intelligible enough. There are among his proselytes those whose characters are unstained, whose standing in society and in public life is assured, of whom we can by no means say, as of the rank and file of the Jacobin host,' 'guarda e passa.' Perhaps we should not err in regarding Mr. Gladstone as the most notable of these; but upon this point we cannot dwell. We are now dealing with principles rather than with men. It would be interesting and instructive to dwell upon those notes' of Mr. Gladstone's mind which present an analogy with the psychological characteristics of the Jacobin. But it will be more in accordance with our present purpose to indicate the real nature of the new departure in English politics by that section of the Liberal party which follows Mr. Gladstone's lead-or perhaps, we should rather say, whose lead Mr. Gladstone follows: puisque je suis leur chef il faut bien que je leur suive.' Lord Macaulay, in a speech delivered at Edinburgh in 1839, spoke of his devotion to what Sidney on the scaffold called 'the good old cause.' That 'good old cause' was the cause of civil and religious liberty, and for Lord Macaulay it was identified in a special manner with the Whigs. It seems to me,' he said, 'that when I look back upon our history, I can discern a great party which has through many generations preserved its identity; a party often depressed, never extinguished; a party which, though often tainted with the faults of the age, has always been in advance of the age; a party which though guilty of many errors and some crimes, has the glory of having established our civil and religious liberties on a firm foundation; and of that party I am proud to be a member.' We will not now enquire how far Lord Macaulay was warranted in these claims on behalf of the Whig party, but no one can deny that the eloquent orator himself worthily represented the historical traditions and accredited doctrines of British Liberalism. And assuredly he was right when he wrote in his essay on Mirabeau :

"The English revolutions have been undertaken for the purpose of defending, correcting, and restoring-never for the purpose of destroying. Our countrymen have always, even in times of the greatest excitement, spoken reverently of the form of government under which they lived, and attacked only what they regarded as its corruptions. In the very act of innovating they have constantly appealed to ancient prescription; they have seldom looked abroad for models; they have seldom troubled themselves with Utopian theories; they have not been anxious to prove that liberty is a natural right of men; they have been content to regard it as the lawful birthright of Englishmen. Their social contract is no

fiction.

fiction. It is still extant on the original parchment, sealed with wax which was affixed at Runnymede, and attested by the lordly names of the Marischals and Fitzherberts.'

This is beyond all doubt true. It would be difficult to express more correctly the way in which reforms have been made from time to time in the English public order, or the spirit by which the Liberal party, whose name is no doubt chiefly connected with those reforms, has ever been animated. 'A sort of bit by bit reform,' Mr. Freeman calls it, which has saved us alike from magnificent theories and from massacres in the cause of humanity.' Burke has at greater length expressed, in his incomparable way, the doctrine of which our civil and religious liberty' is the translation into fact:

6

'Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything, they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon principle. . . When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally negligent of their duty. . . . The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not physically or mathematically, true moral denominations. It is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True, if the constitution of a kingdom be a Vol. 168.-No. 336.

20

problem

problem of arithmetic. This sort of discourse does well enough with the lamp-post for its second: to men who may reason calmly, it is ridiculous. The will of the many, and their interest, must very often differ; and great will be the difference when they make an evil choice. . . . By these theorists the right of the people is almost always sophistically confounded with their power. The body of the community, whenever it can come to act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but till power and right are the same, the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with virtue, and the first of all virtues, prudence. Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.'

*

Such was the accepted constitutional doctrine supposed to be pre-eminently dear to the great historic party, which was to Lord Macaulay the object of such proud boasting. It is manifest how utterly opposed that doctrine is to the Jacobin dogma of the sovereignty of the individual. We quoted at the beginning of this article Professor Green's account of Liberty. Let us turn to the same thinker for an estimate of the Rousseauan principle of Sovereignty.

The practical result' [of it], he writes, 'is a vague exaltation of the prerogatives of the sovereign people, without any corresponding limitation of the conditions, under which an act is to be deemed that of the sovereign people. The justifiability of the laws and acts of Government, and of the rights which these confer, comes to be sought simply in the fact that the people wills them, not in the fact that they represent a true "volonté générale," an impartial and disinterested will for the common good. Thus the question of what really needs to be enacted by the State in order to secure the conditions under which a good life is possible, is lost sight of in the quest for majorities, and as the will of the people, in every other sense than the measure of what the people will tolerate, is really unascertainable in the great nations of Europe, the way is prepared for the sophistries of modern political management, for manipulating electoral bodies, for influencing elected bodies, and for procuring plébiscites.' †

These are the words of no 'hide-bound Tory,' but of one of the freest of free-thinkers, usually reckoned an advanced Radical. We beg our readers to ponder them. The justifiability of the laws and acts of government, and of the rights which these confer, comes to be sought simply in the fact, that the people [that is the numerical majority] wills them.' The question of what really needs to be enacted by the State to secure the conditions under which a good life is possible is lost sight of in the quest for majorities.' The way is prepared for the sophistries of modern political management.' Is it possible

* Works,' vol. v. pp. 109-127. Ed. 1815. tWorks,' vol. ii. p. 388.

better

better to describe the action, the ethos of that section of the Liberal party for which Mr. John Morley philosophizes?

Let us consider it a little. What is the reason assigned-as to the real reason we will not at present enquire-for the Gladstonian surrender to Mr. Parnell? It may be syllogistically stated thus. The desire of the numerical majority of the inhabitants of a country ought to prevail. The numerical majority of the inhabitants of Ireland desires Home Rule. Therefore Home Rule ought to be conceded to them. This is the highest line of argument taken by the chief speakers of the Gladstonian persuasion. What are we to say to it? Very possibly the middle term of this syllogism may be true. There can be no question whatever that Mr. Parnell gave utterance to the sentiments of a considerable number of the inhabitants of Ireland when he announced,* nine years ago, None of us, whether we are in America or Ireland, or wherever we may be, will be satisfied until we have destroyed the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England:' or when, five years later, he said: Speaking for myself, and I believe for the Irish people, and for all my colleagues in Parliament, I have to declare, that we will never accept, either expressly or impliedly, anything but the full and complete right to arrange our own affairs, to make our land a nation, to secure for her, free from outside control, the right to direct her own course among the peoples of the world.'t Let us admit, for the sake of argument, that in these candid utterances-more candid than some of his recent declarations-Mr. Parnell formulates the desire of the numerical majority of the population of Ireland. But why ought the desire of the majority of the population to prevail? Surely the only ought' is a moral ought. The mere desire of a multitude of men, however large, is no more capable of giving birth to any right than is the desire of the most foolish of the units of whom it is composed. The moral value of the majority depends upon the moral value of the elements which make up the majority. Some of the wisest have been of opinion that this value must of necessity be infinitesimal. 'Nothing,' says Goethe, 'is more abhorrent to a reasonable man than an appeal to a majority; for it consists of a few strong men for leaders, of knaves who temporize, of the feeble who are hangers on, and of the multitude who follow without the slightest idea of what they want.' We do not press this view. But we do say, that to regard the desire, whether of one man, or of any number of men, as the source or

* In his speech at Cincinnati on February 23rd, 1880, reported in the Irish World.'

† Speech at Mayo on November 5th, 1885, reported by 'United Ireland.'

norm

norm of right, is, to borrow Pontifical language, a deliramentum : a stupid and delirious blasphemy against primary ethical truth, necessarily fatal to all which the wise have ever venerated as liberty. The sovereignty of the masses-not the sovereignty of the people which is quite another thing, for the masses are not the people, nor the most important constituent thereof―represents the self-same principle as Cæsarism: the domination not of the moral idea, but of brute force. And this is the principle upon which the new school of English Liberalism is founded. That nothing is sacred against the will of the majority -miscalled the people; that it is the unique source of all power, of all right; that the only real crime is to gainsay its wishes-such is the cardinal doctrine of that new gospel borrowed by British Radicals from Rousseau and the Jacobins, which reduces political philosophy to a sum in addition. Hence their desire, variously manifested, but ever informed by the selfsame spirit, to destroy historic institutions, with their innumerable diversities attaching to them, and to reconstruct the public order on the arithmetical basis which they esteem pure reason. We take leave to say it is pure-—or impure—unreason. Το speak merely, just now, of the case of Ireland. Of course no statesman, worthy of the name, could leave out of consideration the rights and interests of England in that island, and deal with the Irish question as if they did not exist. But let us for the sake of the present argument put them aside, or 'prescind from them, and look at the Home Rule question solely from an Irish point of view. We say then, that the numerical majority of the inhabitants of Ireland is not the Irish people, and is not entitled to speak on behalf of the Irish people. We say, that the desire of that majority does not give rise to any right whatever. We We say that self government-if a nation is sufficiently civilized for it-should be not numerical, but dynamical: giving due place, according to their importance, to the various classes which make up the combination and subordination of civil life and guarding against the undue preponderance of any. We say that to vest supreme power in the three millions of Irish peasantry, or rather in the political adventurers who trade upon their greed and hatred, to subjugate to the brutal tyranny, of which the Land League has given the world a foretaste, the well-nigh two millions of Irish Protestants who represent the wealth, the industries, the culture of the island, would be a far worse outrage on liberty than any ever perpetrated by the French Jacobins, the elder offspring of Mr. John Morley's 'spiritual father.'

This doctrine, that the will of the majority is the alone

source