Politics and Ethics
I.Mill's Problem
In the Political Economy Mill had touched upon certain ethical and political questions.These are explicitly treated in a later group of works.The first and most important was the essay upon Liberty (1859).I have already spoken of the elaborate composition of this,his most carefully written treatise.(1)The book,welcomed by many even of his opponents,contains also the clearest statement of his most characteristic doctrine.The treatises on Representative Government (1861),upon the Subjection of Women (written at the same time,but not published till 1869),and upon Utilitarianism (in Fraser's Magazine,1861,and as a book in 1863),are closely connected with the Liberty,and together give what may be called his theory of conduct.(2)Ishall try to bring out their leading principles.
The Liberty,says Mill,could have no claim to originality except in so far as thoughts which are already common property receive a special impress when uttered by a thoughtful mind.
Hymns to liberty,indeed,have been sung so long and so persistently that the subject ought to have been exhausted.The admission that liberty can be in any case an evil is generally evaded by a device of touching simplicity.Liberty,when bad,is not called liberty.'Licence,they mean,'as Milton puts it,'when they cry liberty.'Bentham exposes the sophistry very neatly as a case of 'sham-distinctions'in the book of 'Fallacies.'(3)The general sentiment is perfectly intelligible from the jacobin point of view.At a time when legislators were supposed to have created constitutions,and priests to have invented religions,history was taken as a record of the struggle of mankind against fraud and force.War is simply murder on a large scale,and government force organised to support tyrants.All political evils can be attributed to kings,and superstition to priests,without blaming subjects for slavishness and stupidity.
Such language took the tone of a new gospel during the great revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century.Men who were sweeping away the effete institutions upheld by privileged classes assumed 'Liberty'to be an absolute and ultimate principle.The Utilitarians,though political allies,were opposed in theory to this method of argument.Liberty,like everything else,must be judged by its effects upon happiness.
Society,according to them,is held together by the sovereign.
His existence,therefore,is essentially necessary,and his power almost unlimited.The greater was the importance of deciding when and where it should be used.Bentham and James Mill assumed that all ends would be secured by making the sovereign the servant of the people,and therefore certain to aim at the greatest happiness.They reached the same conclusions,therefore,as those who reached them by a rather shorter cut,and their doctrine differed little in its absolute and a priori tendency.Thorough democracy would give the panacea.J.S.Mill had become heretical.I have noticed in his life how he had been alarmed by the brutality and ignorance of the lowest classes,and had come to doubt whether 'liberty,'as understood by his masters,would not mean the despotic rule of the ignorant.The doubts which he felt were shared by many who had set out with the same political creed.
Here we come once more to the essentially false position in which the philosophical radicals found themselves.The means which they heartily approved led to ends which they entirely repudiated.They not only approved,but were most active in advocating,the adoption of democratic measures.They demanded,in the name of liberty,that men should have a share in making the laws by which they were bound.The responsibility of rulers was,according to James Mill,the one real principle of politics;and it followed that,to use the sacred phrase,the 'sinister interests,which distract them should be destroyed.The legislation which followed the Reform Bill gave an approximate sanction to their doctrine.The abolition of rotten-boroughs destroyed the sinister interest of the land owners;the reform of municipalities,the sinister interest of the self-elected corporations;the new poor-law,the sinister interest of the parish vestries;and the ecclesiastical reforms showed that great prelates and ancient cathedrals were not too sacred to be remodelled and made responsible.The process inevitably smoothed the way for centralisation.The state,one may say,was beginning to come to life.The powers which,in a centralised government,are exercised by an administrative hierarchy,had been treated under the category of private property.To introduce responsibility was to remove the obstacles to uniform machinery.
