Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 02.djvu/407

Bagehot according to Bagehot, which gives so much importance to its debates, and which brings home to the electors their responsibility for sending to parliament the right kind of men, and for making their dissatisfaction felt when their representatives do not speak and vote in the manner best calculated to lend weight to the party which they are pledged to support. Bagehot held that a representative assembly which, like the House of Representatives in the United States, cannot effect any great and notable change by its resolutions, is bound to be something of a cipher, and that the people will never care enough about what such an assembly does, to take the pains requisite for selecting the best men. Nay, more, the best men themselves will not fix their ambition on becoming members of an assembly which exerts so little conspicuous influence on the course of national events. Bagehot was the first to bring out powerfully the paradox in 'government by public meeting,' as he called it, though he did not live to see all the practical illustrations of that paradox which we have witnessed of late years since the rise of Mr. Parnell's Irish party into its present importance. But he had fully grasped the absolute impossibility of conducting such a government as ours unless the House of Commons, in whom all power is centred, is really docile to its leaders on both sides. And Bagehot held that nothing could make it docile to its leaders on both sides except a profound popular conviction that deference to leaders is of the very essence of parliamentary government.

Bagehot, though no admirer of the House of Lords, is, on the whole, a decided partisan of the House of Lords as a revising assembly; but he earnestly desired its reconstitution by the help of a considerable number of distinguished life-peers. 'Most lords,' he said pithily, 'are feeble and forlorn.' The young peers are seldom aware that 'business is really more agreeable than pleasure.' Moreover, they are timorous creatures, who do not know when it is safe to resist an apparent current of popular opinion any more than they know when it is fatal to attempt to resist it. But with all this depreciation of the peers, Bagehot thought that the existence of the House of Lords tended to maintain the respect of the English people at large for the influence of wealth and culture in the community, and to prevent hungry and ignorant men from dictating foolish revolutionary measures to hungry and ignorant crowds of followers. While the House of Lords remains, the people will be insensibly influenced by their liking for the wealth and splendour of the aristocracy, and this liking will act as a sedative to keep them from rash and violent measures, and to confine reform to the removal of clear and visible grievances.

'Physics and Politics' was described by Bagehot as 'an attempt to apply the principles of natural selection and inheritance to political society.' His general view was that in early times the value of government chiefly consisted in the drill of a society into fixed habits, customs, preferences, and rules of its own, so as to subdue arbitrary personal caprice, and to create a common mind and character, a common groove of thought and feeling. He held that for this purpose a good habit or rule was better than a bad habit or rule; but that even a bad habit or rule thoroughly impressed on the whole people, and inducing a common life, was better than a good habit or rule which had not bitten deeply into the life of the people and effectually moulded them in a single mould. The race of men who cannot help acting together if they would, are sure to get the better over any race whose combination for co-operative actions is loose and imperfect; hence his preference for what he called political stupidity — the dull fixed habit of acting all in one way as the English do — to the sprightly divergences and differences of opinion which make it so difficult for the French to know what they really wish, or whether they have any wish in common by which the masses are profoundly affected. In the same way Bagehot explained, of course, the triumph of Rome over Greece and other indifferently welded, though cleverer and more reflective communities. He maintained, however, that this drill may be too effective, may go too far, and that, when it does so, we have cases of what he called 'arrested civilisations.' Such an arrested civilisation we have in China, where the common drill completely trampled out that disposition for cautious criticism and review of national prejudices, which ought to come sooner or later if there is ever to be an age of progress and discussion. Bagehot held that in our own day that respect for action which was characteristic of the times when action was needed to form and mould the national character, is excessive. He thought that reserve of judgment, and especially reserve of resolve, is not half common enough. Men are over-eager to be doing what they are not sure of approving even when they have done it. The military instincts inherited from the age of drill precipitate us into all sorts of premature action, where we really want discussion and suspense of judgment till discussion has done its perfect work. 'Physics and Politics' is a very remarkable illustration of the dread