for half-an-hour was a moral giant beside the courtiers who enjoyed a backstairs intimacy. And the pamphlets by which Johnson showed his gratitude for his pension are, at least, sincere utterances of a thoroughly masculine nature. Their philosophy, indeed, if philosophy it must be called, is simple in the extreme. 'In sovereignty,' he says, 'there are no gradations. . . . There must in every society be some power or other from which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or repeals them, creates or annuls judicatures, extends or contracts privileges, exempts itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity.' That is Johnson's whole political theory. Subordination, as he constantly asserts, is an essential condition of human happiness. The appeal to the rights of man was a piece of sickly sentimentalism. Rousseau ought to be transported. All Whiggism is detestable, because it implies simply the negation of all principles.3 The first Whig was the devil.1

81. In these and other more or less humorous utterances, Johnson gives his genuine creed. He felt rather than inferred on speculative grounds that no`solid basis for government could be made out of social contracts and abstract rights, and all the flimsy apparatus of constitutional theory upon which the Whigs of his day habitually relied. The doctrines of Rousseau tended to sap the foundations of all order; and the best reply was to fasten a determined grasp upon whatever order remained amongst men, without asking awkward questions. The principle, indeed, which implicitly denied the responsibility of governors, because the advocates of responsibility were opposed to all government, might in practice lead to the defence of gross tyranny. But Johnson's views of life made him insensible to all such arguments. The flimsy patriotism of the day put forward pretexts contemptible to his strong common sense. In the civil wars we were fighting for a king and a religion; under Queen Anne there was an effort to upset a government; but the point over which noisy dema

'Johnson's Works, viii. 168, 'Taxation no Tyranny.' 2 Boswell, Feb. 15, 1766.

Ib. April 28, 1778.

3 Ib. July 6, 1763.

gogues were now fighting was, whether Middlesex should or should not be represented by 'a criminal from gaol.' The popular cry was the work of reckless demagogues upon an ignorant mass. Petitions meant nothing. One man signs because he hates the Papists; one because it will vex the parson; another because he owes his landlord nothing; one because he is rich; another because he is poor; one to show that he is not afraid; and another to show that he can write.' 2 The Americans, indeed, alleged some grievances; but what they really meant was, that they would only pay what taxes they pleased. They believed in the doctrine of the fanciful Montesquieu,' that 'in a free State, every man being a free agent, ought to be concerned in his own government.' That doctrine meant simply anarchy. The 'consent' of which theorists talked was anarchy passive.' Every man is 'born. consenting to some system of government.' Anything more than this is the unmeaning clamour of the pedants of policy, the delirious dream of republican fanaticism.' If Americans still chose to complain, they must be satisfied with the answer that they had made their bargain and must stick to it. Their ancestors had chosen, for sufficient consideration, to leave a country where they could have a share in the government, and must take the consequences. If they complain that a tax is unprecedented, it may be easily answered that the longer they have been spared the better they can pay.'5 Meanwhile, American and English patriots alike might console themselves with the thought which Johnson expressed in his familiar addition to Goldsmith's Traveller':

How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!

Though boroughs have changed hands, the general state of the nation has not suffered. The sun has risen, and the corn has grown, and whatever talk has been of the danger of property, yet he that ploughed the field has generally reaped it, and he that built a house was master of the door; the vexation excited by injustice suffered, or supposed to be

'Johnson's Works, viii. 94, The False Alarm.'

2 Ib. viii. 89.

Ib. viii. 173, 'Taxation no Tyranny.'

Ib. viii. 174. • Ib. viii. 189.

suffered, by any private man or single community, was local and temporary; it neither spread far nor lasted long.' '

82. It would be unwise to depreciate, perhaps it would be difficult to exaggerate, the value of this steady unreasoning prejudice as a practical force in politics. Its weakness in one sense is indeed obvious. When maintained by an equally vigorous prejudice on the other side, the only appeal left was to force. The Americans replied by bullets when it was useless to invoke the rights of man. And, moreover, such theories could not permanently hold out against assaults of a speculative kind. Rousseau was not treated on Johnson's plan; and his books stirred emotions which will not be summarily repressed by simple denial. A doctrine which might be alleged on behalf of other governments, bad, good, or indifferent, was really, like the extreme of divine right which was its ancestor, an argument for none. There is, indeed, more truth than politicians willingly admit in the theory of the impotence of governments for good or ill. But it was not a truth which would impress men suffering under actual oppression, and still less could it impart the right impulse to governments decaying from within. Philosophers might console themselves with the thought; but the multitude would reject it as irrelevant; and the rulers be demoralised so far as they came to believe in it.

VIII. THE CONSTITUTIONALISTS.

83. I turn, therefore, to the constitutional theorists, who endeavoured to discover some sort of scientific basis for government. In the preface to Junius's Letters the anonymous author quotes with admiration a passage from a book, then just published, which gives the fullest exposition of the Whig theory. Jean Louis Delolme is not a writer of great original power; his creed has that taint of unreality which is common to all the doctrinaires, and seems to leave out of account precisely the great forces which mould all human affairs. Yet he puts into symmetrical shape a set of propositions which long passed current with commonplace thinkers. He expounds the gospel-such as it is-of the 'Johnson's Works, viii. 85, The False Alarm.'

fossilised constitutionalists. Though very inferior in acuteness and originality to such writers as Montesquieu and Tocqueville, he may be ranked for many purposes in the same class. Like them, he was impressed by the complex machinery of the British Constitution, and tried to frame a comprehensive theory of its nature. His admiration did not meet with the reward to which, in his opinion, it entitled him. He fancied that a book, intended to meet the revolutionary sentiments of the day, should have received some recognition from the rulers whose system he glorified. If, he says, he had told them that he was preparing to boil his teakettle with the English edition, he knows not what they would have replied; but he obviously thinks that the reply would have been 'Boil it.' He was forced to publish by subscription, and the result was not encouraging. One noble lord did not subscribe, but graciously recommended the book to a publisher, and the consequence was that Delolme had to buy off two intending translators for ten pounds. Another noble lord did not pay until Delolme, hearing that he had received a pension of 4,000l. a year, applied, after delicately waiting till the first quarter's payment must have been received, and a week afterwards received a couple of halfcrowns. The poor man, thus discouraged, seems to have fallen into distress, and led an anonymous existence in London for many years, though he ultimately died in Switzerland in 1807. These anecdotes are but too significant of the painful contrast between the ideal and the real; between the wisdom embodied in our matchless constitution and the manners of the constitutional rulers.

84. Delolme came to England at the time of the Wilkes troubles, and published his work contemporaneously with the Letters of Junius. To most Englishmen of the time the working of our constitutional machinery under a severe strain did not seem to justify very rose-coloured views. Delolme, however, was struck, like other foreign observers, by the amount of liberty enjoyed, and especially by the discovery that in England all things not forbidden are permitted, whereas, on the Continent, all things not permitted are forbidden.2 His book records his explanation of the phenomenon. It Delolme, pp. iii., iv. 2 Ib. p. 453, note.

consists of a brief historical sketch of the development of the constitution, followed by a discussion of its general principles.

85. In the preface Delolme states, with a curious naïveté, the doctrine which, less clearly formulated, lies at the bottom of the whole constitution-mongering creed. A government,' he says, 'may be considered as a great ballet or dance, in which, the same as in other ballets, everything depends on the disposition of the figures.' The form, that is, is everything, the substance nothing; to judge of a government you must not know what are the men of whom it is composed, what their beliefs, hereditary predispositions, traditions, or social organism, but simply what is the administrative mechanism. The political quacks of the present day, who would reform human nature by means of patent ballot-boxes, make the same assumption, but they make it tacitly. In the keen controversy between the followers of this school and the followers of Rousseau there was a common ground. Both schools agreed in assuming that the man of their speculations was a mathematical unit, whose qualities might be assumed to be substantially identical in all ages and nations. The dispute arose at the further point, whether the form of government suitable to his wants should be determined by a priori reasoning, or by observation of the experiments that had been made by legislators. If Delolme has the merit of appealing to experience, the assumptions implied in the 'ballet' theory render the appeal nugatory. Both schools, indeed, are fond of historical, and especially of classical, precedents. Rousseau and his followers fancied that they could find in the old democrat the free citizen, uncorrupted by feudalism and ecclesiasticism. Delolme regards the ancient history as a useful collection of precedents, directly applicable to modern times. A mob, he tells us, will inevitably produce a Spartacus or a Viriathus; whilst Pisistratus and Megacles, Marius and Sylla, Cæsar and Pompey,' give sufficient proof, if proof be required, of the danger of a dictator. The characteristic evil of the ancient republics is their instability; they are always losing their liberties, as a man might lose his purse; the most conclusive proof of the merits of the English 2 Ib. p. 306. Ib. p. 200.

1 Delolme, p. xi.

3