on each other; that his book was essentially the book of a most realistic, because a most vividly imaginative, observer of the actual world of politics, the book of a man who was not blinded by habit and use to the enormous difficulties in the way of "government by public meeting," and to the secret of the various means by which in practice those difficulties had been attenuated or surmounted. It is the book of a meditative man who had mused much on the strange workings of human instincts, no less than of a quick observer who had seen much of external life. Had he not studied the men before he studied the institutions, had he not concerned himself with individual statesmen before he turned his attention to the mechanism of our parliamentary system, he could never have written on his book "The English Constitution." I think the same may be said of his book on 'Physics and Politics," a book in which I find new force and depth every time I take it up afresh. It is true that Bagehot had a keen sympathy with natural science, that he devoured all Mr. Darwin's and Mr. Wallace's books, and many of a much more technical kind,as for example Professor Huxley's on the "Principles of Physiology,"— and grasped the leading ideas contained in them with a firmness and precision that left nothing to be desired. But after all, "Physics and Politics" could never have been written without that sort of living insight into man which was the life of all his earlier essays. The notion that a "cake of custom"— of rigid, inviolable law- was the first requisite for a strong human society, and that the very cause which was thus essential for the first step of progress, the step towards unity, was the great danger of the second step, the step out of uniformity, and was the secret of all arrested and petrified civilizations, like the Chinese, is an idea which first germinated in Bagehot's mind at the time he was writing his cynical letters from Paris about stupidity being the first requisite of a political people; though I admit, of course, that it could not have borne the fruit it did, without Mr. Darwin's conception of a natural selection through conflict to help it on. Such passages as the following could evidently never have been written by a mere student of Darwinian literature, nor without the trained imagination exhibited in Bagehot's literary essays: "No one will ever comprehend the arrested civilizations unless he sees the strict dilemma of early society. Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty; those who surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not-and then they themselves were caught in their own yoke. The customary discipline, which could only be imposed on any early men by terrible sanctions, continued with those sanctions, and killed out of the whole society the propensities to variation which are the principle of progress. Experience shows how incredibly difficult it is to get men really to encourage the principle of originality; "* and as Bagehot held, for a very good reason; namely, that without a long accumulated and inherited tendency to discourage originality, society would never have gained the cohesion requisite for effective common action against its external foes. No one, I think, who had not studied as Bagehot had, in actual life, first the vast and unreasoning conservatism of politically strong societies like that of rural England, and next the perilous mobility and impressibility of politically weak societies like that of Paris, would ever have seen as he did the close connection of these ideas with Mr. Darwin's principle of natural selection by conflict. And here I may mention, by way of illustrating this point, that Bagehot delighted in observing and expounding the bovine slowness of rural England in acquiring a new idea. Somersetshire, he used to boast, would not subscribe £1,000 "to be represented by an archangel"; and in one letter which I received from him during the Crimean war, he narrated with great gusto an instance of the tenacity with which a Somersetshire rustic stuck to his own notion of what was involved in conquering an enemy. "The Somersetshire view," he wrote, "of the chance of bringing the war to a successful conclusion is as follows:- Countryman: 'How old, zir, be the Zar?' Myself: 'About sixty-three.' Countryman: 'Well, now, I can't think however they be to take he. They do tell I that Rooshia is a very big place, and if he doo goo right into the middle of 'n, you could not take he, not nohow.' I talked till the train came (it was at a station), and endeavored to show how the war might be finished without capturing the Czar, but I fear without effect. At last he said, 'Well, zir, I hope, as you do say, zir, we shall take he,' as I got into the carriage." It is clear that the humorous delight which Bagehot took in this tenacity and density of rural conceptions was partly the cause of the attention which he paid to the subject. No doubt there was in him a vein of purely instinctive sympathy with this density, for intellectually he could not even have understood it. Writing on the intolerable and fatiguing cleverness of French journals, he describes in one of his Paris letters the true enjoyment he felt in reading a thoroughly stupid article in the Herald (a Tory paper now no more); and I believe he was quite sincere. It was, I imagine, a real pleasure to him to be able to "Physics and Politics," pages 467, 468. "cake of custom," preach in his last general work that a just sufficiently stiff to make innovation of any kind very difficult, but not quite stiff enough to make it impossible, is the true condition of durable progress. The coolness of his judgment, and his power of seeing both sides of a question, undoubtedly gave Bagehot's political opinions considerable weight with both parties; and I am quite aware that a great majority of the ablest political thinkers of the time would disagree with me when I say that, personally, I do not rate Bagehot's sagacity as a practical politician nearly so highly as I rate his wise analysis of the growth and rationale of political institutions. Everything he wrote on the politics of the day was instructive, but to my mind at least seldom decisive; and as I thought, often not true. He did not feel, and avowed that he did not feel, much sympathy with the masses; and he attached far too much relative importance to the refinement of the governing classes. That, doubt, is most desirable, if you can combine it with a genuine consideration for the interests of "the toiling millions of men sunk in labor and pain": but experience, I think, sufficiently shows that they are often, perhaps even generally, incompatible; and that democratic governments of very low tone may consult more adequately the leading interests of the "dim common populations" than aristocratic governments of very high caliber. Bagehot hardly admitted this, and always seemed to me to think far more of the intellectual and moral tone of governments than he did of the intellectual and moral interests of the people governed. Again, those who felt most profoundly Bagehot's influence as a political thinker would probably agree with me that it was his leading idea in politics to discourage anything like too much action of any kind, legislative or administrative, and most of all anything like an ambitious colonial or foreign policy. This was not owing to any doctrinaire adhesion to the principle of laissez-faire. He supported hesitatingly, no doubt, but in the end decidedly - the Irish Land Bill; and never belonged to that straitest sect of the economists who decry, as contrary to the laws of economy and little short of a crime, the intervention of government in matters which the conflict of individual self-interests might possibly be trusted to determine. It was from a very different point of view that he was so anxious to deprecate ambitious policies, and curb the practical energies of the most energetic of peoples. Next to Clough, I think that Sir George Cornewall Lewis had the most powerful influence over him in relation to political principles. There has been no statesman in our time whom he liked so much Х or regretted so deeply; and he followed him most of all in depre- "Old things need not be therefore true, And in all this, if it were advanced rather as a principle of education than as a principle of political practice, there would be great force; but when he applied this teaching, not to the individual but to the state, not to encourage the gradual formation of a new type of character but to warn the nation back from a multitude of practical duties of a simple though arduous kind, such as those for example which we have undertaken in India, duties the value of which, performed even as they are, could hardly be overrated, if only because they involve so few debatable and doubtful assumptions, and are only the elementary tasks of the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the civilization of the future, I think Bagehot made the mistake of attaching far too little value to the moral instincts of a sagacious people, and too much to the refined deductions of a singularly subtle intellect. I suspect that the real effect of suddenly stopping the various safety valves, by which the spare energy of our nation is diverted to the useful work of roughly civilizing other lands, would be, not to stimulate the deliberative understanding of the English people, but to stunt its thinking as well as its acting powers, and render it more frivolous and more vacant-minded than it is. In the field of economy there are so many thinkers who are far better judges of Bagehot's invaluable work than myself that I will say a very few words indeed upon it. It is curious, but I believe it to be almost universally true, that what may be called the primitive impulse of all economic action is generally also strong in great economic thinkers and financiers; I mean the saving, or at least the anti-spending, instinct. It is very difficult to see why it should be so, but I think it is so. No one was more large-minded in his view of finance than Bagehot. He preached that in the case of a rich country like England, efficiency was vastly more important than the mere reduction of expenditure, and held that Mr. Gladstone and other great Chancellors of the Exchequer made a great deal too much of saving for saving's sake. None the less, he himself had the anti-spending instinct in some strength; and he was evidently pleased to note its existence in his favorite economic thinker, Ricardo. Generous as Bagehot was, and no one hesitated less about giving largely for an adequate end, — he always told me, even in boyhood, that spending was disagreeable to him, and that it took something of an effort to pay away money. In a letter before me, he tells his correspondent of the marriage of an acquaintance, and adds that the lady is a Dissenter, "and therefore probably rich. Dissenters don't spend, and quite right too." I suppose it takes some feeling of this kind to give the intellect of a man of high capacity that impulse towards the study of the laws of the increase of wealth, without which men of any imagination would be more likely to turn in other directions. ever Nevertheless, even as an economist, Bagehot's most original writing was due less to his deductions from the fundamental axioms of the modern science than to that deep insight into men which he had gained in many different fields. The essays published in the Fortnightly Review for February and May, 1876, — in which he showed so powerfully how few of the conditions of the science known to us as "political economy" have ever been really "The Postulates of Political Economy." -- |