Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

Mr. Leslie Stephen combines the faculty of acute and searching criticism with a style that is singularly clear, incisive, and exact. His wide knowledge of English literature, and the close study which he has given to the history of English opinions and controversies, speculative, political, and economical, have enabled him to survey an extensive field, to trace the lines of origin and development, to disentangle complicated ideas, and to summarise conclusions in a masterly manner. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since he published his work on English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and his present book on the Utilitarians continues, and indeed brings down to our own time, a similar investigation of the course of certain views, principles, and doctrines which had taken their shape in England and France during the period preceding the French Revolution, and which profoundly influenced political discussion throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. But on this occasion Mr. Stephen's inquiry does not range over the whole area thus laid open, though his subject compels him to make several excursions into the general region of philosophical and political disputation. His main purpose is to relate the history of a creed propagated by a group of remarkable men, who took hold of some prominent theories and doctrines generated by the rationalism of the preceding century, and endeavoured to make them the basis and framework of a system for improving the condition of the English people. Their immediate object was to abolish intolerable abuses of power by the governing classes, and radically to reform on scientific principles the haphazard blundering administration which was assumed to be the source of all evil. Mr. Stephen describes and explains, in short, the rise, progress, and decay of Utilitarianism.

Such a system, by its nature and aims, is evidently practical; it is directed towards a change of laws and an alteration of the prevailing methods of government. To the philosophic minds of the eighteenth-century reformers in England and France, it seemed evident, that any general conclusions upon questions vitally concerning the interests of mankind should be reached by convincing demonstration, should start from axioms, and proceed by a connected chain of logical argument. During the latter half of that century England and France, so incessantly at war and so different in character and in their governing institutions, were nevertheless in alliance intellectually. They were then (with Holland) the only countries in the world where public opinion had free play, and where discussion of philosophic problems was actively carried on; and between them there was a constant interchange of ideas. Now in all speculations, on things human or divine, there have existed immemorially two schools or tendencies of thought, two ways of approaching the subject, corresponding, we may conjecture, to a radical difference of intellectual predispositions. You may start by the high a priori road, or you may feel your way gradually by induction from verifiable experiences; and of these two main currents of speculative opinion whichever is the stronger at any given period will affect every branch of thought and action. Coleridge appealed to history as proving that all epoch-making revolutions coincide with the rise or fall of metaphysical systems, and he attributed the power of abstract theories over revolutionary movements to the craving of man for higher guidance than sensations. However this may be, it may be affirmed that the rationalism of the eighteenth century in England and France found room by replacing the decaying theologies and substituting reason for the traditional authority. This was the period that produced in France the philosophic conception of abstract humanity, everywhere the same naturally, with a superficial distinction of circumstances, but differentiated in the main by bad laws, artificial inequalities, and social injustice. In France the method of deducing conclusions from abstract principles concerning the rights of man and the social compact gained predominance, until they were shaped by Rousseau and others into the formal indictment of a corrupt society. It was the point and impulse thus given to very real grievances and irritation against privilege, that precipitated the French Revolution. Among the English, on the other hand, their public spirit, the connection of large classes with national affairs, and their habit of compromise, had predisposed the leading minds towards cautious views in philosophy and in politics; and at the century's end their inbred distrust of abstract propositions as a basis for social reconstruction received startling confirmation from the tremendous explosion in France.

The foregoing remarks give in bare outline the conditions and circumstances, very carefully examined and skilfully analysed by Mr. Leslie Stephen, that prepared and cleared the ground for the Utilitarians. Their object was not to reconstruct, hardly to remodel, existing forms of government; it was to remove abuses, and to devise remedies for the evils of an unwieldy and complicated administrative machine, clogged by stupidity and selfishness. And the plan of Mr. Stephen's first volume is to describe the state of society at this period, the condition of agriculture and the industries, the position of the Church and the Universities, of the Army and Navy, the intellectual tendencies indicated by the philosophic doctrines, and generally to sketch the political and social aspects of England rather more than a hundred years ago. He is writing, as he says, the history of a sect; and in dealing with the tenets of that sect he lays prominent stress upon what may be called the environment, upon the various circumstances which may influence forms of belief, and particularly upon the idiosyncrasies of the men who held and propagated them. It is for this latter reason that he has given us brief and interesting biographies of those whose influence was greatest in shaping and directing the movement, illustrating his narrative by portraits of them as they lived and acted. All these things help us towards understanding how it comes to pass that conclusions which seem clear as daylight to earnest thinkers in one generation may be abandoned by succeeding generations as manifestly erroneous. The inquiry also shows why, and to what extent, some of the doctrines that were scientifically propounded by the Utilitarians did initiate and lead up to an important reformation in the methods of English government.

'It might be stated as a paradox' (Mr. Stephen observes) 'that, whereas in France the most palpable evils arose from the excessive power of the central government, and in England the most palpable evils arose from the feebleness of the central government, the French reformers demanded more government, and the English reformers less government.... The solution seems to be easy. In France, reformers such as Turgot and the economists were in favour of an enlightened despotism, because ... it would suppress the exclusive privileges of a class which, doing nothing in return, had become a mere burthen, encumbering all social development. But in England the privileged class was identical with the governing class.'

The English aristocracy, in fact, were actually doing the country's business, though they were doing it badly, and paid themselves much too highly for very indifferent administration. Yet the English nation acquiesced in the system, because the middle classes were growing rich and prosperous, and the State interfered very little with their private affairs. To this general statement of the case we agree; but we may point out that in terming our aristocracy a privileged class one material distinction has been passed over. For whereas the French noblesse constituted a caste partly exempted by birthright from the general taxation, and vested with certain vexatious rights to which no duties corresponded, the English aristocracy possessed legally no privileges at all. It was not an exclusive order, but an upper class that was constantly recruited, being open to all successful men; and such a governing body is naturally indifferent to reforms, because it is very little affected by administrative imperfections or abuses. Pauperism and ignorance may fester long among the masses before wealthy and prosperous rulers discover that the interests of their own class are imperilled; the state of prisons does not concern them personally; and so long as life and property are fairly secure, they care little about an efficient police. The Englishman of whom a Frenchman reported with amazement that he consoled himself for having been robbed by the reflection that there were no policemen in his country, must have belonged to this comfortable class. And the inveterate conservation of abuses in the Church, the Law, and the Army may be partially explained in a similar way. In France the Church and the army were really privileged bodies: the vast ecclesiastical revenues were protected from taxation, and the commissioned ranks of the army were reserved for the noblesse; the French parliaments were close magisterial corporations. In England these were all open professions, with no special fiscal rights or social limitations; the prizes were available for general competition, and as every one had a chance of winning them by interest or even merit, there was no formidable outcry against the system.

In politics, therefore, as well as in philosophy, the prevailing habit of the English mind was more moderate, less thorough-going and subversive, than in France. Mr. Stephen makes a keen and rapid analysis of the common-sense psychology, as expounded by Reid and Dugald Stewart, to show the correspondence at this period between abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics, there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. So common sense was brought in as capable of certain intuitive or original judgments which were in themselves necessary, and which luckily coincided with some of the firmest convictions among intelligent mankind. As Carlyle said long afterwards, the Scottish philosophers started from the mechanical premises suggested by Hume. 'They let loose instinct as an indiscriminatory bandog to guard them against his conclusions; they tugged lustily against the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of atheism and fatalism.' To save themselves from materialism they invented Intuitions, and thereby incurred the wrath of orthodox Utilitarianism, which was rigidly empirical. They were, however, accepted in England, where any haven was welcome, however uncertain might be the holding ground, which sheltered the vessel from being blown by windy speculation out into a shoreless sea.

The Scottish philosophy therefore

'was in philosophy what Whiggism was in politics. Like political Whiggism, it included a large element of enlightened and liberal rationalism; but, like Whiggism, it covered an aversion to thorough-going logic. The English politician was suspicious of abstract principle, but would cover his acceptance of tradition and rule of thumb by general phrases about liberty and toleration. The Whig in philosophy equally accepted the traditional creed, sufficiently purified from cruder elements, and sheltered his doctrine by speaking of intuitions and laws of thought.'

The foregoing quotation may serve to indicate briefly the situation, in politics and philosophy, at the time when Bentham, 'the patriarch of the English Utilitarians,' appeared upon the scene. Mr. Stephen's sketch of his life and doctrines, which occupies the latter half of the book's first volume, is eminently instructive and often amusing. He excels in tracing the continuity of ideas, and in showing how they converge upon the point of view that is gradually reached by some writer of superior force and activity, who rejects, alters, or uses them in the process of working out the doctrines of some new school. It was the spread of philanthropy, of a conscientious fellow-feeling for those classes of society who suffered from neglect and misrule, that fostered the movement towards political and social reform. This feeling was represented in Bentham's celebrated formula, originally invented by Hutcheson, about 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'; and the criterion of utility was laid down as having the widest possible application to all sorts and conditions of men. Self-help, individualism, laisser-faire, the economic view that each should be left free to pursue his own interests, were principles intended to operate for the removal of abuses and the destruction of unfair privileges: they were promulgated for the relief of humanity at large, although the system which was built up on them came afterwards to be denounced as narrow, selfish, and materialistic. These ideas were undoubtedly congenial to the habits and character of Englishmen, who, like free men everywhere, had a traditional distrust of strong and active government, preferring King Log, on the whole, to King Stork. Inequalities and incomprehensible laws were to be seen in the course of Nature no less than in the English Constitution; and in either case a man might rely upon his wits and energy to deal with them. It might be that the defects in human government could only be remedied by employing the forces of government to cure them; but if you began to set going the administrative engine there was no saying where it might stop. Bentham held all government to be an evil, though he differed from the modern anarchist in holding it to be a necessary evil; yet he needed a strong scientific administration for the purpose of rooting out inveterate abuses. And this was the dilemma that confronted him. He worked out his solution of the problem by laying out a whole system of morals and a science of politics, with Utility as their base and standard, which has profoundly influenced all subsequent legislation, and led eventually to much more extensive theories regarding the sphere and duties of government than he himself would have advocated or approved.

The principal events of Bentham's life, and the development of his opinions, are condensed by Mr. Stephen into one chapter with his usual biographical skill. Bentham started in life as a barrister, and attended Blackstone's lectures, with the result that he was deeply impressed by the fallacies of the legal theories there expounded, and soon afterward vowed eternal war against the Demon of Chicane. He struggled against narrow means and obscurity until he made the acquaintance of Lord Shelburne, through whom he became acquainted with other leading statesmen, and with Miss Caroline Fox, to whom he made a futile proposal of marriage some years later. At Bowood he also met Dumont, and thereby formed his connection with the French jurists, though in his old age he declared that Dumont, his chief interpreter abroad, 'did not understand a word of his meaning'; the true cause of his quarrel being that Dumont criticised Bentham's dinners. He travelled on the Continent, and lived some time in Russia. Soon afterward the Revolution made a clean sweep of all the old institutions in France, and thus laid open a bare and level ground just suited, as Bentham thought, for an architect who had his portfolio full of new administrative plans. It was long, indeed, before he could understand why systematic reforms were not immediately accepted as soon as their utility was logically demonstrated. He lost no time in providing the French National Assembly with elaborate schemes for the reconstruction of various departments of government, and he even offered to go to France to set up his model prison, proposing himself 'to become gratuitously the gaoler thereof.' The Assembly requited his zeal by conferring on him the title of a French citizen; but social reorganisation took the shape of September massacres and the Reign of Terror, whereat Bentham was disgusted, though in no way disheartened, as a theorist.

'Never' (says Mr. Stephen) 'was an adviser more at cross purposes with the advised. It would be impossible to draw a more striking portrait of the abstract reasoner, whose calculations of human motives omit all reference to passion, and who fancied that all prejudice can be dispelled by a few bits of logic.'

Here, in fact, we have the key to Bentham's character, to its weakness and also to its strength. A philosopher who plunges into the practical affairs of the world without taking human feelings and imagination into account is sure to find himself stumbling about among blocks and blockheads, and tripped up by the ill-will of vested interests; but on the other hand, if he has taken the right direction, his ardent energies have the impetus of some natural force. Bentham's earlier notion had been that political reforms could be introduced like improvements in machinery; you had only to prove the superior utility of your new invention to obtain its adoption by all who were concerned in the business. Latterly he made the surprising discovery that in the public offices, in the Law, and in the Church, the heads of these professions are usually quite satisfied with their own monopolies, are opposed to change, and are always ready with a stock of plausible arguments to show the folly and danger of innovation. If the Utilitarian appeals to facts, common sense, and experience, so also does the Conservative; and until public opinion is decidedly for progress the dead weight prevails. Not for a day did Bentham relax his strenuous exertions, but he changed his tactics; he turned from his mechanical workshop to the study of political dynamics, and he found what he wanted in the rising radicalism—'his principal occupation, in a word, was to provide political philosophy for radical reformers.'

Of the philosophic creed which Bentham undertook to proclaim from his hermitage at Ford Abbey, with James Mill as his leading apostle, Mr. Stephen gives us a very shrewd and incisively critical examination. The founder of a new faith has usually begun by the earnest and authoritative declaration of a few simple truths and positive doctrines, for which his disciples provide, in course of time, the necessary philosophical basis. Bentham's voice had been crying ineffectually in the wilderness; and he now set about laying with his own hands the foundations of his beliefs upon primary scientific principles, always with unswerving aim and application to concrete facts. He was a thorough-going iconoclast, wielding, like Mohammed, a single formula, to the destruction of idols of the market or tribe, and to the confusion of those who fattened upon antique superstitions. 'All government is one vast evil,' and can only be kept from mischief by minute regulations and constant vigilance. Whatever is plainly illogical must be radically wrong—'to make a barrister a judge is as sensible as it would be to select a procuress for mistress of a girls' school;' and a parish boy, if he could read properly, might go through the Church services with the Prayer Book and the Homilies, so that an established Church is a costly and indefensible luxury. Taking Utility, founded on observation of actual facts, as his guide and his measure of existing institutions, he treated them as colossal iniquities, as frauds upon the people, as dead and ineffectual for the purposes of moral and political life. Nevertheless, although he condemned the whole fabric as it stood, Bentham was an absolute believer in the unlimited power of laws and institutions; nor was he far from wishing to deal with them on the principles applicable to the reform of prisons, as undesirable but necessary instruments of coercion to be despotically administered upon a scientific model, after the fashion of his favourite Panopticon. He was, in short, as Mr. Stephen points out, an unconscious follower of Hobbes, with this difference, that in Bentham's case the omnipotent Leviathan, for control and direction, was to be enlightened public opinion. And he was apparently convinced, without misgivings, that a model government, framed logically upon that common sense which is a public property, could be introduced and enforced under popular sanction as easily as new regulations for an ill-managed gaol. He was fully prepared to make liberal allowance, in framing his constitution, for the different needs, circumstances, and habits of communities; he was quite aware that precisely the same legislation would not suit England and India; but he believed national circumstance and character to be extensively modifiable by manifestly useful institutions, and he was ready to begin the operation at once, 'to legislate for Hindostan as well as for his own parish, and to make codes not only for England, Spain, and Russia, but also for Morocco.'

Mr. Stephen has no difficulty in exposing the shortcomings and inadequacy of these doctrines. But he is writing the history of certain political ideas; so his main object is to show how such ideas are formed, the course they have followed, and their influence upon thought and action up to the present day. To trace the links and continuity of ideas is to analyse their elements, and to show the impress that they received from external circumstance, permanent or temporary; it is an important method in the science of politics. Upon the empiricism of English philosophy in the eighteenth century Bentham constructed a Theory of Morals that purported to rest exclusively on facts ascertained and verifiable, with happiness as our being's end and aim, with pain and pleasure as the ultimate principles of conduct; and upon this foundation he proceeded to build up his system of politics and legislation. Any attempt to derive morality from other sources, or to measure it by other standards, he denounced as arbitrary and misleading; he threw aside metaphysics, and therefore theology, as illusory. The exclusive appeal to experience, to plain reasoning from the evidence of our senses, from actual observation of human propensities, was sufficient for his purposes, and tallied with his designs as a practical reformer. In these views he was a disciple of Hume, whose influence has surreptitiously percolated all modern thought, and his unintentional allies were the teachers of Natural religion, with Paley as its principal exponent. Having thus defined and explained the basis of ethical philosophy, the Utilitarian has to build up the superstructure of legal ordinance; and he is at once confronted by the difficult problem of distinguishing the sphere of ethics from the province of law. Upon this vital question Mr. Stephen, as an expert in ethics, gives a dissertation that is exceedingly acute and instructive; and we may commend, in particular, his criticism of the doctrine that the morality of an act depends upon its consequences, not upon its motives. As he observes, this may be true, with certain reserves, in law, where the business of the legislature is to prohibit and punish acts that directly endanger the order and security of a community. But 'the exclusion of motive justifiable in law may take all meaning out of morality'; and yet nothing is more complicated than the question of demarcating a clear frontier between the two provinces. Mr. Stephen's examination of this question is the more important because it involves the problem of regulating private morals by public enactments; and also because the confusion of motives with intentions lies at the bottom of much mischievous sophistry, for some of the worst crimes in history have been suggested by plausible motives, and have been defended on that ground. He shows that Bentham's survey of the springs of human action was incomplete, that he overstrained his formula to make it universally applicable, and that he nevertheless gave a far-reaching impulse to clearer notions and an effective advance in the simplification of legal procedure and the codification of laws. As a moral philosophy, Bentham's system appeared so arid and materialistic that its unpopularity has obscured his real services. For he was the engineer who first led a scientific attack up to the ramparts of legal chicanery, and made a breach through which all subsequent reform found its entry.

The axiom that utility is the source of justice and equity is of very ancient date, and indeed the word is sufficiently elastic to comprehend every conceivable human motive; but no one before Bentham had employed it so energetically as a lever to overturn ponderous abuses, or had pointed his theory so directly against notorious facts. On the other hand, since he despised and rejected historical studies, he greatly miscalculated the binding strength of long usage and possession. He forgot, what Hume had been careful to remember, that whether men's reasoning on these subjects be right or wrong, the conclusions have not really been reached by logic, but have grown up out of instincts, and correspond with certain immemorial needs and aspirations of humanity. Hume had sketched, before Bentham, his Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth; yet he begins by the warning that

'It is not with forms of government as with other artificial contrivances; where an old engine may be rejected if we can discover another more accurate and commodious ... the bulk of mankind' (he adds) 'being governed by authority, not by reason, and never attributing authority to anything that has not the recommendation of antiquity.'

Hume's mission was to undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. Political projectors, says the cautious Hume, are pernicious if they have power, and ridiculous if they want it. Bentham was quite confident that if he could only get the power he could radically change for the better the circumstances of a people in any part of the world, by legislation on the principles of Utility; and he was sure that character is indefinitely modifiable by circumstances. That human nature is constantly altering with, and adapting itself to, the environment, is an undeniable truth; but in the moral as in the physical world the natural changes occupy long periods, and to stir the soil hastily may produce a catastrophe. The latter result actually followed in France; while in England the doctrine of the unlimited power of legislation, to be used for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and wielded by a sovereign State according to the dictates of public opinion, was met by alarm, suspicion, and protracted opposition. It is the habit of Englishmen to admit no proposition, however clear and convincing, until they discover what the propounder intends to do with it. Yet it will be seen that Bentham's plans of reform, if not his principles, did suggest, and to some extent shape, the main direction of judicial and administrative changes during the nineteenth century, though with some consequences that he neither anticipated nor desired. He thought that the State might be invested with power to modify society, and yet might be strictly controlled in the exercise of that power. He might have foreseen, what has actually happened, that the State, once established on a democratic basis, would exercise the power and disregard his carefully drawn limitations. A tendency toward State Socialism he would have detested above all things; and yet that is the direction inevitably taken by supreme authority when the responsibility for the greatest happiness of the greatest number is imposed upon it by popular demand.

Mr. Stephen's second volume describes the later phase of the Utilitarian creed, when it passed from its founder into the hands of ardent disciples. The transition necessarily involves some divergence of views and methods. In religious movements it usually begins after the founder's death; but as Bentham lived to superintend his apostolic successors, his relations with them were not invariably harmonious. The leadership fell upon James Mill, whose early life and general character, the development of his opinions, and the bearing of his philosophy upon his politics, are the subjects of one of those condensed biographical sketches in which Mr. Stephen excels. In the History of India, which brought to James Mill reputation and pecuniary independence, he could apply his deductive theories to a remote and little known country without much risk of contradiction from actual circumstances or of checks from the misapprehension of facts. In England the Utilitarian doctrines, as propounded in Mill's writings, raised up opposition and hostile criticism from various quarters. The general current of ideas and feelings had now set decidedly toward the suppression of inveterate abuses, and toward constitutional reform. Radicalism was gaining ground rapidly, and even Socialism had come to the surface, while Political Economy was in the ascendant. But the old Tories closed their ranks for a fierce resistance against theories that menaced, as it seemed to them, nothing less than destruction to time-honoured institutions; and the Whigs had no taste for doctrines that pretended to be reasonable, but appeared to them in effect revolutionary. The different positions of contending parties were illustrated, as Mr. Stephen shows, by their respective attitudes towards Church Reform. The Tories defended ecclesiastical establishment as one of the main bastions of the citadel; the Whigs would preserve the Church in subjection to the State; while James Mill, in the Westminster Review, declared the Church of England to be a mere State machine, worked in subservience to the sinister interest of the governing classes. He desired 'to abolish all dogmas and ceremonies, and to employ the clergy to give lectures on ethics, botany, and political economy, with decent dances and social meals for the celebration of Sunday.' Mr. Stephen, after observing that this plan exemplifies 'the incapacity of an isolated clique to understand the real tone of public opinion,' adds that 'it seems to have some sense, but one would like to know whether Newman read his article.' Our own notion would be that it is a signal instance of shortsightedness and of insensibility, on the part of a psychologist, to the strength and persistence of one of the most powerful among the emotions that dominate mankind. Mill's article proclaiming these views appeared in 1835, just at the time when the Oxford Movement was stirring up a wave of enthusiasm for the dogmas and ritual which he treated as obsolete and nonsensical; nor is there anything more remarkable or unexpected in the political changes of the last sixty years, than the discomfiture of those prophets who have foretold the decay of all liturgies and the speedy dissolution of ecclesiastical establishments. This phenomenon is by no means confined to England, or even to Europe; and at the present day, when the power of religious idealism is better understood upon wider experience, no practical politician attempts to disregard sentiments that defy logic and pass the understanding.

Nevertheless Utilitarianism, as represented by James Mill's 'Essay on Government,' was attracting increased attention, and was provoking serious alarm. It was a period of confidence in theories which have been partly confirmed and partly contradicted by subsequent experiences of those 'principles of human nature' in which political speculators so unreservedly trusted. In France, some fifty years earlier, the destructive theorist had swept all before him; in England, while he was assaulting with effect the entrenchments of Conservatism, he was taken in flank by the moderate reformers. Mill had denounced the Whigs as half-hearted and even treacherous allies, who dallied with Radicalism to conceal their nefarious design of obtaining political mastery with the fewest concessions possible. He relied upon universal education to qualify the masses for the possession of an extensive franchise, and upon enlightened self-interest to guarantee their proper use of it. Macaulay rejoined, in the Edinburgh Review, that the masses might possibly conclude that they would get more pleasure than pain out of universal spoliation; and that if his opponent's principles were correct and his scheme adopted, 'literature, science, commerce, and manufactures might be swept away, and a few half-naked fishermen would divide with the owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest of European cities.' It was a notable controversial tournament, at which the intelligent bystander probably assisted with much satisfaction and no excessive alarm, having little faith in the absolute theorist, and not much in the disinterestedness of the Whigs. For the moment it was sufficient that both parties agreed in supporting the Reform Bill, although, as Mr. Stephen remarks, the Radical regarded it as a payment on account, while the Whig hoped that it would be a full and final discharge. We may observe, to the honour of a great Liberal family, that as the first Lord Lansdowne discerned Bentham's talents and gave him his start in life, so the impression made upon the second marquis by Macaulay's articles induced him to offer the writer his first seat in Parliament.

Mr. Stephen deals with the duel between Mill and Macaulay from the standpoint of an impartial umpire, with an expert's appreciation of their logical fencing and some humorous glances at the heated combatants. Mill was an austere Puritan, who would fell the Tory like an ox and would trample upon the cunning self-seeking Whig. The Edinburgh Reviewers were a set of brilliant young men who represented intellectual Liberalism; but 'they were men who meant to become judges, members of Parliament, or even bishops, and nothing in their social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against social injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.' As a sample of Whiggism Mr. Stephen takes Mackintosh, who, on the subject of the French Revolution, stood half-way between Burke's holy horror of a diabolic outburst and the applause of root-and-branch Radicals. For a type of Conservatism he gives us Robert Southey, whose fortune it was to be fiercely abused by the Utilitarians and ridiculed by the Whigs. Southey, like many others, had been frightened out of early Liberalism into the conviction that Reform would be the inevitable precursor of revolution; and in 1817 he had written to Lord Liverpool that the only hope of saving the country lay in gagging the seditious press. 'Concessions,' he said, 'can only serve to hasten the catastrophe. Woe be to the garrison who hoist a white flag to an enemy that gives no quarter.' Yet Southey had a deep feeling for the misery of the lower classes at this period of widespread distress. In his belief in the power of Government to remedy social evils, he was much nearer the accepted line of later public opinion than Macaulay, who would have confined the State's business to the maintenance of order, the defence of property, and the practice of departmental economy. And when Southey, following Coleridge and preceding Gladstone, insisted upon the vital importance of religion as a principle of State policy, neither he nor Gladstone deserved all the ridicule cast upon them by Macaulay in his brilliant essays; for at any rate no first-class Government in Europe has hitherto ventured upon dissolving connection with the Church.

For his philosophy, Mr. Stephen tells us, Southey was in the habit of referring to Coleridge, whose hostility to the Utilitarians went on different and deeper grounds. Coleridge had convinced himself that all the errors of the time, and their political dangers, arose from a false and godless empiricism. He declared that revolutionary periods have always been connected with the popular prevalence of abstract ideas, and that the speculative principles of men between twenty and thirty are the great source of political prophecy. He developed this view in a singular letter upon the state of affairs and opinions which he also, like Southey, addressed to Lord Liverpool in 1817, and which somewhat bewildered that veteran statesman. With the moderns, he said, 'nothing grows, all is made'; whereas growth itself is but a disguised mode of being made by the superinduction of the jam data on the jam datum; and he insisted that 'the flux of individuals at any moment in existence in a country is there for the value of the State, far more than the State for them, though both positions are true proportionately.' In other words, Coleridge pressed the evolutionary view against the sharp set, shortsighted Utilitarian propositions; and he would have agreed that antiquated prejudices are absurd only to those who have not looked back to their origin, when they can be found to proceed in logical order from natural causes. He had not been always a resolute opponent of the Utilitarian theory of morals; but, like other philosophers, he had become alarmed at the consequence of being shut up within the prison of finite senses, and he grasped at Kant's discovery of the difference between Understanding and Reason, in order to retire upon a metaphysical basis of religion and morality, and to withstand the prudential calculus. We are inclined to suggest that Mr. Stephen, who does little more than glance at Coleridge's position, has underestimated his influence upon the intellectual direction of politics in the first half of this century. Coleridge certainly provided an antidote to the crudity of eager Radicalism in Church and State, and his ideas may be recognised not only in the great High Church movement that was stirred up by the Tractarians, but also in the larger comprehension of the duties and attributes of the State that has been slowly gaining ground up to our own day.

It is, indeed, the growth and development of English opinion regarding these public duties and attributes, as it is traced in Mr. Stephen's book, that forms, in our opinion, its chief value; and we are reviewing it mainly as a history of political ideas. This is, we believe, the practical outcome of the increasing feeling of sympathy between different classes of the community, of a sense of responsibility, of what is called altruism, of solidarity among all the diverse interests that have lately characterised our legislation:

'The two great rival theories of the functions of the State are—the theory which was for so many years dominant in England, and which may for convenience be called the Individualist theory; and the theory which is stated most fully and powerfully by the Greek philosophers, which we may call the Socialist theory. The Individualist theory regards the State as a purely utilitarian institution, a mere means to an end.... It represents the State as existing mainly for the protection of property and personal liberty, and as having therefore no concern with the private life and character of the citizen, except in so far as these may make him dangerous to the material welfare of his neighbour.

'The Greek theory, on the other hand, though it likewise regards the State as a means to certain ends, regards it as something more.... According to this theory, no department of life is outside the scope of politics; and a healthy State is at once the end at which the science aims, and the engine by which its decrees are carried out.'[29]

Accepting this passage as a philosophical statement of tendencies, we may observe that neither theory has ever been definitely adopted in England. The Utilitarians desired to recast institutions for the greater happiness of all citizens, but they were averse to investing the State with autocratic powers of interference. The Tories, on the other hand, were awakening to the conviction that the Government must do more for the people; but their fear of change and their own 'sinister interests,' persuaded them that this might be done without radical reforms. The Whigs faced both ways, and since in England the truly valuable effect of extreme opinions is always to drive the majority into a middle course, they rose to power on that compromise which is represented by the Reform measures of 1832. The Reform Bill was accepted by the Utilitarians as an instalment of the rightful authority of the people over the conduct of public affairs, and therefore a provisional method of promoting their welfare. The first Tory statesman of that day, on the contrary, was convinced that for the public welfare the existing Constitution could not be bettered:

'During one hundred and fifty years the Constitution in its present form has been in force; and I would ask any man who hears me to declare whether the experience of history has produced any form of government so calculated to promote the happiness and secure the liberties of a free and enlightened people.'[30]

Both parties, in fact, appealed to experience; but Peel took his stand upon history, which the Utilitarians disregarded as a mere record of unscientific errors, or at most as a lighthouse to give warning of rocks, rather than a lamp to show the road ahead. And the point upon which they joined issue was as to the consequences of staking the whole fabric of government upon the basis of public opinion, operating through almost unlimited popular suffrage. The Tory foretold that this would end in wrecking the Constitution, with the ship among breakers, and steering by ballot voting. The Benthamite persuaded himself that enlightened self-interest, empirical perceptions of utility, and general education, would prevail with the multitude for their support of a rational system. But with those who demanded sovereignty for the people a strict limitation of the sphere of government was one essential maxim; and the Utilitarians would have agreed with Guizot when he declared it to be 'a mere commonplace that as civilisation and reason progress, the sphere of public authority contracts.' They do not appear to have foreseen that whenever the masses should have got votes legislation would become democratic, or even socialistic, in order to capture them. This discovery was eventually made by the Tories, who availed themselves of it to dish the Whigs, and to come forward again upon a popular suffrage as the true friends and guardians of the people.

In Mr. Stephen's second volume James Mill is the principal figure, as the apostle of Benthamism, though he also describes briefly, in his terse and incisive style, the lives and opinions of some notable men, foes as well as friends to the party, who represented different expressions of energetic protest against existing institutions. To each of them is allotted his proper place in the line of attack, and his due share in the general enterprise of rousing, by argument or invective, the slow-thinking English people to a sense of their lamentable condition. Cobbett and Owen were at feud with true Utilitarians, and in unconscious alliance, against the orthodox economists, with the Tories, who, as we have said, have eventually found their advantage in the democratic movement. Cobbett fought for the cause of the agricultural labourer, trodden under foot by squires and parsons. Owen believed that the grasping capitalist, with his steam machinery, would further degrade and impoverish the working classes. Godwin, who is merely mentioned by Mr. Stephen, was a peaceful anarchist, who proposed 'to abolish the whole craft and mystery of government,' to abandon coercion and rely upon just reasoning, upon the enlightened assent of individuals to the payment of taxes. They all embodied ideas that are incessantly fermenting in some ardent minds, and that maintain a perceptible influence on political controversies at the present day. Godwin agreed with the Utilitarians that government is a bad thing in itself, but he went beyond them in concluding that it is, or ought to be, unnecessary to society. To both Radical and Socialist, Utilitarianism, with its frigid philanthropy and its reliance on self-help, prudence, and free competition for converting miserable masses into a healthy and moral population, was the gospel of selfishness, invented for the salvation of landlords and capitalists. Malthus was the heartless exponent of natural laws that kept down multiplication by famine, while the rich man fared sumptuously every day; and the Ricardians, with their mechanical balancing of supply and demand, were mocking distress by solemn formulas. It must be admitted that these sharp assailants hit some palpable rifts in the Utilitarian armour of proof; and we know that popular sentiment has since been compelling later economists to take up much wider ground in defence of their scientific position.

The doctrines of Malthus, of Ricardo and of Ricardo's disciples are subjected to a searching analysis by Mr. Stephen, who brings out their limitations very effectively. Yet it is by no means easy, even under our author's skilful guidance, to follow the Utilitarian track through the fields of economy, philosophy, and theology, and to show in what manner or degree it led up to the issues under discussion in our own time. All these 'streams of tendency' have had their influence on the main current and direction of contemporary politics, but they cannot be measured or mapped out upon the scale of a review. And, in regard to political economy, we may even venture to question whether the earlier dogmatic theories now retain sufficient interest to justify the space which, in this volume, has been devoted to a scrutiny of them; for their methods, as well as their conclusions, have now become to a certain extent obsolete. A strictly empirical science must be continually changing with fresh data and a broader outlook; it is always shifting under stress of new interests, changed feelings, and unforeseen contingencies; it is very serviceable for the exposure of errors, but its own demonstrations are in time proved to be erroneous or inadequate. Moreover, to explain the ills that afflict a society, and to declare them incurable except by patience and slow alterative medicines, is often to render them intolerable; nor is it of much practical importance to lay out, on hard scientific principles, the methodical operation of causes and effects that have always been understood in a rough experimental way.

'The truth that scarcity meant dearness was apparently well known to Joseph in Egypt, and applied very skilfully for his purpose. Economists have framed a theory of value which explains more precisely the way in which this is brought about. A clear statement may be valuable to psychologists; but for most purposes of political economy Joseph's knowledge is sufficient,'

If Joseph had written a treatise on the agrarian tenures of Egypt he might not have bought them up so easily at famine prices, and he might have entangled himself in a discussion upon peasant properties. The economist who makes an inductive demonstration of unalterable natural laws and propensities may be likened to the scientific legislator who undertakes to codify prevailing usages: he turns an elastic custom, constantly modified in practice by needs and sentiments, into an unbending statute, when the bare unvarnished statement of the principle produces an outcry. Natural processes will not bear calm philosophic explanations that are understood to imply approval of them as cruel but inevitable; not even in such an essentially moralistic argument as that of Butler's 'Analogy,' which some have regarded as a plea of ambiguous advantage to the cause of natural religion. Malthus, for example, proved undeniably the pernicious consequences of reckless propagation; but he who forces a great evil upon public attention is expected to find the practical remedy; and Malthus had little to prescribe beyond a few palliative measures and the expediency of self-restraint, while his proposal to abolish the poor laws in the interest of pauperism was interpreted as a recommendation that poor folk should be starved into prudential and self-reliant habits. Malthus held, indeed, that the improvement of the condition of the labouring classes should be considered as the main interest of society. But he also thought that

There is much wisdom to be found in these counsels; but good advice rather excites than allays the ignorant impatience of acute suffering, and popular opinion soon began to inquire whether the vis medicatrix might not be administered in some more drastic form by the State. The conception of a rational government superintending, without interference, the slow evolution of morals, had a kind of correspondence, in the religious sphere, with the doctrine of pre-established harmonies so clearly ordained that to suggest any need of further Divine interposition to readjust them occasionally was a reflection upon the wisdom and foresight of Providence. But the stress and exigencies of modern party politics has rendered this attitude untenable for the temporal ruler.

The pure economists, however, prescribed moral remedies without investigating the elements of morality. They settled the laws of production and distribution as eliminated from the observation of ordinary facts; they corrected errors and registered the mechanical working of human desires and efforts. It is Mr. Stephen's plan, throughout this book, to show the bearing of philosophical speculation on practical conduct; and accordingly, after his chapter on Malthus and the Ricardians, he turns back again to philosophy and ethics. His clear and cogent exposition of the views and conclusions put forward on these subjects by Thomas Brown, with the express approval of James Mill, is an illustration of Coleridge's dictum regarding the connection between abstract theories and political movements. Admitting the connection, we may again observe that there is a certain danger in stating the theories too scientifically. Neither morals nor religion are much aided by digging down into their foundations. Yet the logical constructor of a new system usually finds himself driven by controversy into a discussion of ultimate ideas, though the Utilitarians refused to be forced back into metaphysics. No professor of philosophy, however, can altogether avoid asking himself what underlies experience and the formation of beliefs; and Brown did his best for the Utilitarians by defining Intuition as a belief that passes analysis, a principle independent of human reasoning, which 'does not allow us to pass a single step beyond experience, but merely authorises us to interpret experience.' It was James Mill's mission to cut short and to simplify philosophical aberrations for his practical purposes:

His own views are elaborated in his book on the Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, for a close criticism of which we must refer readers to Mr. Stephen's second volume. The connection of these dissertations with the social and political ends of the Utilitarians lies, it may be said briefly, in the support which a purely experiential psychology gives to the doctrine that human character depends on external circumstance, and that such vague terms as the 'moral sense' only disguise the true identity of rules of morality with the considerations that can be shown to produce general happiness. Whenever there appears to be a conflict between these rules and considerations, utility is the only sure criterion. To the extreme situations in which casuistry revels, as when a man is called upon to sacrifice his life or his personal honour for his country's good, the Utilitarian would apply this unfailing test inexorably; in such cases a man ought to decide upon a calculation of the greatest happiness of the majority. He does not, in fact, apply this reckoning; he may possibly not have time, at the urgent moment, to work it out; his heroism is inspired by the universal praise or blame that reward self-devotion or punish shrinking from it, and thus render acts moral or immoral by the habitual association of ideas. The martyr or patriot does not, indeed, stop to calculate; he does not feel the subtle egoism that is hidden in the desire for applause; he believes himself to be acting with the perfect disinterestedness which can only be accounted for by superficial reasoners on the assumption of some such abstract notion as religion, moral sense, or duty. Since the behaviour of mankind at large, therefore, is invariably guided by a remote or proximate consideration of utility; since conduct depends upon character, and character is shaped by external conditions and positive sanctions, it is possible to frame, on utilitarian principles, scientific rules of behaviour which can be powerfully, though indirectly, promoted by legislation and a system of enlightened polity. For morality, it is argued, can be materially assisted by pointing to, or even providing, the serious consequences that are inseparable from human misdeeds, by proving that pain or pleasure follows different kinds of behaviour; while motives are so complex that they can never be verified with certainty, and must therefore be left out of account. This anatomy of the springs of action obviously lays bare some truths, although they fit in much better with the department of the legislator than of the moralist. As Mr. Stephen forcibly shows, although the consideration of motive may fall very seldom within the sphere of legislation, yet no theory which should exclude its influence on the moral standard could be tolerated, since the motive is of primary importance in our ethical judgment of conduct. Nor has motive, as discriminated from intention, ever been kept entirely outside the criminal law, notwithstanding the danger of admitting, as an extenuation of some violent crime, that the offender had convinced himself that some religious or patriotic cause would be served by it. James Mill's view of morals as theoretically coordinate with law—because in both departments the intention is the essential element in measuring actions according to their consequences—operated in practical contradiction to his principle of restraining State interference within narrow limits. It is this latter principle which has since given way. For the general trend of later political opinion has evidently been towards bringing public morality more and more under administrative regulation; and this manifestly indicates a growing expansion of ideas upon the legitimate duties and jurisdiction of the State.

Upon James Mill's psychology Mr. Stephen's conclusion, with which we may agree, is that his analysis of virtue into enlightened self-interest is unsuccessful, and we have seen that his conception of government, as an all-powerful machine resting upon, yet strictly limited by, public opinion, has failed on the side of the limitations. Yet although Mill could not explain virtue, he was, after his fashion, a virtuous man, whose life was conscientiously devoted to public objects.

It is also probable that his theories, and his bitter controversies in defence of them, reacted on his personal character, and that both influences are to be traced beyond James Mill's own life, in the mental and social prepossessions which he bequeathed to his son.

Mr. Stephen's third volume is chiefly occupied by the history of the later Utilitarians, and the expansion of their cardinal principle in its application to a changing temper of the times, under the leadership of John Stuart Mill. We have, first, a closely written and critical description of this remarkable man's early life, his stringent educational training, the development of his opinions, and their influence upon the orthodox tenets of the sect. Upon all these subjects Mill has left us, under his own hand, more intimate and circumstantial particulars than are to be found, perhaps, in any other personal memoir. The writer who tells his own story usually passes hastily over boyhood; the ordinary biographer gives some family details, or endeavours to amuse us with trivial anecdotes of the child who became an important man. J. S. Mill hardly alludes to any member of his family except his father, and his early days are marked by a total absence of triviality. He was bound over to hard intellectual labour at home during the years that for most of us pass so lightly and unprofitably at a public school; he was a voracious and indefatigable reader and writer from his youth up, with a wolfish hunger (as Browning calls it) for knowledge; he plunged into all the current discussions of philosophy and politics; he became a practised writer and made a good figure at debating clubs; he became so intent on the solution of complex social problems as to acquire a distaste for general society; his mental concentration blunted his sensibility to the physical passions that so powerfully sway mankind.

Nevertheless, Mill's outlook upon the world was much wider than his father's, and his aim was so to adjust the Utilitarian creed as to bring it into closer working accord with the advancing ideas and projects of the political parties to whom he was nearest in sympathy. He allied himself in the beginning with the Philosophical Radicals, in the hope of organising them for active service in the cause. But this group soon broke up, and Mr. Stephen ascribes their failure in part to their name, observing that the word '"Philosophical" in English is synonymous with visionary, unpractical, and perhaps simply foolish.' There would be less satire, and possibly more justice, in saying that the word gives a chill to the energetic hot-gospeller of active Radicalism, who pushes past the philosopher as one standing too far behind the fighting line, although he may be useful in forging explosives in some quiet laboratory. Mill himself was continually hampered, as an ardent combatant, by the impedimenta which he brought into the field in the shape of abstract speculations, which could not be made to fit in with the immediate demands of thorough-going partisans. His democratic fervour was tempered by his conviction of the incapacity of the masses. He was a Socialist 'in the sense that he looked forward to a complete, though distant, revolution in the whole structure of society'; he discovered that the Chartists had crude views upon political economy; his attitude toward factory legislation was very dubious. Yet in the main purpose of his life and writings, which was to mend and guide public opinion on social and political questions by theoretical treatment—that is, by a logically connected survey of the facts—he was undoubtedly successful, as is shown by the popularity of his two great works on Logic and Political Economy, which became the text-books of higher study on these subjects for a whole generation. On the other hand, he exposed himself to the distrust and hostility that are always aroused by philosophical arguments which strike at the roots of established beliefs and prejudices, and are discovered to be really more dangerous to them than a direct assault.

It was the philosophic strategy of J. S. Mill to prosecute the Utilitarian war against metaphysics, and finally to exterminate Intuitions, being convinced, as he said, that the a priori and spiritualistic thinkers still far exceeded the partisans of experience, and that a great majority of Englishmen were still Intuitionists. Is this actually a true account of English thought? Mr. Stephen thinks not, for he believes that if Mill had not lived much apart from ordinary folk he would have found Englishmen practically, though not avowedly, predisposed to empiricism, which has been the philosophic tradition in this country since Hobbes. We so far agree with Mr. Stephen that we believe Englishmen, in general, to practise a great deal more of empiricism than they avow. But Mill proposed to demonstrate and declare it as a weapon in polemics and an engine of action, and it was here, probably, that the main body of Englishmen deserted him. They were not ready to cut themselves off from theology and from all ideas that transcend experience, and they demurred to the paramount jurisdiction of logic in temporal affairs. To every section of Churchmen the relegation of moral sanctions within the domain of verifiable consequences was a doctrine to be resisted strenuously. With the high sacerdotalist it amounted to a denial of the Christian mysteries; to the Broad Churchman it was ethically inadequate and ignoble; to the scholastic professor of divinity it meant ruinous materialism.

That a vigorous thinker should have begun by striking at what seemed to him the root of obstructive fallacies was natural enough. He supposed that a logical demonstration would clear the ground for his plans of reform; whereas, on the contrary, it entangled him in preliminary disputations, and his inflexible reasoning alarmed people who followed experience as the guide of life, but instinctively felt that there must be something beyond phenomenal existence. In political economy Mill relied upon common sense and practice in affairs to make the requisite allowance for general laws founded on human propensities regarded abstractedly. His conviction was, in short, that nothing should be taken for granted because everything might be explained; and he desired to tie men down to accepting no belief, or even feeling, that could not be justified by reason. His System of Logic was, as he has himself written, a text-book for the doctrine 'which derives all knowledge from experience, and all moral and intellectual qualities principally from the direction given to the associations.' When he proceeded to construct a systematic psychology upon this basis, he fell into the fundamental perplexities that are concisely brought out by Mr. Stephen in his scrutiny of Mill's doctrine of Causation. He followed Hume in severing any necessary connection between cause and effect, and even invariable sequence became incapable of proof. But when he resolved Cause into a statement of existing conditions that can never be completely known until we have mastered the whole series of physical phenomena, and showed that all human induction is fallible because necessarily imperfect, it became clear that Mill had very little to offer in substitution for those grounds of ordinary belief that he was bent on demolishing. The word Cause is reduced, for ordinary use, to a signification not unlike that which is understood in loose popular language by the word Chance, since Chance means no more than ignorance of how an event came to pass; and in no case, according to Mill, can we ever calculate with security what undiscoverable conditions may suddenly bring about an unexpected event contrary to previous experience. The uniformity of Nature, as Mr. Stephen remarks, is thus made exceedingly precarious; and to the practical intelligence, which looks for some basis that cannot be argued about, there is still something to be said for Intuition. And when Mill, still in search of some precise formula, undertook to interpret persistent sequences by his theory of Real Kinds possessing an indeterminate number of coherent properties—so that our belief in the invariable blackness of crows is justified as a collocation of these visible properties—he merely throws the problem of Causation farther backward. We have to be content with direct observation of phenomena that can be classified as co-existent; we can perceive that things accompany each other, but we can never be sure that they follow each other, as they appear to do.

It may be doubted whether Mill's treatment of these problems has materially affected subsequent psychological speculation, which has since taken different and deeper courses. His main objective was social and political.

'The notion,' he has written, 'that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition, or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions.' In confounding the metaphysicians, and eliminating all mysterious assumptions or axioms, he aimed at clearing the ground for a demonstrable science of character, and to establish the great principle that character can be indefinitely modified. The way is thus opened to questions of conduct, to positive remedies for social and political evils which, as they have been generated and fostered by external circumstances, can be removed by a change of those circumstances.

We cannot follow Mr. Stephen through his elaborate and effective review of this celebrated book. Its appearance marked an epoch in the history of Utilitarianism, for it took a much wider survey of social and political considerations, and the author undertook to expand the orthodox economic theories so that they might embrace and be reconciled with some daring projects of comprehensive reform. But Mill had to put some strain on the principles to which he adhered, and to accommodate certain inconsistencies in order to keep pace with moving ideas. He held on with some effort to the cardinal tenets of the older Utilitarians, to a dislike of interference by governments, to reliance on individual effort, to protest against the deadening influence of paternal administration, to his own trust in the gradual effect of educational agencies, and in the slow emancipation of the popular mind from unreasoning prejudices. On the other hand, he advocated a radical reform of the land laws, peasant proprietorship, the acquisition by the State of railways and canals, the limitation of the right of bequest; and he went even so far as to speak with approval of laws in restraint of improvident marriages. All these proposals could only be carried out by arbitrary and drastic legislation. As he put it, the State must interfere for the purpose of making the people independent of further interference; and he overlooked or set aside the question whether the eventual result of thus calling in the State's agency would not be contrary to the principles and professed intentions of the Utilitarian school, whether the provisional rÉgime would not become permanent, as, in fact, it has been rapidly becoming ever since.

We can see, moreover, that while J. S. Mill's sympathy with the popular cause and with the most ardent reformers was sincere, he was at issue with them in regard to the means, though not in regard to the ends; he wished to better the intelligence of the people as the first step toward bettering their condition. But when he had convinced himself, as he said, that no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought, he had still to persuade men who were stirring and pressing for immediate action that gradual methods were the best. Most of them may have preferred to try whether, if the lot of mankind were improved materially, the moral changes and mental habits would not follow; for indeed Mill's proposition might stand examination and hold good either way. It may be argued that an elevation or widening of intellectual views is the consequence, as often as it is the cause, of increasing comfort and leisure. He thought that all reading and writing which does not tend to promote a renovation of the world's belief is of very little value beyond the moment, which is, of course, true in a general sense; though literature can act much more directly than by dealing with first principles. He welcomes Free Trade as one triumph of Utilitarian doctrines, yet he sadly observes that the English public are quite as raw and undiscerning on subjects of political economy since the nation was converted to Free Trade as before. The nation, in fact, went straight at the immediate point, got what it wanted at the moment, and was satisfied.

Mr. Stephen's criticism of Mill's later writings exhibits further his difficulties in adjusting the essential Utilitarian principles to closer contact with the urgent questions of the day. Mill still held to competition, to the full liberty of individuals, to the inevitable mechanical working of economic laws; he still doubted the expediency of factory legislation, and condemned any laws in restraint of usury. He was opposed, broadly, to all authoritative intrusion upon human existence wherever its necessity could not be proved conclusively to be in the interest of a self-reliant community. Yet he was forced to make concessions and exceptions in the face of actual needs and grievances; and especially he found himself more and more impelled to tolerate and even advocate interference by the State as the only effective instrument for demolishing obstacles to the moral and material betterment of the people. Since unjust social inequalities could be traced to an origin in force or fraud, the legislature might be logically called in to remove them; and as this is manifestly the revolutionary argument (as embodied, for example, in the writings of Thomas Paine), it enabled him to join hands with Radicalism in proposing some very thorough-going measures. 'Landed property in Europe derives its origin from force;' so the legislature is entitled to interpose for the reclamation of rights unjustly usurped from the community; while, as economical science shows that the value of land rises from natural causes, the conclusion is that the State may confiscate the unearned increment. But it was not so easy to convince the hungry mechanic, by rather fine-drawn distinctions, that the capitalist had a better right to monopolise profits than the landlord; for the rise of value in manufactured commodities has very complex causes, some of them superficially natural. So here, again, is a plausible case of social injustice. Again, it may be affirmed that all powerful associations, private as well as public, operate in restriction of individual liberty. You may argue that great industrial companies are voluntary; the question is whether they are innocuous to the common weal, and we may add that this point is coming seriously to the front at the present time. The distinction, as Mr. Stephen remarks, drawn by the old individualism between State institutions and those created by private combination is losing its significance; and, what is more, public bodies are now continually encouraged to absorb private enterprise in all matters that directly concern the people.

In short, we are on the high road to State Socialism, though Mill helps us to console ourselves with having taken that road on strictly scientific principles. It is the not unusual result of stating large benevolent theories for popular application; the principle is accepted and its limitations are disregarded. Nevertheless Mill contends gallantly in his later works for intellectual liberty, complete freedom of discussion, and the utility of tolerating the most eccentric opinions. Into what practical difficulties and questionable logical distinctions he was drawn by the necessity of fencing round his propositions and making his reservations is well known; and Mr. Stephen hits the weak points with keen critical acumen. We all agree that persecution has done frightful mischief, at times, by suppressing the free utterance of unorthodox opinions. But Mill argues that contradiction, even of truth, is desirable in itself, because a doctrine, true or false, becomes a dead belief without the invigorating conflict of opposite reasonings. Resistance to authority in matters of opinion is a sacred privilege essential to the formation of belief; wherefore originality, even when it implies stupidity, is to be carefully protected as a factor of human progress. We need not follow Mr. Stephen in his victorious analysis of the arguments wherewith Mill seeks to uphold this uncompromising individualism, and to guard human perversity against the baneful influence of authority. It is clear enough that society cannot waste its time in perpetual wrangling over issues upon which an authoritative verdict has been delivered; and for most of us a reasonable probability, founded on the judgment of experts, is sufficient in moral or physical questions as well as in litigation. The religious arena still remains open, where experts differ and decisions are always disputable. Yet Mr. Arthur Balfour devotes a chapter in his Foundations of Belief to the contention that our convictions on all the deeper subjects of thought are determined not by reason but by authority; whereby he provides us with an escape from the scepticism that menaces a philosopher who has proved all experience to be at bottom illusory. Mill, on the other hand, would make short work with authority wherever it checks or discourages the unlimited exercise of free individual inquiry; and in politics he would entrust the sovereign power to a representation of the entire aggregate of the community, with the most ample encouragement of incessant discussion. This is, indeed, the system actually in force, and in England it has answered very well; but Mill hardly foresaw that its tendency would be to make the State, as the embodiment of popular will, not less but more authoritative, with a tendency to encroach steadily upon the sphere of individual effort and private enterprise.

It may be said that the abstract Utilitarian doctrine reached its high-water mark in Mill's book on the Subjection of Women, to which Mr. Stephen allots one section of a chapter. The book is a particular enlargement upon Mill's general view that it is a pestilent error to regard such marked distinctions of human character as sex or race as innate and in the main indelible. What is called the nature of women he treats as an artificial thing, an isolated fact which need not at any rate be recognised by law; the proper test was, he argued, to leave free competition to determine whether the distinction is radical or merely the result of external circumstance. But, as Mr. Stephen answers, such a plain physiological difference is at least not negligible; and competition between the sexes may favour the despotism of the stronger, while complete independence on both sides implies freedom to separate at will; and Mill had only glanced evasively at the question of divorce. Here, again, is a theory which the pressure of social conditions, much more than abstract reasoning, is bringing more and more into prominence with our own generation. On the wider and more complicated question of race distinctions Mill never worked out his argument against their indelibility into a regular treatise; nor could he foresee the increasing influence upon contemporary politics that is now exercised by racial feelings and their claims to recognition. In the eighteenth century the French EncyclopÉdistes, who were the direct philosophic ancestors of the Utilitarians, regarded frontiers, classes, and races as so many barriers against the spread of universal fraternity; and the revolutionary government took up the idea as a war-cry. The armies of the French Republic proclaimed the rights of the people in all countries, until Napoleon turned the democratic doctrine into the form of Imperialism. M. EugÈne de VogÜÉ has told us recently that this armed propaganda produced a reaction in Europe toward that strong sentiment of nationality which has been vigorously manifested during the second half of the nineteenth century. The assertion of separate nationalities, by the demand for political autonomy and by the attempt to revive the public teaching of obscure languages, is the form taken in western and central Europe by the problem of race. No movement could be more contrary to the views or anticipations of the Utilitarians, for whom it would have been merely a recrudescence of one of those inveterate and unreasoning prejudices which still retard human progress, a fiction accepted by indolent thinkers to avoid the trouble of investigating the true causes that modify human character. Yet not only is national particularism making a fresh stir in Europe, but the spread of European dominion over Asia has forced upon our attention the immense practical importance of racial distinctions. We find that they signify real and profound characteristics; the European discovers that in Asia he is himself one of a ruling race, and thereby isolated among the other groups into which the population is subdivided. If he is a sound Utilitarian he will nevertheless cherish the belief that economical improvements, public instruction, good laws, and regular administration will obliterate antipathies, eradicate irrational prejudices, and reconcile Asiatic folk to the blessings of scientific civilisation. But he will confess that it is a stubborn element, if not innate yet very like such a quality; if not ineffaceable yet certain to outlast his dominion. It is at least remarkable that Mill's protest against explaining differences of character by race, to which Buckle 'cordially subscribed,' should have been answered in our time by a clamorous demand for the recognition of those very differences, and by an increasing tendency to admit them.

Upon Mill's theological speculations Mr. Stephen has written an interesting chapter, illustrating Mill's desire to treat religion more sympathetically, with a deeper sense of its importance in life, than in the absolute theories of the older Utilitarians. Bentham had declared that the principle of theology, of referring everything to God's will, was no more than a covert application of the test of utility. You must first know whether a thing is right in order to discover whether it is conformable to God's pleasure; and a religious motive, he said, is good or bad according as the religious tenets of the person acting upon it approach more or less to a coincidence with the dictates of utility. The next step, as Bentham probably knew well, is to throw aside an abstraction that has become virtually superfluous, and to march openly under the Utilitarian standard. But there was in Mill a moral and emotional instinct that deterred him from resting without uneasiness upon such a bare empirical conclusion. He rejected all transcendental conceptions; yet he did his best, as Mr. Stephen shows, to find reasonable proofs of a Deity whose existence and attributes may be inferred by observation and experience. He agreed that such an inference is not inconsistent, a priori, with natural laws, and the argument from design was admitted as providing by analogy, or even inductively, a large balance of probability in favour of creation by Intelligence. The difficulty is to attain by these methods the idea of a Deity perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness; for the order of Nature, apart from human intervention and contrivances for making the earth habitable, discloses no tincture of morality. We are thus reduced to the dilemma propounded by Hume, between an omnipotent Deity who cannot be benevolent because misery is permitted, and a benevolent Deity with limited powers; and Mill sums up the discussion, doubtfully, in favour of a Being with great but limited powers, whose motives cannot be satisfactorily fathomed by the human intellect.

This halting conclusion indicates a departure from the pure empiricism of his school, and even the inadequacy of the argument shows the effort that Mill was making towards some fellow-feeling with spiritual conceptions. As Mr. Stephen points out, there is a curious approximation, on some points, between Mill and his arch-enemy Mansel—between the conditioned and unconditioned philosophies. Both of them lay stress on the moral perplexities involved in arguing from the wasteful and relentless course of Nature to an estimate of the divine attributes. And both agree that the existence of evil is a serious difficulty; though Mansel's solution, or evasion, of it is by insisting that the ways of the unconditioned are necessarily for the most part unknowable, while Mill leans to the possibility that God's power or intelligence may be incomplete. Upon either hypothesis we must confess that our knowledge is imperfect and very fallible. Mr. Stephen has no trouble in exposing the philosophical weakness of Mill's attitude; but we are mainly concerned to compare it briefly with the position of his predecessors, for the purpose of continuing a rapid survey of the course and filiation of Utilitarian doctrines. When the orthodox Utilitarians definitely rejected all theology—though until Philip Beauchamp appeared, in 1822, they made no direct attack upon it—they believed that the fall of theology would also bring down religion, which they regarded as the source of motives that were fictitious, misleading, and profoundly unscientific. Mill agreed that a supernatural origin could not be ascribed to received maxims of morality without harming them, because to consecrate rules of conduct was to interdict free examination of them, and to paralyse their natural development in accordance with changes of circumstance. Looking back over the interminable controversies, and the successive variations in form and spirit that every great religion has undergone, this objection does not seem to us very formidable. But Mill's evident object was to reconcile the cultivation of religious feelings with his principle of free thought for individuals. In accepting Comte's ideal of a religion of humanity, he had entirely condemned Comte's reproduction of the spiritual authority in the shape of a philosophical priesthood. And it is remarkable, as indicating a radical discordance between the French and the English moralist, that while Comte's adoration, in his later years, of a woman led him to ordain a formal worship of the feminine representative of the Family, coupled with the strict seclusion of women from politics, Mill's lifelong attachment greatly strengthened his ardour for the complete emancipation of the whole sex.

Our readers will bear in mind that we are endeavouring to measure the permanent influence of Utilitarian doctrines, to determine how far they have fixed the direction, and shaped the ends, of contemporary thought and political action. It cannot be said that these doctrines are now predominant in either of these two closely interacting departments. National instincts and prepossessions have lost none of their force; national character now divides neighbouring peoples more sharply, perhaps, than a hundred years ago. Militarism is stronger than ever; cosmopolitan philanthropy is overridden by the growth of national interests; political economy is overruled by political necessities; nor have ethical systems displaced the traditional religions. Empiricism has fallen into discredit as a narrow and inadequate philosophy; it is superseded in the spiritual world by transcendental interpretations of dogmas as metaphysical representations of underlying realities. Mr. Stephen's most instructive work draws to its close with a dissertation on Liberalism and Dogmatism, showing how and why Utilitarianism failed in convincing or converting Englishmen to a practical assent to its principles and modes of thought. Upon many minds they produced more repulsion than attraction. Maurice earnestly protested that we were to believe in God, not in a theory about God, though the distinction, as Mr. Stephen says, is vague; he appealed to the inner light, to the conscience of mankind; he went back into the slough of Intuitionism. Carlyle cried aloud against materialistic views and logical machinery; he denounced 'the great steam-engine, Utilitarianism'; he was for the able despot and hero-worship against grinding competition and government by discussion. In theology the mystical spirit rose again with its immemorial power of enchanting human imagination; the moral law is discerned to be the vesture of Divinity, in which He arrays Himself to become apprehensible by the finite intellect; and a Science that tries to understand everything explains nothing. Authority, instead of being discarded, is invoked to deliver men out of the great waters of spiritual and political anarchy. The Tractarians struck in with a fierce attack on Rationalism, propounding Faith and Revelation as imperative grounds of belief. You must accept the dogmas, not as useful, not as moral or reasonable, not even as derived intuitively, but as the necessary fundamental truths declared by the infallible Church to be essential to salvation. Those who could not find infallibility in a State Church went over to Rome, abandoning the Via Media; others were content with the high sacramental position of Anglicanism; the moderate Rationalists took shelter with the Broad Church; a few retreated into the cloudy refuge of transcendental idealism. The two extreme parties, the Broad Church and the Sacerdotalists, were at bitter feud with each other; yet they both denounced the common enemy. Arnold 'agreed with Carlyle that the Liberals greatly overrate Bentham, and the political economists generally; the summum bonum of their science is not identical with human life ... and the economical good is often, from the neglect of other points, a social evil.' Newman held that to allow the right of private judgment was to enter upon the path of scepticism; and the latest infidel device, he says, is to leave theology alone. He set up the argument, well-worn but always impressive, that science gives no certainty; and Mr. Stephen contends against it with the weapons of empiricism:—

Mr. Stephen is himself a large-minded Utilitarian. He will have nothing to do with a transcendental basis of morals; and the dogmatist who dislikes cross-examination is out of his court. Dogmatic authority, he says, stands only on its own assertions; and if you may not reason upon them, the inference is that on those points reason is against them. You may withdraw beyond this range by sublimating religion into a philosophy, but then it loses touch with terrestrial affairs, and has a very feeble control over the unruly affections of sinful men. Newman himself resorted to scientific methods in his theory of Development, that is, of the growth and evolution of doctrine. We may agree that these destructive arguments have much logical force, yet on the other hand such certitude as empiricism can provide brings little consolation to the multitude, who require some imperative command; they look for a pillar of cloud or fire to go before them day and night, and a land of promise in the distance. Scientific exposition works slowly for the improvement of ethics, which to the average mind are rather weakened than strengthened by loosening their foundations; and religious beliefs suffer from a similar constitutional delicacy. Conduct is not much fortified by being treated as a function of character and circumstance; for in religion and morals ordinary humanity demands something impervious to reasoning, wherein lies the advantage of the intuitionist.

Mr. Stephen, however, is well aware that empirical certitude will not supply the place of religion. In his concluding pages he states, fairly and forcibly, the great problems by which men are still perplexed. Religion, as J. S. Mill felt, is a name for something far wider than the Utilitarian views embrace.

The Utilitarian doctrines, in short, though propagated by leaders of high intellectual power, and inspired by a pure unselfish morality, achieved little success in the enterprise of providing new and firmer guidance and support to mankind in their troubles and perplexities. But they were not content to look down from serene heights upon the world, leaving the crowd

They laboured devotedly to dispel ignorance and to advance knowledge; they spared no pains to promote the material well-being of society. They helped to raise the wind that filled the sails of practical reform; they headed the attack upon legal and administrative abuses; they stirred up the national conscience against social injustice; they proclaimed a lofty standard of moral obligation. They laid down principles that in the long run accord with human progress, yet in their hopes of rapidly modifying society by the application of those principles they were disappointed; for their systematic theories were blocked by facts, feelings, and misunderstandings which had not been taken into calculation. They were averse to coercion, as an evil in itself; but though they would have agreed with Mr. Bright's dictum that 'Force is no remedy,' they were latterly brought to perceive that in another sense there is no remedy except force, and that the vested interests and preconceptions of society make a stiff and prolonged opposition to enlightened persuasion. They were disposed to rely too confidently upon the spread of intelligence by general education for preparing the minds of people to accept and act upon doctrines that were logically demonstrable, and to reject what could not be proved. Mr. Stephen has somewhere written that to support a religion by force instead of by argument is to admit that argument condemns it. The proposition is too absolutely stated even for the domain of spiritual authority, since it might be replied that no great religion, certainly no organised Church, has existed by argument alone, and it has usually been supported by laws. But at any rate the temporal power subsists and operates by coercion, and the sphere of the State's direct action, instead of diminishing, as the earlier Utilitarians expected it to do, with the spread of education and intelligence, is perceptibly extending itself. The Utilitarians demurred to religion as an ultimate authority in morals, and substituted the plain unvarnished criterion of utility. Upon this ground the State steps in, replaces religious precept by positive law, and public morality is enforced by Acts of Parliament. They were for entrusting the people with full political power, to be exercised in vigilant restraint of the interference by Government with individual rights and conduct; the people have obtained the power, and are using it more and more to place their affairs and even their moral interests under the control of organised authority. We do not here question the expediency of the movement; we are simply registering the tendency.

There are few literary enterprises more arduous than the task of following and demarcating from the written record of a period the general course of political and philosophic movements. The tendencies are so various, the conditions which determine them are so complicated, that it is difficult to keep hold of the clue which guides and connects them. Mr. Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century took the broad ground that is denoted by its title; but, as he now tells us in his preface, he has found it expedient to reduce his present work within less comprehensive limits, by confining it to 'an account of the compact and energetic school of the English Utilitarians.' This reduction of its scope has not, however, damaged the continuity of the narrative, since in the great departments of morals, religion, and political philosophy the Utilitarians were mainly the lineal heirs of the characteristic English writers in the preceding century. It is true that Mr. Stephen has not been able to bring within the compass of his three volumes the subject of general literature, especially of poetry and novels, which in the nineteenth century have given their vivid expression to the doubts and the hopes, to the aims and aspirations of the time. But we can see that such an enlargement of his plan would have rendered it unmanageable, and that Mr. Stephen may have wisely considered the example of Buckle's History of Civilisation in England, which was projected on too large a scale, exhausted the author's strength, and remains unfinished. Mr. Stephen's present work fulfils its promise and completes its design. The Utilitarians are very fortunate in having found a historian whose vivacity of style, consummate literary knowledge, and masculine power of thought will have revived their declining reputations, and secured to them their proper place in the literature of the nineteenth century.

[28] The English Utilitarians. By Leslie Stephen. 3 vols. London, Duckworth and Co., 1900.—Edinburgh Review, April 1901.