Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/823

Rh  to wait until they had defined, in a series of practical rules, the relative powers and duties of the crown and the Parliament. Such was the advice of Mirabeau, whose ways of thought were as English as those of Pitt, and who had a proper disdain for the constitutional effect of verbiage. But the National Assembly insisted that it should lay the foundations of justice in a grand series of general truths; and had it not done so, it would have been false to the teaching of its master. If, as Rousseau taught, the only proper form of government can be deduced from the examination of human nature, it is alike easy and necessary to see, by looking at human nature, what are the rights of citizens, the duties of rulers, and the relations of both. That examination led to some wild statements, and the common sense of the legislators had often to correct the extravagant results of their own theories. Mr. Fitzjames Stephen scarcely needed to write a big book to show the absurdity which lurked in the crude theories of liberty, equality, and fraternity, for all of them were cut down to the proportions of something like sanity by the time that they passed into law. Still, the abstract theories of Rousseau and his school had an enormous influence on the course of the Revolution, and even now they exercise considerable force. To them we may trace much of the eagerness to make all the laws philosophically just, to purchase precision of fair dealing at the cost even of the most violent changes, and to discard the whole past of France in favor of a new evangel. The artisans of Paris and Lyons have not yet been cured of that metaphysical disease, although it takes a less violent form than it once did; and even the example of England has failed to wean M. Louis Blanc from the rigid political maxims of his master, RusseauRousseau [sic].

How came it that England did not display the same slavish submission as France to such theories as we find in the "Contrat Social?" Not of course, because they were unknown here. Hobbes and Locke had taught as clearly as Rousseau the fiction that rulers protected life and property by virtue of a contract, express or implied, between different portions of society. The assumption of such a bargain, as Mr. Leslie Stephen shows, ran through all but a small portion of our political literature in the eighteenth century. Warburton used it, not only to defend the connection between Church and State, but to show, by mathematical demonstration, that the bishops ought to have seats in the House of Lords; and neither Rousseau nor any other Frenchman ever deduced a bolder maxim than that "an established religion, with a test-law, is the universal voice of nature." Indeed, the most destructive political ideas of the French Revolution came from this side of the channel, and they were brought back to us on the wings of Gallican wit. Yet they never produced the slightest tendency to try rash political experiments. It is customary to explain this fact by saying that the English are as practical as the French are flighty. In this theory, as in all popular maxims, there is a measure of truth; but it is very small, and it does little to clear our thoughts. We may more profitably note that the freedom of ages had given to the England of the eighteenth century a set of institutions to which most of the people clung with fanaticism. There was no important rebellious class. There was not even the semblance of such detestation as that which cut off the peasantry of France from the nobles. Hence philosophy, which always interprets general tendencies, was used to find arguments in support of the British Constitution, rather than against it. The assumption of the social contract was employed to show the divine wisdom of the arrangement by which king, lords, and commons kept each other in check. It was used by Tories as well as by Whigs, and the one side was as careful as the other to keep it within the limits of the Constitution. In France, on the other hand, the gradual extinction of local liberties and aristocratic power had left the crown without a rival, and made it seem responsible for all the misery to which bad laws doomed the poor, and for the crushing burdens of a feudalism which had ceased to do any service. Every class was discontented, — the poor because they were pillaged; the rich middle class because they were despised even by the neediest of the aristocracy; the nobles, because their local authority had parsed to the intendants of the king; the courtiers, because they found it more and more difficult to pay for their extravagance out of either private or public funds and the men of letters, because they were quick to see that the laws were theoretically absurd as well as practically oppressive. Hence, interpreting general tendencies, speculative thought tended to attack all existing institutions. The theory of the social contract was used to show that the rulers of France had shamefully broken their bargain with the people.