less to traditional respect for the House of Commons, or superstitious reverence for a majority vote, such as prevails in the United States, than to the fact that resistance means rebellion, visible, unmistakable disobedience to the King. The services still feel proud to consider that they serve, in their own phrase—not the State but—"Gentlemen, the King." No one who has ever been present at the sacrament of the Mess can forget the loyalty, which goes so deep, with which the toast of the King's health is drunk every night. A hardened Canadian politician, of the real boss type, a narrow, selfish anti-Imperialist, owned of Albert, Lord Grey: "I had never heard any one give the toast of His Majesty in a way that made me think what it meant, or feel the least tremor of emotion, until I heard His Excellency say, 'The King!' This party manipulator acknowledged: "The rich tone of his voice made me feel the loyalty that was filling his heart, and it made it very affecting to drink the King's health with him." That sentiment of loyalty, which Bagehot ascribes to the ignorant alone, is as strong in the upper or middle as in the lower orders, and has a far wider, deeper influence than he allows, than perhaps it was consistent with the whole scope of his book to allow.

Much of what has been written upon the contrast between the American and English constitutions—the two great types

of popular government, parliamentary, the direct and

indirect election of the actual executive—was anticipated

in the best chapters of the English Constitution. Bagehot

wrote in 1865, and Maine did not publish his Popular Govern-

ment and Dicey his Law of the Constitution till 1885, and

Bryce his magnum opus on the American Commonwealth till

1888. All three explain the differences between flexible and

rigid constitutions in the eighties, but our author had

anticipated them in the sixties. Few writers so terse, com-

pact, and clear as Bagehot, have been so completely free

from the temptation of deliberate phrase-making; yet few

professional phrase-makers in our time have left in the

minds of their readers so many telling, forcible, and sug-

gestive phrases; sentences in which a novel or striking

thought, an impressive view of new or old truth, a principle

apt to be forgotten or imperfectly appreciated, is vivified and

incarnated in a few emphatic words. Of Peel we read that

“no man has come so near our definition of a Constitutional

Statesman—the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of

a second-rate man.” “Toryism is enjoyment.” “He who

runs may read, but it does not seem likely he will think.”

“The great difficulty which history records is not that of the

first step, but that of the second step.” “The most be-

numbing thing to the intellect is routine, the most bewilder-

ing is distraction; our system is a distracting routine.”

“A Constitutional administrator has to be always consulting

others, finding out what this man or that chooses to think;

learning which form of error is believed by Lord B., which

by Lord C., adding up the errors of the Alphabet and seeing

what portion of what he thinks he ought to do, they will all

of them together allow him to do.” The difficulty when you

begin quoting his obiter dicta is to stop. His phrases remain

with the reader who does well also to remember that in

addition to coining them, he anticipated many a thinker of

the next generation.

Bagehot’s belief in democracy had been chastened by his

experiences in Paris in 1851. The lesson life taught him

confirmed him in this attitude. In 1859 he wrote that

“every person has a right to so much political power as he

can exercise without impeding any other person who would

250 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKERS IN 19TH CENTURY

more fitly exercise such power." A "supremacy of the

central group of trained and educated men" must guide the

course of parliamentary government. Power was to be

proportionate to capacity, for he had not been a Greek

scholar for nothing. The rule of mere numbers did not in

the least attract him. The ignorance of the voter, his haste,

and his excitement-these were dangers he could discern,

and, if these dangers were not heeded, the preface to his

second edition demonstrates how much he feared the

masterfulness of democracy. He was afraid that the Tory

would befriend the artisan of the town and that the Liberal

would befriend the labourer of the country, and that in their

competition for support the Tory and the Liberal would try

each of them to outbid the other. "Vox populi will be

Vox diaboli if it is worked in that manner." Household

suffrage seemed to him the inevitable consequence, the

logical development, of the Reform Bill of 1832. It was at

that point, as he considered, that the right and wrong path

had diverged; that chance and destiny, rather than choice,

determined at the moment the adoption of that which

necessarily and logically led to sheer democracy. The

practice of the old system had become thoroughly vicious,

but the underlying principle was sound and safe. All classes,

all interests, were represented; but accident had given, not to

wealth or birth, but to a particular kind of wealth, a certain

set of families, an enormously disporportionate representa-

tion. The landed interest was wronged in the utterly

inadequate representation of the counties. Ireland was

misrepresented; and the Scots could not be said to be

represented at all. Still, every class, every great interest,

had its spokesmen, exercising a direct and independent

influence on the national councils. Rotten or pocket

boroughs were not only nurseries of professional statesman-

ship, but a back door through which interests, whose direct

representation was impossible, found access in Parliament.

The West Indian interest, the East India Company, and the

statesmen trained in its service, with their special knowledge

and zealous care for the welfare of our Oriental Empire, could

secure a hearing for views to which no English constituency

would listen.

VARIED REPRESENTATION

251

The working classes were represented through those numerous constituencies in which the scot and lot franchise prevailed. It was imperative that the abuses of the system should be redressed; that the new communities which had grown up since the Industrial Revolution should be directly represented; that the borough proprietors and the great families should be deprived of their excessive weight in Parliament; that the middle class should acquire a new power more adequate to its new social and political importance; and that Scotland should be really and directly represented. But in Bagehot's view, which was Burke's, universal and varied representation was of more consequence than arithmetical proportion. No class, no interest, represented in the House of Commons, was likely to be grossly wronged, none could be neglected or unheard. No class intelligent enough to understand its own grievances, to have distinct ideas and desires of its own, would have failed, under a reform retaining the principle of the old system, to command attention and secure redress. Had Pitt been able to carry out his thoroughly sincere scheme of practical reform, or had Canning and his followers sided with the Whigs upon this as upon almost every other question, reform might have anticipated revolution. It was the weakness, rather than the will, of the Whigs that compelled them to travel not only farther and faster, but in another direction, than their actual opinions and traditional inclinations would have carried them. They were compelled to present a scheme broad, simple, and extreme enough, to attract irresistible support.

When once uniformity of franchise and proportionate representation were made the basis of the electoral system, the extension of the former, the more and more accurate adjustment of the latter, became a mere question of time. The poorest class of householders in towns in 1886 are probably as intelligent and competent as were the ten-pounders of 1832. The masses might have been satisfied with the gradual enlargement of their old representation: having been once disfranchised in wholesale fashion, it was certain that they would ere long demand and ultimately secure that complete enfranchisement, by which every

252 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

other class must necessarily be swamped. Minority representation, electoral districts, and single seats, are at best

lame and unsatisfactory methods of engrafting on pure democracy securities and checks, which were essential and

natural parts of the old representation of classes and interests

When once every borough below a certain numerical standard had been extinguished, and all below another

deprived of their second member, the downward extension of the principle became a logical and historical necessity.

Critics, competent and incompetent, hailed the publication of the English Constitution. Among the former Dicey

certified in 1881 that 'Bagehot has brought more knowledge of life and originality of mind to the elucidation of the

theory and practice of English politics than any man since Burke. He is the only Englishman of first-rate talents who,

during the last half-century, has applied the whole force of his mind to the analysis of the mass of laws, maxims, and

habits which go to make up the English Constitution. In the course of a few years he will undoubtedly be recognised

by all the world as the most eminent of constitutionalists. If this recognition has not yet been attained, the failure,

such as it is, is due mainly to the versatility of Bagehot's interests, and to the consequent difficulty felt by ordinary

students in believing that a writer who excelled in so many fields of speculation—in the sphere of criticism, of imaginative

literature, and of political economy—could be so pre-eminent in one field; and to the lucidity of Bagehot's explanations,

which led even those who learnt most from his pages into the delusion that what their teacher explained so

easily was in itself easy to explain and hardly needed explanation.'

The versatility of our author's interests is evident in the fact that the first chapter of his Physics and Politics

appeared in the Fortnightly Review on November 1st, 1867, ten months after the conclusion of the English Constitution.

Maine's Ancient Law had in 1861 applied evolutionary ideas to explain the growth of law, and now Bagehot applies these

ideas to explain the growth of society. The formula of Darwin had been heredity and variation: the formula of

Bagehot was invention and imitation. In his pregnant

Bagehot’s Conservatism

253

manner he described his book as an attempt to apply the

principles of natural selection and inheritance to political

society. His general view was that in early times the value

of government chiefly consisted in the drill of a society into

fixed habits, customs, preferences and rules of its own, so

as to subdue arbitrary personal caprice, and to create a

common mind and character, a common groove of thought

and feeling. The conservatism of mind of the author is

apparent in his English Constitution, and it is no less

apparent in his Physics and Politics, and indeed here he takes

rank with Bolingbroke and Burke. His conservatism was

naturally more scientific than theirs, for Darwin had taught

him that the only sure way to conserve a tradition is to

prolong it. Nor are we sure that his conservatism does not

hark back to Shakespeare himself. There is however, a

conservatism that springs from simple acceptance of fact and

one that springs from fear. The latter is as evident in some

to-day as the former is in Bagehot. He simply—or subtly—

accepted fact. Lord Eldon, for instance, was a conservative

through fear. Nor does Bagehot fail to point out: “There

was another cause beside fear which then inclined, and

which in similar times of miscellaneous revolution will

ever incline, subtle rather than creative intellects to a

narrow conservatism. Such intellects require an exact

creed; they want to be able clearly to distinguish themselves

from those around them, to tell each man where they differ

and why they differ; they cannot make assumptions; they

cannot, like the merely practical man, be content with rough

and obvious axioms; they require a theory. Such a want is

difficult to satisfy in an age of confusion and tumult, when

old habits are shaken, old views overthrown, ancient assump-

tions rudely questioned, ancient inferences utterly denied,

when each man has a different view from his neighbour,

when an intellectual change has set father and son at

variance, when a man’s own household are the special foes of

his favourite and self-adopted creed. A bold and original

mind breaks through these vexations, and forms for itself

a theory satisfactory to its notions, and sufficient for its wants.

A weak mind yields a passive obedience to those among

whom it is thrown. But a mind which is searching without

254 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

being creative, which is accurate and logical enough to see defects, without being combinative or inventive enough to provide remedies—which, in the old language, is criminative rather than discursive—is wholly unable, out of the medley of new suggestions, to provide itself with an adequate belief; and it naturally falls back on the status quo."

Not a little of the Physics and Politics is occupied with the investigation of the status quo and the manner into which it has come into being. He sets out by telling us that in early times the quantity of government is much more than its quality, and that in point of fact it is difficult to get a government at all. What you virtually require is a rule binding men together, compelling them to execute the same things in the same way at the same time. The problem is in fact the securing of obedience. To gain that obedience what we now call Church and State combine, and the priest supports the chief and the chief the priest. The organisation to which each belongs creates what Bagehot calls a cake of custom. By means of this cake of custom, "all the actions of life are to be submitted to a single rule for a single object; that gradually created the 'hereditary drill' which science teaches to be essential, and which the early instinct of man saw to be essential too." Under this régime there is no room for the genius: he must conform to type or be persecuted till he does. The view of Herbert Spencer that a great man is the product of his time is untrue in our days, but if ever it was true it was so in primitive antiquity. The age then was monotonous, for otherwise even the rudiments of society could not come into being, and when in being could not persist, and persistence was necessary to existence. Once mankind at last fixed the yoke of custom upon its shoulders, society began to make faint attempts towards progress. Imitation was the order of the day.

A Socrates could not be allowed, for he was practically pulling to pieces the cake of custom on which society reposed. "The first duty of society is the preservation of society," and a Socrates threatened the very framework of society. Toleration was a vice, not a virtue. The limits of free speech are positive, for 'no Government is bound to permit a controversy which will annihilate itself.' Bigotry is the

ruling principle, and it is rightly the ruling principle. Persecution is at bottom the effort of mankind to secure that uniformity of creed and practice, in religion and in politics, which is essential if society is to endure. Imitation is vital and invention is not vital. Once, however, imitation has been successful on a large scale, then invention is possible. Originality could not be encouraged till imitation had reduced all men to a strong custom of obedience.

The imitative instinct, the herd instinct, and the tests of verifiable progress are matters on which massive volumes have been written by Tarde and others, but the fount of their inspiration is the Physics and Politics. Swift drily remarked that "if you want to gain the reputation of a sensible man, you should be of the opinion of the person with whom for the time being you are conversing." In primitive times the aim of all alike was to be sensible men and women. You conformed, because the cake of custom obliged you so to do. The doctrine of imitation is true in primitive society, and it is also true in modern—though we sometimes forget that this is so. Bagehot points out that we were all frivolous under Palmerston and earnest under Gladstone. A great political leader still dictates the tone of the community. True, there is variation or invention as well as imitation, and Bagehot skilfully shows that it is as accurate to take up this position in literature as it is in society. In this fashion he explains the style of Queen Anne's age. One considerable writer, say, Steele, securesș a sort of start because what he writes is just a shade more congenial to the minds around him than any other sort. What Steele writes, Addison writes. They catch hold of the public mind, and "a curious process soon assimilates other writers in appearance to them." Similarly the uniform style of the leader writers of The Times is explained. There is usually one writer better than all the others, and the rest of them copy him, consciously or unconsciously. For a writer is aware that there is a change in his style as he writes an article for one review as compared with another.

The examples of imitation given by Bagehot are far more convincing than those offered by Tarde in his L'Évolution Littéraire. Arguing against Spencer's theory of evolution

256 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

in art, Tarde holds that literature always "begins with a

book," and his instances are the Iliad, the Bible, and Dante.

Now it would seem to us that all these books come at the

end of a long process of evolution, not at the beginning.

This is certainly true of the Bible and of the Iliad, no matter

what view we may take about its authorship by Homer.

Dante, too, is the fine flower of the Middle Ages.

Once the problem of imitation is solved, the next danger to

society is that it may remain stationary and perish. On the

line of imitation Bagehot showed that Rome was able to

triumph over Greece and other indifferently welded, though

cleverer and more reflective, communities. The Greeks of our

own day suffer grievously because they know neither restraint

nor reverence, neither tradition nor national discipline. Hence

the dull fixed habit of acting all in one way as the English

do was better than the sprightly divergences and differences

of opinion among the French which make it difficult to know

what they really wish, or whether they have any wish in

common by which the masses are seriously affected. As

Bagehot took trouble to point out, this drill may be too

effective, it may go too far, and when it does we have cases

of what he called "arrested civilisations." Such an arrested

civilisation we have in China, where the common drill

completely trampled out the disposition for cautious criticism

and review of national prejudices, which ought to come

sooner or later if ever there is to be an age of progress and

discussion. Stimulating and suggestive as the whole book

is, the author surpasses himself when he comes to discuss

verifiable progress politically. Maine was too analyse this

problem, but there is nothing in all his scattered hints

comparable to the closing pages of the Physics and Politics.

In his book he writes: "If anyone were asked to describe

what it is which distinguishes the writings of a man of genius,

who is also a great man of the world, from all other writings,

I think he would use the words, 'animated moderation.'

He would say that such writings are never slow, are never

expansive, are never exaggerated; that they are always

instinct with judgment, and yet that judgment is never a

dull judgment; that they have as much spirit in them as

would go to make a wild writer, and yet that every line of

them is the product of a sane and sound writer. The

best and almost perfect instance of this in English is Scott."

Another instance is Walter Bagehot himself. That our

verdict is by no means extravagant men like Maine and

Bryce testify. The former wrote to him: “Thank you very

sincerely for your book on Physics and Politics. It is

practically an old friend. I do not know that I was ever

more struck with anything than with the essays when they

first appeared. I don’t think it was your handsome allusions

to me which influence me—but I am much obliged to you for

them all the same.” Bryce acknowledges that “Had

he lived to apply his method he might have exercised almost

the same kind of influence that Montesquieu exerted in the

middle of the eighteenth, and Tocqueville in the earlier part

of the nineteenth century; and we feel in him the power of

an intellect worthy to be compared even with that of the

earlier and greater of those two illustrious men.”

His Lombard Street, which appeared in 1873, gave a

description of the banking world as full of animated modera-

tion as his English Constitution and his Physics and Politics.

Bankers and bill-brokers flit across the pages of Lombard

Street, but its author is far more immersed in the principles

of banking than he is in them. In his English Constitution

we note the place of the dignified elements of the political

constitution, and we note what the monarch can and can-

not do. In Lombard Street we note the place of the efficient

elements of the business constitution, and we note what the

monarch, now the head of a great business, can and cannot

do. We gather that there is very little indeed that he cannot

do. For Bagehot maintains that capitalists are the great

generals of commerce, that they plan the present and—more

important—the future of the business whose strategy they

control. Nor does he confine himself to strategy: he per-

ceives the nature of their tactics, and all this is set forth

with his usual stimulus. For anyone who wishes to realise

the business of the seventies there is no book comparable to it

for the picture it presents.

A Chancellor of the Exchequer like Gladstone and a

President of the United States like Woodrow Wilson

speak warmly of Bagehot. The former gladly records the

258 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

"advantage of frequent and free communication with him on all matters of finance and currency. Nor have I in all my experience known any one from whom in this important province more was to be desired, or who was more free and genial in the communication of his large knowledge and matured reflection." Woodrow Wilson freely confesses that

Bagehot's writings "have all the freshness, the vivacity, the penetration of eager talk, and abound in those flashes of insight and discovery which make the speech of some gifted men seem like a series of inspirations." Bagehot meant much to the reading public, he meant much to the leading statesmen, and he meant most of all to his own friends. Let Hutton testify for the last. "Not very many perhaps, outside Bagehot's inner circle, will carry about with them that hidden pain, that burden of emptiness, inseparable from an image which has hitherto been one full of the suggestions of life and power, when that life and power are no longer to be found; for he was intimately known only to the few. But those who do will hardly find again in this world a store of intellectual sympathy of so high a stamp, so wide in its range and so full of original and fresh suggestion, and judgment to lean on so real and so sincere, or a friend so frank and constant, with so vivid and tenacious a memory for the happy associations of a common past, and so generous in recognising the independent value of divergent convictions in the less pliant present."

The followers of Bagehot are legion: Tarde with his Lois de l'Imitation is only one of them. There are of course anticipators, and among them we may partly reckon Buckle whose History of Civilisation appeared in 1857, suffering from the fact that it was two years before Darwin's Origin of Species. Buckle, like Kidd, was a man of large views without the detailed knowledge required in order to drive home the conviction that his large views were true. Vico and Montesquieu had endeavoured to reduce the phenomena of societies to the reign of law, and substantially this was the aim of Buckle. Crimes, suicides, and acts of forgetfulness, e.g. the omission of an address on an envelope, were shown to recur with statistical regularity. To physical causes he traced the rise of civilisation in Egypt, India,

THE SECRET OF THE COLONIST

259

Mexico, and Peru. To the overpowering energy and the "unmanageability" of nature was due the entire absence of civilisation in Brazil. To the absence of the combined conditions of heat and irrigation north of the twentieth parallel was due the lack of civilisation in America. To the abundance of cheap food was due the abjection of the Indian and Egyptian peoples Bagehot speaks of "Mr. Buckle's idea that material forces have been the mainsprings of progress, and moral causes secondary, and, in comparison, not to be thought of."

Darwin explained the energy and the initiative of the colonist by the stimulating atmosphere of his new home. With him, as with Buckle, the climate was the magic reason. Is this really so? For the enterprise of the colonist has emerged under almost every condition of heat and cold, of high level and low level. The energy is at least as much due to the reason that a man of abundant activity, cramped by a narrow environment at home, found scope at last for his ability abroad. Physically, he was above average. For example, the Scots who fought in the war between North and South in the United States in the sixties were nearly two inches taller than the average at home. Mentally the Puritan, the Huguenot, who migrated because his religious or political freedom was attacked, was one of the select. The abundance of land, and the consequent feeling of hopefulness, the altered conditions demanding new solutions of old problems, the resulting initiative, adaptability, and receptivity to new ideas, all emancipated a man from the cake of custom in the old country. Strabo is well aware that variation combined with isolation modifies the original type, though he, like Bodin, clearly anticipates Buckle in ascribing too much importance to climate.

Buckle does not take sufficiently into account the happy effects of migration. The movement of the energetic in quest of better opportunities, by bringing them into flourishing communities where they have larger families than the stay-at-home, builds up an enterprising breed. In the colonies the men marry early; and, on account of the fewness of the women, the inferior men find no mates. Galton thinks that the rapid rise of the new colonies and the fall of

260 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

old civilisations are mainly due to the social agencies which in the one case promote and in the other retard the marriage of the more suitable. Out-worn traditions, narrow local sentiments, and obstinate prejudices meet and cancel one another. Races fuse and intermarry. There appear new combinations of hereditary factors. Variation is more common. The shutters of the intellect are taken down. The mind becomes alert and supple, though running excessively to material issues. Freed from the hampering net of kin and class ties, the individual emerges. A new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is open, the cake of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals are brought into existence. Now and then the emergence of a man takes place by his leaving the country for the city. "The air of a town makes a man free." The town is a hot-bed where seed-ideas more quickly germinate than in the country. The formation of large, dense, complex bodies of population is favourable to a belief in the rights of man as man that underlies individualism and democracy.

Climate, in spite of considerations like these, works wonders in the hands of Montesquieu, Buckle, and Treitschke. Montesquieu ascribes the immutability of religion, manners, customs and laws in India and other Oriental countries to their warm climate. Buckle ascribes the highly wrought imagination and gross superstition of the Indians to the presence of towering mountains and vast plains, which by their overpowering aspect excite the fancy and paralyse the reason, just as Treitschke similarly accounts for the absence of artistic and poetic development in Switzerland and Alpine Lands. It is much more probable that the geographical isolation of India is the cause, for on land the great sweep of high mountains restricts intercourse with the interior, and by sea the swamps of the Indus and the Ganges on the west and the marshes and lagoons on the east constitute barriers to accessibility. If migration is barely possible, a static condition of society is the inevitable outcome. Greece was as accessible as India was inaccessible, and the setting of the former made it the intellectual focus for the eastern Mediterranean.

HUXLEY'S LOVE OF CONTROVERSY

261

The master like Bagehot requires disciples if his teaching is to prevail. If the pupils possess the graceful style of a Huxley, so much the better for the diffusion of his views. There is a class of scientist who aches for strife, and Huxley belonged to it. He cared for truth. No one who has read the fine biography of him by his son, Mr. Leonard Huxley, can doubt that for a single moment. Did he never care for controversy for controversy's sake? He spawned hypotheses, as Bagehot spawned them, though he never, so far as we know, originated a single discovery save the one he made as an undergraduate of nineteen. He went astray over the Bathybius hypothesis, and he went astray over the phylogeny of the horse. Now before both these mistakes were discovered, would it, we imagine, have gone well with a young man who pointed out the errors in either? A pure lover of truth, like that supreme genius, Faraday, would probably have admitted the error. We are not altogether so sure in the case of a man who loved controversy as Huxley did, for it was the very breath of his nostrils. Can you chase truth with a logical forceps?

Nothing came amiss to the destructive powers of Huxley. It might be the views of General Booth on social reform or it might be the folks who talked about the natural rights of man. He lashed them all, and right vigorously he laid on the lash. To use present-day phraseology, his controversial complexes suffered no repression. No doubt the subconscious is as much overworked as x, y, and z in algebra, and we hesitate to employ this term. Still subconsciously this attitude of Huxley towards controversy, psychologically speaking, affected his attitude towards the pursuit of truth. Instead of constructive work, his is destructive work, and it is seldom possible for the same brain to undertake these two types of creative energy. Even the élan vital of Bergson is not sufficient for such a task. Huxley's coinage of the word Agnosticism has always seemed to us to be a parable of the whole man in science as well as in political philosophy. Despite the opposition of Herbert Spencer, in 1871 Huxley in his article on administrative nihilism pleads with all his wonted power on behalf of the education of the people by the Government. He has few general views on the

262 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

question of laissez-faire. He simply faces a problem like education in an empirical spirit. Is there more loss from lack of education than again by the non-interference on the part of the State? He sees that there is loss, and accordingly he settles the matter. For his part he is unable to entertain the belief that the functions of the State may be summed up in one great negative commandment, "Thou shalt not allow any man to interfere with the liberty of any other man." Yet such a commandment constituted the burden of the teaching of his friend Herbert Spencer. Huxley's argument is that if his next-door neighbour chooses to have his drains in such a state as to create a poisonous atmosphere, which anyone breathes, he restricts the just freedom of anyone to live just as much as if he went about with a pistol threatening life. If he is to be allowed to let his children go unvaccinated, he might as well be allowed to leave strychnine lozenges about in the way of one's children; and if he brings them up untaught, he is doing his best to restrict his neighbour's freedom, by increasing the burden of taxation for the support of gaols and workhouses, which someone has to pay. He endorses Locke's view that the end of government is the good of mankind, terming it the noblest, and at the same time the briefest, known to him. Nor will he ignore any more than Bagehot the share an Established Church may take. "A Church in which, week by week, services should be devoted, not to the iteration of abstract propositions in theology, but to the setting before men's minds of an ideal of true, just, and pure living; a place in which those who are weary of the burden of daily cares, should find a moment's rest in the contemplation of the higher life which is possible for all, though attained by so few; a place in which the man of strife and of business should have time to think how small, after all, are the rewards he covets compared with peace and charity. Depend upon it, if such a Church existed no one would seek to disestablish it."

Huxley subjects the natural inequality of men to a vigorous analysis in 1890. His examination of the doctrines of Rousseau is searching, and there are few places in English where the natural inequality of man is set forth with such lucidity and such power. He does not sufficiently see that

Natural and Political Rights

263

the law of nature has a long pedigree, taking it back to Canon and Roman law, nor does he seem to see the truth that there is in the law of nature a power able to set bounds to the authority of the State He is, however, quite clear that Rousseau's state of nature never existed as a fact, and he invokes ancient law and ancient religion, anthropology and archaeology to disprove it. This year he continued his investigation into natural rights and political rights, and from the historical point of view he attacks with little eagerness Quesnay and the Physiocrats in the eighteenth century and with the keenest eagerness Henry George and his views on the unearned increment derived from land in the nineteenth. In Huxley's survey of the growth of society he shows himself as much an imitationist as Bagehot himself. He exposes the reductio ad absurdum of natural right in land with cogency. “My free and equal fellow countrymen, there is not the slightest doubt that not only the Duke of Westminster and the Messrs. Astor, but everybody who holds land from the area of a thousand square miles to that of a tablecloth, and who, against all equity, denies that every pauper child has an equal right to it, is a ROBBER. (Loud and long-continued cheers ; the audience, especially the paupers, standing up and waving their hats.) But, my friends, I am also bound to tell you that neither the pauper child nor Messrs. Astor, nor the Duke of Westminster, have any more right to the land than the first nigger you may meet, or the Esquimaux at the north end of this great continent, or the Fugeians at the south end of it. Therefore, before you proceed to use your strength in claiming your rights and take the land away from these usurping Dukes and robbing Astors, you must recollect that you will have to go shares with the four hundred and fifty odd millions of Chinamen, the hundred and fifty millions who inhabit Hindostan, the . . . (loud and long-continued hisses; the audience, especially the paupers, standing up and projecting handy movables at the orator).”

In 1890 Huxley subjected two conceptions of government to his able criticism. Was it to wear the form of anarchy? Was it to wear the form of regimentation? His survey of the answers to these two questions runs back to classical

T

I

264 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

times. Once more he investigates the working of the law

of nature, and in the course of his investigation he comes

to the conclusion that Locke, not Hooker, is the father and

founder of individualism. While Huxley is personally

respectful to Herbert Spencer, he is devoid of respect for

the view of the functions of the State which contemplates it

as anarchy plus the policeman. No Christian could feel

the parlous plight of mankind more vividly than Huxley,

who writes: “I do not hesitate to express the opinion, that,

if there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of

the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the

increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion

over Nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which

follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the

extent, and the intensity of Want, with its concomitant

physical and moral degradation, among the mass of the

people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet,

which would sweep the whole affair away, as a desirable con-

summation.” It is akin to a wish expressed by Mill before

him and by Sidgwick after him.

The followers of Huxley felt the same consternation at his

Romanes lecture of 1893 as those of Mill felt on the publica-

tion of his posthumous Three Essays on Religion. In the

latter their author showed that religion meant much more to

him than had been imagined, and in the former its author

showed that ethics meant much more to him than had been

imagined. The Romanes lecture dealt with evolution and

ethics, and we can well imagine the surprise of the biologist

to note that Huxley felt concern in the ethical ends of the

universe. The lecturer shows that the conception of

evolution was familiar to men in India as in Greece six

centuries before our era. He is not content with the sur-

vival of the fittest, if the fittest simply mean those who are

so on physical grounds. To the amazement of the evolu-

tionist, Huxley is decidedly of opinion that “Social progress

means a checking of the cosmic progress at every step and the

substitution for it of another, which may be called the

ethical progress; the end of which is not the survival of those

who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole

of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically

the best." Huxley urges that the practice of that which is

ethically best involves a course of conduct which, in all

respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the

cosmic struggle for existence. Instead of ruthless self-

assertion, it demands self-restraint; instead of thrusting

aside all competitors, it requires that the individual shall

not merely respect, but shall help his fellows. There is the

community, and Huxley thinks in terms of the community.

Locke may be the father of individualism, and Huxley may

admire him, but he is not in the least content to adopt a

creed of individualism which means the adoption of the

beatitude of evolution, Blessed are the strong, for they shall

prey on the weak. Rather, he holds, Blessed are the strong,

for they shall help the weak. It is a fine creed, but how

Huxley reconciles it with evolution is by no means plain.

The publication of B. Kidd's Social Evolution in 1894

attracted as much attention as the publication of H. T.

Buckle's History of Civilisation in 1857. His thesis gave

a point-blank contradiction to the thesis of Buckle. The

latter traced the progress of humanity to the growth of

reason, and this brutal, selfish faculty is to Kidd the evil

genius of humanity. Kidd professes to find the key to

social evolution in the cultivation of the emotions. Just

as the book of Buckle was fortunate in meeting the mood of

the public, so the book of Kidd was equally fortunate. It

fell in with that general anti-intellectualism which Aliotta

has particularly traced in his Idealistic Reaction against

Science. In Kidd's view we have to approach the study of

evolution with the knowledge that it was progressing along

lines in which it was the interests of society, not of

individuals, that mattered. It is a position which Bagehot

assumed when he demonstrated the utter lack of any

connection between the interests of the State and those of

the individuals who compose it. Herein lies the tragedy of

the world which Kidd, in imitation of Bagehot, reveals

with grim power.

If Henry Drummond bore witness to the worth of Social

Evolution, so too did Alfred Marshall. They were moved

by the grandeur of Kidd's conception, and the skill with

which he unified diverse and seemingly disconnected facts

266 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

into a support of it. Many of his incidental criticisms were

just, penetrating, and original, and it was easy to draw the

conclusion that his grand conception possessed all these

qualities. By means of his conception he seeks to test the

truth of religion by its social functions. Religion has

usually been tested by its share in the origin of the con-

stitution of the universe or by its part in the human mind,

but Kidd leaves these to the one side for his view of the

functions performed by religion in the life of societies. He

points out that the inter-racial struggle for existence

incidentally conserves these races whose internal social

organisation renders them more efficient; and that those

races are the most efficient in the external and inter-racial

struggle in which the acutest conflict takes place between

their own members. This internal struggle for existence,

however, though beneficial to the race as a whole, is injurious

to the vast majority of the living individuals who take part

in it, and benefits only a small aristocratic minority. What

prevents the majority, then, from suspending this struggle

and rearranging society on a socialistic and non-competitive

basis? The majority, remarks Kidd, might do this at any

time. Would they not thereby sacrifice the future of their

race? Of course they would, but they themselves would

be the gainers. What motive induces them to pursue the

opposite course? One thing, and one thing alone, can

persuade them to behave so irrationally; and this thing is the

mysterious influence of religion. Is the sole function of

religion, he asks, to induce the masses to submit to con-

ditions of subjection? Nothing, he holds, could be falser

than any supposition such as this, for the action of religion

is twofold. On the one hand it restrains the masses from

accomplishing their desires by force, and on the other it so

softens the heart of the classes, the “power-holding classes,”

that they voluntarily surrender to the masses one privilege

after another. But for the influence of religion, they

would have reserved these privileges for themselves. It is

clear that Kidd impales himself on the horns of a dilemma.

In one part of his book he argues that the masses could at

any time deprive the classes of their privileges, and that

nothing but religion induced them to forbear from so acting.

Forecast Founded on Fact

267

In another part he argues that the classes could always—if they so desired—keep their privileges to themselves, that the masses could never have taken them from the “power-holding classes,” and that nothing but religion persuaded these classes to part with their privileges. Nor is this dilemma the sole criticism we offer. The history invoked by the author is astonishingly deficient in breadth of appeal and inaccurate in substance. With Gibbon, who was misled by Montesquieu, Kidd assumes the decrepitude of the Byzantine Empire, a view which has been exploded by Finlay and Bury among our own scholars, and by Rambaud and Schlumberger, Krumbacher and Stryzgowski among foreign scholars. Nor is this by any means the only blunder in his book.

A scholar to his fingers’ tip, C. H. Pearson published in 1893 his forecast of National Life and Character. Herbert Spencer has expressed his conviction that “the future has in store forms of social life higher than any we have imagined,” holding “a faith transcending that of the Radical, whose aim is some re-organisation admitting of comparison to organisations that exist.” In his Philosophical Dialogues Renan dreams of an oligarchical solution of the problem of the universe, when the elect of intelligent beings, possessing the most important secrets of reality, shall dominate the world by the potent instruments of destruction of which their science has given them absolute disposal, and shall cause as much reason as possible to reign there. These, however, are dreams, and Pearson is content to base his forecast on facts. His qualifications for undertaking the rôle of the prophet are large knowledge of the past and present of human thought and human action, an unusual power of stating and marshalling facts combined with a lively and luminous diction.

The thought of writing his book, the author tells us, was suggested to him by his conviction that the United States are rapidly filling up, and that the spaces fit for the white races are quickly contracting. Climate and the circumstances of prior populations render China, India, and the greater part of Africa not possible fields for European colonisation. True, Russia may contribute a large immigration to

268 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Western Turkestan. France and Italy may gradually Europeanise Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli, and even Morocco.

Yet these small triumphs of the Aryan race are likely, in Pearson’s judgment, to be more than balanced by the disproportionate growth of the Chinese in the Malay Archi-

pelago, the spread of the Hindu to Beluchistan and Southern Persia, of the negroes in Africa, Brazil, and even in the United States. If China were to become a great Power,

which Pearson believes; if her flag floated on every sea, and her naval officers visited every great port as honoured guests; if her army was an important factor in the peace of

the world, and her diplomatists were accordingly respected; if her commerce were world-wide; if her literature was achieving a success for its style and thought, it is incon-

ceivable that these influences should not tell upon the character and conduct of mankind. Years ago Baron

Hübner put this fear of the yellow race in a striking form when he declared that Lord Palmerston, in thinking that he had opened out China to Europe, had in reality let out the

Chinese. Nor does Pearson overlook the danger that Dean Inge obviously fears. For the expansion of the Chinese may involve another kind of danger, as, working as they do for

wages which cannot support a white man, it is conceivable that they may in a not distant future absorb the labour of the world. A Chinese can work for twelve hours a day

for a shilling, and can continue this amazing amount of work week after week. In the first part of his book Pearson occupies himself with the increase of the inferior races, and

with the diminished opportunities of the white races for expansion.

Pearson proceeds to his second part, and in it he states his reasons for thinking that the white races, under the combined influences of democratic legislation and city life,

are becoming fibreless and weak; and are consequently less well equipped than their forefathers for the great struggle which is perpetually going on, and in which the weakest go

down and the fittest only survive. Looking back on the thirty-six years since National Life and Character was written, we remember the deeds of the World War by our

race at home and our sons from the nations overseas, and

we certainly are unable to discern a fibreless and weak condition, and if we transfer our gàze from our own side to that of the enemy it was not apparent there. It is by no means easy even for a prophet so well-equipped as our author to forecast the future. Who at the beginning of the thirteenth century would have anticipated that the Black Death would reduce the population of Europe so seriously as to bring the Middle Ages to an end? Who at the beginning of the seventeenth century would have foreseen that the Thirty Years’ War would hinder the development of Germany for a hundred and fifty years? Who at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign would have foreseen that the population of Ireland, which had been increasing more rapidly than that of England, would in the next sixty years be reduced to about one half of its then existing numbers? Calamities, such as the Black Death, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Potato famine, may not recur in the future, though we have had the World War from 1914 to 1918 and the dire pestilence of influenza in the winter of 1918 when more died from its effects than died during the four years of war.

Pearson believed that universal military service will become the rule, but the trend of recent events is against it. No one can doubt the enormous influence the League of Nations exercises for good in this respect. Our author also believes in the urbanisation of peoples, and here of course evidence supports him. As a result of this urbanisation he holds before us the prospect that men tend to shift all responsibility upon the State. He imagines the State crèche, the State doctor, the State school, and the child, already drilled by the State, passing from the State school to the State workshop.

Physical science, in our author’s opinion, has done its greatest and most suggestive work. This seems to us almost the most questionable generalisation in the whole book. We questioned it before, and we question it again. Every year has apparently fresh scientific revelations in store for us; and though, in the abstract, it may be true that there are limitations to our achievements, every generation finds an answer to problems which previous ages declared to be insoluble. Though Newton discovered the law of gravitation,

and though we freely admit that he had one of the most

colossal brains ever given to a human being, yet there are

more secrets in the universe than what Pearson regards as

"the only secret of the universe to be discovered." A

hundred years after Newton's time Sir W. Herschel detected

the extraordinary fact that the sun was travelling through

space and bearing its own planetary system with it towards

the constellation Hercules. A hundred years after Herschel's

time Einstein discovered the law of relativity which

corrects the Newtonian conception in a remarkable fashion.

The spectroscope has placed in our hands an instrument by

which we can detect the composition of the stars, an idea

that might well have seemed incredible to Newton who

possessed only a telescope. No one to-day who knows

anything about the labours of Sir J. J. Thomson and the

Cambridge School of Physicists are revealing of the nature

of the atom will dream of imposing a limit on what may be

discovered. Our work-a-day world, the world of Pearson

in science at any rate, is bounded by three dimensions of the

space in which we live and move. The mathematician,

like Weyl or Einstein, has long transcended these three

dimensions, forming a conception of space of 4 or 5 or n

dimensions. A Sir J. J. Thomson or a Sir Ernest Rutherford,

engaged on the mass of an electron or the mass of a hydrogen

nucleus, piercing the secrets of the smallest entities, brooding

over the dance of vortices imagined by a Kelvin, with his

magic aid summons elemental forces to reveal the nature of

their powers to his scientific gaze. From one aspect we be-

hold the disciplined brain of the man of science. From

another we behold the imaginative inspiration of the poet.

Newton's transition from a falling apple to a falling moon

`was, at the outset, a leap of the imagination.'

The scientific imagination was lacking in Pearson who

sees more of the machines on mother earth than the secrets

of the heavens. Like Kaiser and Toller, he is afraid of

"l'homme machine." Nor does he recognise, what Alfred

Marshall shows, that monotony of toil need not mean, and

does not necessarily mean, monotony of existence. Despite

the views of Coleridge, Mill, and Ruskin, the machine saves

human toil, and leaves human beings more time to devote to

their own pleasure and profit. During working hours, no doubt the artizan seems to be a mere automaton, no more responsible than an automaton for his actions, but meet him after his working hours, as we meet him, and he is anything but "l'homme machine." At the beginning of the nineteenth century Richter observed that the tendency of our civilisation was to make men as so many drops of water for the service of a monstrous steam-engine, but at the beginning of the twentieth century this tendency has certainly been checked. According to Heine, "See all the gods are flown away, and there sits an old maid all by herself, with leaden hands and sorrowful heart—Necessity." This was true, but is no longer so. We witnessed what some would have deemed impossible before it happened, the way in which our men flocked to the colours during the war, and this they did freely for a long time. The gods of self-sacrifice and patriotism flew back, and the old maid, Necessity, was left deserted. Among the pleasant portents among ourselves and conspicuously so in the United States is the way in which wealthy men steadily and increasingly recognise that property has duties as well as rights. On both sides of the Atlantic we see employers exhibit a constantly increasing disposition to devote their wealth to public objects of importance, and are building improved dwellings, opening pleasure grounds in cities, and providing libraries and pictures, music and museums for the people. Let anyone turn to the days of the Industrial Revolution and witness, say, the horrors of tailoring as depicted in Alton Locke, or let him turn to the bluebooks giving a sober account of what was actually taking place in the factories of the north, and will he not gladly confess the progress that is evident?

Our author may be right in maintaining that "such men as Drake and Frobisher, Clive and Warren Hastings, are likely to become rare and disappear." Each generation has its own type; and the future can never exactly reproduce the past. Yet the nineteenth century may match Drake with Nelson, Frobisher with Livingstone, Warren Hastings with Cecil Rhodes. In India there are Wellesley and the two Lawrences. Pearson says but little here about men of

272 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

science, but a bead-roll which includes Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, Kelvin, Darwin, Sir Gabriel Stokes, Cayley, Dalton, FitzGerald, George Green, Sir W. R. Hamilton, Joule, Lister, Lyell, Rayleigh, and Wallace need not be afraid of scrutiny. Nor, in spite of Pearson, do we believe that literature is in any more parlous plight. There may be silence in one part of literature or another, but even a silence of fifty years in any department will not prove that the creative faculty has said its last word. If the nineteenth century opened with Scott and Shelley, Byron and Keats, there came Tennyson and Browning. In fiction Thackeray and Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, produced work of distinction. In history, with the single exception of the great name of Gibbon, the eighteenth century can produce few names fit to be set alongside Bryce, Bury, Carlyle, Creighton, Finlay, Freeman, Froude, Gardiner, Green, Grote, Hallam, Lecky, Macaulay, Maitland, Seeley, Stubbs, and Thirwall.

If Pearson seems to underrate these men and their labours, he underrates the conservative, the preservative, element provided by Christianity. He assumes that religion will pass into a recognition of ethical precepts and a graceful habit of morality, but what will give people power to practice these ethical precepts and wear this graceful habit of morality? Religion, if there be truth in history, does not pass into morality unless there is a personality behind it. He had admitted in his History of England during the Early and Middle Ages that 'The mediaeval theory of a people framing their life in accordance with God's law, and regarding eternal truth, not cheap government or success, as the first cause of their existence, is among the grandest conceptions of history.' Since he wrote these words much water has flowed under the bridge, and the State assumes the pride of place he formerly conceded to the Church. The closing words of National Life and Character tell us of a Stoicism akin to Matthew Arnold's 'When the gods of Greece passed away with the great Pan, nature lost its divinity, but society was overshadowed by a holier presence. When Christianity itself began to appear grotesque and incredible, men reconciled themselves to the change by belief in an age of reason,

of enlightenment, of progress. It is now more than probable

that our science, our civilisation, our great and real advance

in the practice of government are only bringing us nearer

to the day when the lower races will predominate in the

world, when the higher races will lose their noblest elements,

when we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor

from the future but that we may not deteriorate. Even so,

there will still remain to us ourselves. Simply to do our

work in life, and to abide the issue, if we stand erect before

the eternal calm as cheerfully as our fathers faced the eternal

unrest, may be nobler training for our souls than the faith

in progress."

References

Acton, Lord. Historical Essays and Studies. (London, 1907.)

Anet, H Christianisme et Évolution sociale. (Paris, 1900.)

Bagehot, W. In Memoriam. (London, 1878.)

Bagehot, W. Literary Studies. Vol. I (for Hutton's Memoir).

(London, 1902 )

Barrington, Mrs. R. Life of Walter Bagehot. (London, 1924.)

Birrell, A. Miscellanıes. (London, 1902.)

Cecil, H. M. Pseudo-Phılsophy . . . Kıdd, etc. (London, 1897.)

Davis, M. M. Psychological Interpretatıons of Society. (New York,

1909.)

Drummond, R. B. Free Will in relatıon to Statıstıcs. (London, 1860.)

Étienne, L. Le Positivısme dans l'Hıstoıre. (Paris, 1868.)

Fischer, E. L. Ueber das Gesetz der Entwıckelung auf psyschısch

ethıschem Gebıete . . . mit Rucksicht auf . . . T. Buckle.

(Berlin, 1875.)

Fraenkel, E. Dr. Buckle u. seıne Geschıchtsphılosophıe. (Berlin,

1906.)

Grant Duff, Sir M. E. Out of the Past. Vol. II. (London, 1903.)

Hovre, F. de. La Phılosophıe socıale de Benjamın Kıdd. (Paris,

1910.)

Huth, A. H. Lıfe and Wrıtıngs of Henry Thomas Buckle. (London,

1880.)

Huxley,L. Lıfe and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. (London,1900.)

Loria, A. Mıstıco del materıalısmo Benjamın Kıdd. (Roma, 1902.)

Mackintosh, R. From Comte to Benjamın Kıdd. (London, 1899.)

Mazel, H. L'Évolutıon socıale de Benjamın Kıdd. (Paris, 1896.)

Morgan, F. Ed. Works of Walter Bagehot. Vol. I (for Morgan's

preface and Giffen's study of Bagehot as an economist).

(Hartford, 1891.)

Robertson, J. M. Buckle and hıs Crıtıcs. (London, 1895.)

Stebbing, W. Ed. Charles Henry Pearson. (London, 1900.)

Stephen, Sir L. Studıes of a Biographer. (London, 1910.)

Chapter VII.

GREEN'S POLITICAL IDEALISM

Thomas Hill Green was a great philosopher and a remarkable personality. A brilliant and accurate scholar, fresh and stimulating in his teaching, he thrust his way at once into the heart of philosophical problems. He was, however, much more than a philosopher: he was in Oxford an influence whose full force is even yet not wholly spent. To know him was to experience the power of a great mind and of a still greater spirit. The simplicity and sterling worth of his character were evident in all he did or said, and left an unforgettable impression. The massiveness of his intellect and the nobility of his character dominated all his students. When they became intimate with him, they discovered that to him scholarship was subordinate to service, service to Oxford and to the State. The note of quiet conviction rang through all his utterances in lectures or in his books. This steadfast conviction is characteristic of his scholarship and of his life, of his scholarship because, though he was patient of inquiry and open to correction, his opinions had not been lightly formed; of his life, because his whole personality reposed on a resolute and unshaken faith in the things that are eternal.

Green (1836-82) was the youngest son of Valentine Green, rector of Birkin, Yorkshire, and on his paternal ancestry he was related to Oliver Cromwell. His mother died when he was a year old, and the two sons and the two daughters were brought up by their father. Birkin was seven miles from any town, and the children grew up with little interference on the part of their father. In the days to come the son regretted that "the union of magnanimity, insolence, and a bad digestion " had prevented his father from making the best of himself, and this union appeared in the son. In the summer of 1850 he went to Rugby, then under the

THE SUFFERINGS OF THE POOR

275

head-mastership of E. M. Goulburn. He had not been a

precocious child, and he was an awkward and indolent

schoolboy. Masters and boys alike recognised his ability,

but it was not the sort of ability that won prizes. Once,

to the wonder of everybody, he won the school prize in

1855 for a passage of Milton’s Areopagitica to be translated

into Latin. He was so fired by the passage that he produced

a version in which he surpassed himself as much as his

competitors. Between him and the headmaster there was

little sympathy, though the latter thanked him on his

leaving school for the discipline he had maintained. He

impressed the boys by his sturdy character and his friends

by his independent outlook. His favourite authors in

1854 are F. D. Maurice, Kingsley, and Carlyle.

In October, 1855, he entered Balliol College, Oxford, as

a pupil of Jowett. Classical scholarship but faintly appealed

to him, and accordingly he won only a second-class in

moderations. Stung by the sense of failure, due to his

idleness, he worked hard for eighteen months, gaining a

first class in the school of Literae humaniores, impressing

the examiners as the ablest among several able candidates.

He then read hurriedly for six months for the school of law

and modern history, obtaining a third class and, what was

more important, a background for his thought. He owed

much to Conington, C. Parker, and Jowett, above all, to

the last, who exerted a strong influence in determining the

course of his career. With Conington he spent parts of his

first four long vacations, indulging his love of the country

and his delight in walking. Milton and Wordsworth attracted

him, and the Ode to Duty of the Lake poet struck him as

“the high-water mark of modern poetry.” He liked meeting

farmers and tradespeople, and he took care, without a

trace of condescension, to meet them on their own level.

The wrongs and sufferings of the poor he met in his father’s

parish, and he at all times manifested the deepest sympathy

with them. At College he wrote an able essay on national

life, and a sentence in it ran thus: “Let the flag of England

be dragged through the dirt rather than sixpence be added

to the taxes which weigh on the poor.” Politically he was

a philosophic radical whose views coincided with those of

276 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Bright and Cobden but not for their reasons. An idealist in philosophy, he argued on idealist principles on behalf of the most Utilitarian of schools. He spoke seldom at the Union, though in 1858 he proposed a motion eulogising Bright, and, to his shame, found himself in a minority of two. The attraction he felt for Bright was due to his belief in the moral responsibility of nations, his love of the people, and the noble simplicity and restrained passion of the eloquence of the great Quaker. If Green was a philosophic radical, he was also a religious one. He desired to be a minister of religion, a student of philosophy, and a member of parliament, and he spent time making up his mind what he really was going to be.

He gained the Chancellor's prize for an essay on novels written in 1862. Twice he competed for the Ellerton theological prize, and competed unsuccessfully. For the essays he wrote his old masters, Milton and Wordsworth, Maurice and Carlyle, were still perused. Fichte was among the new, and from Fichte he learnt the nature and vocation of the scholar as well as the man. He speaks of the "tendency to form societies and the reverence for supernatural beings" as affording the twofold evidence of the higher nature of man and the twofold source of loyalty. The impulse which produced and maintained family life, the system of chivalry, and the free constitutions of modern Europe, is the same as that which has produced and maintained true religion. A unifying tendency is characteristic of his thought. Behind all his thought lay the conception of duty which was a clarion call to him.

As an undergraduate Newman and Mill had been among the intellectual forces of the day, but both men moved Green by way of repulsion. He heartily hated the whole Utilitarian school, and Buckle formed a special object of his scorn. Carlyle led him to German thought, and he studied Kant and Hegel, exhibiting a livelier interest in ethical than in metaphysical questions. His central conception is that "the Universe is a single eternal activity or energy, of which it is the essence to be self-conscious, that is, to be itself and not-itself in one." His religious philosophy is a constant reproduction of "the idea that the whole world

History in Green's Thought

277

of human experience is the self-communication or revelation

of the eternal and absolute being." He came to these views

by a slow process of thought enriched by his experience of

life. At Heidelberg he felt the fascination of Baur, and

began a translation of his History of the Christian Church,

but this was never finished.

Through Jowett he returned to his college to lecture on

Greek history for the school of literae humaniores and on

English and early European history for the school of law

and modern history. He grasped facts with no secure

hold, but he grasped their connection and consequences

with a secure hold indeed, evincing as lively a sense of the

dramatic aspect of events as Carlyle himself. With his

efficiency as a lecturer was combined the magnetism of his

personality. He is Mr. Gray in Mrs. Humphry Ward's

Robert Elsmere. Though he gave up lecturing in history,

he retained his interest in it, and in his political writings

he never forgets the pedigree of the teaching he is invest-

igating. In 1860 he became a fellow of his college and in

1869 a tutor. In 1861 he lectured on Aristotle. He

prepared an edition of the Ethics, but this he also abandoned.

In 1864 he was a candidate for the chair of philosophy at

St. Andrews when Flint was appointed.

In the light of after history it is interesting to note that

in 1864 he did not want his countrymen to become excited

about the Danish question or even about the Italian one.

Green was glad when Garibaldi's visit to our shores in 1864

came to an end. This is the more remarkable, for in 1861

he had vindicated Mazzini at the Union. On the other

hand, he was passionately on the side of the North in the

American Civil War. He was conspicuous for his whole-

hearted devotion to the emancipation of the slave, and was

at all times ready to champion the cause of equality and

freedom. No abolitionist welcomed the fall of Vicksburg

with keener joy. He used to say that the whole future of

humanity was involved in the triumph of the Federal arms.

"The fabric of European society," he wrote in 1868, "stands

apparently square and strong on a basis of decent actual

equity, but no adequate rationale of this equity is generally

recognised. The hedonism of Hume has been turned into

278 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

utilitarianism, the jacobinism of Rousseau into a gentle liberalism, but neither ism could save the 'culture' of England, in the great struggle between wilfulness and social right across the Atlantic, from taking sides with the wilfulness. Whatever might be the case practically, it had not learnt speculatively that freedom means something else than doing what one likes. A philosophy based on feeling was still playing the anarch in its thoughts." Like Kant, he set himself to answer David Hume, for he experienced his power still in life.

In December, 1864, he accepted an appointment as assistant-commissioner to the Royal Commission upon middle class schools. Warwickshire and Staffordshire fell to his lot, and subsequently his work extended to three additional counties. He liked his duty, which absorbed his time during the great part of 1865 and the second part of 1866. Just as he desired the opening of the universities, on the ground of justice, to the poorer classes and the dissenters, so he desired the opening of the schools. He defended endowments, as they enabled the teacher to stand out against the tyranny of the parent who took a narrow view of the scope of education. To the increase of first-grade day schools in large towns he looked for the development of higher education in our country, and this hope time has not belied. His strong sympathy lay with the education of the middle classes whom the universities were just beginning to touch. His aim was to efface the demarcation of class, to give freedom of self-elevation in the social scale other than that given by money, and to keep "the career open to the talents."

In 1866 he lectured at Edinburgh on the English Revolution, and, despite the charm of Cromwell, Green is more interested in Vane than in the Protector, in Milton than in Pym, in Harrison than in Monk, and in Lilburne than in Lambert. Ideas moved Green far more than events, and his lectures are still valuable, though Gardiner and Firth spent a lifetime on the history of this Revolution, for the power with which ideas are set forth. Green cared for history, but he was never an historian. At the same time he felt the fascination of an age when men were engrossed

with ideas and ideals, for these engrossed him. Much as

he admired Carlyle, he felt to the full that his book attaches

too little prominence to "the strength of circumstance,

the organic growth of custom and institution, which acts on

the individual from without and from within, which at

once informs his will and places it in limits against which

it breaks itself in vain. In modern life, as Napoleon said

to Goethe, political necessity represents the destiny of the

ancient drama." The tragedy of life lies in "the conflict

between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of

the world, which seems to thwart it," and it is this which

gives to Green his interest in the history of the Great

Rebellion. This conflict assumed form at the Reformation

when mankind found itself face to face with the situation

in which there lay a gulf between its aspirations and the

shape those aspirations wore in existing customs and

institutions. Maine had shown that there is always a gulf

between them, and from the legal aspect he had shown how

this gulf may be bridged. Green discerns a similar gulf in

the seventeenth century. "English puritanism originated

in the consciousness of a spiritual life which no outward

ordinances could adequately express." Once admit Luther

and Calvin, and you at the same time admit Vane and

Cromwell. How can the outward correspond to the

inward? How can the things temporal correspond to the

things eternal? Yet though the rite must always be in-

adequate to the spirit, the spirit cannot be a power in the

world except through the rite. Despite puritanism, the

antithesis between the two cannot be pushed to the length

of complete separation.

Gardiner realised the antithesis as warmly as Green,

though the latter exhibited a more lively sympathy with it.

The spirit of independency made a special appeal to our

philosopher who discerned in it the power which "more

than any other has ennobled the plebeian elements of

English life." If he appreciated its spirit, he appreciated

its danger. It was the spirit which "anticipates in moments

of ecstasy and assurance that which must be to us the ever-

retreating end of God's work in the world." It was also

the danger of attempting "to construct a religious life which

280 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

is nothing without external realisation, on an inward and momentary intuition." Cromwell possessed enough insight, and he spent himself in vain efforts to create a body of wide comprehension which would sustain the enthusiasm of the men of the spirit. In fact, his problem essentially was the reconciliation of old interests with new enthusiasms.

In the concluding words of his lectures there is an allusion to Hegel, whose philosophy had "for its professed object to find a formulae adequate to the acting of reason as exhibited in nature and human society, in art and religion."

In the spring of 1866 Green thought of standing for a chair at Owens College, Manchester, and the following year he unsuccessfully stood for the Waynflete professorship of moral philosophy in his own university. The death of James Riddell left a vacancy in the teaching staff of Balliol, and Green was appointed to fill it. In 1870 Jowett became Master. Green, as tutor, had now the whole subordinate management of the college. He had an immense respect for practical ability, and was not sorry to have the opportunity of using his own. His power of thought and his earnestness of manner commanded the respect of his pupils, and he was pleased when five of them were in the first class in 1867. He lectured on Aristotle and early Greek philosophy, and especially upon the English and Scots thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Through his lectures the sun of Mill set in Oxford and the new stars, Kant and Hegel, rose high in the heavens. The man fascinated many who felt difficulty in following his thought, and indeed he expressed himself with but little facility. A story was current how when one day he had been explaining to a small class his theory of the origin of our ideas, the class listened with rapt attention to his forcible rhetoric, admiring each sentence as it fell, and thinking that all their difficulties were fast being removed.

When he ended they expressed their gratitude for the pleasure he had given them, and were quitting the room, when one, halting at the door, shyly said, "But, Mr. Green, what did you say was really the origin of our ideas?"

If hearers found the lectures hard to understand, they

were a model of fairness to the philosophers of the past.

It was an education in impartiality to listen to them, and

if hearers carried away with them few ideas on their

subject-matter, they certainly carried away the impression

that truth mattered, and that fairness of mind is not the

least of the requirements for discovering it. The work of

philosophers was worthy of study for the sake of truth:

it was worthy for the sake of life. For Green always had

a practical object in his mind. "We best do reverence to

their genius, we most truly appropriate their spirit, in so

exploring the difficulties to which their enquiry led, as to

find in them the suggestion of a theory which may help

us to walk firmly where they stumbled and fell." Such was

the lecturer's own attitude, and he scarcely ever departed

from it. Once he allowed himself to be sarcastic at the

expense of Herbert Spencer, and he tendered his apology

to his audience. "While I cannot honestly retract anything

in the substance of what I then wrote, there are expressions

which I very much regret, as far as they might be taken

to imply want of personal respect for Mr. Spencer." Unlike

Huxley, he realised that the spirit of controversy was by

no means conducive to the discovery of truth.

The teaching of philosophy at Oxford centred around

Aristotle, to which portions of Plato had recently been

added. Pattison and Jowett introduced the writings of

German thinkers, and Green strengthened this tendency

by his eagerness to view philosophical problems from the

historical angle. The historical method is of course but

one application of the evolutional principle which was fast

transforming many departments of thought. Green lectured

on Aristotle because he was the chief writer studied in

Oxford, but his own interests led him to the study and the

criticism of seventeenth and eighteenth century thought.

Nor was it easy to avoid a transition to modern thought,

for if he criticised Hume, he, implicitly at any rate, criticised

Mill. Feeling intensely the fundamental unity of the human

mind in all its manifold activities, in religion and law, in

society and science, he could not accept the antithesis

which he saw in Hume, as he had seen it in Puritanism.

Hume showed conclusively that from the conception of

282 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

the human mind with which he started none but a self-contradictory explanation could be given of what the mind does and experiences. His successors in England, instead of being led thereby to reconsider his premises, have gone on "digging in the old vein which he had exhausted, and of which his final dilemma had shown the bottom." Reconstruction had not come directly from philosophy but indirectly from such poets as Wordsworth and Shelley. Evangelical religion had also assisted in reconstruction, and so too had Rousseau, for he had popularised the conception of right and freedom.

The main idea in Green's philosophy is that the universe is a single eternal activity. Experience leads us to form the conception of self-consciousness as the ultimate reality. The reality of everything lies in its pointing beyond itself to something else, and it is found to consist in relationships. Complete reality means "a system in which every element, being correlative to every other, at once presupposes and is presupposed by every other." Green takes occasion to point out that "If all interests were identical, there would be no state. On the other hand, the state tends to overcome, and, so far as it approaches perfection, actually overcomes, separation of interests. In other words, just so far as there is a state, interests no longer are really separate. In the state separation of interests may be said to exist as one factor of reality, but as in one sense neutralised by the other factor, which is its opposite, viz. the sense of common interest. Neither would be what it is without the other, but in the state neither retains any separate reality." The idealism he expresses is due, in its manner, to his sympathetic study of Kant and Hegel. It is the common heritage of all true idealism, which is "not the admission of an ideal world of guess and aspiration alongside of the empirical, but the recognition of the empirical itself as ideal," which "trusts, not to a guess about what is beyond experience, but to analysis of what is within it."

Kant and Hegel based their systems on a spiritual idea, though they handled this idea diversely. Kant handled it from the point of view of individual consciousness while

Kant and Hegal

283

Hegel handled it from the point of view of the world of organised institutions. Kant broke thought into its elements, Hegel into its germs. The former is critical, the latter evolutional. For we must not forget that Lamarck and Goethe had been at work before Darwin.

Kant’s Rechtslehre appeared in 1797, bearing on it the impress of the French Revolution. Like this Revolution, on one side Kant is destructive and on another constructive. Heine calls him the great iconoclast, and he is so when he assigns rigid limits to human reason, setting up an impassable barrier between the world of appearances and the world of thought. If he is destructive, he is also constructive as the father of idealist philosophy. In the creative energy of the will he found the true self and the God who, in speculation, had almost disappeared. The Revolution was in fact the most signal act of will which had been witnessed in Europe since the Revolution. "Nothing in the world or out of it can be called good without qualification but the good will," was the famous utterance of Kant; and it is zealously enforced by Fichte and Green. Kant no doubt gave the conception of right too fixed a form, but with him, Fichte, and Green the law of right is essentially a moral principle.

Hegel insists that there is nothing in the world of man’s experience that is not the creation of growth, and that reason being essentially a principle of growth, no one of its manifestations is intelligible, unless it is studied along the lines of its historical development. As Vico traces "the ideal and eternal laws of that history which runs its course in time," so does Hegel. He traces the efforts made by the will of man to establish its outward and collective as opposed to its inward and individual freedom. It is the antithesis which Green perceived, and Hegel is as determined as Green to blend the two inseparably. To Hegel "freedom, and freedom alone, is the truth of the life of the Spirit." In the classical world the realisation of this freedom is unconscious or conscious in a rudimentary form. It was Christianity that first consciously conceived freedom as an ideal—the ideal to be realised by all men. The early Christians were content with freedom in its most abstract

284 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

form—the freedom of the spirit in inward communion with

God. The formation of the German States on the ruins of

Roman Empire allowed the application of the idea to the

outward life of man, his social and political requirements,

but this application, even yet, is not at all complete.

Hegel plainly envisages progress towards the gradual

realisation of the idea of freedom. In spite of obstacles,

it is slowly travelling down the ages. This freedom is

neither the mere absence of external restraint nor the

liberty of the individual to do what he pleases with his

own faculties and possessions, though these are among the

conditions of true freedom. Freedom is rather the un-

trammelled development of man's powers, moral, spiritual,

and intellectual, according to the fundamental laws of his

own nature. Man instinctively acted on these laws of

freedom long before the philosophers demonstrated their

existence. Progress affords the key to history and to

political philosophy, and it affords the key to right. Of

course this progress is not continuous, and Hegel appeals to

the annals of the past to prove this point. Nevertheless,

there is progress, progress from a more to a less imperfect

realisation of moral and intellectual truth. He uses all

his powers to convince us of the truth of this progress. To

him history is the pilgrimage of the spirit of man in search of

itself. History is reasonable in showing this, and in showing

its reasonableness he appeals to experience and philosophical

necessity. He lays weighty stress on the share of reason

in moulding history, and it is but one manifestation, co-

ordinate with others, of its creative power in general.

Hegel fully allows for the general movement of historical

progress, and he no less fully allows for the place of the

individual in it. If he exalts the march of the idea, he also

exalts the passion of the individual. Not for a moment will

he sacrifice the individual to the community. Nevertheless

he belongs to a family, and the family belongs to society,

which stands between him and the State. The society is

to the State as the particular to the universal.

Every individual is a “person,” standing before the bar

of legal right. In virtue of his personality he is conscious

of himself as equal to any other individual. His rank,

talent, character, motive—all are left to the one side, and

he stands starkly forth as the embodiment of will. The

first movement of the will, in the sphere of morality, is to

fall back on itself, and its next is to find a resting-place

without. There must be a law of moral action, and of

course moral consciousness is of gradual growth. A universal

element is essential to morality, and Hegel finds it in the

inclusion of the happiness of others as well as of one’s self.

In the sphere of duty the universal element of the happiness

of others and the particular of one’s own unite, and for

Hegel, as for Green, the claim of duty is peremptory.

What is true of the individual is true of the State. Each

State is to make progress in its own life, and this life is to

be duly related to the world of humanity. In this world

of humanity each State can find the corrective to its own

narrowness and insularity. In very diverse fashions Maine

and Arnold, Seeley and Green continued this teaching of

Hegel. In “the soul of the wide world” rather than in

that of the individual, or even in that of the State, Hegel

discerned the true “region of ideas.” “Die Welt Geschichte,”

to use Schiller’s well-known words, “ist das Welt-Gericht.”

If world history is world judgment, nevertheless the test

is world history.

Green took the “vital truth which Hegel had to teach”

to be “that there is one spiritual self-conscious being, of

which all that is real is the activity or expression; that we

are related to this being, not merely as parts of the world

which is its expression, but as partakers in some inchoate

measure of the self-consciousness through which it at once

constitutes and distinguishes itself from the world; and

that this participation is the source of morality and religion.”

The belief that “the objective world, in its actual totality,

is thought” requires, however, the constant reminder that

“the processes of our intelligence are but reflections of that

real thought under the conditions of a limited nature.”

Both points of view are to be kept in mind, and only by

keeping them in mind can we appropriate to ourselves the

true spirit of Hegelianism. The ideal is the free life of the

individual in a free State. Rational faith and reason

inspired by emotion were to transform this individual into

286 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

the good citizen. One of the misfortunes of university

life, so Green thought, lies in its tendency to overrate the

importance of opinions as compared with the practical

principles of the inner life. "Even here, however, in our

intercourse with each other, there are opportunities for us

'to bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of

Christ'; nor, because much of our intellectual activity is

the result of mere curiosity or emulation, should we forget

that there is such a thing as a pursuit of truth, in principle

identical with the striving after God which animates the

moral life. Those of us to whom university life is merely

an avenue to the great world, would do well betimes to

seek opportunities of co-operation with those simple Chris-

tians whose creed, though we may not be able exactly

to adopt it, is to them the natural expression of a spirit

which at the bottom of our heart we recognise as higher

than our own. In the everyday life of Christian citizen-

ship, in its struggle against ignorance and vice, such oppor-

tunities are readily forthcoming."

In January, 1871, Green married Charlotte Symonds, sister

to John Addington Symonds, one of his oldest friends. His

habitual reserve grew less and his life, in spite of ill health,

was brighter and more serene. In the society of his wife,

he felt hospitality less of an effort, and she helped him to

make friends with the poor of Oxford. He was re-elected

to a fellowship at Balliol in 1872, and taught with increasing

influence and effect. In 1867 he had first appeared on a

platform on behalf of the Reform Bill of that year. Nor

was he put out when the Conservatives passed it. "The

whole nation wins by a measure which makes us for the

first time one people." In 1870 he spoke in favour of

Forster's Education Bill, and in 1874 he was elected to

the Oxford School Board. After social reforms the subject

which enlisted his sympathy was temperance. He joined

the United Kingdom (Temperance) Alliance in 1872, and

set up a coffee tavern in St. Clement's in 1875. Local

option met with his approval, and at the end of 1872 he

attacked Sir William Harcourt, then one of the Liberal

members for Oxford, because he treated the evil of

drunkenness too lightly. Green felt keenly disappointed with

the use the workmen made of their weekly half-holiday

and of their shorter hours. To Disraeli's government from

1874 to 1880 he showed unrelenting hostility.

In 1878 he had at last been elected Whyte professor of

moral philosophy at Oxford, and his lectures form the sub-

stance of his unfinished Prolegomena to Ethics, which

Mr. A. C. Bradley edited in 1883. He took part in a trans-

lation of Lotze's Logik and Metaphysik, which was published

the following year. Little as he could spare the time from

his own work, a strong sense of civic duty urged him to

enter the City Council of Oxford. He was the first tutor

who ever offered himself to a ward for election. The

citizens warmly appreciated his action, and by means of

his influence on the Council a grammar school was established.

He founded a scholarship in it for boys from elementary

schools, a policy which County Councils to-day follow. In

1881 he wrote a short political pamphlet on freedom of

contract, which formed a justification of the interference

between landlord and tenant which was proposed by Glad-

stone's Irish Land Bill of 1881. This measure foreign

observers regard as one of the advanced Socialist measures of

the nineteenth century. Green proceeds upon the principle

that true political freedom means "the power on the part

of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of

themselves." Freedom of contract, freedom in all its forms

of doing what one wills with one's own, is only a means

to an end. No contract is valid which "defeats the end

for which society alone enforces contracts at all," i.e. "that

equal development of the faculties of all which is the

highest good of all." On this principle he justifies inter-

ference in the past with individual freedom in matters of

labour, health, and education; and on this principle he

justifies interference in the present with the sale of alcohol

and the sale of land. Like many Liberals then and to-day

as he witnessed some of the results of the policy he advocated

in Ireland, he confessed it produced a "certain political

depression."

Depression there was in the practical life of the philosopher,

but he always clung to the dependence of the will of man in

its service on behalf of others, and behind this dependence

288 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

he always realised the constant presence of a universal spiritual principle. The essence of human life he finds in

the deep purpose of the will which lies in the pursuit of an ideal of its own betterment, which in turn involves the

betterment of the society of which each individual is a member. Society reaches its end in the State, and in this

end the goal before us is the true condition of the life of the individual, the maintenance and development of free

personality. To Green "will, not force, is the basis of the State." So he taught in his very important Principles

of Political Obligation, which Nettleship edited after his death in 1886.

In Platonic spirit Burke tells us that "all persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully

impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the

one great Master, Author, and Founder of Society." It was a spirit familiar to Green. Burke believes in progress

because he believes in God: "that sense of awe at the workings of Nature, Providence, God, in the government

of man--the sense that the house nations build to live in is not all made with hands," the sense that Aristotle and

Augustine, Burke and Salisbury all had, this sense is graven on the heart of Conservatism as it is graven on the outlook

of Green. To-day we have travelled far from the position of Burke. Yet it is while to remember that what

the Divine Right of Kings accomplished on a small scale, religious belief accomplishes on a great one. There were

revolutionary elements in England as there were in America and France. In England John Wesley travelled through

the length and breadth of it, turning men's revolutionary energies to the reform of their souls. Milton's generation

is not the only one to serve as if for ever in the Great Task-master's eye. Green felt this powerfully when he wrote

that "it is in the form of imagination, the imagination of a supreme, invisible, but all-seeing ruler that, in the case

at least of all ordinary good people, the idea of absolute duty is so brought to bear upon the soul as to yield an awe

superior to any personal inclination."

The man Green envisages is not the isolated individual

The Social Contract

289

of Rousseau but the social being contemplated by Aristotle. Early history knows nothing of Rousseau's individual, and Green in turn repels the notion. How can society come into existence by contract? For such a notion implies that there were separate individuals, and Green, in the pages of history, finds no such beings. Not only is this so, but this theory implies that these isolated individuals had fundamental natural rights, and Green cannot believe in the existence of such rights. The social contract means that in forming it men were free and equal. Let us see what this implies. "But if freedom is understood in the sense in which most of these writers seemed to understand it as a power of executing, of giving effect to one's will, the amount of freedom possessed in a state of nature, if that state was one of detachment and collision between individuals, must have been very small. Men must have been constantly thwarting each other and thwarted by the powers of nature. In such a state, those only could be free, in the senses supposed, who were not equal to the rest, who in virtue of superior power could use the rest. But whether we suppose an even balance of weakness in subjection to the crushing force of nature, or a domination of a few over many by means of a superior strength, in such a state of nature no general pact is possible." In fact, as well as being unhistorical, the social contract is logically impossible.

In The Principles of Political Obligation Green provides his view of natural rights. To him natural means necessary, necessary for a given purpose, "which it is the vocation of human society to realise." Natural rights are a means to an end, and that end the fulfilment of men's vocation as moral beings. It is plain that no one could speak of such rights unless he is a member of a society, and of a society whose members recognise some common good as their ideal. These rights discredit the absolutism that attributes rights to the grace of the sovereign. In the sense of Hegel and Green, a person cannot exist apart from society. Persons and society are mutually dependent. With Kant, he believes that every man, as a being endowed with reason and will, is to receive the respect due to him. He distinguishes the State from society. The State presupposes

290 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

other associations. It does not, then, create rights so much as it gives fuller reality to rights already existing. These rights "arise out of social relations that may exist where a State is not. . . . They depend for their existence indeed on society but not on society's having assumed the form of a State." These rights are independent of the State, and in a sense are more fundamental than the State.

So far, the teaching of Green is in keeping with the conservatism of Burke and Hegel, yet he himself was a man imbued with the importance of reform. What is the explanation of this? It lies in his conception of political right which flows from his conception of good as perfection of human character. The moral ideal he held before him demands that which is right, "what in the outward intercourse of men corresponds to the inviolability of the essential material conditions of moral humanity, i.e. to the idea of the existence and perfection of personality." A man claims direct his energies in the light of that common good. Society recognises his claim as necessary for each and for all the members of the society for the purpose of furthering that common good. This claim on the part of the individual and this recognition of it on the part of society are two vital considerations. A right, accordingly, has two sides, a positive and a negative. On the positive side a right is the condition of self-realisation, and on the negative it is that on which others are prohibited from encroaching. If self-realisation is necessary, so is the prohibition against encroachment. For if the individual is aiming at the good of all, any obstacle placed in his path obstructs this realisation of the goal of the community. In his Principles of Political Obligation Green is at pains to set forth that "it is on the relation to a society, to other men recognising a common good, that the individual's rights depend, as much as the gravity of a body depends on relations to other bodies. Right is relative to society. In origin, contents, and condition of maintenance, right depends on society. Clearly, if an individual asserts himself against society, he is asserting himself against his very life. As Green

The Validity of Property

291

emphatically puts it, "a right against society is a contradiction in terms."

With a conception of right such as this, Green was provided with an immense lever towards reform. Not a few members of the body were living a life which was not the Platonic or the Hegelian good life. Obstacle after obstacle stood in its way, and Green set himself steadfastly towards their removal Reform to James Mill meant the triumph of the middle class, but to Green it meant the union of all classes in their supreme desire to achieve all that the body should achieve.

If Green states The Principles of Political Obligation, he is quite ready to apply them, and he applies them to property. The fundamental action involved in the acquisition of property is appropriation, and appropriation according to Green is an expression of will, of the effort of the individual to give reality to a conception of his own good. This act of appropriation reflects a self-consciousness, which says "this shall be mine to do as I like with, to satisfy my wants and express my emotions as they arise." Property, from this angle, is not a mere external material required for bodily sustenance, but has become interwoven with the personality of its owner.

What bestows validity on property? It is a question which Green considers from the historical point of view. Grotius attributes the right of property to a contract, but, as Green shows, does not contract presuppose property? Hobbes attributes this right to the sovereign power of compulsion which grants such a right. Green, who never likes force as the basis of right, objects. He holds that the sovereign power, if it is merely a strong force of compulsion, cannot form the source of rights. The sovereign power, if it is a representative maintainer of rights, implies or presupposes rights. Locke attributes the right of property to the law of nature and the law of reason. Just as a man is entitled to his body, so he is entitled to the results of the work of his body and the labour of his hands. In fact, Locke maintains a labour theory of value which has been much used by the Socialists. Green allows that Locke shows the complex relationship between personal

292 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

rights and the rights of property, but does he explain the exact grounds upon which these rights can be rights in any sense? He shelves this question by appealing to a law of nature and of reason. The way is now clear for Green to bring forward his own view. He bases the recognition of the claim to property on the same ground as the recognition of the other claims to rights. Just as society recognises the claims of a free life as necessary conditions for moral realisation and for the common good of the whole, so it also recognises the claim to property as necessary for that common good. Just as the foundation of the rights of free life rests in the human will, so also does the foundation of the right of property.

The rational justification of property is one thing: its actual development is another. This Green realises as fully as Mill. Theoretically, all may have property, but practically this is not true. If a man has nothing but his labour for sale, does he possess property? In a sense, he does, but not in that ethical sense on which Green lays such stress. In his view, this is an accident of history, and is not inherent in the right of property. That right is necessary for a moral purpose. The fact that many who have property do not use it for that purpose forms no ground for believing that it cannot be used for that purpose, and therefore ought to be abolished. The abuse of a thing does not prevent its use. It is condemnable when the possession of it by one interferes with possession by another. When one man uses property to prevent the acquisition by another we reach the position of Proudhon that property is theft. With Green the right of property carries with it the positive condition of possessing it, viz. labour, and the negative condition of respect for it as possessed by others. Force is not the essence of property any more than it is the essence of the State. The essence of property is its utilisation for social ends, and herein Green finds the ground of the permanent recognition that constitutes a right to property. "The rationale of property," such is his view, "is that every one should be secured by society in the power of getting and keeping the means of realising a will which in possibility is a will directed to social good."

The Inequality of Wealth

293

Our philosopher feels no antagonism towards freedom of trade and freedom of bequest on the ground that they give rise to inequality of wealth. For he argues that wealth, given the purpose for which it alone can be claimed and recognised as a right, will be unequal as men are unequal. As he sees that men are unequal, he also sees that wealth is unequal. He does not believe for a moment that the increased wealth of one man naturally means the diminished wealth of another. For wealth is a flow, not a fixed fund. The wealth of the world is constantly increasing in proportion as the constant production of new wealth by labour exceeds the constant consumption of what is already produced. Production increases, and distribution can be improved. Moreover, though he deplores the condition of a large number of the working men, he points out that many, while working in factories, own shares of stock. He hopes for a wider diffusion of income, a result which economists like Mr. Bowley expect.

Property is founded, so we see, on the "effort of the individual to give reality to a conception of his own good as a whole, or as something permanent in distinction from the mere effort to satisfy a need as it arises." A like reason exists for the foundation of the family. It stands for the well-being of others as well as that of the individual. This well-being is only possible on a monogamous basis involving the suppression of all forms of slavery and that concubinage which practically forms part of slavery. Such was the deep-rooted conviction of Green who held that "the principles (1) that all men and all women are entitled to marry and form households, and (2) that within the household the claims of the husband and wife are thoroughly reciprocal, cannot be realised without carrying with them not merely monogamy, but the removal of those faulty relations between men and women which survive in countries where monogamy is established by law." His object was to strengthen and to fulfil the idea of the family and the home by making it a real possibility for all. The unity of the family was ever dear to him, and he would have liked but little such proposals as those of Mr. H. G. Wells for the "economic independence" of married women.

294 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

The attitude of Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Austin to political obligation is considered, and in their consideration view after view of our thinker emerges. It is significant that Hobbes and Spinoza, like Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz, were all mathematicians. In fact, all the great thinkers of the seventeenth century, except Vico, were mathematicians of mark. Both Hobbes and Spinoza believe in a science of politics, and both men construct it by means of psychology, seeking out the facts of human nature that concern them. As Hobbes regards power as the main motive of men, Spinoza regards self-interest. Both entertain the same lofty view of sovereignty, and both regard the State as an organism with a high degree of vitality. In practice Hobbes tends to become the apologist of despotism, whereas Spinoza undertakes the ideal construction of the most stable types of institutions for monarchy, aristocracy and democracy respectively. To both expediency proves the unbounded authority of the sovereign. Both examine the diseases to which the body politic is liable, and both share the same dislike of revolutions which with Hobbes amounted to mania. Both look on religion as aiding the State in imposing imperative restraint on human passion.

The social contract, as presented by Spinoza and Hobbes, makes no appeal to Green who cannot believe in the natural rights of the individual being enjoyed apart from society. These natural rights exist, and can only exist, for man as a member of a society. The isolated individual may have the power Spinoza discerns, but how can he possess any right whatever? Worse still to Green is Spinoza’s rejection of final causes. For Spinoza regards man as determined by material and efficient causes and as himself a material and efficient cause, a view abhorrent to Green. He criticises Hobbes’s conception of natural rights much as he criticised Spinoza’s. Combined with this criticism, there is something specially due to the fact that Hobbes was a materialist and Green an idealist. At the same time Green exhibits sympathy with Hobbes, for Hobbes preserves the idea of will. Our philosopher cannot regard power as the main motive of man any more than he can believe in the absolutism

CONCEPTION OF SOVEREIGNTY

295

of the sovereign. The real flaw in the theory of contract

is not that it is unhistorical, but that it implies a possibility

of rights and obligations independently of society, a notion

that is fundamentally opposed to Green's whole outlook.

Its profound weakness is that it contemplates rights existing

apart from society.

Locke is a potent influence with Rousseau. The disciple

is never quite like his master, and we are accordingly

prepared to find that while Locke regards the social con-

tract as irrevocable, Rousseau regards it as revocable.

Both men distinguish sharply between Sovereignty and

Government. On the other hand the English thinker

allows his compact to be absolutely free; the French thinker

allows nothing of the sort. Once men enter upon the

contract, Rousseau allows no choice as to its terms. "They

are so completely determined by the nature of the case,"

according to Rousseau, "that the smallest departure from

them would make the whole act null and void." Locke

conceives of the contract as an instrument of individual

freedom with terms varying indefinitely, the individual

holding all the powers not granted to the State. His con-

ception of sovereignty is essentially unrestricted within

constitutional limits. Rousseau reverses all these concep-

tions. He insists that the individual makes a "total

surrender" through the compact. In fact, it is the

"mutilation," the "annihilation" of separate personality,

the "collective self" of the community as a whole.

Rousseau's conception of sovereignty is essentially

unrestricted with no constitutional limitations. The State

holds all the powers of the individual, his goods, his rights,

even his very will. In a word, Locke's contract preserves

the rights of the individual which it is the very object

of Rousseau's to destroy. The moral life of the individual

imagined by Locke stands outside the State: the moral

life of the citizen imagined by Rousseau stands within the

State. For Rousseau is nothing if he is not Platonic in

his outlook. He was a citizen of Geneva: he was also a

citizen of Athens, for the City-State had woven her spell

of enchantment around him.

Green criticises Locke's social contract, as he had criticised

296 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Spinoza's and Hobbes's. The state of nature and the social contract are a logical contradiction in terms, for these terms imply a transition from a non-political society to a political one. If man in a state of nature regarded man as homo homini lupus, then there was but little freedom. A social contract means equality and freedom, yet there is no equality in freedom. Locke in truth asks for the simultaneous existence of opposites. As Green regards the state of nature as implying a recognition of social claims, it must practically be a political state, and in fact there are many such inconsistencies in the Lockeian conception. Much as Green agrees with the Hobbeian stress on the idea of will, he agrees even more with the Lockeian, which is as democratic as the Hobbeian was aristocratic. Strong democrat as he was, Green does not allow himself to be swept off his feet by his feelings. Locke's contract justifies revolution if it is broken by the sovereign, but can our thinker accept this justification? It is tempting for him to do so, yet he realises the strength of his old position that the State stands for will, not force. If the will of the people demands resistance, then resistance there must be. He, however, safeguards this perilous right by suggesting three questions. 'A, What prospect is there of resistance to the sovereign power leading to the modification of its character or the improvement in its exercise without its subversion? B, If it is overthrown, is the temper of the people such, are the influences on which the general maintenance of social order and the fabric of recognised rights depend so far separable from it, that its overthrow will not mean anarchy? C, If its overthrow does not lead to anarchy, is the whole system of law and government so perverted by private interests hostile to the public, that there has ceased to be any common interest in maintaining it?' The conservative spirit of the asker of these three questions is manifest. The obvious way out of the difficulty is some sort of national referendum, though Green drily adds that revolutions are never carried out in this fashion.

In Locke, as in Spinoza and Hobbes, our critic finds much that is amiss, and this is in no way surprising, for he is a political idealist in search of will as the basis of the State.

The General Will

297

This is the outstanding principle of political obligation. Rousseau comes closer to his conception than the others, for he of course lays stress on general will, carefully distinguishing it from the will of all. General will is not the will of all, according to Rousseau, but the will common to all. This is a distinction that marks a real difference.

Rousseau elaborately explains that by the general will he does not mean the sum of the individual wills taken separately; but the corporate will which, from the nature of the case, belongs to a body having a common life, an organised being, of its own. The simple process of counting heads will not necessarily disclose this will. Indeed, we learn that "la volonté générale est rarement celle de tous." It implies a collective consciousness, the complete realisation of the different selves with the State, which gives unity to the mass of the people. The self of the individual is part and parcel of the State, and indeed so much is this the case that the individual is the State. For he exercises no will save in a corporate capacity. The story of the member of the Church of England who was pressed to explain the nature of his beliefs is one of which Rousseau would have approved. "What do you believe?" inquired the questioner. The reply was, "I believe what the Church believes." "And what does the Church believe?" "The Church believes what I believe."

That there is much agreement between Rousseau and Green is evident. That there is to be criticism of the position of the Genevese is equally evident. The test of the dominance of the general will in the assemblies of the people is an approach to unanimity. Rousseau indeed required complete unanimity in the original compact, but was this a true version? Once it has been signed, there are farther difficulties. What rightful claim can there be for the submission of the majority? What is to settle whether anyone is a party to the compact or not? To this question Rousseau suggests residence, but Green destroys this test of residence, which is no indication of consent. Our critic sees quite clearly that it is possible that no State realises the general will, and he also sees that there may be a State without a true sovereign.

298 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

The last thinker to be analysed is Austin. According to Green, the conception of sovereignty has come to be more or less Austinian. As the analytical jurist finds sovereignty in a determinate person or persons, and as he considers its essence to lie in power, it is plain how deeply he dissents from the position of Rousseau and of course from that of Green. At the same time our philosopher is willing to admit that if you take the views of Rousseau and Austin as complementary each to the other, you gain the truest view of sovereignty as it actually exists. Rousseau emphasises will at the expense of force, and Austin emphasises force at the expense of will, but if sovereignty is the power to maintain rights, it has the elements of will and force.

If the sovereign exercises power, it is not because he is tyrannical or coercive that he receives habitual obedience. He is not for a moment omnipotent, for if the general will does not sustain his command, he ceases to exist.

Incidentally, Green draws attention to the limitations which Maine had pointed out. Green thinks that Austin is right when he regards sovereignty as essentially resident with determinate person or persons; for history, past and present, supports this contention. This is true of all forms of society, of despotic as much as of self-governing communities. Green is careful to distinguish the sovereign from the State. There is a person or persons whose authority knows no legal limitation. This is the sovereign. The king in Parliament is the sovereign of Great Britain. There is no legal limitation to the action of the king together with the House of Lords and of Commons.

The Austinian conception is satisfactory, but it is not surprising to learn that this satisfaction is for Green chastened. Austin lays far too much stress on the element of force. Force there is and force there must be, yet it will not explain the origin of sovereignty for our critic. Here Rousseau furnishes a surer guide. Surely, asks Green, “it then needs to be pointed out that if this sovereign power is to be understood in this fuller, less abstract sense, if we mean by it the real determinant of the habitual obedience of the people, we must look for its sources much more widely and deeply than the ‘analytical jurists’ do;

Sovereignty and Good Will

299

that it can no longer be said to reside in a determinate person or persons, but in that impalpable congeries of the hopes and fears of a people, bound together by common interests and sympathy, which we call the general will." Maine saw this, and Green sees it far more deeply. Maine had laid down that "the vast mass of influences which we may call for shortness moral, habitually shapes, limits, or forbids the actual direction of the forces of society by its sovereign." There is a source from which power is derived.

"While the American lawyer," according to Mr. Pound, "as a rule, still believes that the principles of law are absolute, eternal, and of universal validity, and the common law teaches that principles of decision must be found, not made, the people believe no less firmly that law may be made. While to the lawyer the state enforces law because it is law, to the people law is law because the State, reflecting their desires, has so willed." Nominally, the sovereign is supreme, but actually his supremacy depends on the good will of his people. In the background lies vox populi. When the voice of the people and the voice of the sovereign are agreed, they are irresistible, and their irresistibility comes from the agreement of their will. When their voices disagree, what becomes of sovereign power? A contemporary of Hobbes had said that

there's on earth a yet auguster thing Veiled though it be, than Parliament and King.

For Green this auguster thing is will which forms the real basis of the State. Mr. MacIver makes an important distinction. General will is not so much the will of the State as the will for the State, the will to maintain it. Green of course is eager to maintain the State. He has weighed in his judicial balance the claims of the sovereign to his attention, and he has duly considered the conceptions offered to his notice by Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Austin. The last two weigh most with him, for they attach importance to the complementary claims of will and of force as the basis of the State. Nor can anyone forget, at the end of this impressive examination, the place occupied by will in the thought of Green. The moral philosopher

300 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

is supposed to move in the world of abstraction, and Green was a moral philosopher. He was, however, a moral philosopher with a difference, for he related his abstractions to the concreteness of life. Seeley loved concreteness, and so did Green, and his concreteness lends an air of reality to his Principles of Political Obligation which leaves its mark on the reader. He sees, from the point of view of political idealism, the element of value in each thinker, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Austin, and we see how anxious Green is to present this element with the fairness that characterises all his writing. This is specially true of Austin, a jurist who might seem as if he could but make scanty appeal to Green. Our philosopher is as eager to appreciate the truth of the Province of Jurisprudence determined as he is to appreciate the Contrat Social.

The claim of the State as based on will stands out as paramount. He discerns the potency of the appeal to a law of nature as conceived by Rousseau or Kant, for he is very well aware that this appeal has been “the moving principle of the modern reconstruction of Europe.” Yet he is able to reject this appeal, for it failed to give that wide interpretation to life which his own leading conception duly provided. The State affords the fullest development of the rights of all its members. Indeed “the claim of the State is only absolutely paramount on the supposition that in its commands and prohibitions it takes account of all the claims that arise out of human fellowship.” Where it fails to give this complete development, the individual may appeal, if not to a law of nature independent of society, yet to a law of nature presupposed in society. We are coming close to the classical and mediaeval conceptions which regarded law not as something primarily created or made, but as something which already existed as part of local or national life. Green, like Duguit, cannot countenance a right against society, for in and through society we realise the fullness of our life. The State, unlike the king, can do wrong, and he is prepared to admit the rights of a better form of State against a worse. To him right then merged with duty. For he saw no sense in

Negative and Positive Liberty

301

asking what gives individuals a right to resist society,

"unless we suppose a wrong done to society in their persons,

and then it becomes a question not of right merely, but of

duty." Force is a factor in the maintenance of right, but

it is only a factor, a factor too subordinate to right. "There

is no right 'but thinking makes it so'; none that is not

derived from some idea that men have about each other.

Nothing is more real than a right, yet its existence is purely

ideal, if by 'ideal' is meant that which is not dependent

on anything material but has its being solely in conscious-

ness. It is to these ideal realities that force is subordinate

in the creation and development of states."

The old conception of liberty is generally the negative

one of the absence of restraint, of compulsion and ob-

struction. Green's conception is positive. It is not the

absence of restraint, advocated by Mill and Seeley. It

is not to do as one likes, irrespective of what others like.

It is the positive power of doing or enjoying something

worth doing which we can do or enjoy along with others.

It adds something to the common life. Freedom is, then,

for Green as for Hegel, the liberation of all the powers

of men for the social good. It is a means to an end, and

that end the good life of all. On this view of freedom it

is easy to justify interference on the part of the State.

"When we measure the progress of society by its growth in

freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and

exercise of those powers of contributing to social good with

which we believe the members of the society to be endowed;

in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens

as a body to make the most and the best of themselves.

Thus, though of course there can be no freedom among

men who act not willingly but under compulsion, the mere

enabling a man to do as he likes, is in itself no true con-

tribution to true freedom." The Utilitarian ideal had been

the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The

ideal now set before us is not the greatest happiness of the

greatest number but a form of human life, the good life.

It is a conception as old as Plato and as new as Green.

Perhaps we ought to say as old as Aristotle, for our author

is more of an Aristotelian than a Platonist. He is more of

302 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

a Kantian than a Hegelian, and he corrects Kant by Aristotle and Aristotle by Kant.

Green stamped as forcible an impress of his strong individuality on men as Mazzini. As powerful in argument

as Mazzini was passionate, neither man argued for victory. Both cared for truth with all the intensity of their natures.

The simplicity of both men, their earnest devotion to an ideal, their sense of duty, their uprightness of mind, and

their simplicity of character inevitably gained adherents for their respective political creeds. As Mazzini's ideals

developed out of the past of his native country, so Green's developed out of the past of his. Vane and Cromwell

meant as much to him as John Bright. In the last resort Mazzini and Green fell back on the visions that Plato and

Aristotle set before men. The claim of the good life is insistent with both. "The value of the institutions of

civil life," remarks Green in his Principles of Political Obligation, "lies in their operation as giving reality to the

capacities of will and reason and enabling them to be really exercised. . . . So far as they do in fact operate they are

morally justified." The fundamental likeness between the two men lies in the fact that both claim that the theory of

rights rests on the doctrine of political duty. Rousseau may talk as he pleases of "natural rights" just as Paine

may talk of "the rights of men." Green simply remarks that these men were so taken up with innate rights that

they somehow seemed to have forgotten innate duties. Of the two conceptions of right and duty, Green is wholeheartedly convinced that duty is the more fundamental

of the two. "True rights," so runs Green's definition, "are powers which it is for the general well-being that the

individual (or association) should possess, and that well-being is essentially moral well-being."

Like Mazzini, Green joined the worth and the dignity of the individual man to the institutions he worked. Mystic

feeling is present with both. "The enthusiasm of Vane," Green writes in his lectures on the English Commonwealth,

"died that it might rise again. It was sown in weakness that it might be raised in the intellectual comprehension

which is power. 'The people of England,' he said on the

scaffold, 'have been long asleep. I doubt they will be hungry when they awake.' They have slept, we may say, another two

hundred years. If they should yet awake and be hungry, they will find their food in the ideas which, with much

blindness and weakness, he vainly offered them, cleared and ripened by a philosophy of which he did not dream."

This philosophy is of course Hegel's, which influenced Green as consciously as it influenced Mazzini unconsciously.

"The professed object of Hegel's philosophy," according to Green, was to find "formulae adequate to the action of

reason as exhibited in nature and human life, in art and religion." Hegel's object was Green's and Mazzini's. Green

vitalises, humanises and moralises institutions. What life is worth living without institutions? Freedom has to be

earned through their working. Carlyle and Mazzini used to say that freedom stood in need of new definitions. Green

gives us one. Freedom is "a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying,

and that too something that we do or enjoy in common with others." The corporate life, realised in institutions,

is as present to the English thinker as to the Italian.

Mazzini and Green, unlike Marx and Bebel, proceed from kin to kind. "Everything," according to Green,

"that makes life human, the institutions by which

relations dear

And all the charities of husband, son,

And brother first were known;

which create honour and dishonour, loyalty and disloyalty, justice and injustice; which make it possible to die for

one's country or be false to it, to sacrifice oneself to a cause or befriend them--all these the animals know not. They

are not primary, but derived, not given by nature, but constituted by man." Nor is man their sole author. Making

allowance for Hegelian phraseology, Mazzini could have said--if we bear in mind that with Green this "perhaps"

introduces a settled conviction: "Perhaps on thinking the matter out, we should find ourselves compelled to regard

the idea of social good as a communication to the human consciousness, a consciousness developing itself in time,

304 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

from an eternally complete consciousness." With the quietism of Dante and of Mazzini, Green holds that there is room in the genius and the reformer for "a wise passiveness to the heavenly influences which are ever about him."

Mazzini and Green feel, though in different ways, that there is purpose in history, and both accordingly view the past conservatively. Evolution, not revolution, was what both desired. The "return to Nature" of Rousseau and the French Revolutionist was in the eyes of both a reversion to barbarism. Both believe in a progressive revelation to which no final limits can be set. "To anyone who understands a process of development," writes Green, "the result being developed is the reality." In this process Mazzini and he manifested a deep sympathy with the wrongs and the sufferings of the poor. Both hated slavery and both rejoiced in the war between north and south that brought slavery in the United States to an end. Both were anxious to raise the condition of the degraded population. How could the proletariat develop the self-respecting life of citizenship which ought to be his under present conditions? Yet much as both sympathised with the masses, they justified private property and private capital. Green regards it as unfair to blame capital for the admitted evils for which Socialism offers itself as a remedy. Equality of wealth is neither the ideal of Mazzini nor of Green. As the latter regards private property as an instrument for the realisation of human capacities, he holds it reasonable to find that the inevitable inequalities of capacity which diversify society should meet their counterparts in inequalities of riches.

Green used to advise his pupils at Oxford to read Burke: he might also have advised them to read Mazzini. For all three recognised in the State no mere secular product. "There is an order that keeps things fast in their place; it is made to us, and we are made to it," so runs the creed of Burke, the creed of Mazzini and Green. The dependence of the finite spirit on God is as fundamental with Green as it is with Burke and Mazzini. The citizen of the State, guided by what Burke calls the "Divine tactic," succeeds to no

mean heritage. "In great books and great examples,"

according to the English idealist, "in the gathering fullness

of spiritual utterance which we trace through the history of

literature, in the self-denying love which we have known

from the cradle, in the moralising influences of civil life,

in the sacramental ordinances which represent that fellow-

ship, in common worhip, in the message of the preacher

through which, amid diversity of stammering tongues, one

spirit still speaks—here God's sunshine is shed abroad

without us."

The champions of the idealistic school of thought are

Bradley and Bosanquet, who are more Hegelian than Green.

Bradley heard Green's lectures though he was a commoner

of University College and not a Balliol man. His passion

for philosophy was not the reformer's impulse which

dominated Green, but it was in part an innate theoretical

curiosity, and in part an aspiration towards religion in its

deepest meaning. Though he won only a second class in

Literae Humaniores, he obtained a fellowship at Merton,

and if ever the old "idle" fellowship was justified, it was

justified in his case. He hardly ever took a pupil; he never

gave a lecture. The world knew Kant and Hegel, and it knew

Mill and Spencer, but Bradley, philosophic genius as he was,

remained unknown to it. In spite of his gift of expression,

his logic is more difficult to follow than Mill's to which he

administered the coup de grâce. He annihilated the atomic

association of the Mills and Bain, and he established the

principle that association weds only universals. If he

attacks Utilitarianism, it is not the Utilitarian theory of

conduct but rather the Utilitarian frame of mind. His

books were treatises on subjects: the title of his magnum

opus, Appearance and Reality speaks for itself. He had of

course studied previous philosophers, and in his Ethical

Studies (1876) he cites Hegel more than once at length.

Wherever he takes ideas, he manages to stamp on them an

individuality of thought as impressive as the hearing of a

lecture by Green. His Ethical Studies was an analysis of

the substance of actual morality, its grades, the nature of

its aspiration, and in it he finally insisted on the contrast

between the special moral attitude, even at its best, and

306 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

religion in the full sense of the word. The early part of

this volume dealt a death-blow to Hedonism.

In Ethical Studies the chapter on "My station and its

duties" sets forth Bradley's attitude to the community

and the individual, and sets it forth with such power as to

suggest the utter dependence of the individual on the

community. Hegel had exposed the fallacy of the belief in

a sharp cleavage between the State and the individual,

showing its inconsistency with itself and its untruth to

the facts of history. The conscience of the individual was

nothing like the law to itself that Kant had imagined, for

it owed its character, its determinate form, to the un-

conscious working of the practical instinct, the common

sense of the community. That these ideas were present

to the mind of Bradley is clear from his quotations from

Hegel's Philosophische Abhandlungen. Bradley traces the

influences at work on the mind of the individual, due to the

qualities of his parents, heredity, environment, the influence

of national feeling, and the like. The forces Hegel discerned

at work Bradley also discerns at work. "If I wish to

realise my true being, I must therefore realise something

beyond my being as a mere this or that; for my true being

has in it a life which is not the life of any mere particular,

and so must be called a universal life. What is it then I am

to realise? We have said it in 'my station and its duties.'

To know what a man is . . . you must not take him in

isolation. He is one of a people, he was born in a family,

he lives in a certain society, in a certain state. What he

has to do depends on what his place is, what his function

is, and then all comes from his station in the organism."

In truth, man is a social being; he is real only because he is

social, and can realise himself only because it is as social

that he realises himself. The mere individual is a sheer

delusion of theory.

If the thought of Hegel is present with Bradley, so too

is the thought of Green. Bradley, however, perceived

more weakness than Green in the idea of duty for duty's

sake. Bradley's fatal objections to this view are (1) the

universal was abstract. There was no content which

belonged to it and was one with it; and the consequence

My Station and its Duties

307

was, that either nothing could be willed, or what was willed was willed not because of the universal, but capriciously.

(2) The universal was “subjective.” It gave itself out as “objective,” in the sense of being independent of this or that person, but still it was real in the world.

It did not come to us what was in fact, it came to us as what in itself merely was to be, an inner notion in moral persons, which had not power to carry itself out and transform the world.

And self-realisation, if it means will, does mean that we, in fact, do put ourselves forth and see ourselves actual in outer existence.

(3) The universal left a part of ourselves outside it.

However much we tried to be good, however determined we were to make our will one with the good will, yet we never succeeded.

There was always something left in us which was in contradiction with the good.

Bradley concludes that the man cannot find self-realisation in the morality of pure duty; because (1) he cannot look on his subjective self as the realised moral law;

(2) he cannot look on the objective world as the realisation of the moral law;

(3) he cannot realise the moral law at all, because it is defined as that which has no particular content, and therefore no reality.

This failure of the content of the universal will is crucial.

Bradley turns from the disadvantage of duty for duty’s sake to the advantages of the conception of my station and its duties.

(1) It is concrete, and yet not given by caprice.

The concreteness comes out in the circumstance that the universal which is to be realised is no abstraction, but an organic whole, a system where many spheres are subordinated to one sphere, and particular actions to spheres.

The organs are always at work for the whole, the whole is at work in the organs.

And the individual is one of the organs.

That our station is not due to caprice is evident that the individual does not choose it according to his own liking, yet he and everyone else must have some station with duties pertaining to it, and those duties do not depend on our opinion or liking.

(2) It is “objective” ; and this means that it does not stand over against the outer world as a mere “subject” confronted by mere “object.”

It is a real identity of subject and object, which is the only thing

308 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

that satisfies our desires. (3) It leaves nothing of us outside it.

Duty, Bradley insists, was an infinite process, an unending "not-yet"; a continual "not" with an everlasting "to be," or an abiding "to be" with a ceaseless "not." "From this last peevish enemy we are again delivered by 'my station and its duties.' There I realise myself morally so that not only what ought to be in the world is, but I am what I ought to be, and find so to my contentment and satisfaction. If this were not the case, when we consider that the ordinary man is self-contented and happy, we should be forced to accuse him of immorality, and we do not do this; we say, he most likely might be better, but we do not say that he is bad, or need consider himself so. Why is this? It is because 'my station and its duties' teaches us to identify others and ourselves with the station we fill; to consider that as good, and by virtue of that to consider others and ourselves good too. It teaches us that a man who does his work in the world is good, notwithstanding his faults, if his faults do not prevent him from fulfilling his station. It tells us that the heart is an idle abstraction; we are not to think of it, nor must we look at our insides, but at our work and our life, and say to ourselves, Am I fulfilling my appointed function or not? Fulfil it if we can, if we will: what we have to do is not so much better than the world that we can not do it; the world is there waiting for it; my duties are my rights." Kant gave us "good will." It was an empty conception, which Bradley fills with "my station and its duties." At the same time the latter provides no test for distinguishing the evil and the good in different systems of stations. To forms of government he is indifferent. The station of the citizen may be under autocracy or aristocracy or democracy. He is to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. The question remains, Is Caesar entitled to such obedience?

The community is a real moral organism, which in its members knows and wills itself, and sees the individual to be real just so far as the universal self is in his self, as he in it. The belief in this real moral organism, Bradley urges, breaks down the antithesis of despotism and individualism.

The Moral Organism

309

It denies this antithesis, while it preserves the truth of both. The truth of individualism is saved, because, unless we have intense life and self-consciousness in the members of the State, the whole State is ossified. The truth of despotism is saved, because, unless the member realises the whole by and in himself, he fails to reach his own individuality. The individual becomes what he is by including in his being his relationship with society. If morality consists of the realisation of the self, it also consists in the realisation of those relations with society. There is a sort of regimentation in society according to which each has his station and therefore also his duties, the fulfilment of which constitutes the realisation of the self and social relations.

The conception of the moral organism is strong in many directions. It confines the assertion of individuality, the encouraging oneself in having opinions of one's own, in the sense of thinking differently from the world on moral subjects, which may be, in any person other than a heaven-born prophet, sheer self-conceit. It prevents a person throwing off the yoke of custom too lightly. He may become a Philistine, but he may learn that “Philistinism is after all a good thing.” The community gives us self-realisation, and at the same time it gives us limitation. For it bids us say farewell to visions of superhuman morality to “ideal societies, and to practical 'ideals' generally. But perhaps the unlimited is not the perfect, nor the true ideal. And leaving 'ideals' out of sight, it is quite clear that if anybody wants to realise himself as a perfect man without trying to be a perfect member of his country and all his smaller communities, he makes what all sane persons would admit to be a great mistake. There is no more fatal enemy than theories which are not also facts.” Our philosopher evidently is as practical as Green himself. A caution similar to Bradley's is administered by Marshall in the preface to his Industry and Trade. There we read: “The average level of human nature in the western world has risen fast during the last fifty years. But it has seemed to me that those have made most real progress towards the distant goal of ideally perfect social organisation, who have concentrated their energies on some particular

310 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

difficulties in the way, and not spent strength on endeavouring to rush past them."

Idealism in politics has enlisted such adherents as Green and Bradley, Nettleship and Wallace, the two Cairds and Bosanquet. The last wrote The Philosophical Theory of the State in 1899, and its place on our library shelf is close to that of The Principles of Political Obligation. He admits that he follows the footsteps of Green, parting company with him occasionally because of the scrupulous caution which Green displays in estimating the value of the State to its members. We meet once more with the familiar conceptions of the general will, of the State as a moral organism, and of institutions as the embodiment of ethical ideas. Nor does the individual as such occupy a high place in Bosanquet's esteem. The individual is an organ of the common good. He belongs to a body and his character as a citizen stands paramount. Home and family, workshop and profession, trades union and guild, Church and State—all these are “nurseries of citizenship” and “symbols of the social will, and must be made more so.” In himself the individual is a miniature state, a field of various and conflicting activities, harmonised by the general will of a stably ordered life. At the same time the ideal of the individual is inconceivable if it does not carry the individual to the fulfilment and the enhancement of his life.

Bosanquet has no high opinion of the logical capacity of the English mind, but he has the highest opinion of our practical logic, and it pleased him to adduce in proof of this the great organised institutions which have sprung unaided from the brain of our wage-earning class. This practical logic he jealously desires to safeguard. The State, he argues in the spirit of Green, should remove obstacles or create opportunities for the exercise of the public efforts of the individual. The hindrance of hindrances to such efforts is, in fact, the ideal of the State. At the same time he dreads any weakening of the private initiative by which a man learns by experience the sense of the senselessness of the course he pursues. The criterion he suggests for State-action is its effects on the moral character of the citizen. Such a discernment of effects was for him an articulus

stantis aut cadentis philosophiae. Two instances will illustrate the fashion in which he applied his criterion.

He argued that it was better for a man to be paid wages monthly or quarterly rather than weekly, because it requires more

self-control to administer a larger sum. Similarly he criticised old age pensions on the ground that to relieve

men and women of the responsibility of planning for their old age weakened their purpose and shortened their views.

If Green was Aristotelian, Bosanquet was Platonist, and accordingly he praises the Greeks for inventing the device

of government by discussion and vote, the minority acquiescing in the will of the majority. Naturally he has

much to say on the large share taken by the Greek citizen in determining the policy of the City-State. Public opinion

at Athens was effective, yet the part to be taken by such opinion in the modern State is ignored by our author, as

it was ignored by Mill. Our author is so preoccupied with the august majesty of the State that its machinery occasionally eludes his notice.

As Seeley required enthusiasm for the maintenance of Christian society, so Bosanquet requires it for his great society.

A lover of the State, he seeks, and seeks strenuously, to exhibit “the greatness and ideality of life in its commonest actual phases.”

He complains that critics of the State “hardly believe in actual society as a botanist believes in plants, or a biologist in vital processes.

... Those who cannot be enthusiastic in the study of society as it is, would not be so in the study

of a better society if they had it.” The influence of Hegel is plain, and at bottom we see that the idealistic philosophy

of the State is a philosophy of patriotism, or, as Royce would say, of loyalty. Of the utter devotion of our author

to his ideal there cannot be a question. The State becomes to him something awful and mysterious, not to be approached

without reverence. It is too sacred to be touched, except upon rare and solemn occasions, and then only with the

deepest awe. What Plato and Aristotle offered to the Greek, Bosanquet offers to the English. The State is

for him, as for Pearson, a sort of Church, the Church of humanity, and membership of it is nothing else than a

great spiritual experience. In short, for Bosanquet as for

312 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Hegel, the State is the ultimate moral authority for the citizen, the keeper of his civic conscience.

Within the State the ideal held up to our admiration is a lofty one. What are the relations between States? What principles ought to bind them? Hegel of course denies that the same principles of conduct apply between States which apply between the citizens of the same State, and substantially this is the view of Bosanquet. With the German thinker, he denies that the citizens can consent to the creation of any super-authority. It is a problem which Sidgwick attacked, and in practice his solution does not differ widely from that of Bosanquet, who pleads not for a super-authority but for a purification of the will of the different States. Here for him lies the security against that hubris which is the abomination of desolation. Neither Bradley nor Marshall was tempted to believe in short cuts to social salvation, and Bosanquet shares their belief in the slowness of international salvation. He hates war just as much as Green, and his reason is similar. A healthy State, he frankly declares, is non-militant in temper. A non-militant State is one in which stability and social justice are dominant, a militant one is one where they are not. He argues that the peaceful State supports such humanising values as knowledge and art, religion and sympathy, and these values can be shared, in part, with other States. In fact, he is as much a believer in the commonwealth of culture as Matthew Arnold himself. We may live nationally as much as we please, yet to this we must add the condition that we must think internationally, a consideration of outstanding worth. The super-State, so he thinks, will inevitably fail for want of that common experience enabling us to understand the ways and works of citizens of other nations. Much water has flowed under the bridge since the appearance of The Philosophical Theory of the State in 1899, and the World War has certainly supplied an understanding, a growing understanding, of the ways and works of men we used to regard simply as foreigners. All of us are slowly learning to think internationally, and there is a will to understand other folk seldom witnessed before. If there is this will for the common good, sooner or later,

The Beloved Community

313

on the principles of Hegel and Bosanquet, it must express itself in an organisation, which may be the League of Nations, the super-State, what you will.

The spiritual experience of the citizen covers the whole of life, and the content of his experience enriches national existence. Royce goes so far as to find in the "beloved community" the core of religion. The welfare of the body is bound up with the welfare of its members. What they create in science and art, in race and religion, suggests to Bosanquet the fruit of the spirit, working together in a common purpose greater than they dream. From the passing we are raised to the permanent, there to witness the sight of our works as chapters in the working of the spirit, appearances of the Absolute. It is a fine conception finely wrought out by our author. If he treats of freedom, it is a freedom which confronts us with a spiritual interpretation. It is, if you like, Rousseau's transformation of the natural man into the moral one. Bosanquet is prepared to endorse the conclusion of the Genevese thinker: "What man acquires in the civil state is moral liberty, which alone makes him master of himself. For the mere impulse of appetite is slavery; while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty." It is this liberty, this self-government, which Bosanquet expounds with a rare insight. Behind the will of the individual we perceive the will of the community, moulding the will of each into a common purpose of which no single mind is aware. This of course means that the individual can never realise himself so fully as he does when he becomes a member of the community which interprets his will to him, and interprets it to him with a meaning and a value far deeper than any he could possibly give to it. We are indeed greater than we know, and our true greatness depends on the extent to which each of us will render to the community all we owe. Since Green's day such concepts as national spirit, social mind, group consciousness, and the like, enter largely into our life. Bosanquet avails himself of them, and throughout his book we feel how largely these concepts can enrich the life of the whole community. They help towards the realisation of the common good and of the common will

314 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

Yet, his conclusion is that the State "is the guardian of our world and not a factor of our organised world."

The idealist position, notably that of Bradley, lends itself to criticism. Did Hegel mistake the kingdom of Prussia for the kingdom of heaven? Did Bosanquet commit a similar mistake? In spite of Green's care, do the idealists in politics not confound the State and society? The term State, in fact, covers the community and the government; it covers spirit and body. Idealists like Bosanquet en-deavour to combine the two to such a degree that the body is the spirit. No doubt the spirit embodies itself in the body, the institution, but does it ever embody itself so completely as to become the body? Plato laid down the pattern of such a State, but he knew quite well that it was a pattern. Does the idealist realise this distinction? His enthusiasm blinds his eyes to the circumstance that the ideal is not the real with which he has to concern himself. To him the State is part of himself. Is this so with many? Does the State touch the working man to anything like the same extent as his Trades Union? Does it touch the religious man as his Church does? These are examples of group consciousness which the pluralists naturally emphasise. The State of the idealist is akin to the Leviathan of Hobbes. It is perhaps worth saying that there is no necessary connection between idealism and absolutism. Hegel was of course an idealist who was an absolutist, while Green and Bosanquet were idealists who were democrats.

The transition from the idealists to Professor M'Dougall is natural. He believes in the group mind, which is idealism from another angle. Indeed he himself states that the only difference between his theory and idealism is that the idealists believe in collective consciousness. He is a psychologist with a special leaning to its physiological aspect, and he sets himself the task of tracing out in detail the origin and development of the human mind. His Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908, his Group Mind, 1920, and his other writings analyse instinctive impulse, tradition, habit, racial prejudice, personal idiosyncracy, sentiment, and the like. The picture of man he draws in no wise resembles the picture of man intelligently seeking

The Stress laid on Instinct

315

his own advantage on a utilitarian basis. Since Bentham's

day psychology has been set on a new basis. Increasing

knowledge of the physiology of the brain and the application

of evolutionary principles to the study of the mind have

raised psychology to the dignity of a science. It now

claims with ever-increasing right to be the science of conduct

and behaviour. It shows conduct as the resultant of the

social forces working upon the inherited tendencies and

instincts of the race. It is beginning tentatively to offer

an explanation of these tendencies, and to show how the

simple life-preserving instincts evolved by the struggle for

existence, becoming more and more differentiated, form the

essential springs of all thought and action, individual or

collective, as they are gradually developed under the

guidance of the intellectual faculties and the changing

environment. In Dr. M'Dougall's view, directly and

indirectly the instincts are the prime movers of all human

activity. He shows that by the conative or impulsive force

of some instinct or of some habit derived from an instinct—

every train of thought, however cold and passionless it

may seem, is borne along towards its end. In this fashion

every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. Past

thinkers had laid stress on the sum of activities of individuals

moved by enlightened self-interest or by intelligent desire

for pleasure and dislike of pain. Our author allows for

this, but he also allows for the springs of all the complex

activities that make up the life of societies. These springs

he finds in the instincts and in the primary tendencies that

are common to all men and are deeply rooted in the remote

ancestry of the race.

The basis of social relations lies in instincts, and we are

led on to consider the place of habit in the individual. The

formation of habit as a factor in progress is of marked

influence, and is only beginning to be appreciated. The

tyranny of bad habits has long been recognised; we now

recognise the value of the converse. Knowing that an

action once done or a thought once made forms a path in

the brain, and thus by providing a line of less resistance

tends to be repeated, the advanced teacher of the present

day, instead of waiting until the fault has been committed

316 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

and then attempting by punishment to deter its repetition,

tries as far as possible to avoid opportunities for its com-

mission, contriving that the young child should do what is

right by what seems his own choice, until a habit begins

to be established. To the teacher of the old school this

is looked upon as weakening and demoralising, and he turns

with approval to the “spare the rod and spoil the child”

discipline of his younger days. The same principle runs

through medical science: less and less the doctor relies on

curing and more and more on providing healthy condition,

and so building up strength to resist the onset of disease.

Like all principles it is open to abuse, and the process can

easily be carried on so long and so far as to weaken character;

yet it by no means implies that life is to be made a bed of

roses, for this fails to form habits of self-reliance which

Bosanquet desiderated. The underlying fact is, however,

unassailable—a habit once formed is a lasting influence

for good or evil. Certain temptations once formidable

hardly exist for the well-brought-up and well-educated

classes; they shrink from things, as they would say, “by

instinct,” which is here really only early inculcated habit.

This is a point at which psychology and political science

come into close contact in an effort to decide how far the

principle can be carried in safety. We now see that one of

the serious dangers in unemployment is the breaking of

the habit of work and steadiness by months of enforced

idleness.

Instinct is, in Dr. M'Dougall's judgment, the basis of

all human activity. Mankind is only “a little bit” reason-

able, and “to a very great extent unintelligently moved

in quite unreasonable ways.” The seven principal instincts

are flight with the emotion of fear, repulsion with the

emotion of disgust, curiosity with the emotion of wonder,

pugnacity with the emotion of anger, self-abasement with

the emotion of subjection, self-assertion with the emotion of

elation, and parental instinct with the emotion of tenderness.

No doubt our author is open to criticism on such grounds

as his insistence that emotion is the affective aspect of an

instinct. This aspect only develops into emotions under

certain conditions, viz. when there is a delay or check to

the impulse or when there is an excess of excitement which action does not satisfy. That his seven instincts are the prime movers of all human activity is a proposition which requires more qualification than he is apparently prepared to give. They are by no means self-subsistent, and the organism is not a kind of aggregate of them. It is quite in keeping with his criticism of the idealists that Professor Hobhouse should show that within the sphere of instinct intelligence grows up, and that as it develops it decreases the rigidity and fixity of instinctive activity. Besides, instinct exhibits a feeling of satisfaction in the carrying out or fulfilment of an action and dissatisfaction with its non-fulfilment. Professor Hobhouse continues his criticism by showing that it is to this satisfied or dissatisfied element that instinct owes whatever plasticity of adjustment it possesses. In fact, there is very little that is pure instinct. As he remarks, in his Morals in Evolution, “Hunger and thirst no doubt are of the nature of instincts, but the methods of satisfying hunger and thirst are acquired by experience or by teaching. Love and the whole family life have an instinctive basis, that is to say, they rest upon tendencies inherited with the brain and nerve structure; but everything that has to do with the satisfaction of these impulses is determined by the experience of the individual, the laws and customs of the society in which he lives, the woman whom he meets, the accidents of their intercourse and so forth.”

In his Group Mind Dr. M'Dougall applies psychology on an extensive scale to the phenomena of collective life. He employs his former book which explained the fundamental principles of conduct to grasp the behaviour of groups such as the loosely organised crowd, the highly organised army, and the highest form of the group mind yet reached, the State. Instinct and sentiment determine the actions of the crowd, and we learn that an “idea alone as intellectual apprehension cannot exert any influence.” His data he gathers from the historian and the biologist, the anthropologist and the statistician. With the idealists we perceive that “Since, then, the social aggregate has a collective mental life, which is not merely the sum of the

318 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

mental lives of its units, it may be contended that a society

not only enjoys a collective mental life but also has a

collective mind or, as some prefer to say, a collective soul."

When a group exists for some time it possesses a definite

organisation, and this in turn means that it possesses a self.

The relationship between the groups is mental, and, in spite

of his anti-intellectualism, our author allows that a highly

developed group can be described only in terms of mind.

If we define mind "as an organised system of mental or

purposive forces," this group possesses such a mind. The

action of the individual as such is one thing: his action in

the group is quite another, for the group spirit moves him.

Indeed "the structure and organisation of the spirit of

the community is in every respect as purely mental or

psychical as the structure and organisation of the indi-

vidual mind." Within this community Professor M'Dougall

is as anxious to demonstrate the existence of groups

as Bosanquet himself. These groups, to him as to Bosan-

quet, are no mere mechanical mixtures of men. Each of

them links together human beings into an association

with a group mind. The question between these groups

and the State is the all-important one, Are they completing

or competing groups with the State? To men like Bosanquet

and Dr. M'Dougall they are completing but to the pluralists

they are competing. Nor is it surprising to note that

Dr. M'Dougall glorifies public opinion as he glorifies par-

liament.

Professor M'Dougall was at Oxford before Harvard

secured his services for the chair of psychology. Professor

Graham Wallas held the chair of political science in London,

and his books, like those of Dr. M'Dougall, exercise a wide-

spread influence. His Life of Francis Place revealed in

1897 the share that remarkable agitator had in what

happened behind the scenes at the passing of the first

Reform Bill in 1832. This he followed up with his Human

Nature in Politics, 1908, The Great Society, 1914, and Our

Social Heritage, 1921. Just as Dr. M'Dougall from his

particular point of view marked out the anti-intellectualist

character of society, so Professor Graham Wallas marked

it out. It is more than a coincidence that the Introduction

to Social Psychology and Human Nature in Politics both

appeared in 1908. They attack the same problem, and,

attacking it from different angles, are completing, not

competing, pieces of work. The share instinct assumes

with Dr. M'Dougall is the share assumed by suggestion,

imitation, habit, and the unconscious factors generally

with Professor Graham Wallas. He asks us to consider

in what way our point of view upon political questions is

affected by a better realisation of human motive. Dr.

M'Dougall employs the laboratory of science while Mr.

Graham Wallas employs the laboratory of life as he saw

it in politics, in the methods of electioneering, and in the

action of public opinion.

Mr. Graham Wallas recognises the unreality of always

attributing opinion to an intellectual process. He sees the

popular mind at the mercy of the electioneering agent and

the syndicated newspaper. He points out the fallacy under-

lying the assumption of those thinkers who assume not only

that political action is the result of inference as to means

and ends, but that all inferences are of the same "rational"

type. Drawing attention to the way in which psychology

has of recent years transformed the science of education

and the treatment of criminals, he asks for its application

to political science. We require more intellect, he holds,

more reason, a philosophy based upon a sound psychological

foundation for politics. We must give up simply muddling

through and leaving all important posts and work to the

cleverest and most unscrupulous manipulator of the popular

mind. He attacks and utterly demolishes the whole

theoretical foundation upon which democracy rests, yet

remains an ardent democrat who does not hold for a single

moment that its dangers and drawbacks are inevitable

and unavoidable. Mr. H. G. Wells expresses the view of

many people in his Anticipations when he writes: "I know

of no case for the elective democratic government of modern

States that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes.

It is manifest that upon countless important issues there is

no collective will and nothing in the mind of the average

man except blank indifference; that an electional system

simply places power in the hands of the most skilful

320 Social and Political Thinkers of 19th Century

electioneers." Mr. Wallas sees all this rather more clearly than the novelist. His perception of it lends interest to his protest against those who, following the thinkers and the idealists of the early part of the nineteenth century, treat politics and man, so far as he plays his part in them, upon a basis of simplicity that is, when compared with the complexity of human nature, almost ridiculously unreal. To this unreality is to be attributed the change of opinion which follows when the student of politics leaves his books for contact with practical issues and living men and women. As he finds the reality bears so faint a resemblance to the well-ordered examples of his text-books, he is apt to take his tomes to the second-hand dealer and trust to his common sense and the instinct on which Dr. M'Dougall relies.

The distrust of democracy was not so evident when Mr. Wallas began to write as it is to-day. Nevertheless, he notes its advent in the United States as among ourselves. He realises the unstable action of a crowd and the impossibility of predicting what line it will take. This indeed has always been realised, but Mr. Wallas realises, with a power granted to but few, that the great majority of people live, so far as their mental and intellectual life is concerned, under the conditions of a crowd. Urbanisation allows of the crowd mind to an extent unparalleled before the days of the Industrial Revolution. It is no longer even necessary to be gathered together in one place for suggestion to enjoy full scope. The telegraph and the newsagent, wireless and the cinema—these do their work only too well. Hardly has the catastrophe occurred or the murder committed before everyone is reading about it in the newspaper, hearing it by wireless, or seeing it at the cinema. People remote from each other as John o'Groats and Land's End are practically brought into each other's presence, and this on a steadily increasing scale. Two men speaking of the catastrophe or the murder both unconsciously express the same opinion which neither has formed for himself, but thereby immensely strengthening each other. No better instance of mass suggestion and the arousing of sympathetic excitement under modern conditions exists than the—very intelligible excitement shown during the World War. On the

NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE

321

outbreak of war there was an astonishing revelation of the

fashion in which opinion over the whole country could

be forced and formed in a few hours. What is true of

ourselves is even truer then of Germany.

Mr. Wallas sees that we have to reckon with the more

or less simple emotional waves of feeling which are apt to

run through the community. He also sees—and this is

his signal merit—that we have to reckon with the more

subtle, more pervasive, and on the whole far more important

formation of opinion by non-rational inference. As he

does well to distinguish, the theory upon which so much

of our political and economic thought is based contains

really two assumptions. One is that men always act on a

reasoned opinion on the best means of the attainment of

what they desire, and the other is that all inferences are

of the same kind and are produced by a more or less uniform

process of reasoning. Instead of these assumptions actually

functioning, he invites us to contemplate the power of

repeated assertion in influencing the mind of the voter. He

defines liberty as the “capacity of continuous initiative,”

and no one has more cogently exposed the incapacity of the