Author: Irwin Collier

President of Yale and former Professor of Political Economy, Arthur T. Hadley provides guidance to reading in the social sciences in the literature survey of this posting. It was published as one of six papers in a volume “based upon lectures arranged by the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, and delivered in Philadelphia in the winter of 1898-99. The impulse to read good books that has grown out of the work of the Society in Philadelphia seemed to demand the suggestions that it was the purpose of these lectures to offer to those who desire to read wisely.”

Economics is discussed between pages 155 and 162 in the text following the book references, but visitors are encouraged to read the entire essay to appreciate the place of economics in Hadley’s scheme of the social sciences.

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SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMICS, AND POLITICS
BY ARTHUR T. HADLEY

REFERENCES

“History of the Science of Politics,” by Sir Frederick Pollock, London, 1890.
[First edition 1890; New and Revised Edition 1911; Reprint 1930.]

“Commentaries on the Laws of England,” by Blackstone, London, 1765-69.
[John Adams’ copies:  Book I; Book II;  Book III; Book IV]

“Fragment on Government,” by Jeremy Bentham, London, 1776.

“Ancient Law,” by Sir Henry Sumner Maine, London, 1861.

“Wealth of Nations,” by Adam Smith, 1776. Edition with notes by Thorold Rogers, Oxford, 1880. Abridgment by Ashley, London, 1895.  [Vol I.; Vol II.]

“Principles of Political Economy, with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy,” by John Stuart Mill, London, 1848.
[1871: Seventh edition:   Vol. I; Vol. II.]

“Contemporary Socialism,” by John Rae. Second edition, London, 1891.
[1884: First edition; 1891: Second edition;  1901: Third edition]

“Burke,” by John Morley, London, 1888.

“Social Evolution,” by Benjamin Kidd, London, 1894.

“Physics and Politics,” by Walter Bagehot, London and New York, 1872. [1873: First Edition; 1881: Sixth Edition]

[p. 139]

SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMICS, AND POLITICS

It is the work of the biographer or the historian to gather the events which group themselves about some man or body of men, and trace the subtle sequences of causation by which they are connected. The task of the student of political theory, whether he call himself economist, jurist, or sociologist, is a more ambitious and a more perilous one. His explanations of political events must be general instead of specific. It is not enough for him to correlate the occurrences of a particular life or a particular period. He must frame laws which will enable his followers to correlate the events of any life or any period with which they may have to deal, and to sum up in a single generalization the lesson of many such lives and periods.

This is the kind of result at which the sociologist must aim, if he has the right to call himself a sociologist at all. His manner of [140] reaching it will depend upon his individual character. It may be in flashes of genius like that of Burke. It may be by the strict observance of logical processes like those of John Stuart Mill. It may be — and this is the most common method of all — by a painstaking study of history like that of Aristotle or Adam Smith. Such a study of history the sociologist is at some stage of his progress practically compelled to make. The most brilliant genius must verify his theories by comparing them with the facts. The most astute logician must test the correctness of his processes by applying his conclusions to practical life. In default of such study we have not a work of science but a work of the imagination. This is the character of books like Plato’s “Republic,” like More’s “Utopia,” like Bellamy’s “Equality.” It is to a less degree the character of books like Rousseau’s “Contrat Social” or George’s “Progress and Poverty.” Each of these is a work of genius; but in Plato or Bellamy there is no historical verification at all, and in Rousseau or George there is not enough of it. A work of this kind is sure to be unscientific; and what is worse, it is [141] almost equally sure to be pernicious in its practical influence.

We are sometimes told that these imaginative works of sociology bear the same relation to politics that the historical novel does to history. This may be true if we look at them solely from the standpoint of literary art. But if we judge from their moral effect upon the reader the parallel fails. Reader and author both know that the historical novel is not true. It does not pretend to be true. No one is in danger of mistaking “Quentin Durward”or “Henry Esmond” for actual histories of the time with which they deal. With the writings of political theorists it is far otherwise. The line between the picture of an actual state and the picture of a possible state is not a very clear one. The reader of Rousseau or George hardly knows when he passes from a description of real evils and abuses to a description of imaginary remedies. The greater the ability with which such a work is written the greater is the danger of confusion. The author as well as the reader is excited by the exercise of imaginative power. Bellamy is said to have written “Looking Backward” as a work of fiction [142] pure and simple; but when his readers began to regard him in the light of a prophet, there was an irresistible temptation for the author to regard himself in the same way.

If a man can write literature at all, the construction of a work of political imagination gives him a fatally easy chance to act as a leader of men’s thoughts, Plato’s “Republic” was a far easier work to construct than Aristotle’s “Politics.” The one required only concentrated thought, the other involved in addition a painstaking use of material. There is the same advantage in facility of construction in the works of Rousseau as compared with those of Turgot. The easily written work is also the one which enjoys more readers and which has more influence, at least during the writer’s lifetime. George’s “Progress and Poverty” was not based on an investigation into the history of land tenure. He was therefore able in good faith to promise his readers the millennium if certain schemes of social reform were adopted; and readers anxious for the millennium were enthusiastic over the book. Wagner, in his “Foundations of Political Economy,” unfortunately not translated into English, made a [143] scrupulous investigation of those historical points which George had overlooked, and he was therefore unable to promise his readers the millennium. The consequence is that where Wagner counts one disciple George counts a thousand. Of the ultimate disappointment and evil which result when we trust ourselves to unhistorical theories of politics it is hardly necessary to speak. The work of political imagination may have the same artistic character as the historical novel, but it has a baneful practical influence which makes it, from the moralist’s standpoint, an illegitimate use of artistic resources.

It is not in his choice of subject matter, but in the form of his conclusions, that the work of the sociologist differs from that of the writer of history. The man who aims at specific explanations, however widespread, is an historian; the man who is occupied with verifying generalizations, however narrow, is a sociologist. Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” is essentially a work of history. That he deals with a set of contemporary events instead of successive ones is an accident of his subject. He has taken a cross section of history, instead of a longitudinal [144] section, because American political events are better understood by looking at them in the former way than in the latter. On the other hand, Bagehot’s “English Constitution,” though very similar to Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” in its subject and in its external arrangement, is predominantly a sociological work; and the same thing may be said yet more unreservedly of Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” To Bagehot and to Burke, the understanding of English or French politics was not an end; it was rather an incident in the discovery and application of those profounder laws which regulate the politics of every nation.

The use of the name “sociology” to designate investigations of this kind dates from Auguste Comte; its widespread popular acceptance, which makes it necessary for us to use it whether we like it or not, results chiefly from the influence of Herbert Spencer. Many students of political theory regard the term as an unfortunate one; and I am inclined to think that we shall understand the real scope of our subject better if we use the word sociology only under protest. This is not because it is bad Latin, — though it is very bad [145] Latin indeed, — but because it has prevented the use of a much better term, ethics, the science of customs and morals. The effect of calling our subject sociology instead of ethics has been bad, both on the students of morals and on the students of society. It has caused the students of morals to follow old methods and to make their science predominantly a deductive rather than an empirical one. Instead of availing themselves of the results of history and making a social study of those laws of conduct which are essentially social phenomena, they have continued, like their fathers, to make it a branch of psychology. Meantime it has caused the professed students of sociology to go too far in the other direction; to neglect the help which they can get from wide-awake psychologists like Mark Baldwin, whose “Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development” is really a profound contribution to political study, and to occupy themselves far more with classifying things which they see from the outside, than with explaining those which they get from the inside. Among people who have but a slight knowledge of the methods and purposes of political science, [146] there is a tendency to apply the name “sociology” to every description of the actions of men in society, whether scientific or not. The story of a public bath-house, the collection of a few wage statistics, or the scheme for a new method of measuring criminals are all described as studies in sociology; and the observer, who has perhaps collected a little material for the future historian, is deluded by the high-sounding name into the belief that he has done more truly scientific work than Gibbon or Mill, Nor do the really scientific sociologists wholly escape the baleful influence of a name which tends to separate their field so widely from that of the moralists. It leads them to make their science a branch of anthropology; to deal with men chiefly in masses; to give disproportionate importance to the study of prehistoric races just because they are so readily looked at in this way. Even if, like Bastian or Giddings, we give just importance to the development of mental processes, as distinct from physical ones, we are prone to begin at a point so remote from our own that we are unable to test the correctness of our descriptions.

Thus it has come to pass that there is in [147] the popular mind not only a separation but an antithesis between ethics, which deals with the profounder instincts derived from our consciousness, and the various branches of sociology, — law, economics, politics, — whose study and whose precepts are empirical. This way of looking at things is fundamentally wrong. All good sociological work has a profoundly ethical character. Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Blackstone, Adam Smith, not to mention a score of scarcely less distinguished writers, obtained their hold upon the public by the light which they threw upon ethical difficulties and moral problems. Their sociological work has sometimes been based on good ethics and sometimes on bad ethics; in fact, its ethics has generally been good or bad according to the greater or less completeness of the historical study which has preceded it. But some powerful ethical reasoning it has contained and must contain in order to secure a hold on mankind. It must explain men’s mental and moral attitude toward each other. Sociology is ethics, and ethics is sociology. The apparent opposition between the two is the result of deductive scientific methods on one side or the other.

[148] We have now defined the limits of our subject. We are seeking to gain a general view of that literature which is based upon history, expresses its conclusions in general laws, and seeks to explain men’s moral conduct as members of society. The successful investigations in this field fall under three groups: law, economics, and politics. The first seeks to explain, criticise, and justify the judicial relations of mankind as determined by the necessities of public security; the second their commercial relations as determined by the necessities of business; while the third, as yet in its infancy, attempts to consider their political and moral relations as members of a civil society in whose government they have a share.

The principles of law were of course formulated at a very early period. First we have codes of procedure, like the Twelve Tables of Rome; then we have formal rules of conduct which will be enforced by the civil authority; still later we have judicial decisions and legal text-books indicating the methods in which these traditional rules are applied to new cases. But none of these is literature. Legal literature, in the broader [149] sense, may be said to begin when we endeavor to explain the relations between the rules of law and the principles of natural justice accepted by the conscience of the community. The two greatest modern works of law, Blackstone’s “Commentaries” in England and Savigny’s “System of the Roman Law of To-day” in Germany, both owe their power to this underlying idea. Not that it is obtruded upon the reader, but that it is held in reserve as a vivifying force. Blackstone is distinguished from “Coke upon Littleton,” not in being a greater legal authority, — for, technically speaking, “Coke upon Littleton” is legal authority while Blackstone is not, — but because Blackstone wrote a work for the public and not for the lawyers; a work which put all English-speaking gentlemen in touch with the common law, and made it, not an instrument of professional success, but a part of the reader’s life. The ethical character manifest in Blackstone’s writings is from the necessity of the case even more saliently developed in the works of the international lawyers, and most of all in their great leader Grotius. For international law rests not [150] upon the authority of a superior who has the physical force to make his commands respected, but on the common sense and common consent of the parties in interest. A treatise on international law is therefore in the highest sense a treatise on ethics, — ethics put to the test of practice, and verified or rejected by history.

But profound as is the harmony between law and justice in civilized nations, the occasional dissonance is on that ground all the more marked. These dissonances have therefore occupied a large attention among those who studied the relations between law and ethics. What gives authority to certain principles which we call law, more or less independent of those other principles which we call justice? It was Hobbes who, in his “Leviathan,” first undertook a systematic answer to this question, and developed the theory of the social compact which, for good or ill, has formed the subject of so many political controversies. According to Hobbes, a state of nature is for mankind a state of anarchy. To avoid the intolerable evils of this condition, governments have been established for the purpose of giving [151] security. As long as a government does, in fact, give such security, it performs its part of the compact under which it was established; and its subjects, as representatives of the other party to such a compact, are bound to obey its ordinances. The evils of anarchy were, in Hobbes’s view, so great that no approximation to the enforcement of justice could be obtained except under such a surrender of personal rights and opinions as was implied in his fiction of the social compact.

In the hands of Hobbes this doctrine was a conservative force. It justified men in keeping quiet under evils against which their moral sense would otherwise have led them to revolt. But in the century following Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau made a use of the social compact theory of which its author never dreamed, — a use which made it not a conservative but a revolutionary power, — a use which reintroduced into politics and into law those discussions of natural justice which it had been Hobbes’s aim to exclude. For Rousseau denied emphatically that the government had fulfilled its part of the contract with the people when it simply [152] maintained a state of public security. It was not enough to govern, it must govern well; it must not merely repress positive disorder, but promote that justice and that happiness which the collective public opinion of the community demanded. The government, as Rousseau regarded it, was a trustee for the people, pledged and required to pursue popular happiness, and forfeiting its trust the moment it used it for any other purpose. It was on these views of Locke and Rousseau that the authors of the Declaration of Independence based their political doctrines. It was on these views that the French Revolution was founded, and in the exaggeration of these views that its excesses were committed.

But just at the time when this idea of the social compact was most widely influential in practice, it received its deathblow as a theory. With marvelously acute analysis, Bentham, in his “Fragment on Government,” proved that there was neither historically nor logically any such thing as a social compact. Government, according to Bentham, derives its authority, not from an ancient promise to give public security, nor from [153] a long standing trusteeship in behalf of the people, but from the habitual obedience of its subjects. Where such habitual obedience exists, there is government. The accredited acts of such a government are lawful, whether they conform to the ideas of natural justice in any individual case or not. If these acts are habitually contrary to the people’s sense of justice, discontent will culminate in revolution, and then the government will be changed so that another authority and another set of laws will come into being. But the second government, like the first, derives its authority from the fact of being able to exercise its power. Any rights which Hobbes might deduce from a supposed agreement by which it was brought into being, or any limitations on its authority which Rousseau might deduce from a similar hypothesis, are both alike fictitious.

Such was the ground taken by Bentham; and he has been followed by almost all English and American writers who deal with law from a professional standpoint. But there has very recently been a tendency to react from this extreme view and to take a middle ground between the position of [154] Bentham and Hobbes. For while it is undoubtedly true that people habitually obey a government, and that its authority is in fact based on this habitual obedience, it is also true that they obey cheerfully only within certain limits set by public opinion, and that beyond those limits they defeat the governmental authority, not by a revolution, but by the quieter process of nullification. The same habit which establishes the government establishes bounds within which it regards the authority of that government as salutary, and beyond which it will not encourage or even allow the government to go. This view was foreshadowed by Burke in some of the noblest of his political orations. It was applied historically by Sir Henry Maine in his studies of Indian village communities. It has received vigorous support from Herbert Spencer in his brilliant collection of essays, “The Man versus the State.” In America, where the extreme views of Bentham have never enjoyed the unquestioned authority which they possessed in England, even professional lawyers like Abbott Lawrence Lowell have developed theories of law and government based on this [155] view. It only remains for some man of genius to summarize the conclusions of these scattered works, and to develop a theory of the relations between law and justice which shall do for the students of our day what Aristotle did for those of two thousand years ago.

The study of economics, or principles of commerce, began much later than the study of law. The recognition of the ethical character of governments antedated by at least two thousand years the recognition of the ethical character of commerce. Those who look at business operations from the outside, as most of the early writers did, regard them as presumably immoral; as bearing the same relations to the principles of justice which the thief bears to the policeman. Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, are all actuated by this idea. It was reserved for Adam Smith to develop a philosophy of business which was in the highest and best sense of the word a moral philosophy. There have been a good many needless inquiries as to the reasons which make the “Wealth of Nations” superior in merit and influence to the many other acute economic [156] writings in the latter part of the last century. The answer to these inquiries is a simple one. It was because Smith presented clearly to the reader the essentially moral character of business under modern conditions. His predecessors had generally thought of trade as a bargain, as a contest between buyer and seller, where the more skillful and more unscrupulous party gained the advantage over the other. Smith showed how under free competition the self-interest of the several parties, intelligently pursued, conduced to the highest advantage of the community. Did high prices prevail? It was a symptom of scarcity. If we forbade the seller to take advantage of that scarcity, we perpetuated the evil. If, on the other hand, we invited other sellers to compete with him, we directed the industrial forces of the community to the point where they are most needed; we relieved the scarcity of which the high price is but a symptom, and at comparatively small expense to society effected a lasting cure. There is not time to develop this theory of Smith’s in all its varied applications, or to show how, under the marvelous adjustments of modern business, price tends [157] to adjust itself to cost, and cost to be reduced to such a degree as to give the various members of the community the maximum of utility with the minimum of sacrifice. That Smith saw this truth, was his fundamental merit. That he was the first to see it in anything like its full scope, that he had the power to verify it, the candor to recognize its limits, the vigorous English in which to communicate his ideas to others, are facts which give the “Wealth of Nations” the place it deservedly holds in science and in literature. Not in economic science only, but in the whole field of morals have we learned from Adam Smith to expect a harmony of interests between the enlightened self-interest of the individual and the public needs of the community. The fact that the completeness of this harmony has been exaggerated by subsequent writers does not detract from the merit of its discoverer, but rather is a testimony to his power.

Of course Smith’s economic principles were widely called in question and vigorously debated. Some rejected his views altogether. Out of this rejection came the socialist controversy. Others held that his [158] principles of commerce were true as between individuals, but not as between nations; that in the latter case we necessarily had a bargain and a contest rather than a competition, a conflict of interests rather than a harmony. Out of this grew the protectionist controversy. The whole problem of protection is so interwoven with difficult points in the theory of taxation that the best discussion of the subject is often highly technical, and scarcely belongs to the domain of literature. But it would be wrong, in the city of Philadelphia, to give a review of economic writing which should pass over in silence the honored name of Henry C. Carey, who alone, perhaps, among protectionist writers meets the points of Adam Smith with a moral purpose not less profound than that of his opponent.

The socialist controversy belongs in far larger degree to the domain of literature. For half a century succeeding Adam Smith the benefits of increased competition were so great that all classes joined in demanding the removal of barriers against trade. But by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become quite evident that universal [159] happiness was not to be obtained in this way. Under the influence of Malthus many of the professed economists said that it was useless to strive in that direction; that with an increase of population misery must be the lot of the larger part of mankind. Such views aroused a reaction against commercialism. The literature of this reaction falls into two groups, — that of the Christian or conservative socialists, represented in English by Carlyle, Kingsley, and Ruskin, and that of the social democracy, whose great leaders in literature as well as in politics were Lassalle and Marx. The work of the Christian socialists has given us some charming examples of literary art. For the most part, however, the history of this school illustrates the danger of attempts to write on sociology without the necessary historical study. When it came to practical questions the Christian socialists as a body were found on the side of the slaveholder and the tyrant. Actual progress in emancipation came from the cautious and somewhat pessimistic student like Mill or Bright, who saw the difficulties in the way of reform, rather than from the man to whom impatience [160] seemed a virtue and idealism a substitute for history.

Lassalle and Marx deserve far more attention. Lassalle’s works have not been translated into English, and those of Marx are too voluminous and too abstruse for the general reader; but a good account of their character and influence can be found in Rae’s “Contemporary Socialism.” Lassalle was primarily a student of history, Marx a critic of actual business conditions. Lassalle thought that he discovered a law of historical evolution by which the control of business was moving farther and farther down among the masses of the people. Adam Smith’s work represented to him a period of transition from a narrower to a broader economy. It had the merit of taking business out of the hands of the privileged classes. It had the demerit of incompleteness, in that it left it in the hands of the property-owners. The evils of this incomplete work were accentuated — and over-accentuated — by Lassalle and Marx and their followers. Starting from the Aristotelian dogma that value is based on labor, Marx showed that the laborer did not get at present [161] all the product, but only a part of it; and he held that the other part, kept back from the laborer, represented legalized robbery.

Of the great ability of these writers and of their importance in the world’s literature there can be no doubt. In intellectual brilliancy they were probably superior to their greatest contemporary among the defenders of the existing order, — John Stuart Mill. Their failure was the result of a faulty method. Instead of starting from historical facts and working out towards explanations, they started with a principle of deductive ethics, that labor was necessarily the source of value. It was not in intellectual acuteness that they failed by comparison with Adam Smith, but in the intrinsic weakness of purely deductive methods for dealing with social phenomena. And it was just by knowing when to abandon these methods that John Stuart Mill succeeded. It is the fashion nowadays to criticise Mill’s economic writings unsparingly, to say that he carried nothing out to its logical conclusion, that he used neither the relentless logic of the last century nor the Darwinian methods [162] of the present. Yet Mill was greater than his critics. He had a profound conception of the importance of his subject in its moral aspects. He had a wide knowledge of facts. He had infinite industry in testing those facts. The very incompleteness of his conclusions, which has been made a subject of complaint against him, was the result of that candor which would not allow him to deal unscrupulously with facts that interfered with his theories. Great in the sense of Adam Smith he probably was not, at any rate as an economist, for he developed no new truths of wide-reaching importance. His work was not a work of seedtime, but a work of harvest. It was his to gather and store for use the fruit which Adam Smith had sown.

But the middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginnings of a political science wider than the study of law or the study of economics. Men’s minds were no longer satisfied with analyzing the relations between law and justice or between commerce and justice. They demanded to know what was that justice itself, and who made it. The Catholic theory that it was made by the [163] Church, and the Protestant theory that each man made it for himself, were found to be equally inadequate for explaining historical events. We needed a broader science of politics, which should explain the social structure and the public opinion which held it together, — the political entity, of which law was but one manifestation and business another.

The problem was not a new one. Men had tried to solve it in all ages; and at least four attempts had been made which possessed great merit, whether viewed from the standpoint of scientific care, of literary form, or of practical influence. These were the “Politics” of Aristotle, at the culmination of Greek thought; the “Republic” of Jean Bodin, at the close of the Middle Ages; the “Spirit of the Laws” of Montesquieu, in the literary movement which preceded the French Revolution, and the “Philosophy of History and Law” of Hegel. It was the method of analysis which was new. The Darwinian theory, with its doctrine of survival and elimination, gave us a means of explaining political evolution which our ancestors had not possessed. Crude as were the first efforts in [164] its application, and incomplete as are the results even now attained, it represents a new power in political and moral study. In one sense it was not really new; for orators like Burke and Webster and Lincoln were applying to the problems of practical statesmanship those conceptions of evolution and struggle and survival which we associate with the name of Darwin. But the growth of the modern science of biology has had a profound influence on the science and literature of politics; and those ideas which a century or even a half century ago were but the occasional inspirations of our men of genius, are now being systematized and developed in all directions. They form the background of books like Kidd’s “Social Evolution” or Fiske’s “Destiny of Man;” they are reflected in almost every page of the political essays of John Morley; they are made the basis of scientific studies as diverse as those of Spencer, Giddings, and — best of all — Bagehot, whose “Physics and Politics” perhaps represent the high-water mark of constructive attainment in this field of literary and scientific activity. Not that Bagehot’s work is in any sense final; the great book [165] to which future generations shall refer as marking an epoch in this progress remains yet to be written.

But though we cannot yet point to any such culminating achievement, we can indicate with much precision the fundamental ideas which modern political science is following, — the lines of development —

“Where thought on thought is piled till some vast mass
Shall loosen, and the nations echo round.”

The first of these fundamental ideas is that of race character. Each social group — horde, tribe, or nation — has its type of personal development. The habits of the race limit the activity of the individual. Institutions, religions, philosophies of life and conduct, are but the expressions of this race type. This is what is really meant by saying that society is an organism. The men who first made this expression popular, like Spencer, tended to carry too far this analogy to a biological organism, and to study the processes of social nutrition rather than those of social psychology. But this error is largely a thing of the past. The success of a book like Kidd’s “Social Evolution,” in spite of the vagueness or crudeness of many [166] of its parts, shows how eagerly people are looking for a science which shall lay stress on explaining their beliefs and moral characteristics rather than their visible organization.

A second fundamental idea is that this race character is but the record of the past history of the people; embodying itself in habits of action which are a second nature to the individuals that compose it. “In every man,” says Morley, “the substantial foundations of action consist of the accumulated layers, which various generations of ancestors have placed for him. The greater part of our sentiments act most effectively when they act most mechanically.” Or to quote the noble passage in Burke which suggested this utterance of Morley: “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. [167] If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason: because prejudice with its reason has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. . . . Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.”

A third idea following closely upon the second is that these habits of mind have been given their shape in a struggle for existence between different races, no less severe than that which prevails among the lower animals; only this human struggle is chiefly a conflict between ethical types rather than physiological ones, and stamps its verdict of fitness or unfitness upon moral characteristics rather than physical structures. This is where the work of Darwin has given the modern investigator his greatest advantage. There were writers prior to Darwin who, like Hegel, were just as completely possessed of the idea of evolution as Spencer or Bagehot; but Hegel and every other political writer who preceded Darwin found it [168] hard to get, outside of his own consciousness, either a test of fitness or a compelling force which should make for progress. To the Darwinian this is easy. Here are two tribes, with different standards of morality. One standard preserves the race which holds it, and is therefore self-perpetuating; the other has the reverse effect, and is therefore self-destructive. The process of elimination by natural selection does its work and registers its verdict.

But the race characteristics which contributed to success in one age or state of civilization may not be equally successful in a later age or more advanced state. The race which would be permanently successful must have the means of adapting itself to new conditions. A really permanent system of morals must provide for progress as well as discipline, for flexibility to meet future conditions as well as firmness to deal with present ones. How is the combination to be secured ? The answer to this question gives us the modern doctrine of liberty, as developed by Mill and his followers. This represents the fourth and greatest of the ideas of modern social philosophy, which can be [169] applied to almost every department of human activity — commercial freedom, religious toleration, or constitutional government. We cannot better close our survey of political literature than by availing ourself of John Morley’s unrivaled powers of statement in summarizing this great principle.

“We may best estimate the worth and the significance of the doctrine of Liberty by considering the line of thought and observation which led to it. To begin with, it is in Mr. Mill’s hands something quite different from the same doctrine as preached by the French revolutionary school; indeed, one might even call it reactionary, in respect of the French theory of a hundred years back. It reposes on no principle of abstract right, but, like the rest of its author’s opinions, on principles of utility and experience.

“There are many people who believe that if you only make the ruling body big enough, it is sure to be either very wise itself, or very eager to choose wise leaders. Mr. Mill, as any one who is familiar with his writings is well aware, did not hold this opinion. He had no more partiality for mob rule than De Maistre or Goethe or Mr. Carlyle. [170] He saw its evils more clearly than any of these eminent men, because he had a more scientific eye, and because he had had the invaluable training of a political administrator on a large scale, and in a very responsible post. But he did not content himself with seeing these evils, and he wasted no energy in passionate denunciation of them, which he knew must prove futile. . . . Mr. Carlyle, and one or two rhetorical imitators, poured malediction on the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong man, a king, a hero, a dictator. How he was to be found, neither the master nor his still angrier and more impatient mimics could ever tell us.

“Now Mr. Mill’s doctrine laid down the main condition of finding your hero; namely, that all ways should be left open to him, because no man, nor the majority of men, could possibly tell by which of these ways their deliverers were from time to time destined to present themselves. Wits have caricatured all this, by asking us whether by encouraging the tares to grow, you give the [171] wheat a better chance. This is as misleading as such metaphors usually are. The doctrine of liberty rests on a faith drawn from the observation of human progress, that though we know wheat to be serviceable and tares to be worthless, yet there are in the great seed-plot of human nature a thousand rudimentary germs, not wheat and not tares, of whose properties we have not had a fair opportunity of assuring ourselves. If you are too eager to pluck up the tares, you are very likely to pluck up with them these untried possibilities of human excellence, and you are, moreover, very likely to injure the growing wheat as well. The demonstration of this lies in the recorded experience of mankind.”

Source: H. Morse Stephens et al. Counsel upon the Reading of Books, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1901.

Image Source: Wikipedia, Arthur Twining Hadley.