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were no attack on property combined with the political movement for semi-
independence of the Irish nationality, I should think it on the whole best to yield to this movement. I am optimistic as regards the connexion of Ireland with England;
I think this connexion will subsist – for purposes of common defence and offence
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and unrestricted internal trade – whether we give Home Rule or refuse it; but I
think we shall have somewhat less political trouble with Ireland if we give it than
if we refuse it. But to abandon the landowners of Ireland to the tender mercies
of the people who have for eleven years carried on an unscrupulous private war
against their rights of property – rights which those of us who supported the Land
Bill of morally pledged ourselves to secure to them – this is a national crime
and deep moral disgrace in which I can have no part. The fact that even Tory
speakers lay no stress on this danger only makes me feel it more strongly; they
know that the landlords are not a popular class, and that the spoliation of them will arouse very feeble indignation in the breast of the average household suffrager.
(M )
And of course, for Sidgwick, this issue was very much a family affair. In
, when Hicks-Beach resigned as chief secretary for Ireland, the Tory
political forces settled on Balfour as his successor, a move that worried
the Sidgwicks, who were, as the journal records, “much depressed, from
a conviction that he will not be able to stand it physically, and will break
down” (CWC). To the contrary, Sidgwick’s pupil proved his grit by putting
the lie to what had been one of Bryce’s main arguments in favor of Home
Rule – namely, that “the Democracy will not coerce, and therefore we
must come to this in the end; so we had better take it at once quietly.”
Sidgwick allowed, as early as , that “the only tolerable alternative
for Home Rule now is Coercion, and vigorous coercion; any intermediate
scheme has become irrelevant, even to the point of stupidity” (M ).
Balfour agreed and acted quickly to pass his infamous Crimes Act, which
would allow him to impose a serious crackdown on the opposition in
Ireland –
Courts of summary jurisdiction were to be used for the prosecution of certain
offences, among them boycotting, conspiracy to withhold rent, illegal gath-
erings and intimidation. Cases involving trial by jury could now be moved
from one district to another to avoid prejudiced verdicts; the Lord Lieutenant
was given the power to ‘proclaim’ those parts of the country which were to
be governed under the terms of the act, and certain assemblies were declared
unlawful.
As Sidgwick’s journal from reveals, Balfour discussed his measures
with Sidgwick in detail.
The Crimes Act led to the infamous riot in Mitchelstown. The National
League had called a meeting there to protest a trial that was under way,
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that of the Irish nationalist M. P. William O’Brien. As Egremont des-
cribes it:
O’Brien was charged with inciting resistance to the proposed evictions on Lady
Kingston’s estate at Mitchelstown; Dillon and Henry Labouchère, the English
radical, came, together with several other members of parliament, to protest
against this. A riot erupted in which the vastly outnumbered police opened fire
on the crowd, killing three men and wounding more. Liberals and Nationalists
united to condemn the killings.
In Parliament there was an outcry. Balfour would not give an inch. Labouchère,
supported by the Liberal front bench, launched an impassioned attack on the
Chief Secretary although the opposition moved no vote of censure against the
government. Balfour instituted an inquiry into the debacle but quashed the verdict
of wilful murder passed against the police by the local coroner’s jury. He knew
the affair had been badly mishandled by the authorities and that the police had
panicked, yet officially he admitted no error.
Supposedly, ever afterward, Gladstone would murmur “remember
Mitchelstown” when the subject of Balfour came up. The Irish dubbed
him “Bloody Balfour.”
Again, Sidgwick was quite in the thick of all this, however depressed he
was about his spirits. He and Nora would visit Arthur in Ireland and come
away impressed by his “coolness and courage.” His journal is packed with
references to Balfour and the Irish issue, and his other correspondence also
testifies to his not-insignificant advisory role in this case and with regard
to Balfour’s career in general (though his letters float wildly from detailed
assessments of various plans for taxation and land purchase schemes to
resolve the Irish tensions, to minute questions of copyright law, to Hegelian
metaphysics, to plans for the Albert University in London). Despite his
vast admiration for Gladstone, he simply could not go along with the
shift in the Liberal Party, which he deemed “a pusillanimous surrender
of those whom we are bound to protect, and of posterity” (M ). The
Home Rule controversy, along with escalating labor unrest at home, did
much to render him jaded with party politics, and these trials weighed
heavily on him at precisely the time of his great crisis over immortality, a
time when he was also “trying to absorb myself in my Opus Magnum on
Politics.” As he put it to Symonds:
My position is that I seem to myself now to have grasped and analyzed adequately
the only possible method of dealing systematically with political problems; but
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my deep conviction is that it can yield as yet little fruit of practical utility – so doubt whether it is worth while to work it out in a book. Still a man must work –
and a Professor must write books. I look forward with much interest to your new
departure in literary criticism; you certainly have the gift of perennial youthfulness of spirit. I do not think I have, except in my general attitude towards life, which
is very like that of a somewhat pessimistic undergraduate. (M )
When Sidgwick’s book finally appeared, it was somewhat puzzling even
to his friends and colleagues. In fact, there was little agreement on just
what was the most Sidgwickian part of it. Hastings Rashdall suggested,
for the benefit of the reader who wanted to skim some, that “if he wants to
get at Professor Sidgwick’s best and
most characteristic work, he should
read the last few chapters of it.” But Bryce felt that it was rather the first
part of the book, on the functions of government, that succeeded best.
And Maitland, one of Sidgwick’s protégés, whose position at Cambridge
Sidgwick himself had funded, deemed the part on international law and
morality “the best thing that I have read about the subject,” though he also
expressed delight in the critique of Austin, “for the formal jurisprudent
sits heavy upon us and you will deprive him of his terrors.” (For all the
praise of Bentham, the Elements contains a damning indictment of the
theory of sovereignty advanced by his famous disciple.)
As should be clear from Sidgwick’s planning of the work, he himself
regarded the Elements as only a partial fulfillment of his project. Eleanor
Sidgwick, in her Preface to The Development of European Polity, would
give a concise statement of the overall plan:
It had of later years been more and more decidedly the author’s view – as he has left on record – that a threefold treatment of politics is desirable for completeness: –
first, an exposition analytical and deductive, such as he attempted in his work on the Elements of Politics; secondly, an evolutionary study of the development of polity within the historic period in Europe, beginning with the earliest known Graeco-Roman and Teutonic polity, and carried down to the modern state of Europe and
its colonies as the last result of political evolution; thirdly, a comparative study of the constitutions of Europe and its colonies in connexion with the history of what
may be called the constitution-making century which has just ended. The present
book is an attempt at a treatment of political science from the second point of
view. . . . In reading the book it should be borne in mind that it does not deal with theoretical politics as such. The theory of politics is treated in Elements of Politics, where the work and structure of the modern state are examined, and though the
present book is complete in itself, it is intended that, for a full view of the subject,
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both books should be read. As a matter of fact, Mr. Sidgwick often gave a course
of lectures on Political Theory along with the lectures contained in this book –
some of his pupils attending both courses. (DEP v)
She also notes that Sidgwick had the keen (if impractical) wish to spend
much more time in Europe, engaged in the direct study of comparative
politics.
It is curious, and suggestive of how misleading the Elements was in some
respects, that when The Development of European Polity finally appeared,
pieced together from materials that Sidgwick had left at the time of his
death, both Dicey and Bryce observed, in the latter’s words, that “Few
among Sidgwick’s friends knew till this second book appeared how wide
was the range of his historical knowledge, and how complete his mastery
of historical method.” Thus, perhaps one reason why the Elements has
struck some as a retreat from the more historically minded critique of
Benthamism in the Principles is simply that one part of Sidgwick’s political studies has been mistaken for the whole.
In any event, these are crucial points to bear in mind when considering
the claims that the Elements makes on behalf of the analytical or deductive
method. The analytical side of his project must still, after all, work with
a self-consciously historicized account of human nature and the common
sense of humanity, of the political and economic context, and it is still only
one part of the larger task that involves inductive and comparative investi-
gations as well. Sidgwick did not share Dicey’s view that the historical bent
was responsible for everything from nationalist bigotry to sickly emotion-
alism, though he did think that nationalist sentiment was something of an
unfortunate halter on cosmopolitan utilitarian internationalism. In all of
his major treatises, he insists that any concrete applications of the utilitar-
ian principle must involve detailed analysis of the actual social conditions
in question. As he described this aspect of his work in Philosophy, Its Scope
and Relations: “the historical method could hardly be distinguished from
the inductive method; and its alleged ‘invasion’ would not mean more than
a spread of a tendency in all departments of thought to pay more attention
to facts and less to deductive reasoning from general premises, assumed
or supposed to be self-evident” (PSR ).
Again, one of Sidgwick’s primary concerns in emphasizing the pri-
macy of the deductive method is simply that this is rendered all the more
appropriate by the success of historical consciousness in general. If the
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world has changed – presumably for the better – if society has evolved as
well as nature, then perforce the lessons of earlier times will be of limited
applicability to the present, except perhaps in relation to other countries
at different stages of historical progress. The historical method cannot be
dispensed with, of course, and has practical value as well as being appropri-
ate to its own sphere. Historical examples can always undermine sweeping
generalizations – as in the part of Symonds’s argument stressing that the
example of classical Greece demonstrated that same-sex behavior need
not be abnormal, pathological, or decadent. But of course, even Symonds
allowed that there was no going back, and like Sidgwick, instead thought
that a new synthesis was necessary.
As usual, however, Sidgwick’s chief point is the familiar one that the
more ambitious historical and sociological forecasts “can only be vague
and general, if they are kept within the limits of caution and sobriety; and
any guidance that may be derived from such forecasts for the problems of
practical politics must be mainly negative and limitative, and can hardly
amount to positive direction” (EP ). But as he put it in Philosophy,
Especially in the departments of Ethics and Politics, with which I have been
specially concerned, do I recognise the importance of studying in historical order
the variations in political ideas and beliefs in their double relation partly as cause and partly as effect of change in political facts; and similarly in studying the changes in ethical ideals in connexion with changes in other elements of social structure
and in the relations between societies. And of course in both these studies, since
they are departments of history, we must use a historical method. (PSR )
Recall again his worries, highlighted in Chapter , about the direction of
commonsense morality.
Of course, another point that Sidgwick is eager to emphasize is that
History cannot determin
e for us the ultimate end and standard of good and bad,
right and wrong, in political institutions; – whether we take this to be general
happiness, or social wellbeing defined somehow so as to distinguish it from hap-
piness. This ultimate end we cannot get from history; we bring it with us to the
study of history when we judge of the goodness or badness of the laws and political
institutions which history shows us. (EP )
But history does show us just what kind of material we must work with.
Now, after all of this methodological preliminary, what did Sidgwick’s
analytical method actually yield?
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The Elements proceeds in the fashion of so many of his works on the
art of political economy, though in even more encyclopedic detail. Thus,
he begins with a careful elaboration of the individualistic principle, the
basic principle at work in the argument for laissez-faire. Taken as the main
guide for legislation and governmental interference, it means that
what one sane adult is legally compelled to render to others should be merely
the negative service of non-interference, except so far as he has voluntarily un-
dertaken to render positive services; provided that we include in the notion of
non-interference the obligation of remedying or compensating for mischief in-
tentionally or carelessly caused by his acts – or preventing mischief that would
otherwise result from previous acts. This principle for determining the nature and
limits of governmental interference is currently know as ‘Individualism’. . . . the requirement that one sane adult, apart from contract or claim to reparation, shall
contribute positively by money or services to the support of others I shall call
‘socialistic.’ (EP )
As usual, Sidgwick explains how this principle reflects various psycho-
logical and sociological presuppositions – for example, that sane adults are
the best judges of their own interests – and that these are only approximate
generalizations and subject to important limitations. In the Elements, espe-
cially, he is very careful to disentangle these presuppositions, noting how