living incarnation of the spirit of liberty, and that' in which he describes the relation between the character and the constitution of the people, are striking in themselves, in spite of their superficial assumptions, and became the precedent for a long series of similar demonstrations, both at home and abroad. Of their intrinsic value I need not speak. To the impression which they produced in England it will be sufficient to produce one splendid testimony. The most eminent of Montesquieu's admirers called him in an early work 'the greatest genius which has enlightened this age."" Long afterwards, in endeavouring to set forth with the full force of his magnificent intellect the true spirit of the British Constitution, the object of his life-long idolatry, Burke called Montesquieu as the most unimpeachable witness to its excellence. Place before your eyes,' he says, 'such a man as Montesquieu. Think of a genius not born in every country or every time; a man gifted by nature with a penetrating aquiline eye; with a judgment prepared with the most extensive erudition; with an herculean robustness of mind, and nerves not to be broken with labour; a man who could spend twenty years in one pursuit. Think of a man, like the universal patriarch in Milton (who had drawn up before him. in his poetic vision the whole series of the generations which were to issue from his loins), a man capable of placing in review, after having brought together from the east, the west, the north, and the south, from the coarseness of the rudest barbarism to the most refined and subtle civilisation, all the schemes of government which had ever prevailed amongst mankind, weighing, measuring, collating, and comparing them all, joining fact with theory, and calling into council upon all this infinite assemblage of things all the speculations which have fatigued the understandings of profound reasoners in all times. Let us, then, consider that all these were but preparatory steps to qualify a man, and such a man, tinctured with no national prejudice, with no domestic affection, to admire and to hold out to the admiration of mankind, the constitution of England!'3 'Esprit des Lois,' book xix. ch. xxvii. 2 Burke's Works, x. 355 (abridged History of England'). 63. Alas! that one must quote such a glowing passage with the sense that it must be pared to the quick before presents an approximation to the truth! Such, however, was it the ideal Montesquieu as he presented himself to the imagination of the first of all English political writers. Translated from rhetoric into blank technical phrases, we may say that Montesquieu is the prototype of all the writers who have admired the English Constitution from the purely empirical ground; the most elaborate expounder of that theory of checks and balances, and of a judicious mixture of political elements, which has so long stood its ground upon English soil. From the same eloquent lips which thus offered homage to Montesquieu we might hear a denunciation of the arch-deceiver Rousseau. Rousseau, they could tell us, is the oracle of Jacobinism; he is the 'great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England;' no other principle influenced his heart or guided his understanding; he was possessed with vanity to a degree little short of madness; his life was not distinguished by a single good action; and he has used a genius, trembling on the verge of insanity, to degrade and pollute all who came within the range of his influence. The portrait omits the great source of Rousseau's power. The man who moves the souls of his fellow-men must be possessed by sympathy for others as well as by love for himself. But Burke's instinct does not deceive him in tracing the genealogy of the revolutionary creed. Rousseau's 'Con-— trat Social' was as the first blast of the trumpet before which the walls of Jericho were to fall. His doctrines, considered under a purely logical aspect, were probably derived to some extent from Locke, whose treatise on Government, though not explicitly noticed, is recalled in many passages. The contract, indeed, of Rousseau's imagination differs materially from that of his English predecessors. According to Hobbes, the fundamental compact runs this: 'Every man says to every man, I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition that thou give up thy right to him and authorise Burke's Works, vi. 32, 'Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.' all his actions in like manner.'! In Locke's version, though he abstains from giving any definite formula, the compact would run somewhat in this fashion: I give a tacit consent, by accepting property, to become a member of that jointstock association called the State, and consequently engage to obey its authority so long, and only so long, as it is exercised strictly for the purposes contemplated in the deed, the chief of which is the protection of property, and in accordance with the fundamental regulations, the chief of which are that my consent, or that of my authorised representatives, should be obtained to all taxes, and that every official should confine himself to his own proper province. Rousseau states the problem thus: To find a form of association which may defend and protect with the whole common force the person and property of every associate, and by which each uniting with all may yet only obey himself and remain as free as before.' The form of compact which fulfils these conditions is thus expressed: Each of us places in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general will; and we further receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.'' The comparison is curious. 'Strike the crowned head,' says Mr. Morley, 'from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of the Leviathan, and you will have a frontispiece that will do admirably well for the social contract.' Or, in Hobbes's version of the deed, identify the assembly of men' with the whole body of citizens, and the two contracts become identical. 64. Rousseau thus lays a foundation for his political edifice as absolute and immutable as that of Hobbes. Politics with him, in spite of some cursory remarks, becomes a quasi-mathematical science. Its formulæ are deducible by rigorous logic from a fundamental axiom absolutely independent of time and place. History and observation are simply irrelevant. We have an a priori system of politics which would harmonise with the a priori theology of the school of Clarke. Society will be put together on a geometrical plan, without reference to idiosyncrasies of men and races, or to their historical development. On the other hand, ''Leviathan,' part ii. ch. xvii. 2 Rousseau, Du Contrat Social,' book i. ch. vi. if the logical framework of Rousseau's system resembles that of Hobbes, the spirit by which it is animated is caught from Locke, though marvellously altered in the process. 'Man is born free; and he is everywhere in chains.' That is the celebrated phrase which opens his discussion, and strikes the keynote of the treatise. Locke, too, had asserted that doctrine, and had interpreted the freedom of man as involving equality before the laws, and giving a logical support to the right of insurrection. But between the spirit of Locke and the spirit of Rousseau there is the difference which distinguishes Somers from Robespierre. Locke could reconcile slavery to his theories; Rousseau declares that the words 'slavery' and 'right' are contradictory and mutually exclusive. Locke applies his social contract to modify the natural equality of mankind, so far as that phrase implies equality of property, or even of privilege, in consideration of general security. In Rousseau's version equality is not only the starting-point but the goal. The two principal objects of every legislative system should be the establishment of liberty and equality; and by equality Rousseau carefully explains that he means— not, indeed, an absolute equality of wealth and power-but such an approximation towards such an equality that no citizen may be rich enough to buy another, nor any poor enough to be bought." Locke's metaphysical spirit is limited by his utilitarianism; and he endeavours to sanction an existing order, sufficiently well arranged, in his opinion, to protect individual happiness by a tacit consent, which abandons the state of nature.' Rousseau is a metaphysician pure and simple, and his compact overrides all artificial arrangements by which he means the whole existing order-to revert to the mathematical simplicity of the 'state of nature' itself. A religion, said the deists, which is not the religion of nature, must be an artificial religion, or, in other words, a religion consciously invented for the benefit of priests. A political system, adds Rousseau, which is not prescribed by nature must be an artificial system, or a system consciously invented for the benefit of kings. Away with it! We need only add that the state of nature means a collection of men, regarded as individual units, with only those qualities which ''Contrat Social,' book i. ch. iv. 2 Ib. book ii. ch. x. belong to man as man, and therefore without the qualities generated by the infinite variety of forces which have slowly moulded the concrete human beings whom we see around us. Rousseau's theory, therefore, implies the sweeping away of the whole elaborate growth of beliefs, superstitions, and sentiments, and the institutions in which they have been embodied, which have been developed during the course of man's life on the earth, unless they can be justified by abstract reasoning. He would annihilate history, and preaches the true gospel of revolutionary fanaticism. 65. Here, then, we have formally embodied the two doctrines which are to be at death-grips for generations to come. Each absolutely repudiates the whole foundation upon which the other is avowedly based. On turning from Montesquieu to Rousseau, we may fancy that we have been present at some Parisian salon where an elegant philosopher has been presenting to fashionable hearers, conclusions daintily arrayed in sparkling epigram and suited for embodiment in a thousand brilliant essays. Suddenly, there has entered a man stained with the filth of the streets, his utterance choked with passion, a savage menace lurking in every phrase, and announcing himself as the herald of a furious multitude, ready to tear to pieces all the beautiful theories and formulas which may stand between them and their wants. How will those dilettanti demonstrations of the universe meet the new force which has suddenly come amongst them like the blood-boltered' Banquo, to disturb their decorous ceremonials? The guillotine which we can see in the background gives a sufficiently emphatic answer. If Montesquieu represents philosophy coming into the world from the antiquarian's study, Rousseau represents a philosophy which had long been familiar to professors, suddenly descending into the streets and revealing most unsuspected capacities. The political philosophy of Rousseau had indeed a fatal weakness which has revealed itself only too plainly in the attempt to translate its theories into practice. No sound structure could be raised on a doctrine which was the incarnation of anarchy. But the bitter teaching of experience was required to reveal that truth; and, meanwhile, the philosophy had certain advantages in practical warfare. In the first place, it laid down definite and VOL. II. |