Studies in Literature and History
serious alarm. It was a period of confidence in theories which have
been partly confirmed and partly contradicted by subsequent
experiences of those 'principles of human nature' in which political
speculators so unreservedly trusted. In France, some fifty years
earlier, the destructive theorist had swept all before him; in
England, while he was assaulting with effect the entrenchments of
Conservatism, he was taken in flank by the moderate reformers. Mill
had denounced the Whigs as half-hearted and even treacherous allies,
who dallied with Radicalism to conceal their nefarious design of
obtaining political mastery with the fewest concessions possible. He
relied upon universal education to qualify the masses for the
possession of an extensive franchise, and upon enlightened
self-interest to guarantee their proper use of it. Macaulay rejoined,
in the _Edinburgh Review_, that the masses might possibly conclude
that they would get more pleasure than pain out of universal
spoliation; and that if his opponent's principles were correct and his
scheme adopted, 'literature, science, commerce, and manufactures might
be swept away, and a few half-naked fishermen would divide with the
owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities.' It was a
notable controversial tournament, at which the intelligent bystander
probably assisted with much satisfaction and no excessive alarm,
having little faith in the absolute theorist, and not much in the
disinterestedness of the Whigs. For the moment it was sufficient that
both parties agreed in supporting the Reform Bill, although, as Mr.
Stephen remarks, the Radical regarded it as a payment on account,
while the Whig hoped that it would be a full and final discharge. We
may observe, to the honour of a great Liberal family, that as the
first Lord Lansdowne discerned Bentham's talents and gave him his
start in life, so the impression made upon the second marquis by
Macaulay's articles induced him to offer the writer his first seat in
Parliament.
Mr. Stephen deals with the duel between Mill and Macaulay from the
standpoint of an impartial umpire, with an expert's appreciation of
their logical fencing and some humorous glances at the heated
combatants. Mill was an austere Puritan, who would fell the Tory like
an ox and would trample upon the cunning self-seeking Whig. The
Edinburgh Reviewers were a set of brilliant young men who represented
intellectual Liberalism; but 'they were men who meant to become
judges, members of Parliament, or even bishops, and nothing in their
social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against social
injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.' As a sample of
Whiggism Mr. Stephen takes Mackintosh, who, on the subject of the
French Revolution, stood half-way between Burke's holy horror of a
diabolic outburst and the applause of root-and-branch Radicals. For a
type of Conservatism he gives us Robert Southey, whose fortune it was
to be fiercely abused by the Utilitarians and ridiculed by the Whigs.
Southey, like many others, had been frightened out of early Liberalism
into the conviction that Reform would be the inevitable precursor of
revolution; and in 1817 he had written to Lord Liverpool that the only
hope of saving the country lay in gagging the seditious press.
'Concessions,' he said, 'can only serve to hasten the catastrophe. Woe
be to the garrison who hoist a white flag to an enemy that gives no
quarter.' Yet Southey had a deep feeling for the misery of the lower
classes at this period of widespread distress. In his belief in the
power of Government to remedy social evils, he was much nearer the
accepted line of later public opinion than Macaulay, who would have
confined the State's business to the maintenance of order, the defence
of property, and the practice of departmental economy. And when
Southey, following Coleridge and preceding Gladstone, insisted upon
the vital importance of religion as a principle of State policy,
neither he nor Gladstone deserved all the ridicule cast upon them by
Macaulay in his brilliant essays; for at any rate no first-class
Government in Europe has hitherto ventured upon dissolving connection
with the Church.
For his philosophy, Mr. Stephen tells us, Southey was in the habit of
referring to Coleridge, whose hostility to the Utilitarians went on
different and deeper grounds. Coleridge had convinced himself that all
the errors of the time, and their political dangers, arose from a
false and godless empiricism. He declared that revolutionary periods
have always been connected with the popular prevalence of abstract
ideas, and that the speculative principles of men between twenty and
thirty are the great source of political prophecy. He developed this
view in a singular letter upon the state of affairs and opinions which
he also, like Southey, addressed to Lord Liverpool in 1817, and which
somewhat bewildered that veteran statesman. With the moderns, he said,
'nothing grows, all is made'; whereas growth itself is but a disguised
mode of being made by the superinduction of the _jam data_ on the _jam
datum_; and he insisted that 'the flux of individuals at any moment in
existence in a country is there for the value of the State, far more
than the State for them, though both positions are true
proportionately.' In other words, Coleridge pressed the evolutionary
view against the sharp set, shortsighted Utilitarian propositions; and
he would have agreed that antiquated prejudices are absurd only to
those who have not looked back to their origin, when they can be found
to proceed in logical order from natural causes. He had not been
always a resolute opponent of the Utilitarian theory of morals; but,
like other philosophers, he had become alarmed at the consequence of
being shut up within the prison of finite senses, and he grasped at
Kant's discovery of the difference between Understanding and Reason,
in order to retire upon a metaphysical basis of religion and morality,
and to withstand the prudential calculus. We are inclined to suggest
that Mr. Stephen, who does little more than glance at Coleridge's
position, has underestimated his influence upon the intellectual
direction of politics in the first half of this century. Coleridge
certainly provided an antidote to the crudity of eager Radicalism in
Church and State, and his ideas may be recognised not only in the
great High Church movement that was stirred up by the Tractarians, but
also in the larger comprehension of the duties and attributes of the
State that has been slowly gaining ground up to our own day.
It is, indeed, the growth and development of English opinion regarding
these public duties and attributes, as it is traced in Mr. Stephen's
book, that forms, in our opinion, its chief value; and we are
reviewing it mainly as a history of political ideas. This is, we
believe, the practical outcome of the increasing feeling of sympathy
between different classes of the community, of a sense of
responsibility, of what is called altruism, of solidarity among all
the diverse interests that have lately characterised our legislation:
'The two great rival theories of the functions of the State
are--the theory which was for so many years dominant in England,
and which may for convenience be called the Individualist theory;
and the theory which is stated most fully and powerfully by the
Greek philosophers, which we may call the Socialist theory. The
Individualist theory regards the State as a purely utilitarian
institution, a mere means to an end.... It represents the State as
existing mainly for the protection of property and personal
liberty, and as having therefore no concern with the private life
and character of the citizen, except in so far as these may make
him dangerous to the material welfare of his neighbour.
'The Greek theory, on the other hand, though it likewise regards
the State as a means to certain ends, regards it as something
more.... According to this theory, no department of life is outside
the scope of politics; and a healthy State is at once the end at
which the science aims, and the engine by which its decrees are
carried out.'[29]
Accepting this passage as a philosophical statement of tendencies, we
may observe that neither theory has ever been definitely adopted in
England. The Utilitarians desired to recast institutions for the
greater happiness of all citizens, but they were averse to investing
the State with autocratic powers of interference. The Tories, on the
other hand, were awakening to the conviction that the Government must
do more for the people; but their fear of change and their own
'sinister interests,' persuaded them that this might be done without
radical reforms. The Whigs faced both ways, and since in England the
truly valuable effect of extreme opinions is always to drive the
majority into a middle course, they rose to power on that compromise
which is represented by the Reform measures of 1832. The Reform Bill
was accepted by the Utilitarians as an instalment of the rightful
authority of the people over the conduct of public affairs, and
therefore a provisional method of promoting their welfare. The first
Tory statesman of that day, on the contrary, was convinced that for
the public welfare the existing Constitution could not be bettered:
'During one hundred and fifty years the Constitution in its present
form has been in force; and I would ask any man who hears me to
declare whether the experience of history has produced any form of
government so calculated to promote the happiness and secure the
liberties of a free and enlightened people.'[30]
Both parties, in fact, appealed to experience; but Peel took his stand
upon history, which the Utilitarians disregarded as a mere record of
unscientific errors, or at most as a lighthouse to give warning of
rocks, rather than a lamp to show the road ahead. And the point upon
which they joined issue was as to the consequences of staking the
whole fabric of government upon the basis of public opinion, operating
through almost unlimited popular suffrage. The Tory foretold that
this would end in wrecking the Constitution, with the ship among
breakers, and steering by ballot voting. The Benthamite persuaded
himself that enlightened self-interest, empirical perceptions of
utility, and general education, would prevail with the multitude for
their support of a rational system. But with those who demanded
sovereignty for the people a strict limitation of the sphere of
government was one essential maxim; and the Utilitarians would have
agreed with Guizot when he declared it to be 'a mere commonplace that
as civilisation and reason progress, the sphere of public authority
contracts.' They do not appear to have foreseen that whenever the
masses should have got votes legislation would become democratic, or
even socialistic, in order to capture them. This discovery was
eventually made by the Tories, who availed themselves of it to dish
the Whigs, and to come forward again upon a popular suffrage as the
true friends and guardians of the people.
In Mr. Stephen's second volume James Mill is the principal figure, as
the apostle of Benthamism, though he also describes briefly, in his
terse and incisive style, the lives and opinions of some notable men,
foes as well as friends to the party, who represented different
expressions of energetic protest against existing institutions. To
each of them is allotted his proper place in the line of attack, and
his due share in the general enterprise of rousing, by argument or
invective, the slow-thinking English people to a sense of their
lamentable condition. Cobbett and Owen were at feud with true