I. MILL ON GOVERNMENT

I now turn to the general political theory of which Mill was the authoritative exponent.  The Encyclopædia article upon ‘Government’ (1820) gives the pith of their doctrine.  It was, as Professor Bain thinks, an ‘impelling and a guiding force’ in the movement which culminated in the Reform Bill.  The younger Utilitarians regarded it, says J. S. Mill, as ’a masterpiece of political wisdom’; while Macaulay taunts them for holding it to be ’perfect and unanswerable.’  This famous article is a terse and energetic summary of the doctrine implied in Bentham’s Works, but there obscured under elaboration of minute details.  It is rather singular, indeed, that so vigorous a manifesto of Utilitarian dogma should have been accepted by Macvey Napier a sound Whig for a publication which professed scientific impartiality.  It has, however, in the highest degree, the merits of clearness and condensation desirable in a popular exposition.  The reticence appropriate to the place excuses the omission of certain implicit conclusions.  Mill has to give a complete theory of politics in thirty-two 8vo pages.  He has scanty room for qualifying statement or historical illustration.  He speaks as from the chair of a professor laying down the elementary principles of a demonstrated science.

Mill starts from the sacred principle.  The end of government, as the end of all conduct, must be the increase of human happiness.  The province of government is limited by another consideration.  It has to deal with one class of happiness, that is, with the pains and pleasures ‘which men derive from one another.’  By a ‘law of nature’ labour is requisite for procuring the means of happiness.  Now, if ‘nature’ produced all that any man desired, there would be no need of government, for there would be no conflict of interest.  But, as the material produced is finite, and can be appropriated by individuals, it becomes necessary to insure to every man his proper share.  What, then, is a man’s proper share?  That which he himself produces; for, if you give to one man more than the produce of his labour, you must take away the produce of another man’s labour.  The greatest happiness, therefore, is produced by ’assuring to every man the greatest possible quantity of the produce of his own labour.’  How can this be done?  Will not the strongest take the share of the weakest?  He can be prevented in one and apparently only in one way.  Men must unite and delegate to a few the power necessary for protecting all.  ’This is government.’

The problem is now simple.  Government is essentially an association of men for the protection of property.  It is a delegation of the powers necessary for that purpose to the guardians, and ’all the difficult questions of government relate to the means’ of preventing the guardians from themselves becoming plunderers.

How is this to be accomplished?  The power of protection, says Mill, following the old theory, may be intrusted to the whole community, to a few, or to one; that is, we may have a democracy, an aristocracy, or a monarchy.  A democracy, or direct government of all by all, is for the ordinary reasons pronounced impracticable.  But the objections to the other systems are conclusive.  The need of government, he has shown, depends upon ’the law of human nature’ that ’a man, if able, will take from others anything which they have and he desires.’  The very principle which makes government necessary, therefore, will prompt a government to defeat its own proper end.  Mill’s doctrine is so far identical with the doctrine of Hobbes; men are naturally in a state of war, and government implies a tacit contract by which men confer upon a sovereign the power necessary for keeping the peace.  But here, though admitting the force of Hobbes’s argument, he diverges from its conclusion.  If a democracy be impossible, and an aristocracy or monarchy necessarily oppressive, it might seem, he admits, as it actually seemed to Hobbes and to the French economists, that the fewer the oppressors the better, and that therefore an absolute monarchy is the best.  Experience, he thinks, is ‘on the surface’ ambiguous.  Eastern despots and Roman emperors have been the worst scourges to mankind; yet the Danes preferred a despot to an aristocracy, and are as ‘well governed as any people in Europe.’  In Greece, democracy, in spite of its defects, produced the most brilliant results. Hence, he argues, we must go ‘beyond the surface,’ and ’penetrate to the springs within.’  The result of the search is discouraging.  The hope of glutting the rulers is illusory.  There is no ’point of saturation’ with the objects of desire, either for king or aristocracy.  It is a ‘grand governing law of human nature’ that we desire such power as will make ’the persons and properties of human beings subservient to our pleasures.’ This desire is indefinitely great.  To the number of men whom we would force into subservience, and the degree in which we would make them subservient, we can assign no limits.  Moreover, as pain is a more powerful instrument for securing obedience than pleasure, a man will desire to possess ’unlimited power of inflicting pain upon others.’  Will he also desire, it may be asked, to make use of it?  The ‘chain of inference,’ he replies, in this case is close and strong ‘to a most unusual degree.’  A man desires the actions of others to be in correspondence with his own wishes.  ‘Terror’ will be the ’grand instrument.’ It thus follows that the very principle upon which government is founded leads, in the absence of checks, ’not only to that degree of plunder which leaves the members (of a community) ... the bare means of subsistence, but to that degree of cruelty which is necessary to keep in existence the most intense terror.’  An English gentleman, he says, is a favourable specimen of civilisation, and yet West Indian slavery shows of what cruelty he could be guilty when unchecked.  If equal cruelty has not been exhibited elsewhere, it is, he seems to think, because men were not ’the same as sheep in respect to their shepherd,’ and may therefore resist if driven too far.  The difficulty upon this showing is to understand how any government, except the most brutal tyranny, ever has been, or ever can be, possible.  What is the combining principle which can weld together such a mass of hostile and mutually repellent atoms?  How they can even form the necessary compact is difficult to understand, and the view seems to clash with his own avowed purpose.  It is Mill’s aim, as it was Bentham’s, to secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number; and yet he seems to set out by proving as a ‘law of human nature’ that nobody can desire the happiness of any one except himself.  He quotes from Montesquieu the saying, which shows an ’acute sense of this important truth,’ ’that every one who has power is led to abuse it.’ Rather it would seem, according to Mill, all power implies abuse in its very essence.  The problem seems to be how to make universal cohesion out of universal repulsion.

Mill has his remedy for this deeply seated evil.  He attacks, as Bentham had already done, the old-fashioned theory, according to which the British Constitution was an admirable mixture of the three ’simple forms.’  Two of the powers, he argues, will always agree to ’swallow up the third.’ ’The monarchy and aristocracy have all possible motives for endeavouring to obtain unlimited power over the persons and property of the community,’ though the democracy, as he also says, has every possible motive for preventing them.  And in England, as he no doubt meant his readers to understand, the monarchy and aristocracy had to a great extent succeeded.  Where, then, are we to look?  To the ‘grand discovery of modern times,’ namely, the representative system.  If this does not solve all difficulties we shall be forced to the conclusion that good government is impossible.  Fortunately, however, the representative system may be made perfectly effective.  This follows easily.  It would, as he has said, be a ’contradiction in terms’ to suppose that the community at large can ’have an interest opposite to its interest,’ In the Bentham formula, it can have ’no sinister interest.’  It cannot desire its own misery.  Though the community cannot act as a whole, it can act through representatives.  It is necessary to intrust power to a governing body; but that body can be prevented by adequate checks from misusing its powers.  Indeed, the common theory of the British Constitution was precisely that the House of Commons was ’the checking body.’ The whole problem is to secure a body which shall effectively discharge the function thus attributed in theory to the House of Commons.  That will be done when the body is chosen in such a way that its interests are necessarily coincident with those of the community at large.  Hence there is of course no difficulty in deducing the actual demands of reformers.  Without defining precise limits, he shows that representatives must be elected for brief periods, and that the right to a vote must at least be wide enough to prevent the electoral body from forming a class with ‘sinister interests.’  He makes some remarkable qualifications, with the view apparently of not startling his readers too much by absolute and impracticable claims.  He thinks that the necessary identity of interest would still be secured if classes were unrepresented whose interests are ‘indisputably included in those of others.’  Children’s interests are involved in those of their parents, and the interests of ‘almost all women’ in those of their fathers or husbands. Again, all men under forty might be omitted without mischief, for ’the great majority of old men have sons whose interests they regard as an essential part of their own.  This is a law of human nature.’ There would, he observes, be no danger that men above forty would try to reduce the ‘rest of the community to the state of abject slaves.’  Mill, as his son tells us, disowned any intention of positively advocating these exclusions.  He only meant to say that they were not condemned by his general principle.  The doctrine, however, about women, even as thus understood, scandalised his younger followers.

Mill proceeds to argue at some length that a favourite scheme of some moderate reformers, for the representation of classes, could only lead to ‘a motley aristocracy,’ and then answers two objections.  The first is that his scheme would lead to the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords.  The reply is simple and significant.  It would only lead to that result if a monarchy or a House of Lords were favourable to bad government.  He does not inquire whether they are so in fact.  The second objection is that the people do not understand their own interest, and to this his answer is more remarkable.  If the doctrine be true, he says, we are in ‘deplorable’ position:  we have to choose between evils which will be designedly produced by those who have both the power to oppress and an interest in oppression; and the evils which will be accidentally produced by men who would act well if they recognised their own interests. Now the first evil is in any case the worst, for it supposes an ‘invariable’ evil; while in the other case, men may at least act well by accident.  A governing class, that is with interests separate from those of the government, must be bad.  If the interests be identical, the government may be bad.  It will be bad if ignorant, but ignorance is curable.  Here he appeals for once to a historical case.  The priesthood at the Reformation argued on behalf of their own power from the danger that the people would make a bad use of the Bible.  The Bible should therefore be kept for the sacred caste.  They had, Mill thinks, a stronger case in appearance than the Tories, and yet the effect of allowing the people to judge for themselves in religious matters has been productive of good effects ’to a degree which has totally altered the condition of human nature.’ Why should not the people be trusted to judge for themselves in politics?  This implies a doctrine which had great influence with the Utilitarians.  In the remarkable essay upon ‘Education,’ which is contained in the volume of reprints, Mill discusses the doctrine of Helvetius that all the differences between men are due to education.  Without pronouncing positively upon the differences between individuals, Mill observes that, at any rate, the enormous difference between classes of men is wholly due to education. He takes education, it must be observed, in the widest possible sense, as meaning what would now be called the whole action of the ‘environment’ upon the individual.  This includes, as he shows at length, domestic education, all the vast influence exercised upon a child in his family, ‘technical education,’ by which he means the ordinary school teaching, ‘social education,’ that is the influences which we imbibe from the current opinions of our neighbours, and finally, ‘political education,’ which he calls the ’keystone of the arch.’  The means, he argues, by which the ’grand objects of desire may be attained, depend almost wholly upon the political machine.’ If that ‘machine’ be so constituted as to make the grand objects of desire the ’natural prizes of just and virtuous conduct, of high services to mankind and of the generous and amiable sentiments from which great endeavours in the service of mankind naturally proceed, it is natural to see diffused among mankind a generous ardour in the acquisition of those admirable qualities which prepare a man for admirable action, great intelligence, perfect self-command, and over-ruling benevolence.’  The contrary will be the case where the political machine prompts to the flattery of a small ruling body.

This characteristic passage betrays an enthusiasm which really burned under Mill’s stern outside.  He confines himself habitually to the forms of severe logic, and scorns anything like an appeal to sentiment.  The trammels of his scientific manner impede his utterance a little, even when he is speaking with unwonted fervour.  Yet the prosaic Utilitarian who has been laying down as a universal law that the strong will always plunder the weak, and that all rulers will reduce their subjects to abject slavery, is absolutely convinced, it seems, of the possibility of somehow transmuting selfishness into public spirit, justice, generosity, and devotion to truth.  Equally characteristic is the faith in the ‘political machine.’  Mill speaks as if somebody had ‘discovered’ the representative system as Watt (more or less) discovered the steam-engine; that to ‘discover’ the system is the same thing as to set it to work; and that, once at work, it will be omnipotent.  He is not less certain that a good constitution will make men virtuous, than was Bentham that he could grind rogues honest by the Panopticon.  The indefinite modifiability of character was the ground upon which the Utilitarians based their hopes of progress; and it was connected in their minds with the doctrine of which his essay upon education is a continuous application.  The theory of ’association of ideas’ appeared to him to be of the utmost importance in education and in politics, because it implied almost unlimited possibilities of moulding human beings to fit them for a new order.  In politics this implied, as J. S. Mill says, ‘unbounded confidence’ in the influence of ‘reason.’  Teach the people and let them vote freely, and everything would follow.

This gives Mill’s answer to one obvious objection.  The Conservative who answered him by dwelling upon the ignorance of the lower classes was in some respects preaching to a convert.  Nobody was more convinced than Mill of the depths of popular ignorance or, indeed, of the stupidity of mankind in general.  The labourers who cheered Orator Hunt at Peterloo were dull enough; but so were the peers who cheered Eldon in the House of Lords; and the labourers at least desired general prosperity, while the peers were content if their own rents were kept up.  With general education, however, even the lower orders of the people would be fit for power, especially when we take into account one other remarkable conclusion.  The ‘wise and good,’ he says, ’in any class of men do, for all general purposes, govern the rest.’ Now, the class in which wisdom and virtue are commonest is not the aristocracy, but the middle rank.  Another truth follows ’from the principles of human nature in general.’  That is the rather surprising truth that the lower orders take their opinions from the middle class; apply to the middle class for help in sickness and old age; hold up the same class as a model to be imitated by their children, and ‘account it an honour’ to adopt its opinions.  Consequently, however far the franchise were extended, it is this class which has produced the most distinguished ornaments of art, science, and even of legislation, which will ultimately decide upon political questions.  ‘The great majority of the people,’ is his concluding sentence, ’never cease to be guided by that rank; and we may with some confidence challenge the adversaries of the people to produce a single instance to the contrary in the history of the world.’

This article upon ‘Government’ gives the very essence of Utilitarian politics.  I am afraid that it also suggests that the political theory was chiefly remarkable for a simple-minded audacity.  Good political treatises are rare.  They are apt to be pamphlets in disguise, using ‘general principles’ for showy perorations, or to be a string of platitudes with no definite application to facts.  They are fit only for the platform, or only for the professor’s lecture-room.  Mill’s treatise, according to his most famous antagonist, was a mere bundle of pretentious sophistry.

Macaulay came forth like a Whig David to slay the Utilitarian Goliath.  The Encyclopædia articles, finished in 1824, were already in 1825, as Mill says, text-books of the young men at the Cambridge Union.  Macaulay, who won his Trinity fellowship in 1824, had there argued the questions with his friend Charles Austin, one of Bentham’s neophytes.  In the next year Macaulay made his first appearance as an Edinburgh Reviewer; and in 1829 he took the field against Mill.  In the January number he attacked the essay upon ‘Government’; and in two articles in the succeeding numbers of the Review replied to a defence made by some Utilitarian in the Westminster.  Mill himself made no direct reply; and Macaulay showed his gratitude for Mill’s generosity in regard to the Indian appointment by declining to republish the articles. He confessed to have treated his opponent with a want of proper respect, though he retracted none of his criticisms.  The offence had its excuses.  Macaulay was a man under thirty, in the full flush of early success; nor was Mill’s own treatment of antagonists conciliatory.  The dogmatic arrogance of the Utilitarians was not unnaturally met by an equally arrogant countercheck.  Macaulay ridicules the Utilitarians for their claim to be the defenders of the true political faith.  He is afraid not of them but of the ‘discredit of their alliance’; he wishes to draw a broad line between judicious reformers and a ’sect which having derived all its influence from the countenance which they imprudently bestowed upon it, hates them with the deadly hatred of ingratitude.’  No party, he says, was ever so unpopular.  It had already disgusted people with political economy; and would disgust them with parliamentary reform, if it could associate itself in public opinion with the cause.  This was indeed to turn the tables.  The half-hearted disciple was insulting the thoroughbred teacher who had borne the heat and burthen of the day, and from whom he had learned his own doctrine.  Upon this and other impertinences the assertion, for example, that Utilitarians were as incapable of understanding an argument as any ’true blue baronet after the third bottle at a Pitt Club’ it is needless to dwell.  They illustrate, however, the strong resentment with which the Utilitarians were regarded by the classes from whom the Whigs drew their most cultivated supporters.  Macaulay’s line of argument will show what was the real conflict of theory.

His view is, in fact, a long amplification of the charge that Mill was adopting a purely a priori method.  Mill’s style is as dry as Euclid, and his arguments are presented with an affectation of logical precision.  Mill has inherited the ’spirit and style of the Schoolmen.  He is an Aristotelian of the fifteenth century.’  He writes about government as though he was unaware that any actual governments had ever existed.  He deduces his science from a single assumption of certain ’propensities of human nature.’ After dealing with Mill’s arguments, Macaulay winds up with one of his characteristic purple patches about the method of induction.  He invokes the authority of Bacon a great name with which in those days writers conjured without a very precise consideration of its true significance.  By Bacon’s method we are to construct in time the ‘noble science of politics,’ which is equally removed from the barren theories of Utilitarian sophists and the petty craft of intriguing jobbers.  The Utilitarians are schoolmen, while the Whigs are the true followers of Bacon and scientific induction.  J. S. Mill admitted within certain limits the relevancy of this criticism, and was led by the reflections which it started to a theory of his own.  Meanwhile, he observes that his father ought to have justified himself by declaring that the book was not a ‘scientific treatise on politics,’ but an ’argument for parliamentary reform.’ It is not quite easy to see how James Mill could have made such a ‘justification’ and distinguished it from a recantation.

If Mill really meant what Macaulay took him to mean, it would be superfluous to argue the question gravely.  The reasoning is only fit, like the reasoning of all Macaulay’s antagonists, for the proverbial schoolboy.  Mill, according to Macaulay, proposes to discover what governments are good; and, finding that experience gives no clear answer, throws experience aside and appeals to absolute laws of human nature.  One such ‘law’ asserts that the strong will plunder the weak.  Therefore all governments except the representative must be oppressive, and rule by sheer terror.  Mill’s very reason for relying upon this argument is precisely that the facts contradict it.  Some despotisms work well, and some democracies ill; therefore we must prove by logic that all despotisms are bad, and all democracies good.  Is this really Mill’s case?

An answer given by Mill’s champion, to which Macaulay replies in his last article, suggests some explanation of Mill’s position.  Macaulay had paid no attention to one highly important phrase.  The terrible consequences which Mill deduces from the selfishness of rulers will follow, he says, ’if nothing checks.’ Supplying this qualification, as implied throughout, we may give a better meaning to Mill’s argument.  A simple observation of experience is insufficient.  The phenomena are too complex; governments of the most varying kinds have shown the same faults; and governments of the same kind have shown them in the most various degrees.  Therefore the method which Macaulay suggests is inapplicable.  We should reason about government, says Macaulay, as Bacon told us to reason about heat.  Find all the circumstances in which hot bodies agree, and you will determine the principle of heat.  Find all the circumstances in which good governments agree, and you will find the principles of good government.  Certainly; but the process, as Macaulay admits, would be a long one.  Rather, it would be endless.  What ‘circumstances’ can be the same in all good governments in all times and places?  Mill held in substance, that we could lay down certain broad principles about human nature, the existence of which is of course known from ‘experience’, and by showing how they would work, if restrained by no distinct checks, obtain certain useful conclusions.  Mill indicates this line of reply in his own attack upon Mackintosh. There he explains that what he really meant was to set forth a principle recognised by Berkeley, Hume, Blackstone, and, especially, in Plato’s Republic.  Plato’s treatise is a development of the principle that ‘identity of interests affords the only security for good government.’  Without such identity of interest, said Plato, the guardians of the flock become wolves.  Hume had given a pithy expression of the same view in the maxim ‘established,’ as he says, ’by political writers,’ that in framing the ’checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end in his actions than private interest.’  Mill points this by referring to the ‘organs of aristocratical opinion’ for the last fifty years.  The incessant appeal has been for ‘confidence in public men,’ and confidence is another name for scope for misrule. This, he explains, was what he meant by the statement (which Mackintosh considered to have been exploded by Macaulay) that every man pursued his own interest. It referred to the class legislation of the great aristocratic ring:  kings, nobles, church, law, and army.  Utilitarianism, in its political relations, was one continuous warfare against these sinister ‘interests,’ The master-evil of the contemporary political state undoubtedly implied a want of responsibility.  A political trust was habitually confounded with private property.  Moreover, whatever else may be essential to good government, one essential is a strong sense of responsibility in the governors.  That is a very sound principle, though not an axiom from which all political science can be deduced.  If the essay on ‘Government’ was really meant as a kind of political Euclid as a deduction of the best system of government from this single principle of responsibility it was as grotesque as Macaulay asserted.  Mill might perhaps have met the criticism by lowering his claims as his son suggests.  He certainly managed to express his argument in such terms that it has an uncomfortable appearance of being intended for a scientific exposition.

This deserves notice because the position is characteristic of the Utilitarians’ method.  Their appeals to experience always end by absolute assertions.  We shall find the same difficulty in their economic inquiries.  When accused, for example, of laying down absolute principles in such cases, they reply that they are only speaking of ‘tendencies,’ and recognise the existence of ‘checks.’  They treat of what would be, if certain forces acted without limit, as a necessary step towards discovering what is when the limits exist.  They appear to their opponents to forget the limits in their practical conclusions.  This political argument is an instance of the same method.  The genesis of his theory is plain.  Mill’s ‘government,’ like Bentham’s, is simply the conception of legal ‘sovereignty’ transferred to the sphere of politics.  Mill’s exposition is only distinguished from his master’s by the clearness with which he brings out the underlying assumptions.  The legal sovereign is omnipotent, for what he declares to be the law is therefore the law.  The law is his commands enforced by ‘sanctions,’ and therefore by organised force.  The motives for obedience are the fear of the gallows on one side, and, on the other, the desire of protection for life and property.  Law, again, is the ultimate social bond, and can be made at will by the sovereign.  He thus becomes so omnipotent that it is virtually assumed that he can even create himself.  Not only can the sovereign, once constituted, give commands enforced by coercive sanctions upon any kind of conduct, but he can determine his own constitution.  He can at once, for example, create a representative system in practice, when it has been discovered in theory, and can by judicious regulations so distribute ‘self-interest’ as to produce philanthropy and public spirit.  Macaulay’s answer really makes a different assumption.  He accepts the purely ‘empirical’ or ‘rule of thumb’ position.  It is idle, he says, to ask what would happen if there were no ‘checks.’  It is like leaving out the effect of friction in a problem of mechanics.  The logic may be correct, but the conclusions are false in practice. Now this ‘friction’ was precisely the favourite expedient of the Utilitarians in political economy.  To reason about facts, they say, you must analyse, and therefore provisionally disregard the ‘checks,’ which must be afterwards introduced in practical applications.  Macaulay is really bidding us take ‘experience’ in the lump, and refrains from the only treatment which can lead to a scientific result.  His argument, in fact, agrees with that of his famous essay on Bacon, where we learn that philosophy applied to moral questions is all nonsense, and that science is simply crude common-sense.  He is really saying that all political reasoning is impossible, and that we must trust to unreasoned observation.  Macaulay, indeed, has good grounds of criticism.  He shows very forcibly the absurdity of transferring the legal to the political sovereignty.  Parliament might, as he says, make a law that every gentleman with L2000 a year might flog a pauper with a cat-of-nine-tails whenever he pleased.  But, as the first exercise of such a power would be the ‘last day of the English aristocracy,’ their power is strictly limited in fact. That gives very clearly the difference between legal and political sovereignty.  What parliament makes law is law, but is not therefore enforceable.  We have to go behind the commands and sanctions before we understand what is the actual power of government.  It is very far from omnipotent.  Macaulay, seeing this, proceeds to throw aside Mill’s argument against the possibility of a permanent division of power.  The de facto limitation of the sovereign’s power justifies the old theory about ‘mixed forms of government.’  ‘Mixed governments’ are not impossible, for they are real.  All governments are, in fact, ‘mixed.’  Louis XIV. could not cut off the head of any one whom he happened to dislike.  An oriental despot is strictly bound by the religious prejudices of his subjects.  If ‘sovereignty’ means such power it is a chimera in practice, or only realised approximately when, as in the case of negro slavery, a class is actually ruled by force in the hands of a really external power.  And yet the attack upon ‘mixed governments,’ which Bentham had expounded in the Fragment, has a real force which Macaulay seems to overlook.  Mill’s argument against a possible ‘balance’ of power was, as Macaulay asserted, equally applicable to the case of independent sovereigns; yet France might be stronger at Calais and England at Dover. Mill might have replied that a state is a state precisely because, and in so far as, there is an agreement to recognise a common authority or sovereign.  Government does not imply a ‘mixture,’ but a fusion of power.  There is a unity, though not the abstract unity of the Utilitarian sovereign.  The weakness of the Utilitarians is to speak as though the sovereign, being external to each individual, could therefore be regarded as external to the whole society.  He rules as a strong nation may rule a weak dependency.  When the sovereign becomes also the society, the power is regarded as equally absolute, though now applied to the desirable end of maximising happiness.  The whole argument ignores the simple consideration that the sovereign is himself in all cases the product of the society over which he rules, and his whole action, even in the most despotic governments, determined throughout by organic instincts, explaining and not ultimately explicable by coercion.  Macaulay’s doctrine partially recognises this by falling back upon the Whig theory of checks and balances, and the mixture of three mysterious entities, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.  But, as Bentham had sufficiently shown in the Fragment, the theory becomes hopelessly unreal when we try to translate it into facts.  There are not three separate forces, conflicting like three independent forces, but a complex set of social institutions bound together into a whole.  It is impossible really to regard government as a permanent balance of antagonistic forces, confronting each other like the three duellists in Sheridan’s Critic.  The practical result of that theory is to substitute for the ‘greatest happiness’ principle the vague criterion of the preservation of an equilibrium between indefinable forces; and to make the ultimate end of government the maintenance as long as possible of a balance resting on no ulterior principle, but undoubtedly pleasant for the comfortable classes.  Nothing is left but the rough guesswork, which, if a fine name be wanted, may be called Baconian induction.  The ‘matchless constitution,’ as Bentham calls it, represents a convenient compromise, and the tendency is to attach exaggerated importance to its ostensible terms.  When Macaulay asserted against Mill that it was impossible to say which element monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy had gained strength in England in the last century, he is obviously looking at the formulae and not at the social body behind.

This leads to considerations really more important than the argumentation about a priori and inductive methods.  Mill in practice knew very well the qualifications necessary before his principles applied.  He showed it in his Indian evidence; and Place could have told him, had it required telling, that the actual political machinery worked by very strange and tortuous methods.  Yet he was content to override such considerations when he is expounding his theory, and laid himself open to Macaulay’s broad common-sense retort.  The nation at large cannot, he says, have a ‘sinister interest.’  It must desire legislation which is beneficial to the whole.  This is to make the vast assumption that every individual will desire what is good for all, and will be a sufficient judge of what is good.  But is it clear that a majority will even desire what is good for the whole?  May they not wish to sacrifice both other classes and coming generations to their own instantaneous advantages?  Is it plain that even enlightenment of mind would induce a poor man to see his own advantage in the policy which would in the long run be best for the whole society?  You are bound, said Macaulay, to show that the poor man will not believe that he personally would benefit by direct plunder of the rich; and indeed that he would not be right in so believing.  The nation, no doubt, would suffer, but in the immediate period which alone is contemplated by a selfish pauper, the mass of the poor might get more pleasure out of confiscation.  Will they not, on your own principles, proceed to confiscation?  Shall we not have such a catastrophe as the reign of terror?

The Westminster Reviewer retorted by saying that Macaulay prophesied a reign of terror as a necessary consequence of an extended franchise.  Macaulay, skilfully enough, protested against this interpretation.  ’We say again and again,’ he declares, ’that we are on the defensive.  We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison.  Let the vendor prove it to be sanative.  We do not pretend to show that universal suffrage is an evil.  Let its advocates show it to be a good.’ Mill rests his whole case upon the selfishness of mankind.  Will not the selfishness lead the actual majority at a given moment to plunder the rich and to disregard the interests of their own successors?

Macaulay’s declaration that he was only ‘upon the defensive’ might be justifiable in an advocate.  His real thought may be inferred from a speech on the charter made in 1842.  The chartists’ petition of that year had asked for universal suffrage.  Universal suffrage, he replies, would be incompatible with the ’institution of property.’ If the chartists acted upon their avowed principles, they would enforce ’one vast spoliation.’  Macaulay could not say, of course, what would actually result, but his ‘guess’ was that we should see ’something more horrible than can be imagined something like the siege of Jerusalem on a far larger scale.’  The very best event he could anticipate ’and what must the state of things be, if an Englishman and a Whig calls such an event the very best?’ would be a military despotism, giving a ’sort of protection to a miserable wreck of all that immense glory and prosperity.’ So in the criticism of Mill he had suggested that if his opponent’s principles were correct, and his scheme adopted, ‘literature, science, commerce, manufactures’ would be swept away, and that a ’few half-naked fishermen would divide with the owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities.’

Carefully as Macaulay guards himself in his articles upon Mill, the speech shows sufficiently what was his ‘guess’; that is, his real expectation.  This gives the vital difference.  What Macaulay professes to deduce from Mill’s principles he really holds himself, and he holds it because he argues, as indeed everybody has to argue, pretty much on Mill’s method.  He does not really remain in the purely sceptical position which would correspond to his version of ’Baconian induction.’  He argues, just as Mill would have argued, from general rules about human nature.  Selfish and ignorant people will, he thinks, be naturally inclined to plunder; therefore, if they have power, they will plunder.  So Mill had argued that a selfish class would rule for its own sinister interests and therefore not for the happiness of the greatest number.  The argument is the same, and it is the only line of argument which is possible till, if that should ever happen, a genuine science of politics shall have been constituted.  The only question is whether it shall take the pomp of a priori speculation or conceal itself under a show of ‘Baconian induction.’

On one point they agree.  Both Mill and Macaulay profess unbounded confidence in the virtue and wisdom of the middle, that is, of their own class.  Macaulay hopes for a reform bill which will make the votes of the House of Commons ’the express image of the opinion of the middle orders of Britain.’ Mill holds that the middle class will retain this moral authority, however widely the franchise be extended; while Macaulay fears that they will be swamped by its extension to the masses.  The reform bill which they joined in supporting was regarded by the Radicals as a payment on account; while the Whig hoped that it would be a full and final discharge.  The Radical held that no barriers against democracy were needed; he took for granted that a democracy would find its natural leaders in the educated and intelligent.  The Whig, to whom such confidence appeared to be altogether misplaced, had to find some justification for the ‘checks’ and ‘balances’ which he thought essential.

II.  WHIGGISM

I have spoken of Macaulay’s articles because they represent the most pointed conflict between the Utilitarian and the Whig.  Macaulay belongs properly to the next generation, but he appeared as the mouthpiece of the earlier group of writers who in Mill’s time delivered through the Edinburgh Review the true oracles of the Whig faith.  Upon that ground Mill had assailed them in his article.  Their creed, he said, was a ‘see-saw.’  The Whigs were aristocrats as much as the Tories.  They were simply the ‘outs’ who hoped to be the ‘ins.’  They trimmed their sails to catch public opinion, but were careful not to drift into the true popular currents.  They had no desire to limit the power which they hoped one day to possess.  They would attack abuses the slave-trade or the penal laws to gain credit for liberality and enlightenment, when the abuses were such as could be removed without injuring the power of the aristocracy.  They could use ‘vague generalities’ about liberty and so forth, but only to evade definite applications.  When any measure was proposed which really threatened the power of the privileged classes, they could bring out a contradictory set of fine phrases about Jacobinism and democracy.  Their whole argument was a shuffle and they themselves mere selfish trimmers. To this Jeffrey replied (in December 1826) by accepting the position. He pleaded guilty to a love of ‘trimming,’ which meant a love of the British Constitution.  The constitution was a compromise a balance of opposing forces and the only question could be whether they were properly balanced.  The answer was fair enough.  Mill was imputing motives too easily, and assuming that the Reviewers saw the abuses in the same light as he did, and were truckling to public robbers in hopes of sharing the plunder.  He was breaking a butterfly upon a wheel.  The Edinburgh Reviewers were not missionaries of a creed.  They were a set of brilliant young men, to whom the Review was at first a mere pastime, occupying such leisure as was allowed by their professional pursuits.  They were indeed men of liberal sympathies, intelligent and independent enough to hold by a party which was out of power.  They had read Hume and Voltaire and Rousseau; they had sat at the feet of Dugald Stewart; and were in sympathy with intellectual liberalism.  But they were men who meant to become judges, members of parliament, or even bishops.  Nothing in their social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against social injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.  We may take as their interpreter the Whig philosopher James Mackintosh (1765-1832), a man of wide reading, both in history and philosophy, an eloquent orator, and a very able writer.  Mackintosh, said Coleridge, is the ‘king of the men of talent’; by which was intimated that, as a man of talent, he was not, like some people, a man of genius.  Mackintosh, that is, was a man to accept plausible formulae and to make them more plausible; not a man to pierce to the heart of things, or reveal fruitful germs of thought.  His intellect was judicial; given to compromises, affecting a judicious via media, and endeavouring to reconcile antagonistic tendencies.  Thoroughgoing or one-sided thinkers, and Mill in particular, regarded him with excessive antipathy as a typical representative of the opposite intellectual tendencies.  Mackintosh’s political attitude is instructive.  At the outbreak of the French revolution he was a struggling young Scot, seeking his fortune in London, just turning from medicine to the bar, and supporting himself partly by journalism.  He became secretary to the Society of the ‘Friends of the People,’ the Whig rival of the revolutionary clubs, and in April 1791 sprang into fame by his Vindiciae Gallicae.  The Whigs had not yet lost the fervour with which they had welcomed the downfall of the Bastille.  Burke’s Reflections, the work of a great thinker in a state of irritation bordering upon frenzy, had sounded the note of alarm.  The revolution, as Burke maintained, was in fact the avatar of a diabolic power.  It meant an attack upon the very organic principles of society.  It therefore implied a complete breach of historical continuity, and a war against the reverence for ‘prescription’ and tradition which is essential to all healthy development.  To his extreme opponents the same theory afforded the justification of the revolution.  It meant that every institution was to be thrown into the crucible, and a new world to arise governed only by reason.  The view very ably defended by Mackintosh was opposed to both.  He looks upon the French revolution as a more complete application of the principles of Locke and the English Whigs of 1688.  The revolutionists are, as he urges, applying the principles which had been worked out by the ‘philosophers of Europe’ during the preceding century.  They were not, as Burke urged, rejecting experience for theory.  The relation between their doctrine and politics is analogous to the relation between geometry and mechanics. We are now in the position of a people who should be familiar with Newton, but in shipbuilding be still on a level with the Esquimaux.  The ‘rights of man’ appear to him to mean, not, as Burke and Bentham once agreed, a set of ‘anarchical fallacies,’ but a set of fundamental moral principles; and the declaration of them a most wise and ‘auspicious’ commencement of the ‘regenerating labours’ of the new legislators.  The French revolution represented what Somers would now approve if he had our advantages. A thoroughgoing change had become necessary in France.  The church, army, and law were now ’incorrigible.’ Burke had seen, in the confiscation of church property, an attempt to abolish Christianity.  To Mackintosh it seemed to be a reform justifiable in principle, which, though too roughly carried out, would reduce ’a servile and imperious priesthood to humble utility.’ A poor priesthood, indeed, might incline to popular superstition.  We could console ourselves by reflecting that the power of the church, as a corporation, was broken, and that toleration and philosophy would restrain fanaticism. The assignats were still ’almost at par.’ The sale of the national property would nearly extinguish the debt.  France had ’renounced for ever the idea of conquest,’ and had no temptations to war, except her colonies.  Their commercial inutility and political mischievousness had been so ‘unanimously demonstrated,’ that the French empire must soon be delivered from ’this cumbrous and destructive appendage.’  An armed people, moreover, could never be used like a mercenary army to suppress liberty.  There was no danger of military despotism, and France would hereafter seek for a pure glory by cultivating the arts of peace and extending the happiness of mankind.

No wonder that Mackintosh, with these views, thought that the history of the fall of the Bastille would ’kindle in unborn millions the holy enthusiasm of freedom’; or that, in the early disorders, he saw temporary aberrations of mobs, destined to be speedily suppressed by the true leaders of the revolution.  Mackintosh saw, I take it, about as far as most philosophers, that is, about as far as people who are not philosophers.  He observes much that Burke ought to have remembered, and keeps fairly to the philosophical principle which he announces of attributing the revolution to general causes, and not to the schemes of individuals. When assignats became waste paper, when the guillotine got to work, when the religion of reason was being set up against Christianity, when the French were conquering Europe, when a military despotism was arising, when, in short, it became quite clear that the French revolution meant something very different from a philosophical application of the principles of Locke and Adam Smith, Mackintosh began to see that Burke had not so far missed the mark.  Burke, before dying, received his penitent opponent at Beaconsfield; and in 1800 Mackintosh took the opportunity of publicly declaring that he ’abhorred, abjured, and for ever renounced the French revolution, with its sanguinary history, its abominable principles, and its ever execrable leaders.’  He hoped to ’wipe off the disgrace of having been once betrayed into that abominable conspiracy against God and man.’ In his famous defence of Peltier (1803), he denounced the revolution in a passage which might have been adopted from Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace.

In a remarkable letter to Windham of 1806, Mackintosh gives his estimate of Burke, and takes some credit to himself for having discovered, even in the time of his youthful errors, the consistency of Burke’s principles, as founded upon an abhorrence of ’abstract politics.’ Politics, he now thought, must be made scientific by recognising with Burke the supreme importance of prescription and historic continuity, and by admitting that the philosophers had not yet constructed a science bearing to practical politics the same relation as geometry to mechanics.  He applied his theory to the question of parliamentary reform in the Edinburgh Review. Here he accepts the doctrine, criticised by James Mill, that a proper representative system must be judged, not, as Mill maintained, solely by the identity of its interest with that of the community at large, but by its fitness to give power to different classes.  It follows that the landowners, the professional classes, and the populace should all be represented.  And he discovers that the variety of the English system was calculated to secure this end.  Though it was only in a few constituencies that the poorest class had a voice, their vote in such places represented the same class elsewhere.  It was as well that there should be some extreme Radicals to speak for the poorest.  But he thinks that any uniform suffrage would be bad, and that universal suffrage would be the most mischievous of all systems. That would mean the swamping of one class by all a tyranny more oppressive, perhaps, than any other tyranny.  If one class alone were to be represented, it should be the favourite middle class, which has the ‘largest share of sense and virtue,’ and is most connected in interest with other classes. A legitimate aim of the legislator is, therefore, to prevent an excess of democracy.  With Mackintosh it seems essential not simply to suppress ‘sinister interests,’ but to save both the aristocracy and the middle class from being crushed by the lower classes.  The opposition is vital; and it is plain that the argument for the aristocracy, that is, for a system developed from all manner of historical accidents and not evolved out of any simple logical principles, must be defended upon empirical grounds.

Mackintosh was in India during the early period of the Edinburgh Review.  Jeffrey, as editor for its first quarter of a century, may be taken more fully to represent its spirit.  Jeffrey’s trenchant, if not swaggering style, covered a very timid, sensitive, and, in some respects, a very conservative temperament.  His objection to the ’Lake Poets’ was the objection of the classical to the romantic school.  Jeffrey’s brightness of intellect may justify Carlyle’s comparison of him to Voltaire, only a Voltaire qualified by dislike to men who were ‘dreadfully in earnest.’  Jeffrey was a philosophical sceptic; he interpreted Dugald Stewart as meaning that metaphysics, being all nonsense, we must make shift with common-sense; and he wrote a dissertation upon taste, to prove that there are no rules about taste whatever.  He was too genuine a sceptic to sacrifice peace to the hopeless search for truth.  One of the most striking passages in his Essays is an attack upon ‘perfectibility.’  He utterly disbelieves that progress in knowledge will improve morals or diminish war, or cure any of the evils that flesh is heir to.  Such a man is not of the material of which enthusiastic reformers are made.  Throughout the war he was more governed by his fear than by his zeal.  He was in constant dread of failure abroad and ruin at home.  The Review provoked the Tories, and induced them to start its rival, not by advocacy of political principles, but by its despairing view of the war. He was still desiring at that time (1808) to avoid ’party politics’ in the narrower sense.

The political view corresponding to this is given in the articles, some of which (though the authorship was not yet avowed) were assailed by Mill in the Westminster.  In an early article he defends the French philosophers against the imputation of responsibility for the reign of terror.  Their excellent and humane doctrines had been misapplied by the ‘exasperation’ and precipitation of inexperienced voters.  His most characteristic article is one published in January 1810.  The failure of the Walcheren expedition had confirmed his disbelief in our military leaders; the rise of English Radicalism, led by Burdett in the House of Commons, and Cobbett in the press, the widely spread distress and the severity of oppressive measures, roused his keenest alarm. We are, he declared, between two violent and pernicious factions the courtiers of arbitrary power and the democrats.  If the Whig leaders did not first conciliate and then restrain the people, the struggle of the extreme parties would soon sweep away the constitution, the monarchy, and the Whig aristocracy by which that monarchy ’is controlled, confirmed, and exalted above all other forms of polity.’  Democracy, it was plain, was increasing with dangerous rapidity.  A third of every man’s income was being taken by taxes, and after twenty years’ boastful hostility we were left without a single ally.  Considering all this, it seems as though ’the wholesome days of England were numbered,’ and we are on the ’verge of the most dreadful of all calamities’ a civil war.

Jeffrey has learned from Hume that all government is ultimately founded upon opinion.  The great thing is to make the action of public opinion regular and constituted.  The whole machinery of the constitution, he says, is for the express purpose of ’preventing the kingly power from dashing itself to pieces against the more radical power of the people.’ The merit of a representative body is not to be tested simply by the goodness of its legislation, but by its diminishing the intensity of the struggle for the supreme power.  Jeffrey in fact is above all preoccupied with the danger of revolution.  The popular will is, in fact, supreme; repression may force it into explosion; but by judicious management it may be tamed and tempered.  Then we need above all things that it should, as he says in his reply to Mill (December 1826), give their ’natural and wholesome influence to wealth and rank.’  The stability of the English Constitution depends, as he said in 1810, upon the monarchy and aristocracy, and their stability on their being the natural growth of ages and having ’struck their roots deep into every stratum of the political soil.’

The Whigs represent the view implied in Macaulay’s attack upon Mill the view of cultivated men of sense, with their eyes open to many difficulties overlooked by zealots, but far too sceptical and despondent to rouse any enthusiasm or accept any dogmas absolutely.  By the time of the Reform Bill the danger was obviously on the side of dogged obstructionism, and then the ‘middle party,’ as Jeffrey calls it, inclined towards the Radical side and begged them to join its ranks and abandon the attempt to realise extreme views.  They could also take credit as moderate men do for having all along been in the right.  But to both extremes, as Jeffrey pathetically complains, they appeared to be mere trimmers.

The Utilitarian held the Whig to be a ‘trimmer’; the Whig thought the Utilitarian a fanatic; they agreed in holding that the Tory was simply stupid.  And yet, when we look at the Tory creed, we shall find that both Whig and Utilitarian overlooked some very vital problems.  The Tories of course represent the advocates of strong government; and, as their opponents held, had no theories only prejudices.  The first article of the creed of an Eldon or a Sidmouth was, ’I believe in George III.’; not a doctrine capable of philosophical justification.  Such Toryism meant the content of the rich and powerful with the system by which their power and wealth were guaranteed.  Their instincts had been sharpened by the French revolution; and they saw in any change the removal of one of the safeguards against a fresh outburst of the nether fires.  The great bulk of all political opinion is an instinct, not a philosophy; and the obstructive Tories represented little more than class prejudice and the dread of a great convulsion.  Yet intelligent Tories were being driven to find some reasons for their creed, which the Utilitarians might have considered more carefully.

III.  CONSERVATISM

A famous man of letters represents certain tendencies more clearly than the average politician.  Robert Southey (1777-1843), the ’ultra servile sack-guzzler,’ as Bentham pleasantly calls him in 1823, was probably the best abused man, on his own side at least, among Mill’s contemporaries.  He was attacked by Mill himself, and savagely denounced by Byron and Hazlitt.  He was not only a conspicuous writer in the Quarterly Review but, as his enemies thought, a renegade bought by pensions.  It is, I hope, needless to defend him against this charge.  He was simply an impatient man of generous instincts and no reflective power, who had in his youth caught the revolutionary fever, and, as he grew up, developed the patriotic fever.

Later views are given in the Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), chiefly known to modern readers by one of Macaulay’s essays.  Southey was as assailable as Mill.  His political economy is a mere muddle; his political views are obviously distorted by accidental prejudices; and the whole book is desultory and disjointed.  In a dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, he takes the opportunity of introducing descriptions of scenery, literary digressions, and quaint illustrations from his vast stores of reading to the confusion of all definite arrangement.  Southey is in the awkward position of a dogmatist defending a compromise.  An Anglican claiming infallibility is necessarily inconsistent.  His view of toleration, for example, is oddly obscure.  He would apparently like to persecute infidels; and yet he wishes to denounce the Catholic church for its persecuting principles.  He seems to date the main social evils to the changes which began at the Reformation, and yet he looks back to the period which succeeded the Reformation as representing the ideal state of the British polity.  His sympathy with the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries predisposed him to this position.  He would have been more intelligible if he had been more distinctly reactionary.  For all that, his views show the presence of a leaven which was materially to affect the later development of English opinions.  That Jacobinism meant anarchy, and that anarchy led irresistibly to military despotism were propositions which to him, as to so many others, seemed to be established by the French revolution.  What, then, was the cause of the anarchy?  Sir Thomas More comes from the grave to tell us this, because he had witnessed the past symptoms of the process.  The transition from the old feudal system to the modern industrial organisation had in his day become unmistakably developed.  In feudal times, every man had his definite place in society; he was a member of a little group; supported, if controlled and disciplined, by an elaborate system of spiritual authority.  The Reformation was the period at which the ‘masterless man’ made his appearance.  The conversion of pastures into arable land, the growth of commerce and of pauperism, were marks of the coming change.  It proceeded quietly for some generations; but the development of the modern manufacturing system represents the operation of the same process on a far larger scale, and with far greater intensity.  The result may be described by saying that we have instead of a legitimate development a degeneration of society.  A vast populace has grown up outside of the old order.  It is independent indeed, but at the heavy price of being rather an inorganic mass than a constituent part of the body politic.  It is, briefly, to the growth of a huge ‘proletariate’ outside the church, and hostile to the state, that Southey attributes all social evils.

The view has become familiar enough in various shapes; and in the reproaches which Southey brings against the manufacturing system we have an anticipation of other familiar lamentations.  Our manufacturing wealth is a ‘wen,’ a ’fungous excrescence from the body politic’; it is no more a proof of real prosperity than the size of a dropsical patient is a proof of health; the manufacturer worships mammon instead of Moloch; and wrings his fortune from the degradation of his labourers as his warlike ancestors wrung wealth from their slaves; he confines children in a tainted atmosphere, physical and moral, from morning till night, and a celebrated minister (Pitt) boasts of this very evil; he treats his fellow-creatures as machines, and wealth, though accumulated, is not diffused; the great capitalists, ‘like pikes in a fishpond,’ devour the weaker fish; competition is not directed to providing the best goods, but the cheapest; every man oppresses his neighbour; the landlord racks his tenant, the farmer grinds the labourer; all the little centres of permanent life are broken up; not one man in a thousand is buried with his fathers, and the natural ties and domestic affections are prematurely dissolved.

Here, too, is to be found the source of the infidel opinions which call for suppression.  London is a hotbed of corruption; a centre of wealth; and yet, in spite of poor-laws, a place where wretches are dying of starvation, and which could collect a mob capable of producing the most appalling catastrophes.  In such a place, men become unbelievers like savages, because removed from all humanising influences, and booksellers can carry on a trade in blasphemy.  Infidelity is bred in ’the filth and corruption of large towns and manufacturing districts.’ The disappearance of clerical influence has led to ’a mass of ignorance, vice, and wretchedness which no generous heart can contemplate without grief.’ It is not surprising that, in Southey’s opinion, it is doubtful whether the bulk of the people has gained or lost in the last thousand years. Macaulay takes all this as mere sentimentalism and preference of a picturesque outside to solid comfort.  But whatever Southey’s errors of fact, they show at least a deeper insight than his opponent into some social evils.  His proposed remedies explain his diagnosis of the evil.  In the first place, it is not surprising, though it surprised Macaulay, that he had many sympathies with the socialist, Robert Owen.  He saw Owen in 1816, and was much impressed by his views.  In the Colloquies, Owen is called the ’happiest, most beneficent, and most practical of all enthusiasts’; an account is given of one of the earliest co-operative schemes, and Southey believes in the possibility of the plan.  He makes, however, one significant remark.  Owen, he thinks, could not succeed without enlisting in his support some sectarian zeal.  As Owen happened to object to all religious sects, this defect could not be remedied.

Southey, in fact, held that the absence of religious discipline was at the root of the whole evil.  Religion, he declares, much to the scorn of Macaulay, ’is the basis upon which civil government rests.’ There must, as he infers, be an established religion, and the state which neglects this duty is preparing its own ruin.  ‘Nothing,’ he declares, ’in abstract science can be more certain than these propositions,’ though they are denied by ’our professors of the arts babblative and scribblative’ that is, by Benthamites and Whigs.  For here, in fact, we come to the irreconcilable difference.  Government is not to be a mere machinery for suppressing violence, but an ally of the church in spreading sound religion and morality.  The rulers, instead of merely reflecting the popular will, should lead and direct all agencies for suppressing vice and misery.  Southey, as his son takes pains to show, though he was for upholding authority by the most stringent measures, was convinced that the one way to make government strong was to improve the condition of the people.  He proposed many measures of reform; national education on the principles, of course, of Dr. Bell; state-aided colonisation and the cultivation of waste lands at home; Protestant sisterhoods to reproduce the good effects of the old order which he regretted and yet had to condemn on Anglican principles.  The English church should have made use of the Wesleyans as the church of Rome had used the Franciscans and Dominicans; and his Life of Wesley was prompted by his fond belief that this might yet be done.  Government, he said, ought to be ’paternal’; and his leading aspirations have been adopted by Socialists on the one hand, and the converts to Catholicism on the other.

For his philosophy, Southey was in the habit of referring to Coleridge; and Coleridge’s Constitution of Church and State is perhaps the book in which Coleridge comes nearest to bringing an argument to a conclusion.  Though marked by his usual complexities of style, his parentheses and irrelevant allusions and glances at wide metaphysical discussions, he succeeds in laying down a sufficient sketch of his position.  The book was originally published in 1830, and refers to the Catholic emancipation of the previous year.  Unlike Southey, he approves of the measure, only regretting the absence of certain safeguards; and his general purpose may be said to be to give such a theory of the relations of church and state as may justify an establishment upon loftier grounds than those of the commonplace Tory.

His method, as he explains, is to find the true ‘idea’ of a constitution and a national church.  The ‘idea,’ he explains, does not mean the conscious aim of the persons who founded or now constitute the bodies in question.  An ‘idea’ is the subjective counterpart of an objective law. It corresponds to the vital force which moulds the structure of the social organism, although it may never have been distinctly formulated by any one of the actors.  In this sense, therefore, we should have to proceed by a historical method.  We should study the constitution as we study the physiology of a physical body; and he works out the analogy at some length.  So far, Coleridge is expressing the characteristic view that Nature in general is to be regarded as an evolution; only that evolution is to be understood in the sense of Schelling not in the sense of either Darwin.  Of course, when Coleridge professes to find the ‘idea’ of the church and state, what he really finds is not the idea so much as his idea of the idea which may be a very different thing.  His theory of ‘evolution’ is compatible with assuming that evolutions are illegitimate whenever he happens to dislike them.

He coincides rather curiously with James Mill in asserting that the ‘social bond’ was originally formed to protect property, not to protect life. He discovers accordingly that the ancient races, Jews, Goths, and Kelts alike, divided the land into two parts, one to be inherited by separate families, the other to be set apart for the nation.  From the latter or the ‘nationalty’ springs the church establishment.  This property belongs rightfully and inalienably to the nation itself.  It is held by what he calls the ‘clerisy.’  Its functions are, in the first place, to provide a career by which the poorest classes may rise to a higher position; and secondly, to provide for the development of all the qualities which distinguish the civilised man from the savage. Briefly, then, the church is that part of the national organism which is devoted to educating the people to be ’obedient, free, useful organisable subjects, citizens, and patriots, living to the benefit of the estate, and prepared to die for its defence.’  Henry viii. would have surpassed Alfred if he had directed the ‘nationalty’ to its true purposes; that is, especially to the maintenance of universities, of a parochial clergy, and of schools in every parish.  Unluckily, Henry VIII.’s ‘idea’ of a national church was vague.  Ideas were not his strong point.  Coleridge appears to be especially troubled to work the principles into conformity with his views of Catholic emancipation.  The peculiarity of the theory is that the church, according to him, seems to be simply a national institution.  It might exist, and in fact, did exist before Christianity, as is proved not only by the Jewish but by the Druidical church. That it should be Christian in England is a ’blessed accident,’ or ’providential boon’ or, as he puts it, ’most awfully a godsend.’  Hence it follows that a primary condition of its utility is that the clerisy should contribute to the support of the other organs of the community.  They must not be the subjects of a foreign power, nor, as he argues at length, subject to the desocialising influence of celibacy.  It follows that the Roman church is unfitted to be ever a national church, although, if that danger be sufficiently obviated, no political disqualifications should be imposed upon Romanists.  And thus, too, the Church Catholic is essentially a body which has no relations to any particular state.  It is opposed to the world, not to the nation, and can have no visible head or ’personal centre of unity.’ The church which makes such claims is the revelation of Antichrist.

We need not inquire into the prophecies.  It is enough to say that to Coleridge as to Southey the preservation of an established church seemed to be an essential condition of morality and civilisation.  They differed from the ordinary Tory, who was content to defend any of the abuses by the cry of sacrilege and confiscation.  The church was to be made worthy of its position, and rendered capable of discharging its high functions effectually.  Coleridge, it may be said, would fully admit that an organ which had ceased to correspond to its idea must die.  It could not continue to preserve itself by mere force of obstruction, but must arouse, throw off its abuses, and show itself to be worthy of its high claims.  Meanwhile, however, he was perhaps more anxious to show the Utilitarians that in assailing the institution on account of its abuses, they were really destroying the most essential guarantee of progress.  He sums up, in a curious passage, the proofs of modern degradation. The wicked eighteenth century is of course responsible for everything.  The ‘mechanic corpuscular theory’; the consequent decay of philosophy, illustrated by such phrases as an excellent ‘idea’ of cooking; ’the ourang-outang theology of the origin of the human species substituted for the first ten chapters of the book of Genesis; rights of nature for the duties and privileges of citizens; idealess facts, misnamed proofs from history, for principles and the insight derived from them’:  all these and other calamitous results of modern philosophy are connected with a neglect of the well-being of the people, the mistaking of a large revenue for prosperity, and the consumption of gin by paupers to the ’value of eighteen millions yearly.’  He appeals pathetically to the leaders of the Utilitarians.  They will scorn him for pronouncing that a ’natural clerisy’ is ‘an essential element of a rightly constituted nation.’  All their tract societies and mechanics’ institutes and ’lecture bazaars under the absurd name of universities’ are ‘empiric specifics’ which feed the disease.  Science will be plebified, not popularised.  The morality necessary for a state ’can only exist for the people in the form of religion.  But the existence of a true philosophy, or the power and habit of contemplating particulars in the unity and fontal mirror of the idea, this in the rulers and teachers of a nation is indispensable to a sound state of religion in all classes.  In fact, religion, true or false, is and ever has been the centre of gravity in a realm to which all other things must and will accommodate themselves.’

The existence of the eighteenth century always remained a hopeless puzzle for Coleridge and his followers.  Why at that period everything went wrong in the higher regions of thought remained a mystery.  ’God is above,’ says Sir Thomas More to Southey, ’but the devil is below; evil principles are in their nature more active than good.’  The devil seemed to have got into the upper air, and was working with his allies, Bentham and Mill and Paine and Cobbett, with remarkable success.  But, whatever the theories of conservatives in church and state, the fact that the theories were held is important.  The diametrical opposition between two schools, one of which regarded the church as a simple abuse, and its doctrines as effete superstitions, while the other looked to the church and its creed as giving the sole hope for suppressing the evil principle, was a critical point in later movements, political as well as religious.

IV.  SOCIALISM

I have spoken of Southey’s sympathy for Robert Owen.  Owen (1771-1858) is one of the characteristic figures of the time.  He was the son of a village tradesman in Wales, and had risen to prosperity by the qualities of the virtuous apprentice.  Industry, patience, an imperturbably good temper, and sagacity in business matters had raised him to high position as a manufacturer at the time of the rapid advance of the cotton trade.  Many poor men have followed the same path to wealth.  Owen’s peculiarity was that while he became a capitalist he preserved his sympathy with the working classes.  While improving machinery, he complained that the ‘living machinery’ was neglected.  One great step in his career was his marriage to the daughter of David Dale of New Lanark, a religious and worthy manufacturer. Dale had employed a number of pauper children who were in that day to be disposed of by their parishes; and had done his best to make their position more tolerable.  Owen took up this scheme, and carried it out more systematically.  New Lanark, in his hands, became a model village; he provided in various ways for the encouragement of sobriety, industry, and honesty among his workmen, set up stores to supply cheap and good provisions, and especially provided infant schools and a systematic education.  ‘The children,’ he declares, ’were the happiest human beings he ever saw.’  When his partners interfered with his plans, Owen bought them out and started the company to which Bentham and Allen belonged.  New Lanark rapidly became famous.  It was visited by all the philanthropists of the day.  The royal dukes not only of England but of Russia were interested; and Owen even believed that he had converted Napoleon at Elba.  So far, Owen was a benevolent capitalist, exercising a paternal sway over his people.  He became convinced, however, that he had discovered the key to the great social problems of the day.  When the distresses followed the peace, he was prepared to propound his remedy, and found many willing hearers in all classes.  Liverpool and Sidmouth listened to him with favour, and the duke of Kent became president of a committee started to carry out his views.  He gave the impetus to the movement by which the Factory Act of 1819 was carried, although it was far from embodying his proposals in their completeness.

Owen’s diagnosis of the social disease explains Southey’s partiality.  Like Southey, he traced the evil to the development of the manufacturing system.  That system involved, as he held, what later Socialists have called the ‘exploitation’ of the labouring classes by the capitalists.  With singularly crude notions of political economy, Owen assumed that the ‘dead machinery’ was in competition with the ‘living machinery.’  He made startling calculations as to the amount of human labour represented by steam-engines; and took for granted that the steam-engine displaced an equal number of workmen.  His remedy for poverty was to set up a number of communities, which should maintain themselves by cultivating the soil with the spade, and in which every man should labour for all.  Thus New Lanarks were to be spread over the country, with the difference that the employer was to be omitted.  Owen, in short, became properly a Socialist, having been simply a paternal philanthropist.  For a time Owen met with considerable support.  A great meeting was held in London in 1817, and a committee was started two years afterwards, of which Ricardo was a member.  Ricardo, indeed, took pains to let it be known that he did not believe in the efficacy of Owen’s plans.  Meanwhile Owen was breaking off his connection with New Lanark, and becoming the apostle of a new social creed.  His missionary voyages took him to Ireland, to the United States and Mexico, and attempts were made to establish communities in Scotland and in the State of Illinois.

Owen and his followers became natural antagonists of the Utilitarians.  He agreed with Southey in tracing distress to the development of the great manufacturing system, though he went much further.  The principles essentially involved in the whole industrial system were, according to him, pernicious.  He held the essential doctrine of his modern successors that property is theft.  Between such a man and the men who took the Wealth of Nations for their gospel, and Ricardo as its authorised commentator, there was an impassable gulf.  On the other hand, Owen was equally far from the Tory view of religious principles.  Southey’s remark that he could only succeed by allying himself with some religious fanaticism was just to the point.

Owen was a man of very few ideas, though he held such as he had with extraordinary tenacity, and enforced them by the effective if illogical method of incessant repetition.  Among them was the idea which, as he declares, had occurred to him before he was ten years old that there was something radically wrong in all religions.  Whether this opinion had come to him from the diffused rationalism of his time, or was congenial to the practical and prosaic temperament which was disquieted by the waste of energy over futile sectarian squabbles, or was suggested by his early study of Seneca the only author of whom he speaks as having impressed him in early years it became a fixed conviction.  He had been an early supporter of Lancaster and ‘unsectarian’ education.  When his great meeting was to be held in 1817 it occurred to him that he might as well announce his views.  He accordingly informed his hearers that the religions of the world were the great obstacles to progress.  He expected, as he assures us, that this candid avowal would cause him to be ‘torn in pieces.’  It provoked on the contrary general applause, and Owen congratulated himself rather hastily on having struck the deathblow of superstition.

Owen’s position, at any rate, was a significant symptom.  It showed that the Socialist movement sprang from motives outside the sphere of the churches.  Owen’s personal simplicity and calmness seems to have saved him from any bitter animosity.  He simply set aside Christianity as not to the purpose, and went on calmly asserting and re-asserting his views to Catholics and Protestants, Whigs, Radicals, and Tories.  They agreed in considering him to be a bore, but were bored rather than irritated.  Owen himself, like later Socialists, professed indifference to the political warfare of Whigs and Tories.  When, at the height of the Reform movement, he published a paper called the Crisis, the title referred not to the struggle in which all the upper classes were absorbed, but to the industrial revolution which he hoped to bring about.  He would have been equally ready to accept help from Whig, Tory, or Radical; but his position was one equally distasteful to all.  The Tory could not ally himself with the man who thought all religions nonsense; nor any of the regular parties with the man who condemned the whole industrial system and was opposed to all the cherished prejudices of the respectable middle classes.

Owen’s favourite dogma is worth a moment’s notice.  He was never tired of repeating that ‘character is formed by circumstances’; from which he placidly infers that no man deserves praise or blame for his conduct.  The inference, it must be admitted, is an awkward one in any ethical system.  It represents, probably, Owen’s most serious objection to the religions of the world.  The ultimate aim of the priest is to save men’s souls; and sin means conduct which leads to supernatural punishment.  Owen, on the contrary, held that immorality was simply a disease to be cured, and that wrath with the sinner was as much out of place as wrath with a patient.  In this sense Owen’s view, as I at least should hold, defines the correct starting-point of any social reformer.  He has to consider a scientific problem, not to be an agent of a supernatural legislator.  He should try to alter the general conditions from which social evils spring, not to deal in pardons or punishment.  Owen was acting with thoroughly good sense in his early applications of this principle.  The care, for example, which he bestowed upon infant education recognised the fact that social reform implied a thorough training of the individual from his earliest years.  Owen’s greatest error corresponds to the transformation which this belief underwent in his mind.  Since circumstances form character, he seems to have argued, it is only necessary to change the circumstances of a grown-up man to alter his whole disposition.  His ambitious scheme in America seemed to suppose that it was enough to bring together a miscellaneous collection of the poor and discontented people, and to invite them all to behave with perfect unselfishness.  At present I need only remark that in this respect there was a close coincidence between Owen and the Utilitarians.  Both of them really aimed at an improvement of social conditions on a scientific method; and both justified their hopes by the characteristic belief in the indefinite modifiability of human nature by external circumstances.

I turn to a man who was in some ways the most complete antithesis to Owen.  William Cobbett (1762-1835), unlike Owen, took a passionate and conspicuous part in the political struggles of the day.  Cobbett, declares the Edinburgh Review in July 1807, has more influence than all the other journalists put together.  He had won it, as the reviewer thought, by his force of character, although he had changed his politics completely ‘within the last six months.’  The fact was more significant than was then apparent.  Cobbett, son of a labourer who had risen to be a small farmer, had in spite of all obstacles learned to read and write and become a great master of the vernacular.  His earliest model had been Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and in downright vigour of homely language he could scarcely be surpassed even by the author of the Drapier’s Letters.  He had enlisted as a soldier, and had afterwards drifted to America.  There he had become conspicuous as a typical John Bull.  Sturdy and pugnacious in the highest degree, he had taken the English side in American politics when the great question was whether the new power should be bullied by France or by England.  He had denounced his precursor, Paine, in language savouring too much, perhaps, of barrack-rooms, but certainly not wanting in vigour.  He defied threats of tar and feathers; put a portrait of George III. in his shop-window; and gloried in British victories, and, in his own opinion, kept American policy straight.  He had, however, ended by making America too hot to hold him; and came back to declare that republicanism meant the vilest and most corrupt of tyrannies, and that, as an Englishman, he despised all other nations upon earth.  He was welcomed on his return by Pitt’s government as likely to be a useful journalist, and became the special adherent of Windham, the ideal country-gentleman and the ardent disciple of Burke’s principles.  He set up an independent paper and heartily supported the war.  On the renewal of hostilities in 1803 Cobbett wrote a manifesto directed by the government to be read in every parish church in the kingdom, in order to rouse popular feeling.  When Windham came into office in 1806, Cobbett’s friends supposed that his fortune was made.  Yet at this very crisis he became a reformer.  His conversion was put down, of course, to his resentment at the neglect of ministers.  I do not think that Cobbett was a man to whose character one can appeal as a conclusive answer to such charges.  Unfortunately he was not free from weaknesses which prevent us from denying that his political course was affected by personal motives.  But, in spite of weaknesses and of countless inconsistencies, Cobbett had perfectly genuine convictions and intense sympathies which sufficiently explain his position, and make him more attractive than many less obviously imperfect characters.  He tells us unconsciously what were the thoughts suggested to a man penetrated to the core by the strongest prejudices they can hardly be called opinions of the true country labourer.

The labourer, in the first place, if fairly represented by Cobbett, had none of the bitter feeling against the nobility which smouldered in the French peasantry.  Cobbett looked back as fondly to the surroundings of his youth as any nobleman could look back to Eton or to his country mansion.  He remembered the ‘sweet country air’ round Crooksbury Hill, the song of birds, and the rambles through heather and woodland.  He loved the rough jovial sports; bull-baiting and prize-fighting and single-stick play.  He had followed the squire’s hounds on foot, and admired without jealousy the splendid gardens of the bishop’s palace at Farnham.  Squire and parson were an intrinsic part of the general order of things.  The state of the English working classes was, he often declares, the happiest that could be imagined, and he appeals in confirmation to his own memories.  Although, upon enlisting, he had found the army corrupt, he not only loved the soldier for the rest of his life, but shared to the full the patriotic exultation which welcomed the 1st of June and the Nile.  Even to the last, he could not stomach the abandonment of the title ’King of France’; for so long as it was retained, it encouraged the farmer to tell his son the story of Crecy and Agincourt.

What, then, alienated Cobbett?  Briefly, the degradation of the class he loved.  ‘I wish,’ he said, ’to see the poor men of England what the poor men of England were when I was born, and from endeavouring to accomplish this task, nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.’ He had a right to make that boast, and his ardour in the cause was as unimpeachable as honourable.  It explains why Cobbett has still a sympathetic side.  He was a mass of rough human nature; no prig or bundle of abstract formulae, like Paine and his Radical successors.  Logic with him is not in excess, but in defect.  His doctrines are hopelessly inconsistent, except so far as they represent his stubborn prejudices.  Any view will serve his purpose which can be made a weapon of offence in his multitudinous quarrels.  Cobbett, like the Radicals of the time, was frightened by the gigantic progress of the debt.  He had advocated war; but the peasant who was accustomed to reckon his income by pence, and had cried like a child when he lost the price of a red herring, was alarmed by the reckless piling up of millions of indebtedness.  In 1806 he calmly proposed to his patron Windham to put matters straight by repudiating the interest.  ’The nation must destroy the debt, or the debt will destroy the nation,’ as he argued in the Register. The proposal very likely caused the alienation of a respectable minister, though propounded with an amusing air of philosophical morality.  Cobbett’s alarm developed until it became to him a revelation of the mystery of iniquity.  His Radical friends were denouncing placemen and jobbery, and Cobbett began to perceive what was at the bottom of the evil.  The money raised to carry on the war served also to support a set of bloodsuckers, who were draining the national strength.  Already, in 1804, he was lamenting a change due to Pitt’s funding system.  The old families, he said, were giving way to ‘loanjobbers, contractors, and nabobs’; and the country people amazed to find that their new masters had been ’butchers, bakers, bottle-corkers, and old-clothesmen.’ Barings and Ricardos and their like were swallowing up the old country gentry wholesale; and in later years he reckons up, as he rides, the changes in his own neighbourhood. His affection for the old country-gentleman might be superficial; but his lamentations over the degradation of the peasantry sprang from his heart.  It was all, in his eyes, part of one process.  Paper money, he found out, was at the bottom of it all; for paper money was the outward and visible symbol of a gigantic system of corruption and jobbery.  It represented the device by which the hard-earned wages of the labourer were being somehow conjured away into the pockets of Jews and stockjobbers.  The classes which profited by this atrocious system formed what he called the ’Thing’ the huge, intricate combination of knaves which was being denounced by the Radicals though with a difference.  Cobbett could join the reformers in so far as, like them, he thought that the rotten boroughs were a vital part of the system.  He meets a miserable labourer complaining of the ‘hard times.’  The harvest had been good, but its blessings were not for the labourer.  That ‘accursed hill,’ says Cobbett, pointing to old Sarum, ’is what has robbed you of your supper.’ The labourer represented the class whose blood was being sucked.

So far, then, as the Radicals were assailing the borough-mongers, Cobbett could be their cordial ally.  Two years’ imprisonment for libel embittered his feelings.  In the distress which succeeded the peace, Cobbett’s voice was for a time loudest in the general hubbub.  He reduced the price of his Register, and his ‘two-penny trash’ reached a circulation of 25,000 or 30,000 copies.  He became a power in the land, and anticipated the immediate triumph of reform.  The day was not yet.  Sidmouth’s measures of repression frightened Cobbett to America (March 1819), where he wrote his history of the ’last hundred days of English liberty.’  He returned in a couple of years, damaged in reputation and broken in fortune; but only to carry on the war with indomitable energy, although with a recklessness and extravagance which alienated his allies and lowered his character.  He tried to cover his errors by brags and bombast, which became ridiculous, and which are yet not without significance.

Cobbett came back from America with the relics of Paine.  Paine, the object of his abuse, had become his idol, not because Cobbett cared much for any abstract political theories, or for religious dogmas.  Paine’s merit was that he had attacked paper money.  To Cobbett, as to Paine, it seemed that English banknotes were going the way of French assignats and the provincial currency of the Americans.  This became one main topic of his tirades, and represented, as he said, the ’Alpha and Omega’ of English politics.  The theory was simple.  The whole borough-mongering system depended upon the inflated currency.  Prick that bubble and the whole would collapse.  It was absolutely impossible, he said, that the nation should return to cash payments and continue to pay interest on the debt.  Should such a thing happen, he declared, he would ’give his poor body up to be broiled on one of Castlereagh’s widest-ribbed gridirons.’ The ‘gridiron prophecy’ became famous; a gridiron was for long a frontispiece to the Register; and Cobbett, far from retracting, went on proving, in the teeth of facts, that it had been fulfilled.  His inference was, not that paper should be preserved, but that the debt should be treated with a ‘sponge.’

Cobbett, therefore, was an awkward ally of political economists, whose great triumph was the resumption of cash payments, and who regarded repudiation as the deadly sin.  The burthen of the debt, meanwhile, was so great that repudiation was well within the limits of possibility. Cobbett, in their eyes, was an advocate of the grossest dishonesty, and using the basest incentives.  Cobbett fully retorted their scorn.  The economists belonged to the very class whom he most hated.  He was never tired of denouncing Scottish ‘feelosophers’; he sneers at Adam Smith, and Ricardo was to him the incarnation of the stock-jobbing interest.  Cobbett sympathised instinctively with the doctrine of the French economists that agriculture was the real source of all wealth.  He nearly accepts a phrase, erroneously attributed to Windham, ‘Perish Commerce’; and he argues that commerce was, in fact, of little use, and its monstrous extension at the bottom of all our worst evils. Nobody could be more heartily opposed to the spirit which animated the political economists and the whole class represented by them.  At times he spoke the language of modern Socialists.  He defines Capital as ’money taken from the labouring classes, which, being given to army tailors and suchlike, enables them to keep foxhounds and trace their descent from the Normans.’

The most characteristic point of his speculations is his view of the poor-laws.  Nobody could speak with more good sense and feeling of the demoralisation which they were actually producing, of the sapping of the spirit of independence, and of all the devices by which the agricultural labourer was losing the happiness enjoyed in early years.  But Cobbett’s deduction from his principles is peculiar.  ’Parson Malthus’ is perhaps the favourite object of his most virulent abuse.  ‘I have hated many men,’ he says, ‘but never any one so much as you,’ ‘I call you parson,’ he explains, ’because that word includes “boroughmonger” among other meanings, though no single word could be sufficient.’ Cobbett rages against the phrase ’redundant population.’  There would be plenty for all if the borough-mongers and stockjobbers could be annihilated, taxes abolished, and the debt repudiated.  The ordinary palliatives suggested were little to the taste of this remarkable Radical.  The man who approved bull-fighting and supported the slave-trade naturally sneered at ‘heddekashun,’ and thought savings-banks a mean device to interest the poor in the keeping up of the funds.  His remedy was always a sponge applied to the debt, and the abolition of taxes.

This leads, however, to one remarkable conclusion.  Cobbett’s attack upon the church establishment probably did more to cause alarm than any writings of the day.  For Paine’s attacks upon its creed he cared little enough.  ‘Your religion,’ said a parson to him, ’seems to be altogether political.’  It might well be, was Cobbett’s retort, since his creed was made for him by act of parliament. In fact, he cared nothing for theology, though he called himself a member of the church of England, and retained an intense dislike for Unitarians, dissenters in general, ‘saints’ as he called the Evangelical party, Scottish Presbyterians, and generally for all religious sects.  He looked at church questions solely from one point of view.  He had learned, it seems, from a passage in Ruggles’s History of the Poor, that the tithes had been originally intended to support the poor as well as the church.  Gradually, as he looked back upon the ‘good old times,’ he developed the theory expounded in his History of the Reformation.  It is a singular performance, written at the period of his most reckless exasperation (1824-27), but with his full vigour of style.  He declares in 1825 that he has sold forty-five thousand copies, and it has been often reprinted.  The purpose is to show that the Reformation was ’engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy, and cherished and fed by plunder and devastation, and by rivers of English and Irish blood.’ Briefly, it is the cause of every evil that has happened since, including ’the debt, the banks, the stockjobbers, and the American revolution.’ In proving this, Cobbett writes in the spirit of some vehement Catholic bigot, maddened by the penal laws.  Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and William III. are his monsters; the Marys of England and Scotland his ideal martyrs.  He almost apologises for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Gunpowder Plot; and, in spite of his patriotism, attributes the defeat of the Armada to a storm, for fear of praising Elizabeth.  The bitterest Ultramontane of to-day would shrink from some of this Radical’s audacious statements.  Cobbett, in spite of his extravagance, shows flashes of his usual shrewdness.  He remarks elsewhere that the true way of studying history is to examine acts of parliament and lists of prices of labour and of food; and he argues upon such grounds for the prosperity of the agricultural labourer under Edward III., ’when a dung-cart filler could get a fat goose and a half for half a day’s work.’  He makes some telling hits, as when he contrasts William of Wykeham with Brownlow North, the last bishop of Winchester.  Protestants condemned celibacy.  Well, had William been married, we should not have had Winchester school, or New College; had Brownlow North been doomed to celibacy, he would not have had ten sons and sons-in-law to share twenty-four rich livings, besides prebends and other preferments; and perhaps he would not have sold small beer from his episcopal palace at Farnham.  Cobbett’s main doctrine is that when the Catholic church flourished, the population was actually more numerous and richer, that the care of the priests and monks made pauperism impossible, and that ever since the hideous blunder perpetrated by the reformers everything has been going from bad to worse.  When it was retorted that the census proved the population to be growing, he replied that the census was a lie.  Were the facts truly stated, he declares, we should have a population of near twenty-eight million in England by the end of this century, a manifest reductio ad absurdum.  If it were remarked that there was a Catholic church in France, and that Cobbett proves his case by the superiority of the English poor to the French poor, he remarked summarily that the French laws were different.

Thus, the one monster evil is the debt, and the taxes turn out to have been a Protestant invention made necessary by the original act of plunder.  That was Cobbett’s doctrine, and, however perverse might be some of his reasonings, it was clearly to the taste of a large audience.  The poor-law was merely a partial atonement for a vast and continuous process of plunder.  Corrupt as might be its actual operation, it was a part of the poor man’s patrimony, extorted by fear from the gang of robbers who fattened upon their labours.

Cobbett’s theories need not be discussed from the logical or historical point of view.  They are the utterances of a man made unscrupulous by his desperate circumstances, fighting with boundless pugnacity, ready to strike any blow, fair or foul, so long as it will vex his enemies, and help to sell the Register.  His pugnacity alienated all his friends.  Not only did Whigs and Tories agree in condemning him, but the Utilitarians hated and despised him, and his old friends, Burnett and Hunt, were alienated from him, and reviled by him.  His actual followers were a small and insignificant remnant.  Yet Cobbett, like Owen, represented in a crude fashion blind instincts of no small importance in the coming years.  And it is especially to be noted that in one direction the philosophic Coleridge and the keen Quarterly Reviewer Southey, and the Socialist Owen and the reactionary Radical Cobbett, were more in agreement than they knew.  What alarmed them was the vast social change indicated by the industrial revolution.  In one way or another they connected all the evils of the day with the growth of commerce and manufactures, and the breaking up of the old system of domestic trade and village life. That is to say, that in a dumb and inarticulate logic, though in the loudest tones of denunciation, Tories and Socialists, and nondescript Radicals were raging against the results of the great social change, which the Utilitarians regarded as the true line of advance of the day.  This gives the deepest line of demarcation, and brings us to the political economy, which shows most fully how the case presented itself to the true Utilitarian.