reasoners in all time.' It is one of the most splendid panegyrics ever uttered.1

6

It

Unfortunately, the praise is not altogether disinterested. serves, as any skilful guesser might have predicted that it would, to enhance the value of Montesquieu's preference for the English Constitution: to point the contrast between the 'sense' of the Patriarch and the nonsense of his countrymen who, in the teeth of his precepts, had chosen to ransack 'Knaves' Acre for the rotten stuff of outworn delusion and sedition,' rather than profit by the collected wisdom of mankind' which he had spread before them. Here we have the secret of Burke's admiration. It was the conservative strain in Esprit des lois, the conservative moral naturally suggested by his method and the general tenor of his argument, that drew him to Montesquieu; and at any rate, in his later years, the years of the anti-Jacobin crusade-it was little else. And that conservative moral he was willing-or rather, eager-to accept in its extremest form: preservation of the existing orderin the spirit, if not in the letter-at all costs; absolute stagnation, sooner than any material change either in the inward balance, or in the outward direction, of the Constitution which had come down from the past. 'Let the whole movement stand still, rather than that any part should proceed beyond its boundary,' and by so doing alter the general character of the whole.2

That Montesquieu himself would ever have gone to such lengths is hardly to be believed. With all his conservatism, there was too much of the reformer in him for that. Indeed, in his famous eulogy of the English Constitution, he touches on this very point, but handles it in a spirit which is clearly distinguishable from that of Burke. The balance between these three Powers '-King, Lords and Commons- might be expected to end in rest or inaction. But the inevitable march of things compels them to move; and for the reasons stated, they are forced to move in concert.' 3 That, it may be objected, is pretty much Burke's theory, as it stood before his nerves had been upset by the Revolution. It may be so; but it would be hard to bring any passage, even from his earlier writings, in which the Holy of Holies is represented as capable of 'march' or 'movement'; in which the Ark of the Covenant is conceived as anything but ‘standing still.' The metaphors he delights to use are of repairs' to be executed, of 'restorations' to be effected, of 'balance' or 'equipoise' to be preserved. In other words, they are all drawn from the statics of the subject, not from its dynamics. The stationary was his 1 Close of Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs: Works, i. p. 535. 2 Appeal, Works, i. pp. 534-5.

3 Esprit des lois, xi. 6; compare xix. 27.

ideal. Can the same thing be fairly said of Montesquieu? Not, surely, to the same extent; not, surely, without some sweeping qualifications.

That the influence of Montesquieu has, in the main, been a conservative influence, it would be idle to deny. The admiration of Burke, the hostility of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, would alone be enough to prove it. And the reason is plain. The mere fact that he employs the historical method, the mere fact that he insists upon the inseparable connection of the political with the social, the moral, the religious life of every community, of the present with the past, inevitably points the way to caution; inevitably disposes men to be wary how they touch the life of this 'mysterious incorporation' in one member, lest, without meaning it, they do violence to the rest. The warning was salutary; and it is the enduring service of Montesquieu to have given it: or rather, to have laid the train of speculative argument from which it inevitably results. If no wise man now thinks that it is possible to make sweeping changes in one direction without opening the door to changes of incalculable extent in many others, that is largely due to his teaching; and, it must in fairness be added, to the deepening and strengthening which that teaching received at the hands of Burke.

The warning was salutary. But has its full bearing been always, or even commonly, understood? The truth is that to the argument of Montesquieu, and of Burke also, there is another side which has too often been forgotten. If the conservative moral is that which suggests itself to our first thoughts, our secondthoughts will warn us that a precisely contrary moral lies behind. If all parts of a nation's life are inseparably interwoven, the more necessary is it jealously to guard against the corruption which must inevitably spread from one part to the rest. If the present has its roots deep down in the past, by the same principle the future must draw its life from the present. And when one generation allows abuses to go unchecked and uncorrected, the next generation, or those that come after, must look to pay the penalty. That penalty may take one of two forms. It may either lie in the increased difficulty of rooting out an abuse which has been suffered to grow and spread beyond all knowledge, or it may lie in the blind fury of a revolution which will sweep away the good with the bad, the wheat with the tares, in a whirlwind of indiscriminating vengeance.

Thus the reformer's inference is as valid as the conservative's. Once grant that the life of the community, its history past and present, forms one organic whole-a whole of which each part is conditioned by all the others, each moment by all that has gone 1 Burke, Reflections: Works, i. p. 394.

before-and the one consequence is as inevitable as the other. If it be true that nothing can be changed without change, or risk of change, to all that surrounds it and all that comes after it, it is equally true that nothing can be left standing without incalculable consequence, for evil as well as for good, to all succeeding generathat all the risks lie on one side, is to fly in the tions. To suppose There is a risk in standing face of all experience and all reason. still, just as there is a risk in moving forward; and true wisdom lies in the capacity for judging rightly when to move, no less than when to stand.

Of the one danger we hear much from Montesquieu, still more from Burke; of the other, little or nothing. In the earlier writer, of the past, than dim memory a to whom revolutions were no more that may readily be forgiven. The later writer, the sworn denouncer of the French Revolution, can plead no such justification. And we, with the warning of at least three such earthquakes before us, deserve no pity if we refuse to take the lesson to heart. The historical method, the historical argument, in politics knows no distinction of side or party. When rightly interpreted, it is essentially double-edged: as favourable to the conservative cause as to the liberal; as favourable to the liberal as to the conservative. And it is not the least of Montesquieu's merits that, with all his conservative leanings, he should have held the scales so comparatively even between the one side and the other: that he should, on the whole, have employed both method and argument in a spirit so equitable, so different from the reckless partisanship of Burke -much more, of Joseph de Maistre.

With the generation which followed the Revolution, the curtain may be said to fall upon the figure of Montesquieu. His direct and recognised influence upon those who have themselves moulded public opinion was virtually at an end. Hegel indeed, with a liberality which he seldom showed to foreign thinkers, makes more than one acknowledgement of the services he rendered to political thought; and always on the same ground, that he was the first to assert the organic wholeness of national life.1 Other tributes, generally less intelligent, might easily be cited from the secondary writers of that period: all of whom, however, had lived through the revolutionary storm and framed their systems in conscious hostility, or conscious devotion, to its principles.

This, no doubt, In later times such references have been rare. is largely because his teaching has now passed into the common 1 Rechtsphilosophie, §§ 3, 261 (pp. 25, 316); Geschichte der Philosophie, iii. p. 475; Philosophie der Geschichte, pp. 10, 79. In the last passage, Montesquieu's name is not mentioned, but the reference to him is plain.

stock of educated opinion. But it is also due to a less creditable reason: to the sectarian taint which clings to some of the more recent schools of political thought: to many of the socialist sects, on the one hand; to belated individualists, such as Herbert Spencer, upon the other. Pure individualism, a purely industrial socialism -each of these, for different reasons, is wholly incompatible with that integrity of the national life which, alike as historian and philosopher, it was the mission of Montesquieu to drive home. To the extreme individualist, the nation is either a trivial fiction or a gross usurpation. In the more fanatical forms of socialism, one element of the national life, the industrial element, annihilates all the others; one class of the community, that engaged in manual labour, claims to ride rough-shod over the rest. What has either of these schools in common with the principle which maintains that the individual exists, and can only exist, as member of a community? that the very idea of a community carries with it a tissue of relations, each of which claims a fair field for its own activities, but each in turn qualifies and is qualified by the rest? It was the purpose of Montesquieu to insist upon the significance of the past to a true judgement of the present. Consciously or unconsciously, it is the work both of individualist and of extreme socialist to deny it.

CHAPTER VI

THE ASSAULT ON CONTRACT: HUME

THE main movement of political controversy from the time of Hobbes onward centres, as we have seen, round the individualist theory of Government: centres, that is, essentially round the question, What is the source and nature of Right? Even within the lifetime of Hobbes, however, Spinoza had attempted to change the issue of Right for that of Expediency or Utility; and two generations later, the same attempt was renewed by Hume. For the second time, therefore, we find ourselves compelled to break the main thread of our enquiry, in order to follow the course of a movement which, whatever may be thought of its fruitfulness, yet won a strong backing both in England and in France: in France, during the generation which preceded the Revolution; in England -it must be added, in America also--for at least a century and a half.

It was a new issue. But there is a sense in which it is not altogether out of connection with the old. So far as theory goes, there is nothing to prevent the utilitarian from being an individualist in practice; neither is there anything to prevent him from being a strong supporter of State action and State control. The course he takes on these matters will be determined solely by what he considers to be the expediency of the case. The one thing certain is that his decision will not be rested on the grounds which determine either the individualist or his opposite: that it will have nothing whatever to do with considerations of Right. In this country, no doubt, as well as in America, the utilitarians have shown a strong tendency to range themselves, for practical purposes, side by side with the individualists. That is true, in the main, of Bentham; it is equally, perhaps still more markedly, true of the 'philosophical radicals' who inherited his tradition. But it is emphatically not true of Helvétius, nor of other French utilitarians. It is not even true, without reserve, of Bentham, nor of the Mills, father and son.

The truth is that, in each country, the practical policy of the