第32章 Political Theory(10)

It was as well that there should be some extreme Radicals to speak for the poorest.But he thinks that any uniform suffrage would be bad,and that universal suffrage would be the most mischievous of all systems.64That would mean the swamping of one class by all --a 'tyranny more oppressive,perhaps,than any other tyranny.If one class alone were to be represented,it should be the favourite middle class,which has the 'largest share of sense and virtue,'and is most connected in interest with other classes.65A legitimate aim of the legislator is,therefore,to prevent an excess of democracy.With Mackintosh it seems essential not simply to suppress 'sinister interests,'but to save both the aristocracy and the middle class from being crushed by the lower classes.The opposition is vital;and it is plain that the argument for the aristocracy,that is,for a system developed from all manner of historical accidents and not evolved out of any simple logical principles,must be defended upon empirical grounds.

Mackintosh was in India during the early period of the Edinburgh Review .Jeffrey,as editor for its first quarter of a century,may be taken more fully to represent its spirit.Jeffrey's trenchant,if not swaggering style,covered a very timid,sensitive,and,in some respects,a very conservative temperament.

His objection to the 'Lake Poets'was the objection of the classical to the romantic school.Jeffrey's brightness of intellect may justify Carlyle's comparison of him to Voltaire,--only a Voltaire qualified by dislike to men who were 'dreadfully in earnest.'Jeffrey was a philosophical sceptic;he interpreted Dugald Stewart as meaning that metaphysics,being all nonsense,we must make shift with common-sense;and he wrote a dissertation upon taste,to prove that there are no rules about taste whatever.He was too genuine a sceptic to sacrifice peace to the hopeless search for truth.

One of the most striking passages in his Essays 66is an attack upon 'perfectibility.'He utterly disbelieves that progress in knowledge will improve morals or diminish war,or cure any of the evils that flesh is heir to.Such a man is not of the material of which enthusiastic reformers are made.Throughout the war he was more governed by his fear than by his zeal.He was in constant dread of failure abroad and ruin at home.The Review provoked the Tories,and induced them to start its rival,not by advocacy of political principles,but by its despairing view of the war.67He was still desiring at that time (1808)to avoid 'party politics'in the narrower sense.

The political view corresponding to this is given in the articles,some of which (though the authorship was not yet avowed)were assailed by Mill in the Westminster.In an early article 68he defends the French philosophers against the imputation of responsibility for the reign of terror,their excellent and humane doctrines had been misapplied by the 'exasperation'and precipitation of inexperienced voters.His most characteristic article is one published in January 1810.

The failure of the Walcheren expedition had confirmed his disbelief in our military leaders;the rise of English Radicalism,led by Burdett in the House of Commons,and Cobbett in the press,the widely spread distress and the severity of oppressive measures,roused his keenest alarm.69We are,he declared,between two violent and pernicious factions --the courtiers of arbitrary power and the democrats.If the Whig leaders did not first conciliate and then restrain the people,the struggle of the extreme parties would soon sweep away the constitution,the monarchy,and the Whig aristocracy by which that monarchy 'is controlled,confirmed,and exalted above all other forms of polity.'Democracy,it was plain,was increasing with dangerous rapidity.A third of every man's income was being taken by taxes,and after twenty years'boastful hostility we were left without a single ally.Considering all this,it seems as though 'the wholesome days of England were numbered,'and we are on the 'verge of the most dreadful of all calamities'--a civil war.

Jeffrey has learned from Hume that all government is ultimately founded upon opinion.The great thing is to make the action of public opinion regular and constituted,the whole machinery of the constitution,he says,is for the express purpose of 'preventing the kingly power from dashing itself to pieces against the more radical power of the people.'70The merit of a representative body is not to be tested simply by the goodness of its legislation,but by its diminishing the intensity of the struggle for the supreme power.

Jeffrey in fact is above all preoccupied with the danger of revolution,the popular will is,in fact,supreme;repression may force it into explosion;but by judicious management it may be tamed and tempered.Then we need above all things that it should,as he says in his reply to Mill (December 1826),give their 'natural and wholesome influence to wealth and rank.'

The stability of the English Constitution depends,as he said in 1810,upon the monarchy and aristocracy,and their stability on their being the natural growth of ages and having 'struck their roots deep into every stratum of the political soil.'

The Whigs represent the view implied in Macaulay's attack upon Mill --the view of cultivated men of sense,with their eyes open to many difficulties overlooked by zealots,but far too sceptical and despondent to rouse any enthusiasm or accept any dogmas absolutely.By the time of the Reform Bill the danger was obviously on the side of dogged obstructionism,and then the 'middle party'as Jeffrey calls it,inclined towards the Radical side and begged them to join its ranks and abandon the attempt to realise extreme views.They could also take credit as moderate men do for having all along been in the right.