by James Grant
IN HIS WORKADAY JOB, Bagehot wrote for money, but outside the offices of the Economist, he sometimes wrote to answer an intellectual adversary. In the case of Lombard Street, that provoking agent would be Thomson Hankey. But first, for The English Constitution, the goad was John Stuart Mill.
Of the not-yet-named job description of “public intellectual,” Bagehot and Mill were fellow practitioners. While on the payroll of the East India Company, Mill found that he could finish his day’s work in three hours,11 leaving plenty of time for the production of such volumes as A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive in 1843, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy in 1844, and Principles of Political Economy in 1848, as well as such works as “Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History” in 1845 and “M. de Tocqueville on Democracy in America” in 1849.
Bagehot made no secret of his admiration for the man whom Gladstone called “the Saint of Rationalism.”12 In fact, The English Constitution begins with a quotation from Mill: “‘On all great subjects,’ says Mr. Mill, ‘much remains to be said,’ and of none is this more true than of the English Constitution.” And when Mill announced his intention to stand for Parliament, the Economist remarked that the philosopher would improve the caliber of debate in the House of Commons simply by representing himself, never mind his constituents. Nor did it matter which line of argument Mill might choose to pursue—the free play of his mind would constitute a public benefaction. How good it would be for the country if other boroughs, taking Westminster’s cue, returned the kind of men “who would contribute something to the general stock of Parliamentary ideas, rather than minutely represent the electors’ views.”
Still, Bagehot took exception to Mill’s Representative Government. In it, the new member for Westminster ascribed the smooth functioning of the British government to the checks and balances of the English Constitution. The Commons counterbalanced the Lords, while, together, the two legislative houses protected against the overreach of the monarchy. Bagehot denied that it was so. It was rather the unity of the legislative and executive functions that animated the English state: “The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive and legislative powers. The connecting link is the cabinet,” i.e., a committee of legislators chosen to head the various major governmental bureaucracies.¶
In America, cabinet officers served the president alone; they had no legislative role. In England, the ministers, as members of Parliament, discharged duties both executive and legislative. It was the “union, the nearly complete fusion,” of the two roles for which Englishmen should give thanks. The conjoining of powers was key, “all the books” to the contrary, Bagehot grandly asserted, notwithstanding.13
The politicos from Bridgwater, practical men determined to put their candidate in a place where he might do them some good, may or may not have noticed the serialized unveiling of the still-untitled English Constitution. What might they have thought of it, if they chanced to read it? We can only know that they would have been able to understand it: Bagehot’s arguments were as plain as day. He wrote like the journalistic observer he was, brilliant, irreverent, and aphoristic. As Lombard Street was a description of the money market, in the words of its subtitle, so The English Constitution was a description of British politics, as living politicians actually practiced them.
Paradox is the recurrent theme in The English Constitution, as it is in so many of Bagehot’s writings. What you thought about the Constitution isn’t so, the author taunts the reader. What is so, you had always overlooked or, happening to see it, had put out of mind because it seems so implausible.
Bagehot’s fundamental observation is that the English government takes two basic forms, the efficient and the theatrical. The efficient segment—cabinet, administrative departments, working committees of Parliament—does the work. “The Crown is, according to the saying, the ‘fountain of honor,’” he writes, “but the treasury is the spring of business.”14
The theatrical segment, meanwhile—the royals, the nobility, the scenic rich—inspires the deference which keeps the lower orders in line. How much better is this arrangement for England than the one across the Atlantic, Bagehot reflects: “royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.”15
The secrecy, aloofness, and mystery of the sovereign, which is seemingly of no importance to English public life, is in fact essential to good order: “The existence of this secret power is, according to abstract theory, a defect in our constitutional polity, but it is a defect incident to a civilization such as ours, where august and therefore unknown powers are needed, as well as known and serviceable powers.”16
A good thing it is, Bagehot goes on, that the poorest can’t vote. Lucky, too, that the qualified electors vote with no great conviction and that the members they do elect willingly yield to party discipline. It is this show of human weakness that throws the management of the affairs of state on to the wise old heads in the cabinet.
Better, surely, the cabinet than the House of Commons, when it comes to drafting legislation. Imagine the House, convened in plenum, as a Committee of the Whole, Bagehot invites his readers; imagine it trying to write a “bill of many clauses which eager enemies are trying to spoil, and various friends are trying to mend. An Act of Parliament is at least as complex as a marriage settlement; and it is made much as a settlement would be if it were left to the vote and settled by the major part of persons concerned, including the unborn children.”17
As for the Lords, you may have thought that that noble branch passes wise and disinterested judgment on the sometimes impetuous Commons, but the fact is that Lords rarely do so. “On free trade, for example,” writes Bagehot, instancing the founding cause of the family newspaper, “no one can doubt that the Lords—in opinion, in what they wished to do, and would have done, if they had acted on their own minds—were utterly wrong. Commerce is like war; its result is patent. Do you make money or do you not make it? There is as little appeal from figures as from battle.”18
Grant the Lords, though, or at least some lords, the virtue of intimidating the rustics: “An old lord will get infinite respect. His very existence is so far useful that it awakens the sensation of obedience to a sort of mind in the coarse, contracted multitude, who could neither appreciate nor perceive any other.”19
Once upon a time, a belief was prevalent that universal education and rising incomes could erase the differences between individuals and classes, as all would converge at the same level. “But now,” Bagehot argues,
when we see by the painful history of mankind at what point we began, by what slow toil, what favorable circumstances, what accumulated achievements, civilized man has become at all worthy in any degree so to call himself . . . our perceptions are sharpened as to the relative steps of our long and gradual progress. We have in a great community like England crowds of people scarcely more civilized than the majority of two thousand years ago; we have others, even more numerous, such as the best people were a thousand years since. The lower orders, the middle orders, are still, when tried by what is the standard of the educated “ten thousand,” narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious. It is useless to pile up abstract words.20
Do you doubt the inferiority of the lower orders, he challenges. Just try to strike up a conversation with the servants in the kitchen. “The dullest platitude” will stump them.** “Great communities are like great mountains—they have in them the primary, secondary and tertiary strata of human progress; the characteristics of the lower regions resemble the life of old times rather than the present life of the higher regions. And a philo
sophy which does not ceaselessly remember, which does not continually obtrude, the palpable differences of the various parts, will be a theory radically false, because it has omitted a capital reality—will be a theory essentially misleading, because it will lead men to expect what does not exist, and not to anticipate that which they will find.”21
The schoolboy who had called his classmates “the mob” had grown up to become a supercilious man. Bagehot scorned the “vacant many,” including the rather less numerous noble owners of vast tracts of land who “generally cannot speak, and often cannot think.” To twenty-first-century sensibilities, this contempt for his fellow man—especially the “little people,”22 as Bagehot was wont to call the underlings—is jarring. It discomfited some of his contemporaries, too, including the unsigned author of the Spectator’s review of The English Constitution, which came out shortly after the work appeared between covers in 1867.†† But even the democrats of Bagehot’s day stopped short at extending a universal invitation to join the body politic to the working multitudes. John Bright, when it came to it, would exclude the lowest rung of society, “the residuum,” the wretched poor, and Mill, a proponent of almost universal suffrage, women as well as men, would administer a literary and numeracy test to establish fitness for the vote. Disqualified would be any on parish relief and those who paid no taxes.23 Nor was Mill prepared to accept the American notion that “one man (‘with a white skin’) is as good as any other”; the official propagation of such a canard, said the philosopher, was about as “detrimental to moral and intellectual excellence [as] any effect which most forms of government can produce.”24
As for the merits of Bagehot’s book, the judgment of the constitutional scholar A. V. Dicey, a long-lived contemporary of Bagehot’s, seems valid even today: “His English Constitution is so full of brightness, originality, and wit, that few students notice how full it is also of knowledge, of wisdom, and of insight.”25
IN MARCH 1866, William Gladstone brought forward the government’s bill to draw more British subjects within the pale of the Constitution. The proposed reform would extend the franchise by reducing the property qualification to vote, and would redistribute seats, taking from the old, stable constituencies and giving to the new, growing ones.
The English sorted electoral districts as “county,” meaning rural, or “borough,” meaning city or town. They likewise sorted people. Birth, income, and occupation defined one’s class, with working, middle, upper, and aristocratic being the principal delineations. The working classes were subdivided, in ascending order of respectability, into laborers, working men, and artisans.
One hundred pounds sterling a year was a commonly perceived threshold of middle income, though exceptions to this rule of thumb abounded. An expert coach maker, earning as much as £250 a year, belonged to the working class, while a postal clerk, making £90, saw himself—dressed as he was in black suit and top hat—as a member in good standing of the middle class.26
The amount of rent you paid decided your eligibility to vote in parliamentary elections. In the boroughs, £10 per annum was the minimum. In the counties, £50 gained you a vote, though qualifications for voting in local or municipal elections were set within easier reach. But since 1832, the year of the Great Reform Act, Britain had become less agricultural and more populous, and it was past time for change, Gladstone told the Commons.‡‡
In its simplest form, Gladstone’s bill would confer the franchise on male town-dwellers who paid a yearly rent of at least £7, rather than £10, and on county renters at £14 rather than £50. By such provision, said the chancellor, 144,000 new working-class voters would be brought into the electoral fold, a 14 percent increase to the 126,000 already on the rolls. And if, as he expected, another 60,000 of their brethren would presently be enfranchised, the prospective grand total of 330,000 working-class electors would constitute a cohort not much smaller than the 362,000 middle-class-and-higher voters in Britain, out of an overall British male population of five and a half million.27
Gladstone faced stiff resistance from the Conservative Party and not a little from his own party. Robert Lowe led the insubordinate Liberals. Lowe’s position was not, exactly, that “the lower orders” were unfit to vote, though he did not scruple to say that many would fail the test; he rather took his stand on the principle that voting was not an end in itself but a means to the end of good government. To dilute the quality of the franchise was to devalue the caliber of the House of Commons and thus of Great Britain. Better that the would-be electors raise themselves to meet the standard than that the standard be lowered to flatter them. John Bright, no hearty friend of a bill that, as he contended, failed to go far enough, likened the opponents of reform to the disaffected Israelites in the Book of Samuel who gathered to plot and sulk in the cave of Adullam.
Lowe, the leader of these Adullamites, was an albino. One eye was blind, the other dim.
His handsome head was the purest white. Born in 1811, the son of an athletic, well-read Nottingham vicar and prebendary, young Bobby excelled at Winchester school, tormented though he was for his short-sightedness and curious appearance. He compensated for these defects by distinguishing himself in classics, then as later the heart of the public school curriculum. Hard work at length raised him to a position in the schoolboy hierarchy at which he could return his tormentors’ favors. “No one knew what a bully was till he knew him,” attested James D’Israeli, one of Lowe’s schoolboy underlings, according to James’s illustrious brother, Benjamin, who had little more use for Lowe than Lowe had for him.28
At University College, Oxford, which he entered in 1829, Lowe earned a first in classics but a second in mathematics. Like the young Bagehot arguing with the results of double-entry bookkeeping, Lowe, as he told the story, held that there was more opinion than fact in the answers that he couldn’t seem to solve for (or, indeed, see clearly on the page).
Failing to win a hoped-for academic appointment, Lowe tutored in classics, read law, was called to the bar, and emigrated to Australia, his doctors having astoundingly misinformed him that the glaring antipodean sunshine was just what his weak eyes needed to stave off otherwise-certain blindness. In Sydney the newcomer built a lucrative law practice and made a name for himself in the New South Wales legislative council as an espouser of controversial causes. He returned to London in 1850 determined to enter British politics. He joined the editorial page of The Times in 1851 and was returned as MP for Kidderminster in the general election of 1852. Not infrequently, Lowe the leader-writer commended the political agenda of Lowe the parliamentarian.
The Times and its knowing editorialist did not underestimate Lowe’s parliamentary achievements. In a succession of subministerial offices under Viscount Palmerston, Lowe performed the essential work that was, as he put it, “too hard or too dangerous for aristocratic hands.”29 As vice president of the Board of Trade, he put through what proved to be his signal legislative success, the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856, which, along with the amendments of 1857 and 1858, permitted the creation of businesses whose investors risked their equity capital alone and not, as before, a pro rata share of the debts which their firm incurred. It was an incautious entrepreneur who took a chance in founding a business when the cost of failure could make him a personal (in addition to corporate) bankrupt. Correctly, Lowe viewed limited liability as a force for democracy in capitalism and for equality of opportunity between the rich and the aspiring rich.
In 1859, once more disappointed at being bypassed for high office, Lowe settled for the management of the departments of health and education in the second Palmerston government. For the sake of the cause of compulsory immunization against smallpox, he put aside his libertarian principles, and he held them in abeyance in waging the fights for pure water, the healthful disposal of urban waste, and the regulation of poisons, each reform entailing a measure of state coercion. In education, he strove to introduce accountability into subsidized elementary education: teachers should be pa
id according to the results their pupils achieved on standardized tests, he asserted. To make the point, he mischievously introduced a bill to cast Eton, Harrow, and the rest into the web of mandatory testing, legislation certain to go nowhere in Houses of Parliament packed with so-called public school alumni. His point made, he withdrew the legislation, while sure that, at least in the case of his own alma mater, the students would flunk. Endowed schools were the worst offenders against the common-sense stricture that teachers must teach so that students might learn. With those privileged institutions, said Lowe, it was “all salaries and no work, all teachers and no taught.”30
Lowe, later to be created Viscount Sherbrooke, had always had a noble bearing. Gladstone judged that, in the parliamentary debate of 1866, he was “at the very top of the tree.” His jeremiads against democracy, laced with wit and classical allusions, won the admiration of both sides of the House. Like Bagehot, with whom he rubbed elbows socially—he was among the guests whom James Wilson assembled in 1859 to toast Bagehot on the publication of his pamphlet on electoral reform—the member for Kidderminster believed in progress uninhibited by tradition. He marveled at the working of the free market: unguided by government, he elegiacally wrote, the interplay of prices performs its function of “correction and compensating errors—one extreme invariably producing another—dearness producing cheapness, and cheapness dearness; and thus the great machine of society is constantly left oscillating to its center.”31 Seemingly inoculated against nostalgia, Lowe looked ahead to an England in which scientific education pushed aside the classics—an odd, even a philistine, view for a classics tutor, some said—and merit supplanted aristocratic privilege.
Excellence, most of all, was what Lowe stood for, and he did not always find it in the constituency that sent him to Parliament. Returning to Kidderminster in 1857 to stand for reelection in the general election of that year, Lowe loudly announced that he would pay no bribes, nor buy the town a beer, nor stoop to “mob oratory”—he would leave all that to his Tory opponent. Situated 16 miles southeast of Birmingham, in the county of Worcestershire, Kidderminster was famous for its carpet makers. To the many currently unemployed carpet weavers, the town was notorious for Lord Ward’s steam looms, just then displacing human labor. Would the Liberal candidate support policies to relieve local unemployment? In reply, Lowe suggested emigration, perhaps to Australia.32 He himself had made his fortune Down Under, and no less a humanitarian reformer than the Earl of Shaftesbury supported that plan for self-betterment.33 It did not charm the townspeople.