第33章 Political Theory(11)

But to both extremes,as Jeffrey pathetically complains,they appeared to be mere trimmers.71The Utilitarian held the Whig to be a 'trimmer';the Whig thought the Utilitarian a fanatic;they agreed in holding that the Tory was simply stupid.And yet,when we look at the Tory creed,we shall find that both Whig and Utilitarian overlooked some very vital problems.The Tories of course represent the advocates of strong government;and,as their opponents held,had no theories --only prejudices.The first article of the creed of an Eldon or a Sidmouth was,'I believe in George III';--not a doctrine capable of philosophical justification.Such Toryism meant the content of the rich and powerful with the system by which their power and wealth were guaranteed.Their instincts had been sharpened by the French revolution;and they saw in any change the removal of one of the safeguards against a fresh outburst of the nether fires.The great bulk of all political opinion is an instinct,not a philosophy;and the obstructive Tories represented little more than class prejudice and the dread of a great convulsion.Yet intelligent Tories were being driven to find some reasons for their creed,which the Utilitarians might have considered more carefully.

III.CONSERVATISM

A famous man of letters represents certain tendencies more clearly than the average politician.Robert Southey (1777-1843),the 'ultra servile sack-guzzler,'as Bentham pleasantly calls him in 1823,72was probably the best abused man,on his own side at least,among Mill's contemporaries.He was attacked by Mill himself,and savagely denounced by Byron and Hazlitt.He was not only a conspicuous writer in the Quarterly Review ,but,as his enemies thought,a renegade bought by pensions.It is,I hope,needless to defend him against this charge.He was simply an impatient man of generous instincts and no reflective power,who had in his youth caught the revolutionary fever,and,as he grew up,developed the patriotic fever.

Later views are given in the Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829),chiefly known to modern readers by one of Macaulay's essays.Southey was as assailable as Mill.His political economy is a mere muddle;his political views are obviously distorted by accidental prejudices;and the whole book is desultory and disjointed.In a dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More,he takes the opportunity of introducing descriptions of scenery,literary digressions,and quaint illustrations from his vast stores of reading to the confusion of all definite arrangement.Southey is in the awkward position of a dogmatist defending a compromise.An Anglican claiming infallibility is necessarily inconsistent.His view of toleration,for example,is oddly obscure.He would apparently like to persecute infidels;73and yet he wishes to denounce the Catholic church for its persecuting principles.He seems to date the main social evils to the changes which began at the Reformation,and yet he looks back to the period which succeeded the Reformation as representing the ideal state of the British polity.His sympathy with the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries predisposed him to this position,He would have been more intelligible if he had been more distinctly reactionary.For all that,his views show the presence of a leaven which was materially to affect the later development of English opinions.That Jacobinism meant anarchy,and that anarchy led irresistibly to military despotism were propositions which to him,as to so many others,seemed to be established by the French revolution.What,then,was the cause of the anarchy?Sir Thomas More comes from the grave to tell us this,because he had witnessed the past symptoms of the process.The transition from the old feudal system to the modern industrial organisation had in his day become unmistakably developed.In feudal times,every man had his definite place in society;he was a member of a little group;supported,if controlled and disciplined,by an elaborate system of spiritual authority.

The Reformation was the period at which the 'masterless man'made his appearance.

The conversion of pastures into arable land,the growth of commerce and of pauperism,were marks of the coming change.It proceeded quietly for some generations;but the development of the modern manufacturing system represents the operation of the same process on a far larger scale,and with far greater intensity.The result may be described by saying that we have instead of a legitimate development a degeneration of society.

A vast populace has grown up outside of the old order,it is independent indeed,but at the heavy price of being rather an inorganic mass than a constituent part of the body politic.It is,briefly,to the growth of a huge 'proletariate'outside the church,and hostile to the state,that Southey attributes all social evils.

The view has become familiar enough in various shapes;and in the reproaches which Southey brings against the manufacturing system we have an anticipation of other familiar lamentations.