The Evolution of States Part 51
FROM THE RESTORATION TO ANNE
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The broad outcome of the monarchic restoration under Charles II is the intensifying of the royalist sentiment by way of reaction from the Rebellion and the autocracy of the Protector. It has been held that had Richard Cromwell had the energy of his father he might easily have maintained his position, so quietly was his accession at first accepted; and no doubt his irresolution made much of the difference between success and failure; but nothing can be clearer than the leaning of the ma.s.s of the people to the "lawful" dynasty. It is a proof of Cromwell's complete dislocation of the old state of touch between the official cla.s.ses and the public,[1145] that the army leaders had no misgivings when they commenced to intrigue against Richard, and that Monk was so slow to declare for the king when the event showed how immense was the royalist preponderance. During the Rebellion, London, led by the Puritans, had dominated the country; under the Protectorate, town and country were alike dominated by a selected official and military cla.s.s, representing a minority with military force to impose its rule. As soon as this cla.s.s began to disrupt in factions, the released play of common sentiment began to carry all forward on a broad tide towards a Restoration; the only footing on which the English people could yet unite being one of tradition and superst.i.tion. The anarchy of a State still unfitted for republican government had before brought about the Protectorate: it now led back to the monarchy. And that the new monarchy did not become as absolute as the contemporary rule of Louis XIV was solely owing to the accident of the later adhesion of the restored dynasty to the Church of Rome, which the ma.s.s of the people feared more than they did even the prospect of another Civil War. It was the memory of the Fronde that enabled Louis to override the remains of the French const.i.tution and set up an autocracy; and the same force was now at work in England. It was the memory of the Civil War that made the people so much more forbearing with the new king, when his private adhesion to the Catholic Church became generally suspected,[1146] than their fathers had been with his father. By temperament and from experience they were disposed to do anything for the throne; but the general fear of Popery on the one hand, and the special royalist aversion to the Puritan sects on the other, plunged the State into a new ferment of ecclesiastical politics, the strifes of which so far absorbed the general energy that ill-luck in the commercial wars with Holland seems to have been almost a necessary result, even had the king ruled well. Not that the generation of Charles II was a whit less bent on dominion and acquisition than the decade of the Protectorate.
In this new situation, under a king too little devoted to his trade to choose really sagacious courses, but too shrewd to ruin himself, occur the beginnings of parliamentary statesmanship, in the modern sense of government in harmony with the Crown. The powerful administration of Strafford had been a matter of helping the Crown to resist Parliament.
The very capable though unforeseeing statesmanship of the Pyms and Hampdens of the Long Parliament, again, was a matter of resisting the Crown; and with Shaftesbury such resistance recurred; but the indolence of the king, joined with his sense of the dangers of the old favouritism, gave rise to the principle of Ministerial Government before partisan Cabinets had come into existence. Clarendon had in him much of the const.i.tutionalist temper. Shaftesbury, however, was better qualified both by training and parts for the task of statesmanship in a stormy and unscrupulous generation. Read dispa.s.sionately, his story is seen to be in the main what his careful vindicator would make it--that of a man of average moral quality, with exceptional energy and resource. The legend of his wickedness[1147] is somewhat puzzling, in view of his staunch hostility to Romanism, and of his political superiority to the famous Deist statesman of the next generation, Bolingbroke, who has been so little blackened in comparison. A reasonable explanation is that Shaftesbury was d.a.m.ned by the Church for resisting the king, while Bolingbroke's services to the Church covered his mult.i.tude of sins. But the idle rumours of Shaftesbury's debauchery[1148] apparently damaged him with the Protestant Dissenters, and his wickedly reckless policy over the Popish Plot might easily secure him a share in the infamy which is the sole a.s.sociation of the name of t.i.tus Oates. Here also, however, he has been calumniated. Burnet, though plainly disliking him, says nothing of debauchery in his life, and declined to believe, when Charles suggested it, that he had any part in trumping up the falsehoods about the Plot.[1149]
There can be no reasonable doubt that Shaftesbury honestly believed there was a great danger of the re-establishment of Popery, and it is not at all improbable that he credited some of the tales told, as Lord Russell solemnly testified at the scaffold that he for his part had done. To acquit Russell and criminate Shaftesbury is possible only to those who have made up their minds before trying the case. It is practically certain, moreover, that some vague Catholic plotting really did take place;[1150] and in the then posture of affairs nothing was more likely. Shaftesbury, like the other capable statesmen of the Restoration, was in favour of toleration of the Dissenters; but like all other Protestant statesmen of the age, he thought it impossible to tolerate Catholicism. Nor can it well be doubted that had Charles or James been able to establish the Roman system, it would have gone hard with Protestantism. It is true that the only exhibition thus far of the spirit of tolerance in Protestant and Catholic affairs in France and England had been on the part of Richelieu towards the Huguenots, themselves intensely intolerant; but it could not reasonably be supposed that an English Catholic king or statesman, once well fixed in power, would have the wisdom or forbearance of Richelieu. The two systems, in fine, aimed at each other's annihilation; and Shaftesbury simply acted, politically that is, as the men of the First Rebellion would have done in similar circ.u.mstances. Instead of dismissing him as a mere scoundrel, we are led to realise how imperfectly moralised were all the men of his age in matters of religion and racial enmity. The friend of Locke can hardly have been a rascal.
For the rest, he was admitted even by the malicious and declamatory Dryden to have been a just Chancellor; it is proved that he opposed the Stop of the Exchequer; and he sharply resisted the rapacity of the royal concubines. In his earlier policy towards Holland he conformed odiously enough to the ordinary moral standard of the time[1151] in politics, a standard little improved upon in the time of Palmerston, and not discarded by those Englishmen who continue to talk of Russia as England's natural enemy, or by those who speak of Germany as a trade rival that must be fought to a finish. His changes of side between the outbreak of the Rebellion and his death, while showing the moral and intellectual instability of the period, were not dishonourable, and are not for a moment to be compared with those of Dryden, most unstable of all men of genius, whose unscrupulous but admirably artistic portrait of the statesman has doubtless gone far to keep Shaftesbury's name in disesteem. It may be, again, that his sufficient wealth takes away somewhat from the merit of his steadfast refusal of French bribes; but the fact should be kept in mind,[1152] as against the other fact that not only the king and some of the Opposition but Algernon Sidney took them.[1153] On the whole, Shaftesbury was the most tolerable of the Ministers of his day, though his animus against Catholicism made him grossly unscrupulous toward individual Catholics; and his miscalculation of possibilities, in clinging to the scheme of giving Monmouth the succession, finally wrecked his career. He had almost no alternative, placed and principled as he was, save to call in the Prince of Orange; and this would really have been at that moment no more feasible a course than it was to declare Monmouth the heir, besides being more hazardous, in that William was visibly less easy to lead. Of Shaftesbury, Burnet admits that "his strength lay in the knowledge of England"; and when he took a fatal course, it was because the whole situation was desperate.
His fall measures not so much the capacity of Charles as the force which the royalist superst.i.tion had gathered.
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This growth can be traced in the clerical literature of the time. The conception of a "divine right" inhering in kings by heredity--a conception arising naturally as part of the general ethic of feudal inheritance--had been emphasised on the Protestant side in England[1154]
by way of express resistance to the Papacy, which from the time of Gregory VII had been wont in its strifes with emperors and kings to deny their divine right and to a.s.sert its own, formally founding the latter, however, on the "natural" right inherent in ma.s.ses of men to choose their own rulers, even as the citizens of Rome had been wont to elect the Popes.[1155] The total effect of the English Rebellion was to give an immense stimulus to the high monarchic view, not now as against the Papacy, but as against Parliament. When the learned Usher drew up at the request of Charles I his treatise[1156] on _The Power communicated by G.o.d to the Prince, and the Obedience required of the Subject_, he proceeded almost wholly on arguments from the Scriptures and the Fathers; not that there were not already many deliverances from modern authorities on the point, but that these evidently had not entered into the ordinary stock of opinion. On the papal side, from Thomas Aquinas[1157] onwards, the negative view had been carefully set forth, not merely as a papal claim, but also as an obvious affirmation of the ancient "law of nature." Thus the Spanish Jesuit Suarez (1548-1617) had in his _Tractatus de Legibus_, while deriving all law from the will of G.o.d, expressly rejected the doctrine that the power of rule inheres by succession in single princes. Such power, he declared, "by its very nature, belongs to no one man, but to a mult.i.tude of men,"[1158] adding a refutation of the patriarchal theory which "might have caused our English divines to blush before the Jesuit of Granada."[1159] At the beginning of the seventeenth century, again, while leading Englishmen were affirming divine right, the German Protestant Althusius, Professor of Law at Herborn, publishing his _Politica methodice digesta_ (1603), declares in a dedication to the States of Friesland that the supreme power lies in the people.[1160] Hooker, too, had stamped the principle of "consent" with his authority, very much as did Suarez.[1161]
But the compiler of _The History of Pa.s.sive Obedience since the Reformation_,[1162] after showing that the tenet[1163] had been held by dozens of Protestant divines and jurists after the Reformation, and even strongly affirmed by Nonconformists, is able to cite nearly as many a.s.sertions of it in the reign of Charles II as in the whole preceding period. The clergy were, indeed, able to show that the principle of non-resistance had been a common doctrine up to the Great Rebellion; and, though the contrary view was on the whole more common,[1164] it well ill.u.s.trates the instinctive character of political movement that the democratic doctrine had followed the course of action step by step, and not preceded it. There had been resistance before the right to resist was formulated in the schools. And Bishop Guthry records that at the General a.s.sembly in Edinburgh in January, 1645, "everyone had in his hand that book lately published by Mr. Samuel Rutherford, ent.i.tled _Lex Rex_, which was stuffed with positions that in the time of peace and order would have been judged d.a.m.nable treasons; yet were now so idolised that, whereas in the beginning of the work Buchanan's treatise, _De Jure Regni apud Scotos_, was looked upon as an oracle, this coming forth, it was slighted as not anti-monarchical enough, and Rutherford's _Lex Rex_ only thought authentic."[1165] So Milton's answer to Salmasius, vindicating the right of rebellion as inherent in freemen, marks the high tide of feeling that sustained the foremost regicides. But in the nature of the case the feeling swung as far the other way when they had touched their extreme limit of action; and when the royalist cause came in the ascendant, the monarchical principle was perhaps more pa.s.sionately cherished in England than in any of the other European States.[1166] How it normally worked may be seen in Dryden's sycophantic dedication[1167] of his _All for Love_ to Lord Danby (1678), sinking as it does to the extravagant baseness of the declaration that "every remonstrance of private men has the seed of treason in it." It was in this very year that Charles and Danby made the secret treaty with France, the revelation of which by Louis soon afterwards brought Danby to the Tower; and Danby it was who three years before carried through the House of Lords a bill to make all placemen declare on oath that they considered all resistance to the king unlawful.
The handful of remaining republicans and political Liberals, appealing as they did to tradition in their treatises against the traditional pleadings of the Churchmen and royalists, could have no appreciable influence on the public, because the mere spirit of tradition, when not appealed to as the sanction of a living movement of resistance, must needs make for pa.s.sivity. Algernon Sidney's posthumous folio on Government in answer to Filmer's _Patriarcha_, arguing the question of self-government _versus_ divine right, and going over all the ground from Nimrod downwards, point by point, is a far greater performance than Filmer's; and Locke in turn brought a still greater power of a.n.a.lysis to bear on the same refutation; but it is easy to see that Filmer's is the more readable book, and that with its straightforward dogmatism it would most readily convince the average Englishman. Nor was the philosophy all on one side, though Filmer has ten absurdities for the other's one, and was so unguarded as to commit himself to the doctrine that the possession of power gives divine right, no matter how come by. Sidney himself always argued that "Vertue" ent.i.tled men to superior power; and though he might in practice have contended that the choice of the virtuous should be made by the people, his proposition pointed rather plainly back to Cromwell, acclaimed by Milton as the worthiest to bear rule. And to be governed by a military autocrat, however virtuous and capable, was as little to the taste of that generation as it was to the taste of Carlyle's. Even a clergyman could see that the political problem was really one of the practical adjustment of crude conflicting interests, and that there could easily be as much friction under a virtuous monarch as under a dissolute one. The conscientiousness of the first Charles had wrought ruin, where the vicious indolence of the second steered safely.
As Filmer and Sidney, besides, really agreed in awarding "the tools to him who could handle them," and as the most pressing practical need was to avoid civil war, the solution for most people was the more clearly a "loyal" submission to the reigning house; and no amount of abstract demonstration of the right of self-government could have hindered the habit of submission from eating deeper and deeper into the national character if it were not for the convulsion which changed the dynasty and set up a deep division of "loyalties," keeping each other in check.
In the strict sense of the term there was no cla.s.s strife, no democratic movement, no democratic interest; indeed, no ideal of public interest as the greatest good of the whole. Thus Harrington's _Oceana_, with its scheme of "an equal Commonwealth, a Government established upon an equal Agrarian, arising into the Superstructures of three Orders, the Senat debating and proposing, the People resolving, and the Magistracy executing by an equal Rotation through the suffrage of the People given by the Ballot"[1168]--this conception, later p.r.o.nounced by Hume "the only valuable model of a commonwealth that has yet been offered to the public,"[1169] although the same critic exposed its weakness--was in fact as wholly beside the case as the principle of the Second Coming. No man desired the proposed ideal; and the very irrelevance of the systematic treatises strengthened the case for use and wont. The political discussions, being thus mostly in the air, could serve only to prepare leading men to act on certain principles should events forcibly lead up to new action. But the existing restraints on freedom did not supply sufficient grievance to breed action. The dissenters themselves were almost entirely resigned to their ostracism; and the preponderance of the Church and the Tory party was complete.
Luckily the political fanaticism of Charles I reappeared in his son James; and that king's determination to re-establish in his realm the Church of his devotion served to break a spell that nothing else could have shattered.[1170] The very Church which had been a.s.suring him of his irresistibility, having to choose between its own continuance and his, had perforce to desert him; and the old panic fear of Popery, fed by the spectacle of Jeffreys' b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.size, swept away the monarch who had aroused it. He would have been an energetic king; his naval Memoirs exhibit zeal and application to work; and he had so much of rational humanity in him that in Scotland he pointed out to the popes of Presbyterianism how irrational as well as merciless was their treatment of s.e.xual frailty. But his own fanaticism carried him athwart the superst.i.tion which would have sufficed to make him a secure despot in all other matters; and when the spirit of freedom seemed dying out in all forms save that of sectarian zealotry, his a.s.sault on that brought about the convulsion which gave it fresh chances of life.
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While practical politics was thus becoming more and more of a stupid war of ecclesiastical prejudices, in which the shiftiest came best off, and even theoretic politics ran to a vain disputation on the purposes of G.o.d towards Adam, some of the best intelligence of the nation, happily, was at work on more fruitful lines. The dire results of the principles which had made for union and strife of late years, drove thoughtful men back on a ground of union which did not seem to breed a correlative malignity.[1171] It was in 1660, the year of the Restoration, that the Royal Society was const.i.tuted; but its real beginnings lay in the first years of peace under Cromwell, when, as Sprat records, a "candid, unpa.s.sionate company" began to meet at Oxford in the lodgings of Dr.
Wilkins, of Wadham College,[1172] to discuss questions of natural fact.
"The University had, at the time, many Members of its own, who had begun a free way of reasoning; and was also frequented by some gentlemen, of Philosophical Minds, whom the misfortunes of the Kingdom, and the security and ease of a retirement amongst Gowns-men, had drawn thither."[1173] In const.i.tuting the Society, the a.s.sociates "freely admitted men of different religions, countries, and professions of life," taking credit to themselves for admitting an intellectual shopkeeper, though "the far greater number are Gentlemen, free, and unconfined."[1174] Above all things they shunned sectarian and party feeling. "Their first purpose was no more then onely the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag'd in the pa.s.sions and madness of that dismal Age;"[1175] and when they formally incorporated themselves it was expressly to discuss "things and not words."
It is noteworthy that the French Academy, which gave the immediate suggestion for the const.i.tution of the English Royal Society, contained almost no authors save belletrists and ecclesiastics. In the list of members down to 1671 (_Relation_ cited, p. 336), I find no writer on science save De la Chambre, the King's physician. And the first important undertaking of the Academy (projected about 1637) was a _Dictionary_. Sprat (p. 56) suggests that the Royal Society has usefully influenced the Academy in the direction of the study of things rather than words. (Compare the avowed literary ideal of the authors of the _Relation_, p. 373.) But although the French group from the first tended mainly to literary pursuits, they too aimed at a "free way of reasoning," "et de ce premier age de l'Academie, ils en parlent comme d'un age d'or, durant lequel avec toute l'innocence et toute la _liberte_ des premiers siecles, sans bruit, et sans pompe, et sans autres loix que celles de l'amitie, ils goutoient ensemble tout ce que la societe des esprits, et la vie raisonnable, ont de plus doux et de plus charmant" (_Relation_, p. 7).
And even while Sprat was writing, the French were making up their scientific leeway. In 1664-65 there was published in English a translation of _A General Collection of Discourses of the Virtuosi of France upon Questions of all Sorts of Philosophy and other_ (sic) _Natural Knowledge made in the a.s.sembly of the_ Beaux Esprits _at_ Paris, _by the most Ingenious Persons of that Nation_ (2 vols.
sm. folio), wherein, though the scientific discussions are distinctly amateurish, there are many speculations likely to stimulate both French and English experiment. There is indeed little to choose in point of solidity between the early themes of the English Royal Society and those of the French Academy. On the other hand, the French Government specially promoted exact study.
In 1666 Colbert established the _Academie Royale des Sciences_, for the promotion of Geometry, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, building a laboratory and an observatory, and inviting to France Ca.s.sini and Huygens (Life of Colbert by Bernard, in ed. of Colbert's _Last Testament_, 1695). Colbert further founded the _Academie Royale d'Architecture_ in 1671; and had set up what came to be the _Academie des Inscriptions_ in his own house. All three bodies did excellent work. (See the acknowledgment, as regards science, in Lawrence's _Lectures on Comparative Anatomy_, etc., 1819, p. 13.) In France, besides, the philosophy and science of Descartes made way from the first, and it was his works that first gave Locke "a relish for philosophical things." On the other hand, Sprat, who was not without an eye to literature, and made a reputation by his style, acutely notes (p. 42) that "in the Wars themselves (which is a time wherein all Languages use, if ever, to increase by extraordinary degrees, for in such busie and active times there arise more new thoughts of some men, which must be signifi'd and varied by new expressions)" the English speech "received many fantastical terms ... and with all it was enlarg'd by many sound and necessary Forms and Idioms which it before wanted"; and he proposes an authoritative dictionary on the lines of the French project.
The English naturalists would have nothing to do with theology, "these two subjects, G.o.d and the Soul, being only forborn."[1176] Reasoning from the development of military faculty in the Civil War, they decided that "greater things are produced by the free way than the formal"[1177]--a principle already put forth by Renaudot, in the preface to the reports of the French Academy, as the guide of their procedure.
By attending solely to results and questions of concrete fact, the inquirers were "not only free from Faction, but from the very causes and beginnings of it";[1178] and in the language of the time they held that "by this means there was a race of young Men provided against the next Age, whose minds receiving from them their just Impressions of sober and generous knowledge, were invincibly arm'd against all the inchantments of Enthusiasm"[1179]--that is, of religious fanaticism. And with this recoil from fanaticism there went the stirring and energetic curiosity of people habituated to action by years of war, and needing some new excitement to replace the old. While many turned to debauchery, others took to "experiment."[1180] Says Sprat:--
"The late times of Civil War and confusion, to make some recompense for their infinite calamities, brought this advantage with them, that they stirr'd up men's minds from long ease and a lazy rest, and made them active, industrious, and inquisitive: it being the usual benefit that follows upon Tempests and Thunders in the State, as well as in the skie, that they purifie and cleer the Air which they disturb. But now, since the King's return, the blindness of the former Age and the miseries of this last are vanish'd away: now men are generally weary of the Relicks of Antiquity, and satiated with Religious Disputes; now not only the eyes of men but their hands are open, and prepar'd to labour; Now there is a universal desire and appet.i.te after Knowledge, after the peaceable, the fruitful, nourishing knowledge; and not after that of antient Sects, which only yielded hard indigestible arguments, or sharp contentions, instead of food: which when the minds of men requir'd bread, gave them only a stone, and for fish a serpent."[1181]
Here too, then, there was reaction. It could not suffice to lift the plane of national life, which was determined by the general conditions and the general culture; nor did it alter the predominance of _belles lettres_ in the reading of the educated; but it served to sow in that life the seed of science, destined to work through the centuries a gradual transformation of activity and thought which should make impossible the old political strifes and generate new. Out of experiment came invention, machinery, theory, new scepticism, rationalism, democracy. It is difficult to measure, but not easy to over-estimate, the gain to intellectual life from even a partial discrediting of the old preoccupation with theology, which in the centuries between Luther and Spinoza stood for an "expense of spirit" that is depressing to think of. Down even to our own day, the waste of labour and learning continues; but from the time when two-thirds of Europe had been agonised by wars set up or stimulated by theological disputes, the balance begins to lean towards saner things. The second generation after that in which there arose a "free way of reasoning"[1182] saw the beginnings of "Freethinking" in those religious problems which were for the present laid aside, and the foundation of a new experiential philosophy. New and great reactions against these were to come; reactions of endowed clericalism, of popular sloth, of new "enthusiasm" generated in new undergrowths of ignorance, of recoil from terrific democratic revolution. But the new principle was to persist.
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It is not easy, at this time of day, to accept as a scientific product the confused theory of const.i.tutionalism which gradually grew up in English politics from William the Third onwards. The theory in all its forms is in logic so invertebrate, and in morals so far from satisfying any fairly developed sense of political justice, that we are apt to dismiss it in derision. In so far, indeed, as it proceeds on a formulation of the "social contract" it is always severely handled by the school of Sir Henry Maine, which here represents the anxiety of the upper cla.s.ses since the French Revolution to find some semblance of rational answer to the moral plea that all men are ent.i.tled to political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt and social help on the simple ground of reciprocity, supposed to be canonised for Christians in the "Golden Rule." Locke, of course, was not thinking of the working ma.s.s when he wrote his Letters on Government, any more than when he helped to draw up a const.i.tution for South Carolina endorsing slavery.[1183] But he was at least much nearer rational morals than were his antagonists; the provisions for liberty of conscience in the South Carolina Const.i.tution are notably far in advance of any official view ever previously promulgated; and in subsuming the "social contract" he was but following Hooker and Milton, and indeed adapting Aristotle, an authority whom Locke's later critics are wont to magnify.
Sir Frederick Pollock, in his _Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics_ (p. 20), a.s.sumes to have saved Aristotle from the criticism which a.s.sails the "social contract" theory, by saying that Aristotle regards a "clanless and masterless man" as a monster or an impossibility, whereas the "theorists of the social contract school" take such a man to be the social unit. There is really no reason to suppose that Aristotle would have denied a pre-political state of nomadic barbarism such as is vaguely figured by Thucydides (i, 2); and as a matter of fact he does expressly posit a process of society-making by compact, first by the utility-seeking combination of families in a village, later by the villages _joining themselves_ into a State, whose express purpose is "good life" (_Politics_, I, ii). It does not cancel this to say that Aristotle also makes the State "prior" in the rational order to man, for his "prior" (I, ii, 12-14) is not a historical but a metaphysical or ethical proposition. In the third book, again (c.
9), he endorses a proposition of Lycophron which virtually affirms the social contract.
And just as the school of Maine attacks the social contract theory for giving a false view of the origin of society, so did Bodin long ago, and at least as cogently, attack Aristotle and Cicero for defining a State as a society of men a.s.sembled to live well and happily. Bodin insists (_De la Republique_, 1580, l. i, c. i, p. 5; l. i, c. vi, p. 48; l. iv, c. i, _ad init._ p. 350) that all States originated in violence, the earliest being found full of slaves. It is true that Aristotle at the outset implies that slavery is as old as the family, but he still speaks of States as voluntary combinations for a good end. As to the first kings he is also vague and contradictory, and is criticised by Bodin accordingly.
Aristotle was doubtless adaptable to the monarchic as well as to the democratic creed; but Bodin's criticism suggests that in the sixteenth century he was felt to be too favourable to the latter.
It may be worth while to remark that the notion of an unsociable "state of nature" prior to a "social contract" was effectively criticised by Sir William Temple in his _Essay upon the Origin and Nature of Government_ (1672). With a really scientific discrimination he points to food conditions as mainly determining gregation or segregation among animals, observing: "Nor do I know, if men are like sheep, why they need any government, or, if they are like wolves, how they can suffer it" (_Works_, ed. 1814, i, 9, 10). In the next generation, again, the ultra-Hobbesian view was keenly attacked and confuted by Shaftesbury within a few years of Locke's death (_Characteristics_, early edd. i, 109-11; ii, 310-21). As I have elsewhere pointed out (_Buckle and his Critics_, p. 395), the "contract" theory lent itself equally to Whiggism and to High Toryism.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century we find the Radical Bentham (_Fragment on Government_, 1776) deriding it as held by the Tory Blackstone. But Rousseau himself (preface to the _Discours sur l'inegalite_) avowedly handled the "State of Nature" as an ideal, not as a historical truth; and Blackstone did the same. It is therefore only a new species of abstract fallacy, and one for which there is no practical excuse, to argue as does the school of Maine (cp. Pollock, as cited, pp. 63, 75, 79, etc.) that the theories in question are responsible for the French Revolution in general, or the Reign of Terror in particular. Revolutions occur for reasons embodied in states of life: they avail themselves of the theories that lie to hand. The doctrine that "all are born equal" or "free"
comes from the Inst.i.tutes of Justinian, and is laid down in so many words by Bishop Sherborne of Chichester in 1536, and by the orthodox Spanish Jesuit Suarez early in the seventeenth century (_Tractatus de Legibus_, l. ii, c. ii, -- 3). The first-mentioned pa.s.sage is cited by Stubbs, iii, 623-24, and the second by Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, iii, 160.
The derivation was bound to warp the theory; but such as it is, it represents the beginning of a new art, and therefore of a new science, of representative government. A variety of forces combined to prevent anarchy on the one hand, and on the other the fatal consolidation of the monarch's power which took place in France.[1184] The new English king was a Protestant, and therefore religiously acceptable to the people; but he was a Dutchman, and therefore racially obnoxious; for fierce commercial jealousy had long smouldered between the two peoples, and war had fanned it into flames that had burned wide. Further, he was a "lat.i.tudinarian" in religious matters, and zealous to appoint lat.i.tudinarian bishops; and the retirement from London forced on him by his asthma deepened tenfold the effect of his normal coldness of manner towards all and sundry. In the very Church whose cause he had saved, he was unpopular not only with the out-and-out zealots of political divine right, but with the zealous Churchmen as such, inasmuch as he favoured the Dissenters as far as he dared. So hampered and frustrated was he that it seems as if nothing but his rare genius for fighting a losing battle could have saved him, despite the many reasons the nation had for adhering to him.
One of these reasons, which counted for much, was the political effect of a National Debt in attaching creditors as determined supporters to the Government. The highest sagacity, perhaps, could not have framed a better device than this for establishing a new dynasty; albeit the device was itself made a ground of hostile criticism, and was, of course, resorted to as a financial necessity, or at least as a resource pointed to by Dutch example, not as a stroke of statecraft. What prudence and conciliation could do, William sought to do. And yet, with all his sanity and enlightenment, he failed utterly to apply his tolerant principles to that part of his administration which most sorely needed them--the government of Ireland. Even in England he could not carry tolerance nearly as far as he wished;[1185] but in Ireland he was forced to acquiesce in Protestant tyranny of the worst description. The bigotry of his High Church subjects was too strong for him. On the surrender of the last adherents of James at Limerick he concluded a treaty which gave the Irish Catholics the religious freedom they had had under Charles II when the Cromwellian oppression was removed; but the English Parliament refused to sanction it, save on the condition that n.o.body should sit in the Irish Parliament without first repudiating the Catholic doctrines. This was not the first virtual breach of faith by England towards Ireland; and it alone might have sufficed to poison union between the two countries; but it was only the first step in a renewal of the atrocious policy of the past.[1186]
At the Restoration the ex-Cromwellian diplomatists had contrived to arrange matters so that the monstrous confiscations made under the Commonwealth should be substantially maintained; though the settlement of 1653 had been made in entire disregard of the Act of Oblivion by Charles I in 1648; and though Charles II avowed in the House of Lords in 1660 that they had "showed much affection to him abroad." So base were the tactics of the Protestants that many Irish were charged with having forfeited their lands by signing under compulsion the engagement to renounce the House of Stuart; while those who had compelled them to the act now held the lands as royalists. But the decisive evil was the base indolence of the King. As Halifax said of him, he "would slide from an asking face";[1187] and what Clarendon called "that _imbecillitas frontis_ which kept him from denying"[1188] made him solve the intolerable strife of suitors by leaving possession in the main to those who had it. The adventurers and soldiers finally relinquished only one-third of their estates;[1189] and only a few hundreds of favoured Irish were restored to their old lands, under burden of compensation to the dispossessed holders.[1190]
When the resort of James II to Ireland gave power to the oppressed population, it was a matter of course that reprisals should be attempted. The English historian glibly decides that they should not have been permitted; that the King "ought to have determined that the existing settlement of landed property should be inviolable"; and that "whether, in the great transfer of estates, injustice had or had not been committed, _was immaterial_. That transfer, just or unjust, had taken place so long ago that to reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society."[1191] Thus does the race which claims to be civilised prescribe a course of action for that which it declares to be uncivilised.[1192] It is further suggested that the English interest in the Irish Parliament would have "willingly" granted James a "very considerable sum" to indemnify the despoiled natives for whom during a quarter of a century it had never moved a finger. There is not the least reason to believe in any such willingness; and it was in the ordinary way of things that the wronged race should not exhibit a moderation and magnanimity of which the wrongers had never for a moment shown themselves capable. The Irish Parliament of 1689, indeed, took care to indemnify all purchasers and mortgagees, while dispossessing original holders under the Cromwellian Settlement;[1193] but it pa.s.sed an Act of Attainder in the fashion of the age; and when the Protestant cause triumphed, the revenge taken was a hundredfold greater than the provocation.
It was the legislature, not the crown, that did the work. Under the tolerant and statesmanlike King, the Irish Protestant Parliament proceeded to pa.s.s law after law making the life of Catholics one of cruel humiliation and intolerable wrong. There is nothing in civilised history to compare with the process by which religious and racial hatred in combination once more set the miserable Irish nation on the rack. The extreme political insanity of the course taken is doubtless to be attributed to the propagandist madness of James, who had just before sought to give all Ireland over to Catholicism. Fanaticism bred fanaticism. But the fact remains that the Protestant fanatics began in the reign of William a labour of hate which, carried on in succeeding reigns, at length made Ireland the darkest problem in our politics.
Ha.s.sencamp (pp. 117, 125) insists that the penal laws "were not dictated by any considerations of religion, but were merely the offspring of the spirit of domination," citing for this view Burke, _Letter to a Peer_ (_Works_, Bohn ed. iii, 296), and _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_ (_Id. ib._ p. 321). But this is an attempt to dissociate religion from persecution in the interests of religious credit, and will not bear criticism. Burke, in fact, contradicts himself, a.s.signing the religious motive in an earlier page (292) of the _Letter to a Peer_, and again in the _Letter to Langrishe_ (p.
301). When the Protestants went on heaping injuries on the Catholics in the knowledge that the people remained fixed in Catholicism, they were only acting as religious persecutors have always done. On Burke's and Ha.s.sencamp's view, persecution could never take place from religious motives at all. No doubt the race feeling was fundamental, but the two barbaric instincts were really combined. Cp. Macaulay's _History_, ch. vi (2-vol. ed. 1877, i, 390-93).
As regards Irish trade, commercial malice had already effected all that religious malice could wish. Even in the reign of Henry VIII a law was pa.s.sed forbidding the importation of Irish wool into England; and in the next century Strafford sought further to crush the Irish woollen trade altogether in the English interest, throwing the Irish back on their linen trade and agriculture, which he encouraged.[1194] Strafford's avowed object was the keeping Ireland thoroughly subject to the English crown by making the people dependent on England for their chief clothing; and to the same end he proposed to hold for the crown a monopoly of all Irish trade in salt.[1195] Cromwell, on his part, was sane enough to leave Irish shipping on the same footing as English under his Navigation Act; but in 1663 the Restoration Parliament put Ireland on the footing of a foreign State, thus destroying her shipping trade once for all,[1196] and arresting her natural intercourse with the American colonies. In the same year, a check was placed on the English importation of Irish fat cattle: two years later, the embargo was laid on lean cattle and dead meat; still later, it was laid on sheep, swine, pork, bacon, mutton, and cheese. In William's reign, new repressions were effected. The veto on wool export having led to woollen manufactures, which were chiefly in the hands of Dissenters and Catholics,[1197] the Irish Parliament, consisting of Episcopalian landlords, was induced in 1698 to put heavy export duties on Irish woollens; and this failing of its full purpose, in the following year the English Parliament absolutely prohibited all export of manufactured wool from Ireland.[1198]
To this policy of systematic iniquity the first offset was a measure of protection to the Irish linen trade in 1703; and this benefaction went almost solely into the hands of the Scotch settlers in Ulster.[1199]
Even thereafter the linen trade of Ireland was so maimed and restricted by English hindrances that it was revived only by continual bounties from 1743 to 1773. And this twice restored and subsidised industry, thus expressly struck out of native and put in Protestant and alien hands, has been in our own age repeatedly pointed to as a proof of the superiority of the Protestant and non-Celtic inhabitants over the others in energy and enterprise. As a matter of fact, many of the Scots who benefited by the bounties of 1703 in Ulster had recently immigrated because of the poverty and over-population of their own country, where their energy and enterprise could do nothing. Irish energy and enterprise, on the other hand, had been chronically strangled, during two hundred years, by English and Protestant hands, with a persevering malice to which there is no parallel in human history; and the process is seen at its worst after the "glorious Revolution" of 1688.
Modern English writers of the Conservative school, always eager to asperse Ireland, never capable of frankly avowing the English causation of Irish backwardness, think it a sufficient exculpation of their ancestors' crimes to say that Irishmen have not taken up the old industries since they have been free to do so. Thus the late Mr. H.D. Traill meets Irish comment on Strafford's treatment of the Irish woollen trade by saying that the complainants "in these days prefer other and less worthy industries to those which they have now been free to practise, if they chose, for generations" (_Strafford_, 1889, p. 137). This is a fair sample of the fashion in which racial and political prejudices prompt men otherwise honourable to devices worthy of baseness. It should be unnecessary to point out, in reply, that when the Irish industries had been so long extirpated as to be lost arts, it was simply impossible that they could be successfully restored _in compet.i.tion_ with the highly developed machine industry of England.
Other countries set up new industries under high protective duties.
This Ireland could not do. But the most obvious considerations are missed by malice.
The beginnings of modern parliamentary government thus coincide with the recommencement, in the worst spirit, of the princ.i.p.al national crime thus far committed by England; and this not by the choice of, but in despite of, the king, at the hands of the Parliament. In the next reign the same sin lies at the same door, the monarch doing nothing. The fact should serve better than any monarchic special pleading to show us that the advance towards freedom is a warfare not merely with despots and despotic inst.i.tutions, but with the spirit of despotism in the average man; a warfare in which, after a time, the opposing forces are seldom positive right and wrong, but as a rule only comparative right and wrong, evil being slowly eliminated by the alternate play of self-regarding instinct. Gross and wilful political evil, we say, was wrought in the first stages of the new progress towards political justice. But that is only another way of saying that even while gross political evil was being wrought, men were on the way towards political justice. A clear perception of the whole process, when men attain to it, will mean that justice is about to be attained.
-- 5
Even while the spirit of religion and the spirit of separateness were working such wrong in Ireland, the spirit of separateness was fortunately defeated in Scotland, where it had yet burned strongly enough to make perpetual division seem the destiny of the two kingdoms.
We learn how much political inst.i.tutions count for when we realise that in Scotland, just before the parliamentary union with England, there was as furious an aversion to all things English as there has ever been shown in France of late years to things German. The leading Scots patriots were not only bitterly averse to union, but hotly bent on securing that the line of succession in Scotland after Anne should not be the same as that in England; this because they held that Scottish liberties could never be secure under an English king. The stern Fletcher of Saltoun, a Republican at heart, had to play in part the game of the Jacobites, much as he abominated their cause. But both alike were defeated, with better results than could possibly have followed on any separation of the crowns; and the vehement opposition of the great ma.s.s of the Scots people to the Parliamentary Union was likewise defeated, in a manner hard to understand. The heat of the popular pa.s.sion in Scotland is shown by the infamously unjust execution of the English Captain Green and two of his men[1200] on a charge of killing a missing Scotch captain and crew who were not even proved to be dead, and were afterwards found to be alive. The fanatical remnant of the Covenanters was as bitter against union as the Jacobites. Yet in the teeth of all this violence of feeling the Union was carried, and this not wholly by bribery,[1201] as was then alleged, and as might be suspected from the a.n.a.logy of the later case of Ireland, but through the pressure of common-sense instinct among the less noisy. There was indeed an element of bribery in the English allowance of liberal compensation to the shareholders of the African Company (better known as the Darien Company), who thus had good cash in exchange for shares worth next to nothing; and in a certain sense the reluctant English concession to Scotland of freedom of trade was a bribe. But it is by such concessions that treaties are secured; and it needed a very clear self-interest to bring round a Scotch majority to union in the teeth of a popular hostility much more fierce than is shown in our own day in the not altogether disparate case of Ulster, as regards Home Rule. Burton and Macaulay agreed[1202] that the intense wish and need of the Scottish trading cla.s.s to partic.i.p.ate in the trade of England (as they had done to much advantage under Cromwell, but had been hindered from doing after the Restoration) was what brought about the pa.s.sing of the Act of Union in the Scots Parliament. No doubt the moderate Presbyterians saw that their best security lay in union;[1203] but that recognition could never have overridden the stiff-necked forces of fanaticism and race hatred[1204] were it not for the call of plain pecuniary advantage. A transformation had begun in Scotland. The country which for a hundred and fifty years had been distracted by fanatical strifes, losing its best elements of culture under the spell of Judaic bibliolatry, had at length, under the obscure influence of English example, begun to move out of the worst toils of the secondary barbarism, not indeed into a path of pure civilisation--the harm had gone too deep for that--but towards a life of secular industry which at least prepared a soil for a better life in the centuries to come; and even for a time, under the stimulus of the new thought of France, developed a brilliant and various scientific literature. The Darien scheme may be taken as a turning-point in Scottish history; an act of commercial enterprise then arousing an amount of energy and sensation that had for centuries been seen only in connection with strokes of State and sect. It is not agreeable to idealising prejudice to accept Emerson's saying[1205] that the greatest ameliorator in human affairs has been "selfish, huckstering trade"; but, barring the strict force of the superlative, the claim is valid. It is the blackest count in the indictment against England for her[1206]
treatment of Ireland that she deliberately closed to the sister nation the door which the Scotch, by refusing union on other terms when union was highly expedient in the view of English statesmen, forced her to open to them.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1145: Armand Carrel (_Histoire de la Contre-Revolution en Angleterre_, ed. Bruxelles, 1836, p. 8) notes the "apathetic indifference" to which Cromwell's imperialist rule had reduced the middle cla.s.ses.]