VIII. similarity between the legislation which has actually Lecture taken place in these Colonies and laws passed or desired in England is worth notice, for it throws considerable light on the natural tendencies of that latent socialism or collectivism, not yet embodied in any definite socialistic formulas, which has for the last thirty years and more been telling with ever-increasing force on the development of the law of England. Our survey of the course of law and opinion from 1830 onwards suggests two reflections : The difference between the legislation characteristic of the era of individualism and the legislation characteristic of the era of collectivism is, we perceive, essential and fundamental. The reason is that this dissimilarity (which every student must recognise, even when he cannot analyse it) rests upon and gives expression to different, if not absolutely inconsistent, ways of regarding the relation between man and the State. Benthamite Liberals have looked upon men mainly, and too exclusively, as separate persons, each of whom must by his own efforts work out his own happiness and well-being; and have held that the prosperity of a community-as, for example, of the English nation-means nothing more than the prosperity or welfare of the whole, or of the majority of its members. They have also assumed, and surely not without reason, that if a man's real interest be well understood, the true welfare of each citizen means the true welfare of the State. Hence Liberals have promoted, during the time when their influence was dominant, legislation which should increase each citizen's liberty, energy, and independence; which VIII. Lecture should teach him his true interest, and which should intensify his sense of his own individual responsibility for the results, whether as regards himself or his neighbours, of his own personal conduct. Collectivists, on the other hand, have looked upon men mainly, and too exclusively, not so much as isolated individuals, but as beings who by their very nature are citizens and parts of the great organism-the State-whereof they are members. Reformers, whose attention has thus been engrossed by the social side of human nature, have believed, or rather felt, that the happiness of each citizen depends upon the welfare of the nation, and have held that to ensure the welfare of the nation is the only way of promoting the happiness of each individual citizen. Hence collectivists have fostered legislation which should increase the force of each man's social and sympathetic feelings, and should intensify his sense of the responsibility of society or the State for the welfare or happiness of each individual citizen. The force of collectivism is, we all instinctively feel, not spent; it is not, to all appearance, even on the decline. That legislation should, for the present and for an indefinite time. to come, deviate farther and farther from the lines laid down by Bentham, and followed by the Liberals of 1830, need, however, cause no surprise. Public opinion is, we have seen, guided far less by the force of argument than by the stress of circumstances,' and the circumstances which have favoured the growth of collectivism still continue in existence, and exert their power over the beliefs and the feelings of the public. Laws 1 See pp. 23-27, ante. VIII. again are, we have observed, among the most potent Lecture of the many causes which create legislative opinion; the legislation of collectivism has continued now for some twenty-five or thirty years, and has itself contributed to produce the moral and intellectual atmosphere in which socialistic ideas flourish and abound. So true is this that modern individualists are themselves generally on some points socialists. The inner logic of events leads, then, to the extension and the development of legislation which bears the impress of collectivism.1 1 On a movement which has not yet reached its close, it is impossible to pronounce anything like a final judgment. It may be allowable to conjecture that, if the progress of socialistic legislation be arrested, the check will be due, not so much to the influence of any thinker as to some patent fact which shall command public attention; such, for instance, as that increase in the weight of taxation which is apparently the usual, if not the invariable, concomitant of a socialistic policy. LECTURE IX IX. THE DEBT OF COLLECTIVISM TO BENTHAMISM Lecture THE patent opposition between the individualistic liberalism of 1830 and the democratic socialism of 1905 conceals the heavy debt owed by English collectivists to the utilitarian reformers. From Benthamism the socialists of to-day have inherited a legislative dogma, a legislative instrument, and a legislative tendency. The dogma is the celebrated principle of utility. In 17761 Bentham published his Fragment on Government. The shrewdness or the selfishness of Wedderburn at once scented the revolutionary tendency of utilitarian reform. 2 "This principle of utility," he said, " is a dangerous principle." On this dictum Bentham has thus commented : "Saying so, he [Wedderburn] said that which, to "a certain extent, is strictly true; a principle which "lays down, as the only right and justifiable end "of Government, the greatest happiness of the greatest number-how can it be denied to be a 1 In the same year was published Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. 2 Afterwards Lord Chancellor, under the title of Baron Loughborough, and created in 1801 Earl of Rosslyn. 66 66 IX. dangerous one? Dangerous it unquestionably is to Lecture Government which has for its actual end or object the greatest happiness of a certain one, with every or without the addition of some comparatively small number of others, whom it is a matter of pleasure or accommodation to him to admit, each "of them, to a share in the concern on the footing "of so many junior partners. Dangerous it there"fore really was to the interest-the sinister interest "-of all those functionaries, himself included, whose "interest it was to maximise delay, vexation, and expense in judicial and other modes of procedure "for the sake of the profit extractible out of the expense. In a Government which had for its end "in view the greatest happiness of the greatest "number, Alexander Wedderburn might have been 'Attorney-General and then Chancellor; but he would "not have been Attorney-General with £15,000 a year, nor Chancellor, with a peerage with a veto 66 upon all justice, with £25,000 a year, and with 500 "sinecures at his disposal, under the name of Ecclesi"astical Benefices, besides et ceteras." 66 66 66 In 1905 we are less surprised at Bentham's retort, which betrays a youthful philosopher's enthusiastic faith in a favourite doctrine, than at Wedderburn's alarm, which seems to savour of needless panic. What is there, we ask, in the greatest happiness principlea truism now accepted by conservatives no less than by democrats that could disturb the equanimity of a shrewd man of the world well started on the path to high office? Yet Wedderburn, from his own point of view, formed a just estimate of the 1 Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. i. p. 5 (n). |