Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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leaders of affairs seemed about to be booted from the seats of power. What the 20th century would bring, should these trends come to fulfilment, was terrible to contemplate.
But what is a rigorous scholar to do, just because the world he esteems is beginning to crumble? Does he fastidiously avert his eyes? Or does he instead sound an alarm, to rally others around him and beat back the forces of turmoil? Eye-aversion was not for William Edward Hartpole Lecky, the Irish historian and political philosopher. He chose to write—and fight.
Lecky was born near Dublin on March 26, 1838. All his life he remained a staunch Irish patriot—though a conservative, not a radical, one. He was an ardent foe of Home Rule, as propounded by Parnell and Gladstone. He took degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1859 and 1863. Despite early inclinations toward theology and politics, he found his niche in history after the large success of his History of Rationalism in Europe, published in 1865. It was a book that exhibited most of Lecky's strengths and shortcomings—powerful scholarship and a clean, clear literary style, marred by a tendency to go on at infinite length, scattering main points like diamonds in a field too heavily ploughed. The Victorians were undaunted, however, by large books, and Lecky's career prospered. His History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne, a sort of companion to the study of rationalism, likewise enjoyed success. But it was his 8-volume History of England in the Eighteenth Century, a work that took 19 years to research and write, that established Lecky's reputation. Each volume, as it appeared, won him new admirers. Lecky was not only lucid, but scrupulously objective throughout, even when treating of his beloved Ireland. Deeply interested in politics, he went to Parliament in 1895 as the Liberal Unionist member for Dublin University and sat until 1902. He became a privy councillor in 1897 and, in the year of his retirement from Parliament, received the Order of Merit. He died in London, October 22, 1903.
Lecky may have associated himself with the Liberal Party, but his political philosophy was tenaciously conservative. From his long study of the past, he had divined first principles. He saw how the affairs of men had been regulated before; he saw what had succeeded and what had failed. Change was not his enemy; he stood instead against change that went far beyond the simple righting of wrongs and redressing of grievances; wherein he was like his fellow Irishman, Burke, the arch-foe of metaphysical tinkerings with deeply rooted institutions. Burke maintained that the success of an institution, over years of growth and development, was tolerable proof of its worthiness and utility. This, too, Lecky affirmed. Burke asserted that some were fit to govern and others not. Likewise Lecky. A century separated the two Irish philosophers but very little else.
The revolution that Lecky saw raging around him was, as revolutions go, a mild and peaceable affair; no lordly estates plundered, no royal necks laid on the chopping block. Fittingly enough, for the most literate age the world had yet seen, the revolution was one more of words than of deeds. Such deeds as were performed were normally of ink and paper. They were laws, Acts of Parliament. For all that, the blaze they kindled was brighter, both then and now, than incendiary torches.
Democracy was the late Victorian age's great passion—a concept not just to profess but to translate into reality. The democracy professed was less radical than that of the French revolutionaries who, in Burke's day, had cried, “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality!”—and then had decapitated thousands of their free and equal brethren. Democracy, to the Victorians, meant something relatively high-minded—government by the majority for the benefit of the majority. The principle was amiable enough, certainly. It was in the practical application that things began to go wrong, as Lecky and a few others easily discerned. The implications of democracy for good government, for liberty-for precisely the values that democracy was meant to assert—were deeply disturbing.
It was in 1896 that Lecky published his premonitions. Democracy and Liberty was issued by Longmans, Green, and Co. in March and by October had run through four printings. The reviews, while attentive and appreciative, were not uniformly enthusiastic. Lecky's inveterate tendency to wander down interesting bypaths, never mind how far removed from his central theme, was frequently faulted.
In truth, Democracy and Liberty is about a great many things besides democracy and liberty in purest form. To name only a few of these things: the Irish land question, Indian suttee, Mormonism and polygamy, England's Italian policy, gambling, drunkenness as a disease, divorce, and women's rights. (The women's movement of the late 20th century would find Lecky surprisingly sympathetic; he was a powerful advocate of votes for women.) The Dictionary of National Biography calls Democracy and Liberty “a storehouse of admirable, if somewhat disjointed, reflection.” A. Lawrence Lowell, a future president of Harvard University, writing in the American Historical Review, chided the author for supposedly blaming “all the ills from which we suffer” on democracy alone. Still, like Sir Henry Maine's Popular Government and Sir James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,—learned, lucid protests against the spirit of the new age—Lecky's two sturdy volumes pointedly reminded Victorian England of the disaster it was storing up for posterity.
The argument of the book is the incompatibility of two concepts which, in the late 20th century, are regarded virtually as twins—democracy and liberty. The one might seem, at first glance, to reinforce and invigorate the other. But it was not so, as Lecky proceeded to establish in detail.
Democracy demanded easy access to the ballot box, and the Victorians had gone far toward complying. The electoral reforms of 1867 had enfranchised the industrial workers, those of 1884 the rural classes. Women would not gain the ballot until after the First World War, but it could be said of late Victorian Britain anyway that something like real democracy—the rule of The People—was being achieved. Whereas in 1866 only 1.3 million Britons had been privileged to vote, the right was shared by 5.7 million in 1886. The franchise had in two decades more than quadrupled.
Theoretically, all this represented a great advance. But Lecky was not so easy to convince. Like Burke, he never valued abstractions. That a thing worked, worked well, and gave every evidence of continuing to do so, was more important to him than speculative dreams. What had worked best for Britain, so far as he was concerned, was the electoral system that prevailed from the Reform Bill of 1832 until the Reform Bill of 1867. In 1832, the middle class had been enfranchised. The change had, at the time, split the country asunder, but it had worked. This was because, in Lecky's view, it had admitted to power a class of men solid, trustworthy, educated, and hard-working. Their merits, not their abstract “rights,” qualified them for the franchise. It was different with the millions granted the vote in 1867 and 1884. Sheer numbers was what mainly seemed to commend them as voters.
But what were mere numbers against intelligence, experience, and wisdom? “In every field of human enterprise,” argued Lecky, “in all the competitions of life, by the inexorable law of Nature, superiority lies with the few, and not with the many, and success can only be attained by placing the guiding and controlling power mainly in their hands.”1
In speaking of such matters, Lecky refused to mince words. “As far as the most ignorant class have opinions of their own, they will be of the vaguest and most childlike nature.”2 “One of the great divisions of politics in our day,” he predicted, “is coming to be whether, at the last resort, the world should be governed by its ignorance or by its intelligence.”3 It is a measure of how much ideological water has flowed under the bridge since 1896, that a noted author, soon to become a member of Parliament, should write so frankly without giving public scandal. In the late 20th century, he would be picketed by college freshmen, pilloried by congressmen and TV talk show hosts, without anyone's stopping to inquire whether intelligence might, on the whole, be socially more useful than ignorance.
What Lecky feared was that his country's government would pass out of the hands of gentlemen and “into the hands of professional politicians”—like those to be found in the United States. (Lecky admired the American Constitution and the American Senate and compared Alexander Hamilton favorably to Burke; yet he winced to see democracy so far advanced in the Republic.) Already in Britain, since democracy had taken root, there was more bribe-taking, more apostasy, more flouting of principle.
Lecky was concerned, accordingly, that gentlemen should continue to govern. He was concerned especially