Historical and Political Essays

W >> William Edward Hartpole Lecky >> Historical and Political Essays

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Ninety years have passed since the Union, and the conditions of
Ireland have completely changed. The whole system of religious
disqualification and commercial disability has long since passed away.
Every path has been thrown open, and English professions, as well as
the great Colonial and Indian services, are crowded with Irishmen. The
Established Church no longer exists. Representation has been placed on
a broadly democratic basis, giving Ireland, however, an absurdly
disproportioned weight in the representation of the kingdom, and its
poorest and most backward districts an absurdly disproportioned weight
in the representation of Ireland. Finally, an attempt has been made to
put down agrarian agitation by legislation to which there is no real
parallel in English history, and some parts of which would have been
impossible under the Constitution of the United States. Landlords who
possessed by the clearest title known to English law the most absolute
ownership of their estates have been converted into mere
rent-chargers. Tenants who entered upon their tenancies under formal
written contracts for limited periods have been rooted for ever on the
soil. Rents have been reduced by judicial sentence, with complete
disregard both to previous contracts and to market value, and the
legal owner has had no option of refusing the change and re-entering
on the occupation of his land. A scheme of purchase, too, based upon
Imperial credit, has been established and will probably soon be
largely extended, which is so extravagantly and almost grotesquely
favorable to the tenant that it enables him by paying for the space of
forty-nine years, instead of his reduced judicial rent, an annual sum
which is considerably smaller, to purchase the freehold of his farm.
It is a simple and incontestable truth that neither in the United
States, nor in England, nor in any portion of the Continent of Europe,
is the agricultural tenant so favoured by law as in Ireland, or
anything of the nature of landlord oppression made so impossible. But
though agitation has diminished, it has not ceased, and the great body
of the poorer Catholics still follow the banner of Home Rule.

About a third of the population of Ireland, on the other hand, regard
Home Rule as the greatest catastrophe that could befall themselves,
their country, or the Empire; and it is worthy of notice that they
include almost all the descendants of Grattan's Parliament, and of the
volunteers and of those classes who in the eighteenth century
sustained the spirit of nationality in Ireland. Belfast and the
surrounding counties, which alone in Ireland have attained the full
height and vigour of English industrial civilisation; almost all the
Protestants, both Episcopalian and Nonconformist; almost all the
Catholic gentry; the decided preponderance of Catholics in the lay
professions, and a great and guiding section of the Catholic
middle-class are on the same side. Their conviction does not rest upon
any abstract doctrine about the evil of federal governments or of
local parliaments. It rests upon their firm persuasion that in the
existing conditions of Ireland no Parliament could be established
there which could be trusted to fulfil the most elementary conditions
of honest government--to maintain law; to protect property; to observe
or enforce contracts; to secure the rights and liberties of
individuals and minorities; to act loyally in times of difficulty and
danger in the interests of the Empire.

They know that the existing Home Rule movement has grown up by the
guidance and by the support of men who are implacable enemies to the
British Empire; that it has been for years the steady object of its
leaders to inspire the Irish masses with feelings of hatred to that
Empire, contempt for contracts, defiance of law and of those who
administer it; that, having signally failed in rousing the
agricultural population in a national struggle, those leaders resolved
to turn the movement into an organised attack upon landed property;
that in the prosecution of this enterprise they have been guilty, not
only of measures which are grossly and palpably dishonest, but also of
an amount of intimidation, of cruelty, of systematic disregard for
individual freedom scarcely paralleled in any country during the
present century; and finally that, through subscriptions which are not
drawn from Ireland, political agitation in Ireland has become a large
and highly lucrative trade--a trade which, like most others, will no
doubt continue as long as it pays.

The nature, methods, and objects of the organisation which would
probably exercise a dominant influence over an Irish Parliament have
been established by overwhelming evidence and beyond all reasonable
doubt, after a long, careful, and most impartial judicial
investigation. The report of the late Special Commissioners[7] and the
evidence on which it is founded have been published; and their
conclusions have very recently been summed up in an admirable work by
Professor Dicey, perhaps the ablest of living writers on political
subjects. Readers may find in these works abundant evidence of the
true character of the Irish Home Rule movement. If they read them with
impartiality they will, I believe, have little difficulty in
concluding that there have been few political movements in the
nineteenth century which are less deserving of the respect or support
of honest men.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The Parnell Commission.--ED.

FORMATIVE INFLUENCES

It was about four years before the great upheaval of beliefs in
England, which was partly caused and partly disclosed by the
publication of the 'Essays and Reviews,' in 1860, that I entered
Trinity College, Dublin. I had then a strong leaning toward
theological studies and looked forward to a peaceful clerical life in
a family living near Cork; and in addition to the ordinary university
course, I went through that appointed for divinity students. I found
my life at the university one of more than common intellectual
activity, for although circumstances and temperament made me perhaps
culpably indifferent to college ambitions and competitions, I soon
threw myself with intense eagerness into a long course of private
reading, chiefly relating to the formation and history of opinions.
The great High Church wave which had a few years before been so
powerful, had been broken when Newman and many other leaders of the
party had passed to Catholicism. Darwin and Herbert Spencer had not
yet risen above the horizon. Mill was in the zenith of his fame and
influence. The intellectual atmosphere was much agitated by the recent
discoveries of geology, by their manifest bearing on the Mosaic
cosmogony and on the history of the Fall, and by the attempts of Hugh
Miller, Hitchcock, and other writers to reconcile them with the
received theology. In poetry, Tennyson and Longfellow reigned, I
think with an approach to equality which has not continued. In
politics, the school of orthodox political economy was almost
unchallenged. In spite of the protests of Carlyle, all sound Liberals
in England then desired to restrict as much as possible the functions
of government, and to enlarge as much as possible the sphere of
individual liberty; and they regarded unrestrained competition and
inviolable contracts as the chief conditions of material progress.

The first great intellectual influence which I experienced was, I
believe, that of Bishop Butler, who was at that time probably studied
more assiduously at Dublin than in any other university in the
kingdom. There were few sermons in the college chapel in which some
allusion to his writings might not be found, and few serious students
whose modes of thought were not at least coloured by his influence.
That influence now appears to me to have been not only various, but
even in some measure contradictory. The 'Analogy' is perhaps the most
original, if not the most powerful, book ever written in defence of
the Christian creed; but it has probably been the parent of much
modern Agnosticism, for its method is to parallel every difficulty in
revealed religion by a corresponding difficulty in natural religion,
and to argue that the two must stand or fall together. Butler's
unrivalled sermons on human nature, on the other hand, have been
essentially conservative and constructive, and their influence has
been at least as strong on character as on belief. Their doctrine is
that consciousness reveals in the inner principles of our being a
moral hierarchy, 'a difference in nature and kind altogether distinct
from strength'; and that among these principles conscience has, by the
very structure of our nature, a recognised supremacy or guiding
authority which clearly distinguishes it from all others.

'The principle of reflection or conscience being compared with the
various appetites, affections, and passions in men, the former is
manifestly supreme and chief, without regard to strength.... From its
very nature it manifestly claims superiority over all others, so that
you cannot form a notion of this faculty, conscience, without taking
in judgment, direction, superintendency. To preside and govern, from
the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it. Had it
strength as it has right, it would govern the world.'

It was a noble philosophy, well fitted to strengthen and elevate the
character, and it has supported many amid the dissolution of positive
beliefs. Utilitarian theories of morals move very smoothly as long as
their only task is to define the course which it is in the interests
of society that each man should pursue. They are less successful in
furnishing any firm and adequate reason why a man should pursue that
course when individual interests and individual passion are opposed to
it. It is the merit of the schools of Kant and of Butler, that they
raise the idea of duty above all the calculations of self-interest,
and make it the supreme and guiding principle of life.

Among living men, the strongest intellectual influence at that time in
Dublin was, I think, Whately, our archbishop, an original and powerful
thinker who has scarcely obtained a place in the literary and
intellectual history of his time commensurate with the wide and deep
influence he undoubtedly exercised. For this there are many reasons.
Unlike the High Church leaders who flourished with him at Oxford in
the second quarter of the nineteenth century, he never identified
himself with any organised party or school of thought, and he thus
deprived himself of many echoes and of much support. It was, indeed,
one of his first principles that there is no more fatal obstacle to
the discovery of truth than the deflecting influence of party and
system, and that the jealous maintenance of an independent judgment is
the first element of intellectual honesty. Few considerable writers
have appealed less to common passions or wide sympathies; and the only
passion--if it can be called so--that appears strongly in his
writings, is the love of truth for its own sake, which is the rarest
and highest of all. He was accustomed to speculate much upon that
strange power of intellectual magnetism which enables some men to draw
others to their views apart from any process of definite reasoning;
and he acknowledged with truth that he was wholly destitute of it;
that he had never produced any effect which could not be clearly
accounted for, or altered any judgment except by distinct reasons. As
a writer, his style, though wholly without grace, was admirable in its
lucidity. He had a singular felicity of illustration, and especially
of metaphor, and a rare power of throwing his thoughts into terse and
pithy sentences; but his many books, though full of original thinking
and in a high degree suggestive to other writers, had always a certain
fragmentary and occasional character, which prevented them from taking
a place in standard literature. He was conscious of it himself, and
was accustomed to say that it was the mission of his life to make up
cartridges for others to fire. The little volume of 'Miscellanies,'
including his commonplace book and his notes for his books, which was
published by his daughter, exhibits with great clearness the character
of his mind. Though a very candid and, in the best sense of the word,
a very tolerant man, and an excellent scholar, he had, I think, little
power of reproducing the modes of thought of men whose mental
structure was widely different from his own, or of entering into the
intellectual conditions of other ages; but he touched a large circle
of subjects, social, political, and even scientific, as well as moral
and religious, with an original and most independent judgment; and he
raised greatly the moral standard of love of truth and the
intellectual standard of severe reasoning wherever his influence
extended. He delighted in that fine saying of Hobbes that, 'words are
the counters of the wise man, but the money of the fool'; he believed
that most controversies might be resolved into verbal ambiguities; and
his hatred of vagueness, grandiloquence, affected obscurity, and
rhetorical exaggeration exercised a very useful influence over young
men. He was also a most attentive and sagacious observer of human
nature, and few modern writers have written so wisely on the
diversities and the management of character and on the science of
life. In this respect he had a strong affinity to Bacon--the Bacon not
of the 'Organon,' but of the 'Essays'--and perhaps still more to
Benjamin Franklin. In theology he challenged the severest inquiry, and
believed that if honestly pursued it would lead only to orthodox
belief. 'A good man,' he once wrote, 'will indeed wish to find the
evidence of the Christian religion satisfactory; but a wise man will
not for that reason think it satisfactory, but will weigh the evidence
the more carefully on account of the importance of the question.'

His strongest antipathy was to the teaching of the Oxford 'Tracts,'
and he wrote about them with great severity, but more from the moral
than the intellectual side. He believed the Tractarian doctrines of
'reserve' and 'economy' to be essentially disingenuous; he considered
that there was good reason to conclude that leading members of the
Oxford school had remained in the Church of England for a considerable
time after they had adopted the Roman theology, had used language
deliberately intended to mask their position, and had employed their
influence as English clergymen to sap the English Church; and he
especially denounced as the grossest dishonesty the attempt that was
made in Tract XC. to show that a man was justified in subscribing to
the Articles of the Church of England and at the same time holding
everything laid down by the Council of Trent, 'though the Articles
were expressly drawn up to condemn the authoritative teaching of the
Roman Church, and after the Council of Trent had held 22 out of its
whole number of 25 sessions.' The quibbling, special-pleading,
equivocating mind which is consciously or half-consciously
endeavouring by subtle distinctions to maintain an untenable position,
was of all things the most abhorrent to him, and while the
Evangelicals denounced the Tractarians as leading men to Rome,
Whately, perhaps alone among his contemporaries, steadily predicted
that their teachings would be followed by a great period of religious
scepticism. This, he said, would be the result of the discredit they
were throwing on the evidential school, of their habit of coupling
ecclesiastical with Scripture miracles, and of their doctrine that it
is the function of faith to supply the missing links of imperfect
evidence and to impart the character of certainty to propositions
which in reason rest only on probabilities. He himself was of the
school of Grotius and Paley, and believed that simple historical
evidence established supernatural facts. This subject long held a
foremost place in my thoughts and studies, and I afterward wrote much
upon it in connection with the history of witchcraft and the miracles
of the Saints.

I owed much to Whately, but I was studying concurrently with him
teachers of very opposite schools, among others Coleridge, Newman, and
Emerson in English; Pascal, Bossuet, Rousseau, and Voltaire in French.
Locke's writings formed part of the college course, and I became very
familiar with them, and fully shared Hallam's special admiration for
the little treatise 'On the Conduct of the Understanding,' while
Dugald Stewart, Mackintosh, and Mill opened out wide and various
vistas in moral philosophy. The following passage from Coleridge,
which I chose as the motto of almost my first published writing,
exercised so great an influence over my later studies, and shows so
happily the direction in which I was endeavoring to turn my mind, that
I may be excused from quoting it at length:

'Let it be remembered by controversialists on all subjects, that every
speculative error which boasts a multitude of advocates has its golden
as well as its dark side; that there is always some truth connected
with it, the exclusive attention to which has misled the
understanding; some moral beauty which has given it charms for the
heart. Let it be remembered that no assailant of an error can
reasonably hope to be listened to by its advocates, who has not proved
to them that he has seen the disputed subject in the same point of
view and is capable of contemplating it with the same feelings as
themselves; for why should we abandon a cause at the persuasion of one
who is ignorant of the reasons which have attached us to it?'

Adopting an illustration which had been employed by Bossuet for
another purpose, I came to believe that religious systems resemble
those pictures occasionally seen in the museums of the curious, which
appear at first to be mere incongruous assemblages of unconnected and
unmeaning figures, till they are regarded from one particular point of
view, when these figures immediately mass themselves into a regular
form, and the whole picture assumes a coherent and symmetrical
appearance. To discover in each system this point of view; to
cultivate that peculiar form of imagination which makes it possible to
realise how different forms of opinions are held by their more
intelligent adherents, appeared to me the first condition of
understanding them.

In this method of inquiry I was, at a little later period, much aided
by the writings of Bayle, a great critic who brought to the study of
opinions an almost unrivalled knowledge, and one of the keenest and
most detached of human intellects. Gradually, however, by a natural
and insensible process I passed into the habit of examining opinions
mainly from an historical point of view--investigating the
circumstances under which they grow up; their relation to the general
conditions of their time; the direction in which they naturally
develop; the part, whether for good or ill, which during long spaces
of time they have played in the world. It was first of all in
connection with the Roman Catholic controversy, with which we were
much occupied in Ireland, that I learnt to pursue this course. Of the
enormous and essential difference between matured Catholicism and the
Christianity of the New Testament, I never doubted, and my convictions
were much deepened by long travels in Italy, France, and Spain, during
which I endeavoured to study carefully Catholicism in its actual
workings as a popular religion, and not as it appears clarified and
rationalised in such books as the 'Exposition,' by Bossuet. I often
asked myself, who could have imagined from a perusal of the New
Testament that Christianity was intended to be a highly centralised
monarchy, governed with supreme divine authority by the Bishop of
Rome; that this bishop was to be connected, not with the great author
of the Epistle to the Romans, but with St. Peter; that the figure
which was to occupy the most prominent place in the devotions and
imaginations of millions of Christian worshippers was to be the Virgin
Mary, who is not so much as mentioned in the Epistles; that in the
immediate neighbourhood, and with the full sanction of the highest
ecclesiastical authorities, graven images were to be employed in
devotion as conspicuously as in a pagan temple, particular images
being singled out from all others for particular devotion by special
indulgences and by special miracles? I soon convinced myself that
popular Catholicism, as it exists in southern Europe and as it has
existed through a long course of centuries, is as literally
polytheistic and idolatrous as any form of paganism, though it has
many beauties, and though much of its very mingled influence has been
for good. In the teaching of my early youth, this transformation of
Christianity was described as the great predicted apostasy, the
mystery of iniquity, the work of Antichrist among mankind. Under the
influence of the historic method it assumed a different aspect, and
the mystery became very explicable. Hobbes had struck the keynote in a
passage of profound truth as well as of admirable beauty:

'If a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical
dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the
ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave
thereof.'

Few evolutions in history, indeed, can be more clearly traced than the
successive stages through which Rome, by a gradual and very natural
process, obtained the primacy of Christendom. In the condition of
Europe, again, at the time of the downfall of the Roman Empire, the
invasion, the triumph, and the rapid conversion of the barbarians, the
chief causes of the materialising transformation which Christian ideas
underwent appeared abundantly evident; and it became clear to me that
some such transformation was inevitable, and essential to their enduring
influence. Was it possible, I asked myself, that in ages of anarchy and
convulsion, any religion resembling Protestant Christianity could have
prevailed among great masses of wild and ignorant barbarians, with all
the associations and mental habits of idolaters, at a time when neither
rag paper nor printing was invented, and when a wide diffusion of the
Bible was absolutely impossible? But such methods of reasoning could not
stop there. I was naturally led to consider how different are the
measures of probability, the predispositions toward the miraculous, the
canons of evidence and proof, the standards and ideals of morals in
different ages, and how largely these differences affect the whole
question of evidence. I began to realise the existence of climates of
opinion; to observe how particular forms of belief naturally grow and
flourish in certain stages of intellectual development, and fade when
these conditions have changed; how much that is called apostasy and
imposture is in reality anachronism, the survival in one age of forms of
belief that were the appropriate product of an earlier one.

A writer of extraordinary brilliancy and power was at this time
exercising a great influence either of attraction or repulsion on all
serious students of history. Those who are old enough to remember the
appearance of the first volume of Buckle's 'History,' in 1857, and of
the second volume, in 1861, will remember also how rapidly and how
passionately it divided opinion. It was in truth a book in which
extraordinary merits were balanced by extraordinary defects. On the
special subject of the growth of religions, which most interested me,
it was peculiarly deficient, for with all his great gifts Buckle was
almost colour-blind to the devotional and reverential aspect of things,
and he had little more power than Whately of projecting himself into
the beliefs, ideals, and modes of thought of other men and ages. His
unqualified, undiscriminating contempt for the ages of superstition is
the more remarkable, because fifteen years before the appearance of his
first volume, Comte, with whom Buckle had some affinity, and for whom
he expressed great admiration, had been placing those ages on a
pinnacle of extravagant eulogy. His doctrine that there is no real
progress in moral ideas and no real history of morals, I have always
believed to be profoundly untrue, and to have vitiated a large part of
his conclusions; and although he rendered valuable service in showing
by ample illustrations that the capital changes in history are much
less due to the great men who directly effected them than to the long
train of intellectual, political, or industrial tendencies that had
prepared them, he pushed this, like many of his other generalisations,
to exaggeration and even to extravagance. Individuals, and even
accidents, have had a great modifying and deflecting influence in
history, and sometimes the part they have played can scarcely be
over-estimated. If, as I have elsewhere said, a stray dart had struck
down Mohammed in one of the early skirmishes of his career, there is no
reason to believe that the world would have seen a great military and
monotheistic religion arise in Arabia, powerful enough to sweep over a
large part of three continents, and to mould during many centuries the
lives and characters of about a fifth part of the human race. In one
respect, too, Buckle was singularly unfortunate in the time in which he
appeared. From the days of Bacon and Locke to the days of Condillac and
Bentham, it had been the tendency of advanced liberal thinkers to
aggrandise as much as possible the power of circumstances and
experience over the individual, and to reduce to the narrowest limits
every influence that is innate, transmitted, or hereditary. They
represented man as essentially the creature of circumstances, and his
mind as a sheet of blank paper on which education might write what it
pleased. Buckle pushed this habit of thought so far that he even
questioned the reality of such an evident and well-known fact as
hereditary insanity. But only two years after the appearance of the
first volume of the 'History of Civilisation,' Darwin published his
'Origin of Species,' which gradually effected a revolution in
speculative philosophy almost as great as it effected in natural
science; and from that time the supreme importance of inborn and
hereditary tendencies has become the very central fact in English
philosophy. It must be added that Buckle had many of the distinctive
faults of a young writer; of a writer who had mixed little with men,
and had formed his mind almost exclusively by solitary, unguided study.
He had a very imperfect appreciation of the extreme complexity of
social phenomena, an excessive tendency to sweeping generalisations,
and an arrogance of assertion which provoked much hostility. His wide
and multifarious knowledge was not always discriminating, and he
sometimes mixed good and bad authorities with a strange indifference.

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