by Bart Schultz
deepened his insight into the development of historic polity. Indeed, he once said
to me that he valued the wide popularity of his Expansion of England, not only for the effects that might be hoped from it in furthering practical aims that he had at
heart, but also not less because the book seemed to have proved itself a persuasive
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example of his method: because it had brought home to Englishmen throughout
the Empire, that, in order to know what England ought to be and do now, they
must study what she has been and done in the past.
Seeley obviously had no sympathy for a priori method in histori-
cal study; his methodological lineage had altogether different heroes –
Aristotle, Burke, Macaulay, Maine. For him, the family and the state
are the pervasive facts of history, and to examine them even in the case of
“primitive” societies is crucial. Still, for all his comparative methodologi-
cal dogmatism, one hears echoes of Sidgwick’s voice in the closing lecture
of the Introduction, when Seeley addresses “how the name ‘aristocracy,’
originally one of the most respectable of all political names, has come
in recent times to have disagreeable, almost disreputable associations.”
Recalling its meaning as “government by the best,” he goes on to explain
how enduringly important this bit of taxonomy is to political science:
In every community there is a part which has ordinarily no share in those move-
ments which constitute political vitality. In many communities this part is in-
finitely larger than the part which is disturbed by them. Imagine the condition of
the Russian populations for many centuries. . . . In such a state aristocracy is not only real, but is, as it were, the chief reality. It arises not by contrivance, not out of a theory that some qualifications are necessary, not out of any design on the
part of the rich to exclude the poor in order that they may have more freedom to
oppress them; it arises inevitably and naturally. The population falls of itself into two parts. On the one side are seen those who have thoughts and feelings about the
public welfare; on the other are those who have no such thoughts and feelings. In
one sense all are included in the state, for the state protects all and imposes duties upon all. But one of these two classes is normally passive; nothing, therefore, can
prevent the other from monopolising public affairs. For purposes of action, or in
the eyes of foreign statesmen, these active citizens are the state, and the passive
class, often the great mass of the population, do not count.
Seeley goes on to explain that although he has appealed to the extreme
case of Russia, the England of the previous century might provide “another
case in order to show that aristocracy of this natural, necessary kind is by
no means uncommon.” With truly Burkean relish, and no little nostalgia,
he patiently explains how
not only the whole lower class, but a very large proportion of the middle class,
were excluded from the franchise, and therefore had no share whatever in the
government of the country or in making the government. Now, there was at that
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time nothing artificial in this exclusion; it caused no discontent; no cry was then
raised for an extension of the franchise. It would seem that the vast excluded class
acquiesced contentedly in its exclusion, and that it was conscious of having no
serious political opinions.
The “genius of aristocracy,” he triumphantly proclaims, is that “political
consciousness or the idea of the state comes to some minds before it comes
to others. Those monopolise all the powers of the state who alone enter into
its nature and understand it. These are the good people.” Of course, these
“good people are by no means saints,” and there is always the temptation
of corruption, of possible degeneration into oligarchy.
The “advance spirits” will likely be of one class – “those to whom wealth
has given leisure, freedom of mind, and the habit of dealing with large
affairs.” And in case the moral is slow in hitting home, Seeley indulges in a
little futuristic speculation, imagining that “some test better than birth and
wealth has been invented, by adopting which the danger should be avoided
of introducing oligarchy under the name of aristocracy; and that this test
is also safe against the objections which are urged against competitive
examination.” The result, a “pure and true aristocracy,” would be such
that “every one would hail it with delight,” and it “would appear at once
that all the invective against aristocracy to which we have grown accus-
tomed in recent times is like a letter which has been misdirected; it ought to
have been addressed to oligarchy.”
Now, such remarks, besides recalling Sidgwick’s worries over the fate
of the word “aristocracy” and the ways in which he followed Bryce in
deploring party politics and the failure of the “best men” to lead, also call
to mind the work of another Cambridge historian, Maine. Maine, born in
, was of course one of the Cambridge giants – a brilliantly success-
ful undergraduate at Pembroke College, Cambridge – and an Apostle –
after which he became a tutor of Trinity Hall and in , Regius Profes-
sor of Civil Law. He resigned the Regius Professorship in , devoting
much more time to writing and producing his classic work on Ancient
Law, which appeared in . The enthusiastic reception of this book led
to his becoming very deeply involved with British rule in India, serving
on the Council of the Governor-General from to and being
named “Knight Commander of the Star of India” and given a permanent
appointment to the Council of the Secretary of State for India. He would
also become Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, eventually
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returning to Cambridge as the Whewell Professor of International Law
in . And he must have regarded Sidgwick as a sympathetic fellow
Apostle, since when, in , he started feeling out the possibilities for a
return to Cambridge as the Whewell Professor, one of the first things that
he did was to solicit Sidgwick’s support, authorizing him to declare his
candidacy.
Maine and Seeley made natural colleagues, though the latter was less
shaped by the passion for utilitarian institutions that marked Maine’s pol-
icy views, despite his histo
rical approach. It was Maine who gave currency
to the view that the basis of legal and social institutions of the Aryan family
had evolved historically from “Status to Contract,” in the famous phrase,
and his studies of the evolution of legal and political institutions, especially
in India, would provide much of the basis for Seeley’s – and Sidgwick’s –
claims about that country, and about England’s governance of it. All
of the luminaries of the Victorian era, including Spencer and Mill, cited
Maine’s work on historical and comparative methods (especially as applied
to India), which were perceived as systematizing and rendering scholarly
the antideductivist work of the Macaulay school. Moreover, as Thomas
Thornely, a later Cambridge political scientist, once remarked, for Maine
“democracy” was “almost a term of contempt.” He completely shared – for
that matter anticipated, from a less liberal perspective – Seeley’s warm ar-
guments about aristocracy, believing that change and progress were always
the work of the energetic few. When, in the aftermath of the democratic
reforms of the eighties, Maine revised his antidemocratic essays for pub-
lication in book form, he added a remark that would seem to capture very
well the Cambridge of Seeley and Sidgwick:
Whether – and this is the last objection – the age of aristocracies be over, I cannot take upon myself to say. I have sometimes thought it one of the chief drawbacks
of modern democracy that, while it gives birth to despotism with the greatest
facility, it does not seem to be capable of producing aristocracy, though from that
form of political and social ascendancy all improvement has hitherto sprung.
It is extremely intriguing that Sidgwick could have thought so highly
of Maine’s work, suggesting how he was coming to feel the strains in the
Liberal Party. As Shannon explains, at this point there
was grave disquiet at the pattern of Liberal appeasement of challenges to ruling
authority: ‘Socialism’ at home; Afrikaners in the Transvaal; Parnellism in Ireland;
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the ‘Ilbert Bill’ giving way to nationalist agitation in India. The revealing symptom of this anxiety in was Henry Maine’s Popular Government, in which he
argued that the assumption of progress integral to democratic idealism was ‘not
in harmony with the normal forces ruling human nature, and is apt therefore to
lead to cruel disappointment and serious disaster.’
Even Tennyson weighed in, with his tale of Liberal disillusionment,
“Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.”
Here, then, was the common problem, another face of the worry running
throughout Sidgwick’s Principles and Elements, to the effect that so little is known about what makes for a vital culture, for scientific and artistic
progress and religious development – all the things that slip past the work
of political economy. And plainly, Seeley and Maine provided a great deal
by way of in-the-flesh example of the historical method to which Sidgwick
was so concerned to do justice.
But before further pointing up just what Sidgwick shared with this
gallery of “competent authorities,” it would be helpful to rehearse in
slightly more detail their visions of India and of spiritual expansion in
general. In a striking account of the “benefits” of British civilization,
Seeley explained:
India then is of all countries that which is least capable of evolving out of itself
a stable Government. And it is to be feared that our rule may have diminished
what little power of this sort it may have originally possessed. For our supremacy
has necessarily depressed those classes which had anything of the talent or habit
of government. The old royal races, the noble classes, and in particular the Mus-
sulmans who formed the bulk of the official class under the Great Moguls, have
suffered most and benefited least from our rule. This decay is the staple topic of
lamentation among those who take a dark view of our Empire; but is it not an
additional reason why the Empire should continue? Then think of the immense
magnitude of the country; think too that we have undermined all fixed moral and
religious ideas in the intellectual classes by introducing the science of the West
into the midst of Brahminical traditions. When you have made all these reflexions,
you will see that to withdraw our Government from a country which is dependent
on it and which we have made incapable of depending upon anything else, would
be the most inexcusable of all conceivable crimes and might possibly cause the
most stupendous of all conceivable calamities.
This smacks of the “white man’s burden,” while admitting that the
white man did quite a bit to create the burden in the first place. Seeley
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does, however, also offer this consoling background report on how, strictly
speaking, the British did not conquer India at all:
If we begin by remarking that authority in India had fallen on the ground through
the decay of the Mogul Empire, that it lay there waiting to be picked up by
somebody, and that all over India in that period adventurers of one kind or another
were founding Empires, it is really not surprising that a mercantile corporation
which had money to pay a mercenary force, should be able to compete with other
adventurers, nor yet that it should outstrip all its competitors by bringing into the field English military science and generalship, especially when it was backed over
and over again by the whole power and credit of England and directed by English
statesmen.
Thus, the “conquest of India” was not really the “act of a state,” and
besides, India was not really a state properly so called:
[I]n India the fundamental postulate cannot be granted, upon which the whole
political ethics of the West depend. The homogeneous community does not exist
there, out of which the State properly so called arises. . . . The majority of the Governments of India were Mussulman long before the arrival of the Mogul in
the sixteenth century. From this time therefore in most of the Indian States the
tie of nationality was broken.
Thus, although Seeley is far from any jingoism, there is the weariness
of the weight of moral responsibility running through his claims about
India. The poor English founded the empire “partly it may be out of
an empty ambition of conquest and partly out of a philanthropic desire
to put an end to enormous evils. But, whatever our motives might be, we
incurred vast responsibilities, which were compensated by no advantages.”
Unlike the colonial empire, which has “grown up naturally, out of the
operation of the plainest causes,” British
India “seems to have sprung
from a romantic adventure; it is highly interesting, striking and curious, but
difficult to understand or to form an opinion about.” And when it comes to
whether the British have actually done the Indians any good, Seeley is all
humility:
I have asserted confidently only thus much, that no greater experiment has ever
been tried on the globe, and that the effects of it will be comparable to the effect of the Roman Empire upon the nations of Europe, nay probably they will be much
greater. This means no doubt that vast benefits will be done to India, but it does
not necessarily mean that great mischiefs may not also be done. Nay, if you ask
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on which side the balance will incline, and whether, if we succeed in bringing
India into the full current of European civilisation, we shall not evidently be
rendering her the greatest possible service, I should only answer, ‘I hope so; I
trust so.’ In the academic study of these vast questions we should take care to
avoid the optimistic commonplaces of the newspaper. Our Western civilisation
is perhaps not absolutely the glorious thing we like to imagine it. Those who
watch India most impartially see that a vast transformation goes on there, but
sometimes it produces a painful impression upon them; they see much destroyed,
bad things and good things together; sometimes they doubt whether they see many
good things called into existence. But they see an enormous improvement, under
which we may fairly hope that all other improvements are potentially included,
they see anarchy and plunder brought to an end and something like the immensa
majesta Romanae pacis established among two hundred and fifty millions of human beings.
Another thing almost all observers see, and that is that the experiment must go
forward, and that we cannot leave it unfinished if we would. For here too the great
uniting forces of the age are at work, England and India are drawn every year for
good or for evil more closely together. Not indeed that disuniting forces might
not easily spring up, not that our rule itself may not possibly be calling out forces which may ultimately tend to disruption, nor yet that the Empire is altogether