BOOKS.

MR. BAGEHOT'S BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES.* THE reprints of Mr. Bagehot's essays succeed, but do not resemble one another. In each there is not only more of what we have had before—though that is so excellent, that we turn at once to the preface, in the fear of an announcement that there is no more to come—but there is also something new and distinctive,—something that makes us realise more clearly not only how much, but how many things, the world has lost in losing him ; something that makes us regret in turn that he was not all economist, or all politician, or all historian. Not, indeed, that this regret will stand the test of consideration. The tendency of an ago is never so wholly good, that we can afford to do without an occasional protest against it, and Mr. Bagehot was an embodied protest against the tendency to excessive specialisation. Specialisation is to letters what division of labour is to industry. The advantages of it up to a certain point are beyond question, but by degrees we begin to see that what is hest for the work is not always best for the workman. Pins may be bettor and cheaper now that it takes fourteen men. to make one than when a single man did all the work, but there are more men who are good for nothing except to make the fourteenth part of a pin. Mr. Bagehot was the exact converse of the man who lately moved Lord Sherbrooke to verse. Though he knew many things, he knew them all well enough to make them mutually useful. In his mind, business, polics, science, reacted on one another, and each was con- stantly suggesting some happy illustration which served to light up the dark places of the rest.

The new feature in Biographical Studies is the historical power shown in the essays on Bolingbroke and Pitt. We know of no book in which the thoughts of the average Englishman of William III.'s time are so clearly set out as in the essay on Bolingbroke. Mr. Bagehot had a singular gift for divining what stupid people think. He was not repelled by them, as is ordinarily the case with men at once so able and so brilliant as he was. On the contrary, he took a specific pleasure in tracing the course of their ideas, and explaining the quaint processes by which they arrived at them. There are examples in abundance of this faculty in his economical writings, and inasmuch as political economy, like all sciences that deal with practical life, has much to do with stupid people, it was often of very great service to him. Mr. Bagehot did not fall into the mistake of thinking that stupid people put things to themselves stu- pidly. They can generally find some one—the clergyman they most respect, or the editor of their favourite news- paper—who will dress up their ideas plausibly. Mr. Bagehot always made proper allowance for this, aud consequently his readers are not left lost in wonder how anything

Biographical Studies. By the late Walter Bagehot. Edited by it. H. Hutton. London Longmans and Co.

so foolish could possibly have been believed. They arc more likely to think that, if Mr. Bagehot had not been there to make things plain, they might possibly have believed it themselves. Here is a passage which will show exactly what we mean. Mr. Bagehot is speaking of the Revolution of 1688 :— " But to common people, when it happened, the change was great. Even now the detail of our parliamentary system is not much under- stood by the poorer part of the public, and they care for it but little ; the Queen and her family, and the Prince of Wales and the Princess. Alexandra, mainly interest them. The person of the sovereign em- bodies to them constitution, law, power. But our revolution changed the sovereign. The only political name and idea known to rural hamlets wore taken away, and another name and idea were substi- tuted in their stead. Jacobites went about saying that there was one king whom God had made, and another king whom Parliament had made. At this moment, though the dogma of hereditary right has been confuted for ages, though it has been laughed at for ages, though Parliaments have condemned it, though divines have been impeached for preaching it, though it is a misdemeanour to maintain it, the tenet still lives in ordinary minds. In Somorsetshire and half the quiet counties the inhabitants would say that Queen Victoria ruled by the right of birth and the grace of God, and not by virtue of an Act of Parliament. They still think that she has a divine right to the Crown, and not a right by statute only. If the old creed of the Jacobites is still so powerful, what must have been its force in Queen Anne's time ? That generation had seen the change from 'God's king' to man's ,king,' and very many of them did not like it. Shrewd men said that England was prosperous under the revolu- tionary Government ; common-sense said that an ill-born King who governed well was better than a well-born King who governed ill ; Whigs said that England was free after the revolution, and would have been enslaved but for the revolution ; yet on the simple super- stition of many natural minds the force of these arguments was lost. They admitted the advantage of liberty and of prosperity, but they would not renounce the Lord's anointed for a mess of pottage.'"

And here is another, on the difference between the position of William and that of Anne :—

"The question of dynasty was in a very odd and very English state of complexity. It might have been thought to be a question of bare alternatives, and to have boon susceptible of no compromise. Either Parliament had no power to choose a Sovereign upon grounds of expediency, or it might choose any sovereign who was expedient. If King James might be expelled at all, it could only be because he- was a bad King, and in order to put in a bettor King. On principle, Parliament was either powerless or omnipotent. But this clear, de- cisive logio has never suited Englishmen. As for King William, indeed, no one could say he was any sort of King except a Parlia-

mentary Xing, but his heir was the Princess Anne. Surely, it was thought, she and. her children had some divine right—a little, if not much? She had no right by birth, certainly, for her father and her brother came before her ; she was not the nearest heir, but she was the nearest Protestant heir ; she was not the eldest son of the last King, but she was his eldest daughter that was living.' Those facts do not seem to be very material to us now, but at the time they were critically material. Half the population probably believed that it would be right—not merely expedient, but right in some high, mystic sense—to obey Anne and her children. They were not only ready, bat were anxious, to take her for the root of a now dynasty."

Half the art of a historian is to make us take in the identity between similar situations in different periods. The past becomes comprehensible, when it is expressed in terms of the familiar present. How many of us know Bolingbroke and the England of 13olingbrole so well as not to feel that we know both better after reading this ? " In our time" (this was

written in 1863) "it is easy to vex Tories. You have only to ask, 'What is Dizzy's next move P' Such short words would not have suited our formal ancestors. But many a courteous Whig, doubtless, asked many a Tory, What is to be my Lord Boling- broke's next fine stroke of policy?' "

In the essay on Pitt there is an admirably clear account of the coalition between Fox and Lord North, and of the means George III. took to break it up. In dealing with the latter. point, Mr. Bagehot shows another of the qualities which go to make the historian, as distinct from the politician. When Lord Macaulay is describing a constitutional conflict, he invariably takes a side. What is sauce for the Tories the day he wrote was sauce for them a hundred years earlier. Mr. Bagehot is altogether exempt from this temptation. After saying that George III. "did much that was, according to the good notions now fixedly established, thoroughly unconstitutional," he goes on to point out,—

" That it would have been inexpedient to apply, iu the year 1784, the strict constitutional maxims on which we should act in the year 1861 that the beneficial relations, and that the inevitable relations of the Parliament and the Crown, were different then from what they are now ; that, under such an aristocratic legislature as the unre- formed Parliament principally was, it was needful that the Crown should sometimes intervene, when the opinion of Parliament was opposed to the opinion of the people ; that, in times when public' opinion was formed but slowly, it was advisable that the Crown should, do so, not by an instant dissolution of the blouse of Commons, as we should now exact, but by a deferred dissolution, which would enable

the thinking part of the community to reflect, and give the whole country, far and near, time to form a real judgment."

Mr. Bagehot excuses himself from working out this view by the plea of want of space, and more than once in this volume we are reminded how much he left undone for a similar reason. When he comes to deal with Pitt's Sinking Fund he only says " An excess of income over outlay is a pre-requisite of a true repayment. Mr. Pitt, however, not only did not see this, but persuaded a whole generation that it was not so. He proposed to borrow the money to pay off the debt, and fancied that he thus diminished it. He had framed a puzzle in compound in-

terest which deceived himself, and. every one who was intrusted with the national finances, for very many. years." Would

that Mr. Bagehot had gone on to explain how it was that Pitt was able to impose this fallacy upon himself and his genera- tion! Now that it has long been exploded, everybody Can show where Pitt was wrong, but Mr. Bagehot would have been able to bring out what historically is much the more interesting point of the two,—how Pitt came to think he was right—what the potent charm was that carried away "one of the greatest financiers in our history," the statesman who "repaired the great disorders Of the American war, restored a surplus to the revenue, understood the true principles of taxa- tion, and even knew that the best way to increase a revenue from the consumption of the masses is to lower the rate of duty and develop° their consuming power."

The essay on Lord Althorp does a similar service to the reader for the period preceding the Reform Bill, and it contains a most valuable analysis of the way in which the defects of the authors of the Reform Act of 1832 made the defects of the last Reform Act all but inevitable. No doubt there is another side to the picture Mr. Bagehot here gives. He did not like the democracy, and he expected no good to follow upon its final victory. Those who who feel differently towards it will be likely to hold a different opinion upon this point. But whether they agree with Mr. Bagehot or not, they will not, if they are candid democrats, quarrel with his description of the change which has come over English politics in consequence of the last Reform Act, or with his statement of the problem

which that Act has proposed for solution. The Reform Act of 1832, he says, substituted uniformity of franchise for variety. It abolished that "miscellaneous collection of constituencies" in which "every class was sure to have some members who represented it," and made the middle-class the sole depositary of

effective political power. That was impossible as a permanent settlement ; and so the next Reform Act went lower, and made the working-class the sole depositary of effective political power. Worse than this, the Act of 1832 destroyed the select constituencies which formed an "organ for what may be called specialised political thought," and created nothing in their place. The result of this is to be seen in "the political conversation of Members of Parliament, a few of the greatest excepted." That conversation,

"Is less able and loss striking than that of other persons of fair capacity. Thom is a certain kind of ideas which you hardly ever hear from any other educated person, but which they have to talk to their constituents, and which, if you will let them, they will talk to you too. Some of the middle-aged men of business, the 'soap. boilers,' as the London world disrespectfully calls them, whom local influence raises to Parliament, really do not seem to know any better; they repeat the words of the hustings as if they were parts of their -creed. And as for the more intellectual Members who know better, no one of good manners likes to press them too closely in argument on politics, any more than he likes to press a clergyman too strictly on religion. In both cases, the status in the world depends on the belief in certain opinions, and therefore it is thought rather ill-bred, except for some great reason, to try to injure that belief. Intellectual ileferonce used to be paid to Members of Parliament, but now, at least in London, where the species is known, the remains of that deference are rare."

It is another instance of Mr. Bagehot's political foresight -that, writing in '1870, he detected the "increased power of the provinces," which has-been so unmistakably shown in the last general election. "Any gust of popular excitement runs through them instantly, grows greater and greater as it grows, till it

gains such huge influence that for a moment the central educated. world is powerless If an election were now to happen at a moment of popular fury, that fury would have little or nothing to withstand it." Opinions will differ as to the comparative political value of the popular constituencies, and of the "central educated world." But there is no room for any such difference as to the part which these elements severally play in the composition of the House of Commons. Mr. Bage- hot was not sanguine as to the possibility of replacing intellec- tual constituencies by schemes of minority representation. Before any such scheme can be adopted, it is necessary "to in- duce this self-satisfied, stupid, inert mass of men to admit its own insufficiency, which is very hard ; to understand fine schemes for supplying that insufficiency, which is harder ; and to exert itself to get those ideas adopted; which is hardest of all." It seems likely, moreover, to be all the harder, for a reason which Mr. Bugehot does not mention, and that is the tendency of intellectual minorities to put the intellect aside when they deal with politics, and to be as ignorantly Conservative as the popular .majorities are ignorantly Radical. That is a thought which is all the more bitter because it inevitably suggests the unavailing wish that Mr. Bagehot could have lived to guide them to a better knowledge of the part, whatever it may prove, which it is yet possible for them to play in England.