Studies in Literature Part 4

Nor does the error stop at the literary sources of political theories.

A point more or less in an estimate of a writer or a book is of trivial importance compared with what strikes us as Sir Henry Maine's tendency to impute an unreal influence to writers and books altogether. There is, no doubt, a vulgar and superficial opinion that mere speculation is so remote from the real interests of men, that it is a waste of time for practical people to concern themselves about speculation. No view could be more foolish, save one; and that one is the opposite view, that the real interests of men have no influence on their speculative opinions, and no share either in moulding those opinions or in causing their adoption. Sir Henry Maine does not push things quite so far as this. Still he appears to us to attribute almost exclusive influence to political theories, and almost entirely to omit what we take to be the much more important reaction upon theory, both of human nature, and of the experience of human life and outward affairs. He makes no allowance among innovating agencies for native rationalism without a formula. His brilliant success in other applications of the Historic Method has disposed him to see survivals where other observers will be content with simpler explanations.

The reader is sometimes tempted to recall Edie Ochiltree's rude interruption of Mr. Oldbuck's enthusiasm over the praetorium of the Immortal Roman camp at Monkbarns. "Praetorian here, Praetorian there!

I mind the bigging o 't!"

Sir Henry Maine believes that the air is thick with ideas about democracy that were conceived _a priori_, and that sprung from the teaching of Rousseau. A conviction of the advantages of legislative change, for example, he considers to owe its origin much less to active and original intelligence, than to "the remote effect of words and notions derived from broken-down political theories." There are two great fountains of political theory in our country according to the author: Rousseau is one, and Bentham is the other. Current thought and speech Is infested by the floating fragments of these two systems--by loose phrases, by vague notions, by superst.i.tions, that enervate the human intellect and endanger social safety. This is the constant refrain of the pages before us. We should have liked better evidence. We do not believe that it is a Roman praetorium. Men often pick up old phrases for new events, even when they are judging events afresh with independent minds. When a politician of the day speaks of natural rights, he uses a loose traditional expression for a view of social equities which has come to him, not from a book, but from a survey of certain existing social facts. Now the phrase, the literary description, is the least significant part of the matter. When Mr.

Mill talks of the influence of Bentham's writings, he is careful to tell us that he does not mean that they caused the Reform Bill or the Appropriation Clause. "The changes which have been made," says Mill, "and the greater changes which will be made, in our inst.i.tutions are not the work of philosophers, but of the interests and instincts of large portions of society recently grown into strength"

_(Dissertations_, i. 332). That is the point. It is the action of these interests and instincts which Sir Henry Maine habitually overlooks. For is the omission a mere speculative imperfection. It has an important bearing on the whole practical drift of the book. If he had made more room for "the common intellect rough-hewing political truths at the suggestion of common wants and common experience,"

he would have viewed existing circ.u.mstances with a less lively apprehension.

It is easy to find an apposite ill.u.s.tration of what is meant by saying that this talk of the influence of speculation is enormously exaggerated and misleading. When Arthur Young was in France in the autumn of 1787, he noticed a remarkable revolution in manners in two or three important respects. One of them was a new fas.h.i.+on that had just come in, of spending some weeks in the country: everybody who had a country seat went to live there, and such as had none went to visit those who had. This new custom, observed the admirable Young, is one of the best that they have taken from England, and "its introduction was effected the easier being a.s.sisted by the magic of Rousseau's writings." The other and more generally known change was that women of the first fas.h.i.+on were no longer ashamed of nursing their own children, and that infants were no longer tightly bound round by barbarous stays and swaddling clothes. This wholesome change, too, was a.s.sisted by Rousseau's eloquent pleas for simplicity and the life natural. Of these particular results of his teaching in France a hundred years ago the evidence is ample, direct, and beyond denial.

But whenever we find gentlemen with a taste for country life, and ladies with a fancy for nursing their own children, we surely need not cry out that here is another proof of the extraordinary influence of the speculations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We need not treat it as a survival of a broken-down theory. "Great Nature is more wise than I,"

says the Poet. Great Nature had much more to do with moulding men and women to these things than all the books that have ever been printed.

We are entirely sceptical as to the proposition that "men have at all times quarrelled more fiercely about phrases and formulas than even about material interests" (p. 124). There has been a certain amount of fighting in the world about mere words, as idle as the faction fights between Caravats and Shanavests, or Two-Year-Olds and Three-Year-Olds in Ireland. But the more carefully we look into human history, the more apparent it becomes that underneath the phrase or the formula there is usually a material or a quasi-material, or a political, or a national, or an ecclesiastical interest. Few quarrels now seem so purely verbal as those which for several centuries raged about the mysteries of the faith in the Western and the Eastern Churches. Yet these quarrels, apparently as frivolous as they were ferocious, about the relations of mind and matter, about the composition of the Trinity, about the Divine nature, turned much less on futile metaphysics than on the solid compet.i.tion for ecclesiastical power, or the conflict of rival nationalities. The most transcendental heresy or orthodoxy generally had business at the bottom of it.

In limiting the parentage of Modern English Liberalism of a Radical or democratic type to Rousseau and Bentham, the author has left out of sight what is a.s.suredly a much more important factor than any speculative, literary, or philosophic matter whatever. "Englishmen,"

he says truly, "are wont to be content with the rough rule of success or failure as the test of right or wrong in national undertakings."

The same habit of mind and temper marks the att.i.tude of Englishmen towards their national inst.i.tutions. They look to success and failure, they take the measure of things from results, they consult the practical working of the machine, they will only go to school with experience. We cannot find the proof that _a priori_ Radicalism ever at any time got a real hold of any considerable ma.s.s of the people of this country, or that any of the great innovations in domestic policy since the end of Lord Liverpool's administration have been inspired or guided by Rousseauite a.s.sumptions. G.o.dwin, whose book on Political Justice was for a long time the great literary fountain of English Radicalism, owed quite as much to the utilitarian Helvetius as to the sentimental Rousseau. Nor can either William Cobbett or Joseph Hume be said to have dealt largely in _a priori_. What makes the Radical of the street is mostly mother-wit exercising itself upon the facts of the time. His weakness is that he does not know enough of the facts of other times.

Sir Henry Maine himself points to what has had a far more decisive influence on English ways of thinking about politics than his two philosophers, put together. "The American Republic," he says (p. 11), "has greatly influenced the favour into which popular government grew.

It disproved the once universal a.s.sumptions that no Republic could govern a large territory, and that no strictly Republican government could be stable." Nothing can be more true. When Burke and Chatham and Fox persistently declared that the victory of England over the colonists would prove fatal in the long run to the liberties of England itself, those great men were even wiser than they knew.

The success of popular government across the Atlantic has been the strongest incentive to the extension of popular government here.

We need go no further back than the Reform Bill of 1867 to remind ourselves that the victory of the North over the South, and the extraordinary clemency and good sense with which that victory was used, had more to do with the concession of the franchise to householders in boroughs than all the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone and all the diplomacies of Mr. Disraeli.

To the influence of the American Union must be added that of the British colonies. The success of popular self-government in these thriving communities is reacting on political opinion at home with a force that no statesman neglects, and that is every day increasing.

There is even a danger that the influence may go too far. They are solving some of our problems, but not under our conditions, and not in presence of the same difficulties. Still the effect of colonial prosperity--a prosperity alike of admirable achievement and boundless promise--is irresistible. It imparts a freedom, an elasticity, an expansiveness, to English political notions, and gives our people a confidence in free inst.i.tutions and popular government, which they would never have drawn from the most eloquent a.s.sumptions of speculative system-mongers, nor from any other source whatever, save practical experience carefully observed and rationally interpreted.

This native and independent rationality in men is what the jealous votary of the historic method places far too low.

In coming closer to the main current of the book, our first disappointment is that Sir Henry Maine has not been very careful to do full justice to the views that he criticises. He is not altogether above lending himself to the hearsay of the partisan. He allows expressions to slip from him which show that he has not been anxious to face the problems of popular government as popular government is understood by those who have best right to speak for it. "The more the difficulties of mult.i.tudinous government are probed," he says (p.

180), "the stronger grows the doubt of the infallibility of popularly elected legislatures." We do not profess to answer for all that may have been said by Mr. Bancroft, or Walt Whitman, or all the orators of all the Fourths of July since American Independence. But we are not acquainted with any English writer or politician of the very slightest consideration or responsibility who has committed himself to the astounding proposition, that popularly elected legislatures are infallible. Who has ever advanced such a doctrine? Further, "It requires some attention to facts to see how widely spread is the misgiving as to the absolute wisdom of popularly elected chambers." We are not surprised at the misgiving. But after reasonable attention to facts, we cannot recall any publicist, whom it could be worth while to spend five minutes in refuting, who has ever said that popularly elected chambers are absolutely wise. Again, we should like the evidence for the statement that popularly elected Houses "do not nowadays appeal to the wise deduction from experience, as old as Aristotle, which no student of const.i.tutional history will deny, that the best const.i.tutions are those in which there is a large popular element. It is a singular proof of the widespread influence of the speculations of Rousseau that although very few First Chambers really represent the entire community, nevertheless in Europe they almost invariably claim to reflect it, and as a consequence they a.s.sume an air of divinity, which if it rightfully belonged to them would be fatal to all argument for a Second Chamber." That would be very important If it were true. But is it true that First Chambers a.s.sume an air of divinity? Or is such an expression a "burlesque of the real argument?" A reasonable familiarity with the course of the controversy in France, where the discussion has been abundant, and in England, where it has been comparatively meagre, leaves me, for one, entirely ignorant that this claim for divinity, or anything like it, is ever heard in the debate. The most powerful modern champion of popular government was Gambetta. Did Gambetta consider First Chambers divine?

On the contrary, some of the most strenuous pleas for the necessity of a Second Chamber are to be found precisely in the speeches of Gambetta (_e.g._ his speech at Gren.o.ble, in the autumn of 1878, _Discours_ viii. 270, etc.). Abstract thinking is thinking withdrawn from the concrete and particular facts. But the abstract thinker should not withdraw too far.

Sir Henry Maine speaks (p. 185) of "the saner political theorist, who holds that in secular matters it is better to walk by sight than by faith." He allows that a theorist of this kind, as regards popularly elected chambers, "will be satisfied that experience has shown the best Const.i.tutions to be those in which the popular element is large, and he will readily admit that, as the structure of each society of men slowly alters, it is well to alter and amend the organisation by which this element makes itself felt." Sir Henry Maine would surely have done better service in this grave and difficult discussion, if he had dealt with views which he mistrusts, as they are really held and expressed by sane theorists, and not by insane theorists out of sight.

In France, a hundred years ago, from causes that are capable of explanation, the democracy of sentiment swept away the democracy of utility. In spite of casual phrases in public discussion, and in spite of the incendiary trash of Red journalists without influence, it is the democracy of reason, experience, and utility that is now in the ascendant, both in France and elsewhere.

The same spirit of what we must call parody is shown in such a statement as that (p. 78) "an audience composed of roughs or clowns is boldly told by an educated man that it has more political information than an equal number of scholars." By "roughs" Sir Henry Maine explains that he means the artisans of the towns. The designation is hardly felicitous. It is not even fas.h.i.+onable; for the roughs and clowns are now by common consent of Tories and Liberals alike transformed into capable citizens. Such a phrase gives us a painful glimpse of the accurate knowledge of their countrymen that is possessed by eminent men who write about them from the dim and distant seclusion of college libraries and official bureaux. If Sir Henry Maine could spare a few evenings from dispa.s.sionate meditations on popular government in the abstract, to the inspection of the governing people in the concrete, he would be the first to see that to dispatch an audience of skilled artisans as an a.s.sembly of roughs is as unscientific, to use the mildest word, as the habit in a certain religious world of lumping all the unconverted races of the earth in every clime and age in the summary phrase, the heathen. A great meeting of artisans listening to Mr. Arthur Balfour or Sir Henry Roscoe at Manchester, to Sir Lyon Playfair at Leeds (the modern democrat, at any rate, does not think the Republic has no need of chemists), or to anybody else in a great industrial centre anywhere else, is no more an a.s.semblage of roughs than Convocation or the House of Lords. Decidedly, an enemy of the unverified a.s.sumptions of democracy ought to be on his guard against the unverified a.s.sumptions of pedantocracy.

As for the particular bit of sycophancy which educated men wickedly dangle before roughs and clowns, we should like to be sure that the proposition is correctly reported. If the educated man tells his roughs (if that be the right name for the most skilful, industrious, and effective handicraftsmen in the world) that they have as much of the information necessary for shaping a sound judgment on the political issues submitted to them, as an equal number of average Masters of Arts and Doctors of Laws, then we should say that the educated man, unless he has been very unlucky with his audience, is perfectly right. He proves that his education has not confined itself to books, bureaux, and an exclusive society, but has been carried on in the bracing air of common life. I will not add anything of my own on this point, because any candidate or member of Parliament is suspect, but I will venture to transcribe a page or so from Mr.

Frederic Harrison. Mr. Harrison's intellectual equipment is not inferior to that of Sir Henry Maine himself; and he has long had close and responsible contact with the cla.s.s of men of whom he is speaking, which cannot be quite a disqualification after all.

"No worse nonsense is talked than what we are told as to the requisites for the elective franchise. To listen to some people, it is almost as solemn a function as to be a trustee of the British Museum. What you want in a body of electors is a rough, shrewd eye for men of character, honesty, and purpose. Very plain men know who wish them well, and the sort of thing which will bring them good. Electors have not got to govern the country; they have only to find a set of men who will see that the Government is just and active.... All things go best by comparison, and a body of men may be as good voters as their neighbours without basing the type of the Christian hero.

"So far from, being the least fit for political influence of all cla.s.ses in the community, the best part of the working cla.s.s forms the most fit of all others. If any section of the people is to be the paramount arbiter in public affairs, the only section competent for this duty is the superior order of workmen.

Governing is one thing; but electors of any cla.s.s cannot or ought not to govern. Electing, or the giving an indirect approval of Government, is another thing, and demands wholly different qualities. These are moral, not intellectual; practical, not special gifts--gifts of a very plain and almost universal order.

Such are, firstly, social sympathies and sense of justice; then openness and plainness of character; lastly, habits of action, and a practical knowledge of social misery. These are the qualities which fit men to be the arbiters or ultimate source (though certainly not the instruments) of political power. These qualities the best working men possess in a far higher degree than any other portion of the community; indeed, they are almost the only part of the community which possesses them in any perceptible degree."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Order and Progress_, pp. 149-54, and again at p. 174.]

The worst of it is that, if Sir Henry Maine is right, we have no more to hope from other cla.s.ses than from roughs and clowns. He can discern no blue sky in any quarter. "In politics," he says, "the most powerful of all causes is the timidity, the listlessness, and the superficiality of the generality of minds" (p. 73). This is carrying criticism of democracy into an indictment against human nature. What is to become of us, thus placed between the devil of mob ignorance and corruption, and the deep sea of genteel listlessness and superficiality? After all, Sir Henry Maine is only repeating in more sober tones the querulous remonstrances with which we are so familiar on the lips of Ultramontanes and Legitimists. A less timid observer of contemporary events, certainly in the land that all of us know best and love best, would judge that, when it comes to a pinch, Liberals are still pa.s.sably prudent, and Conservatives quite sufficiently wide-awake.

Another of the pa.s.sages in Sir Henry Maine's book, that savours rather of the party caricaturist than of the "dispa.s.sionate student of politics," is the following:--

"There is some resemblance between the period of political reform in the nineteenth century and the period of religious reformation in the sixteenth. Now as then the mult.i.tude of followers must be distinguished from the smaller group of leaders. Now as then there are a certain number of zealots who desire that truth shall prevail.... But behind these, now as then, there is a crowd which has imbibed a delight in change for its own sake, who would reform the Suffrage, or the House of Lords, or the Land Laws, or the Union with Ireland, in precisely the same spirit in which the mob behind the reformers of religion broke the nose of a saint in stone, made a bonfire of copes and surplices, or shouted for the government of the Church by presbyteries" (p. 130).

We should wish to look at this remarkable picture a little more closely. That there exist Anabaptists in the varied hosts of the English reformers is true. The feats of the Social Democrats, however, at the recent election hardly convince us that they have very formidable mult.i.tudes behind them. Nor is it they who concern themselves with such innovations as those which Sir Henry Maine specifies. The Social Democrats, even of the least red shade, go a long way beyond and below such trifles as Suffrage or the Upper House.

To say of the crowd who do concern themselves with reform of the Suffrage, or the Land Laws, or the House of Lords, or the Union with Ireland, that they are animated by a delight in change for its own sake, apart from the respectable desire to apply a practical remedy to a practical inconvenience, is to show a rather highflying disregard of easily ascertainable facts. The Crowd listen with interest to talk about altering the Land Laws, because they suspect the English land system to have something to do with the unprosperous condition of the landlord, the farmer, and the labourer; with the depopulation of the country and the congestion in the towns; with the bad housing of the poor, and with various other evils which they suppose themselves to see staring them daily in the face. They may be entirely mistaken alike In their estimate of mischief and their hope of mitigation. But they are not moved by delight in change for its own sake. When the Crowd sympathises with disapproval of the House of Lords, it is because the legislative performances of that body are believed to have impeded useful reforms in the past, to be impeding them now, and to be likely to impede them in the future. This may be a sad misreading of the history of the last fifty years, and a painfully prejudiced antic.i.p.ation of the next fifty. At any rate, it is in intention a solid and practical appeal to experience and results, and has no affinity to a restless love of change for the sake of change. No doubt, in the progress of the controversy, the a.s.sailants of the House of Lords attack the principle of birth. But the principle of birth is not attacked from the _a priori_ point of view. The whole force of the attack lies in what is taken to be the attested fact that the principle of a hereditary chamber supervising an elective chamber has worked, is working, and will go on working, inconveniently, stupidly, and dangerously. Finally, there is the question of the Irish Union. Is it the English or Scottish Crowd that is charged with a wanton desire to recast the Union? n.o.body knows much about the matter who is not perfectly aware that the English statesman, whoever he may be, who undertakes the inevitable task of dealing with the demand for Home Rule, will have to make his case very plain indeed in order to make the cause popular here. Then is it the Irish Crowd? Sir Henry Maine, of all men, is not likely to believe that a sentiment which the wisest people of all parties in Ireland for a hundred years have known to lie in the depths of the mind of the great bulk of the Irish population, to whom we have now for the first time given the chance of declaring their wishes, is no more than a gratuitous and superficial pa.s.sion for change for its own sake. The sentiment of Irish nationality may or may not be able to justify itself in the eye of prudential reason, and English statesmen may or may not have been wise in inviting it to explode. Those are different questions. But Sir Henry Maine himself admits in another connection (p. 83) that "vague and shadowy as are the recommendations of what is called a Nationality, a State founded on this principle has generally one real practical advantage, through its obliteration of small tyrannies and local oppressions." It is not to be denied that it is exactly the expectation of this very practical advantage that has given its new vitality to the Irish National movement which seems now once more, for good or for evil, to have come to a head. When it is looked into, then, the case against the mult.i.tudes who are as senselessly eager to change inst.i.tutions as other mult.i.tudes once were to break off the noses of saints in stone, falls to pieces at every point.

Among other vices ascribed to democracy, we are told that it is against science, and that "even in our day vaccination is in the utmost danger" (p. 98). The instance is for various reasons not a happy one. It is not even precisely stated. I have never understood that vaccination is in much danger. Compulsory vaccination is perhaps in danger. But compulsion, as a matter of fact, was strengthened as the franchise went lower. It is a comparative novelty in English legislation (1853), and as a piece of effectively enforced administration it is more novel still (1871). I admit, however, that it is not endured in the United States; and only two or three years ago it was rejected by an overwhelming majority on an appeal to the popular vote in the Swiss Confederation. Obligatory vaccination may therefore one day disappear from our statute book, if democracy has anything to do with it. But then the obligation to practise a medical rite may be inexpedient, in spite of the virtues of the rite itself.

That is not all. Sir Henry Maine will admit that Mr. Herbert Spencer is not against science, and he expresses in the present volume his admiration for Mr. Spencer's work on _Man and the State_. Mr. Spencer is the resolute opponent of compulsory vaccination, and a resolute denier, moreover, of the pretension that the evidence for the advantages of vaccination takes such account of the ulterior effects in the system as to amount to a scientific demonstration. Therefore, if science demands compulsory vaccination, democracy in rejecting the demand, and even if it went further, is at least kept in countenance by some of those who are of the very household of science. The ill.u.s.tration is hardly impressive enough for the proposition that it supports.

Another and a far more momentous ill.u.s.tration occurs on another page (37). A very little consideration is enough to show that it will by no means bear Sir Henry Maine's construction. "There is, in fact," he says, "just enough evidence to show that even now there is a marked antagonism between democratic opinion and scientific truth as applied to human societies. The central seat in all Political Economy was from the first occupied by the theory of Population. This theory ... has become the central truth of biological science. Yet it is evidently disliked by the mult.i.tude and those whom the mult.i.tude permits to lead it."

Sir Henry Maine goes on to say that it has long been intensely unpopular in France, and this, I confess, is a surprise to me. It has usually been supposed that a prudential limitation of families is rooted in the minds and habits of nearly, though not quite, all cla.s.ses of the French nation. An excellent work on France, written by a sound English observer seven or eight years ago, chances to be lying before me at the moment, and here is a pa.s.sage taken almost at random.

"The opinions of thoughtful men seem to tend towards the wish to introduce into France some of that improvidence which allows English people to bring large families into the world without first securing the means of keeping them, and which has peopled the continent of North America and the Australian colonies with an English-speaking race" (Richardson's _Corn and Cattle Producing Districts of France_, p. 47, etc.). Surely this is a well-established fact. It is possible that denunciations of Malthus may occasionally be found both in Clerical and Socialistic prints, but then there are reasons for that.

It can hardly be made much of a charge against French democracy that it tolerates unscientific opinion, so long as it cultivates scientific practice.

As for our own country, and those whom the mult.i.tude permits to lead it, we cannot forget that by far the most popular and powerful man _in faece Romuli_--as Sir Henry Maine insists on our putting it in that polite way--was tried and condemned not many years ago for publis.h.i.+ng a certain pamphlet which made a limitation of population the very starting-point of social reform. It is not necessary to p.r.o.nounce an opinion on the particular counsels of the pamphlet, but the motives which prompted its circulation (motives admitted to be respectable by the Chief-Justice who tried the case), and the extraordinary reception of the pamphlet by the serious portion of the workmen of the towns, would make a careful writer think twice before feeling sure that popular bodies will never listen to the truth about population. No doubt, as Sir Henry Maine says in the same place, certain cla.s.ses now resist schemes for relieving distress by emigration. But there is a pretty obvious reason for that. That reason is not mere aversion to face the common sense of the relations between population and subsistence, but a growing suspicion--as to the reasonableness of which, again, I give no opinion--that emigration is made into an easy and slovenly subst.i.tute for a scientific reform in our system of holding and using land. In the case of Ireland, other political considerations must be added.

Democracy will be against science, we admit, in one contingency: if it loses the battle with the Ultramontane Church. The worst enemy of science is also the bitterest enemy of democracy, _c'est le clericalisme_. The interests of science and the interests of democracy are one. Let us take a case. Suppose that popular Government in France were to succ.u.mb, a military or any other more popular Government would be forced to lean on Ultramontanes. Ultramontanes would gather the spoils of democratic defeat. Sir Henry Maine is much too well informed to think that a clerical triumph would be good for science, whatever else it might be good for. Then are not propositions about democracy being against science very idle and a little untrue? "Modern politics," said a wise man (Pattison, _Sermons_, p. 191) "resolve themselves into the struggle between knowledge and tradition."

Democracy is hardly on the side of tradition.

We have dwelt on these secondary matters, because they show that the author hardly brings to the study of modern democracy the ripe preparation of detail which he gave to ancient law. In the larger field of his speculation, the value of his thought is seriously impaired by the absence of anything like a philosophy of society as a whole. n.o.body who has studied Burke, or Comte, or Mill--I am not sure whether we should not add even De Maistre--can imagine any of them as setting to work on a general political speculation without reference to particular social conditions. They would have conducted the inquiry in strict relation to the stage at which a community happened to be, in matters lying outside of the direct scope of political government.

So, before all other living thinkers, should we have expected Sir Henry Maine to do. It is obvious that systems of government, called by the same name, bearing the same superficial marks, founded and maintained on the same nominal principles, framed in the same verbal forms, may yet work with infinite diversity of operation, according to the variety of social circ.u.mstances around them. Yet it is here inferred that democracy in England must be fragile, difficult, and sundry other evil things, because out of fourteen Presidents of the Bolivian Republic thirteen have died a.s.sa.s.sinated or in exile. If England and Bolivia were at all akin in history, religion, race, industry, the fate of Bolivian Presidents would be more instructive to English Premiers.

One of the propositions which Sir Henry Maine is most anxious to bring home to his readers is that Democracy, in the extreme form to which it tends, is of all kinds of government by far the most difficult.

He even goes so far as to say (p. 87) that, while not denying to Democracies some portion of the advantage which Bentham claimed for them, and "putting this advantage at the highest, it is _more than compensated_ by one great disadvantage," namely, its difficulty. This generalisation is repeated with an emphasis that surprises us, for two reasons. In the first place, if the proposition could be proved to be true, we fail to see that it would be particularly effective in its practical bearings. Everybody whose opinions are worth consideration, and everybody who has ever come near the machinery of democratic government, is only too well aware that whether it be far the most difficult form of government or not, it is certainly difficult enough to tax the powers of statesmans.h.i.+p to the very uttermost. Is not that enough? Is anything gained by pressing us further than that? "Better be a poor fisherman," said Danton as he walked in the last hours of his life on the banks of the Aube, "better be a poor fisherman, than meddle with the governing of men." We wonder whether there has been a single democratic leader either in France or England who has not incessantly felt the full force of Danton's e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n. There may, indeed, be simpletons in the political world who dream that if only the system of government were made still more popular, all would be plain sailing. But then Sir Henry Maine is not the man to write for simpletons.

The first reason, then, for surprise at the immense stress laid by the author on the proposition about the difficulty of popular government is that it would not be of the first order of importance if it were true. Our second reason is that it cannot be shown to be true.

You cannot measure the relative difficulty of diverse systems of government. Governments are things of far too great complexity for precise quantification of this sort. Will anybody, for example, read through the second volume of the excellent work of M. Leroy-Beaulieu on the Empire of the Czars (1882), and then be prepared to maintain that democracy is more difficult than autocracy? It would be interesting, too, to know whether the Prince on whose shoulders will one day be laid the burden of the German Empire will read the dissertation on the unparalleled difficulties of democracy with acquiescence. There are many questions, of which the terms are no sooner stated than we at once see that a certain and definite answer to them is impossible. The controversy as to the relative fragility, or the relative difficulty, of popular government and other forms of government, appears to be a controversy of this kind. We cannot decide it until we have weighed, measured, sifted, and tested a great ma.s.s of heterogeneous facts; and then, supposing the process to have been ever so skilfully and laboriously performed, no proposition could be established as the outcome, that would be an adequate reward for the pains of the operation.

This, we venture to think, must be p.r.o.nounced a grave drawback to the value of the author's present speculation. He attaches an altogether excessive and unscientific importance to form. It would be unreasonable to deny to a writer on democracy as a form of government the right of isolating his phenomenon. But it is much more unreasonable to predicate fragility, difficulty, or anything else of a particular form of government, without reference to other conditions which happen to go along with it in a given society at a given time.

None of the properties of popular government are independent of surrounding circ.u.mstances, social, economic, religious, and historic.

All the conditions are bound up together in a closely interdependent connection, and are not secondary to, or derivative from, the mere form of government. It is, if not impossible, at least highly unsafe to draw inferences about forms of government in universals.

No writer seems to us to approach Machiavelli in the acuteness with which he pushes behind mere political names, and pa.s.ses on to the real differences that may exist in movements and inst.i.tutions that are covered by the same designation. Nothing in its own way can be more admirable, for instance, than his reflections on the differences between democracy at Florence and democracy in old Rome--how the first began in great inequality of conditions, and ended in great equality, while the process was reversed in the second; how at Rome the people and the n.o.bles shared power and office, while at Florence the victors crushed and ruined their adversaries; how at Rome the people, by common service with the n.o.bles, acquired some of their virtues, while at Florence the n.o.bles were forced down to seem, as well as to be, like the common people (_Istorie Fiorentine_, bk. iii).

This is only an example of the distinctions and qualifications which it is necessary to introduce before we can prudently affirm or deny anything about political inst.i.tutions in general terms. Who would deny that both the stability and the degree of difficulty of popular government are closely connected in the United States with the abundance of accessible land? Who would deny that in Great Britain they are closely connected with the greater or less prosperity of our commerce and manufactures? To take another kind of ill.u.s.tration from Mr. Dicey's brilliant and instructive volume on the Law of the Const.i.tution. The governments of England and of France are both of them popular in form; but does not a fundamental difference in their whole spirit and working result from the existence in one country of the _droit administratif_, and the absolute predominance in the other of regular law, applied by the ordinary courts, and extending equally over all cla.s.ses of citizens? Distinctions and differences of this order go for nothing in the pages before us; yet they are vital to the discussion.

The same fallacious limitation, the same exclusion of the many various causes that cooperate in the production of political results, is to be discerned in nearly every argument. The author justly calls attention to the extraordinary good luck which has befallen us as a nation. He proceeds to warn us that if the desire for legislative innovation be allowed to grow upon us at its present pace--pace a.s.sumed to be very headlong indeed--the chances are that our luck will not last. We shall have a disaster like Sedan, or the loss of Alsace Lorraine (p. 151).

This is a curiously narrow reading of contemporary history. Did Austria lose Sadowa, or was the French Empire ruined at Sedan, in consequence of the pa.s.sion of either of those Governments for legislative innovations; or must we not rather, in order to explain these striking events, look to a large array of military, geographical, financial, diplomatic, and dynastic considerations and conditions? If so, what becomes of the moral? England is, no doubt, the one great civilised power that has escaped an organic or structural change within the last five-and-twenty years. Within that period, the American Union, after a tremendous war, has revolutionised the social inst.i.tutions of the South, and reconstructed the const.i.tution. The French Empire has foundered, and a French Republic once more bears the fortunes of a great State over troubled waters.

Germany has undergone a complete transformation; so has the Italian peninsula. The internal and the external relations alike of the Austrian Power are utterly different to-day from what they were twenty years ago. Spain has pa.s.sed from monarchy to republic, and back to monarchy again, and gone from dynasty to dynasty. But what share had legislative innovation in producing these great changes? No share at all in any one case. What is the logic, then, of the warning that if we persist in our taste for legislative innovation, we shall lose our immunity from the violent changes that have overtaken other States--changes with which legislative innovation had nothing to do?

In short, modern societies, whether autocratic or democratic, are pa.s.sing through a great transformation, social, religious, and political. The process is full of embarra.s.sments, difficulties, and perils. These are the dominant marks of our era. To set them all down to popular government is as narrow, as confused, and as unintelligent as the imputation in a papal Encyclical of all modern ills to Liberalism. You cannot isolate government, and judge it apart from the other and deeper forces of the time. Western civilisation is slowly entering on a new stage. Form of government is the smallest part of it. It has been well said that those nations have the best chance of escaping a catastrophe in the obscure and uncertain march before us, who find a way of opening the most liberal career to the aspirations of the present, without too rudely breaking with all the traditions of the past. This is what popular government, wisely guided, is best able to do.

But will wise guidance be endured? Sir Henry Maine seems to think that it will not. Mill thought that it would. In a singularly luminous pa.s.sage in an essay which for some reason or another he never republished, Mill says--

"We are the last persons to undervalue the power of moral convictions. But the convictions of the ma.s.s of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or their cla.s.s feelings. _We have a strong faith, stronger than either politicians or philosophers generally have, in the influence of reason and virtue over men's minds_; but it is in that of the reason and virtue of their own side of the question. We expect few conversions by the mere force of reason from one creed to the other. Men's intellects and hearts have a large share in determining what _sort_ of Conservatives or Liberals they will be; but it is their position (saving individual exceptions) which makes them Conservatives or Liberals."

This double truth points to the good grounds that exist why we should think hopefully of popular government, and why we should be slow to believe that it has no better foundation to build upon than the unreal a.s.sumptions of some bad philosophers, French or others.