66

V.

"so necessary for the general quiet. That such Lecture regulations would secure tranquillity is quite certain, for notwithstanding the general influence of example, the workmen in some of the greatest manufactures did not furnish a single recruit to "Radicalism."1

This want of harmony between the needs and the institutions of the time reappears in matters which, though of less importance than the condition of the working-classes, affected the comfort of thousands of Englishmen.

Nothing can be more necessary for the happiness of ordinary citizens than protection against robbery and physical violence. Yet even in London the protection was not adequately supplied. Until 1829 the capital of England did not possess a regular body of police.2 The welfare, again, of a mercantile community is dependent on the existence of a fair and effective law of bankruptcy, yet the state of the bankruptcy law

1 Scott's Familiar Letters, vol. ii., Letter to Morritt, 19th May

1820.

2 The slowness with which necessary reforms have been carried out in England is curiously illustrated by the history of the police force during the nineteenth century. The creation of the Metropolitan police in 1829 (10 Geo. IV. c. 44) is due to Peel's administrative genius; it was a stroke of intensely unpopular but very beneficent statesmanship; but even in the metropolis the police force was not put on a satisfactory basis till 1839 (2 & 3 Vict. c.,47). In the boroughs reform went on slowly, and was not anything like complete until 1839. In the counties reform progressed at even a slower pace. The so-called Permissive Act of 1839 (2 & 3 Vict. c. 93) made the organisation of a good county police possible. In 1842 an attempt was made to infuse new life into the decrepit system of parish constables. Fourteen years later the County and Borough Police Act, 1856 (19 & 20 Vict. c. 69), known as the Obligatory Act, for the first time provided every part of England with stipendiary police, and thus completed a police system for the whole country. See Melville, History of Police in England, chaps. xiii.-xv.

V.

Lecture shocked every man versed in business. There was an absolute opposition on this matter between the law of the land and the feelings of the mercantile world. The state of things as late as the beginning of the reign of Victoria (1837) is thus described by Lord Bowen :

"The great commercial world, alienated and scared 'by the divergence of the English bankruptcy law "from their own habits and notions of right and wrong, avoided the court of bankruptcy as they "would the plague. The important insolvencies "which have been brought about by pure mercantile "misfortune were administered to a large extent "under private deeds and voluntary compositions, which, since they might be disturbed by the caprice or malice of a single outstanding creditor, were always liable to be made the instruments of "extortion. To the honest insolvent the bankruptcy "court was a terror.' To the evil-doer it afforded means of endlessly delaying his creditors, while the enormous expenses of bankruptcy administrations "rendered it the interest of few to resort to the "remedy, except with the object of punishing the "fraudulent or vexing the unfortunate."1

66

From whatever direction then we examine the condition of England between 1800 and 1830, and especially between 1815 and 1830, we can perceive the discord between a changing social condition and unchanging laws.

(3) As to the lapse of time.-Before the outbreak of the French Revolution intelligent Englishmen of all classes were prepared to welcome natural and 1 Bowen, Reign of Queen Victoria, i. p. 315.

V.

gradual reforms. Blackstone, though an optimist, Lecture was not opposed to reasonable changes; Pitt, Burke, and Fox were all of them in different ways reformers ; and the men we have named are representatives of that large class of Englishmen who at most times. have been quite willing to abolish abuses or grievances of a practical character. In the ordinary course of things the law of England would have been amended before the end of the eighteenth, or soon after the beginning of the nineteenth century. The obstacle to reasonable reform is to be found in the revolutionary excesses of France. In England the French Revolution worked nothing but evil; it delayed salutary changes for forty years, and rendered reforms, when at last they came, less beneficial than they might have been if gradually carried out as the natural result of the undisturbed development of ideas suggested by English good sense and English love of justice. But to the men who began to take part in public life, or to take an interest in national affairs, between 1815 and 1830, the horrors of the Reign of Terror were mere traditions. They knew by experience the narrow-mindedness of the Tories who had governed England since the beginning of the century, and toryism had by a strange fatality grown less reasonable and more reactionary from the very time when Waterloo, and the permanent peace which it established, had deprived the resistance to all innovation and restrictions on individual liberty of such justification as was afforded by a life and death struggle for national independence. In 1819 or 1820 the Six Acts, the so-called Manchester massacre, the sordid scandals of the quarrel between

V.

Lecture George IV. and his Queen were present realities. The horrors of a Regicide Peace1 were ancient history. Sensible men perceived that the state of England would soon necessitate a choice between revolution and reform.

(4) As to the existence of Benthamism.—The work of Bentham and his school forms the subject of the next lecture; thus much may here be said: reformers who had escaped from the panic caused by revolutionary excesses, and prolonged by Napoleonic aggression, had inherited the distrust of Jacobinical principles. The need of the day was, they felt, thorough-going but temperate reform, thought out by teachers who, without being revolutionists, had studied the faults of English law, and elaborated schemes for its practical amendment. Such teachers were found in Bentham and his disciples; they provided for reformers an acceptable programme. Utilitarian individualism, which for many years under the name of liberalism, determined the trend of English legislation, was nothing but Benthamism modified by the experience, the prudence, or the timidity of practical politicians. The creation of this liberalism was the death-blow to old toryism, and closed the era of legislative stagnation.

1 The very title of Burke's celebrated Three Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France, 1796, is a curious example of the difference between the feelings of his times and of our own. Would suggestions of peace with France (or for that matter with any other civilised country) now excite horror simply on the ground that the French Government had put their king to death? The Directory, by the way, had not as a government executed Louis XVI. Would Burke, one wonders, have blamed Louis XIV. for recognising Cromwell, who was in the strictest sense a regicide?

LECTURE VI

THE PERIOD OF BENTHAMISM OR INDIVIDUALISM 1

1

VI.

INDIVIDUALISM as regards legislation is popularly, Lecture and not without reason, connected with the name and the principles of Bentham. The name of one man, it is true, can never adequately summarise a whole school of thought, but from 1825 onwards the teaching of Bentham exercised so potent an influence that to him is fairly ascribed that thorough-going though gradual amendment of the law of England which was one of the main results of the Reform Act.2

Bentham's genius and position were fully understood by his contemporaries.

"The age of law reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same. He is the father "of the most important of all the branches of reform, the leading and ruling department of human im

1 See Bentham, "Memoirs and Correspondence," Works, x. xi.; Montague, Bentham's Fragment on Government; L. Stephen, English Utilitarians, i., especially chaps. i.-iii.; Elie Helévy, La formation du radicalisme philosophique; G. Wallas, Life of Francis Place, ch. iii.; Bowen on 66 Administration of the Law, from 1837-1887," Reign of Queen Victoria, i. 281.

2 The influence even on law reform of Adam Smith and his disciples ought, of course, not to be forgotten, but in 1830 the economists and the Benthamites formed one school.