第85章 Economic Heretics(9)

Perhaps,however,it is fairer to notice in how many points there was unconscious agreement;and how by converting very excellent maxims into absolute dogmas,from which a whole system was deducible,the theories appeared to be mutually contradictory,and,taken separately,became absurd.The palpable and admitted evil was the growth of pauperism and demoralisation of the labourer.The remedy,according to the Utilitarians,is to raise the sense of individual responsibility,to make a man dependent upon his own exertions,and to give him security that he will enjoy their fruit.Let government give education on one hand and security on the other,and equality will follow in due time.The sentimental Radical naturally replies that leaving a man to starve does not necessarily make him industrious;that,in point of fact,great and growing inequality of wealth has resulted;and that the rights of man should be applied not only to political privilege,but to the possession of property.The Utilitarians have left out justice by putting equality in the background.Justice,as Bentham replied,has no meaning till you have settled by experience what laws will produce happiness;and your absolute equality would destroy the very mainspring of social improvement.Meanwhile the Conservative thinks that both parties are really fostering the evils by making individualism supreme,and that organisation is necessary to improvement;while one set of Radicals would perpetuate a mere blind struggle for existence,and the other enable the lowest class to enforce a dead level of ignorance and stupidity.They therefore call upon government to become paternal and active,and to teach not only morality but religion;and upon the aristocracy to discharge its functions worthily,in order to stamp out social evils and prevent a servile insurrection.But how was the actual government of George IV and Sidmouth and Eldon to be converted to a sense of its duties?On each side appeal is made to a sweeping and absolute principle,and amazingly complex and difficult questions of fact are taken for granted.The Utilitarians were so far right that they appealed to experience,as,in fact,such questions have to be settled by the slow co-operation of many minds in many generations.

Unfortunately the Utilitarians had,as we have seen,a very inadequate conception of what experience really meant,and were fully as rash and dogmatic as their opponents.I must now try to consider what were the intellectual conceptions implied by their mode of treating these problems.

Notes:

1.The discussions of population most frequently mentioned are:-W.Godwin,Thoughts occasioned by Dr Parr's Spital Sermon ,etc.1801;R.Southey,in (Aikin;'s)Annual Review for 1803,pp.292-301;Thomas Jarrold,Dissertations on Man ,etc.1806;James Grahame,Inquiry into the Principle of Population ,1816;George Ensor,Inquiry concerning the Population of Nations ,1818;W.Godwin,On Population ,1820;Francis Place,Principles of Population ,1822;David Booth,Letter to the Rev.T.R.Malthus ,1823;M.T.Sadler,Law of Population ,1830;A.Alison,Principles of Population ,1840;T.Doubleday,True Laws of Population ,1842.

2.Quarterly Review ,Dec.1812(reprinted in Southey's Moral and Political Essays ,1832),3.Quarterly Review ,July 1827,by (Archbishop)Sumner,Malthus's commentator in the Records of Creation .Ricardo's Letters to Trower ,p.47.