Confidence Tricks: The English Constitution and the Dangers of Democracy
On its own the English Constitution, first released as a book in 1867, ensures that Bagehot is required reading for any soul bold enough to inquire into the arrangements by which Britain persists in being governed. In it, he presents an alternative view of the parliamentary system, in which it is divided into two parts, as opposed to three, and the traditional theory of checks and balances between them is discarded. There are the dignified parts, ‘which excite and preserve the reverence of the population’, and the efficient, ‘by which it in fact works and rules’.59 The Queen and House of Lords belong to the former category, with the crown placed at the head of a ‘parade’ or ‘theatrical show’ meant to distract and gratify ‘the mob’ below. This ‘disguise’ allows the ‘real rulers’ – not the House of Commons but the Cabinet, a ‘committee of the legislature’ chosen by it – to conduct the business of the nation in relative peace and quiet.
Business is the operative term. Bagehot repeatedly emphasized how much this committee resembled a ‘board of directors’ – its greatest virtue, in his eyes – with the royal family there to smooth out its one comparative shortcoming: the fact that cabinet members could be removed suddenly based on shifts in public opinion. Since most people, he said, ‘really believe that the Queen governs’, the real rulers came and went ‘without heedless people knowing it’, avoiding the unrest or uncertainty such reshuffles might otherwise provoke. The upshot was as cynical as it sounds. A vindication of the ‘plutocratic’ upper and lower houses and a strong executive shrouded in secrecy were the wonders of political science in England.60
Yet Bagehot’s classic work – revered by jurist Albert Dicey as the first to explain ‘in accordance with actual fact the true nature of the Cabinet and its real relation to the Crown and Parliament’ – must be considered in the context of the Economist.61 For over five years before the serialization of the English Constitution, Bagehot had been writing on politics, evaluating constitutional structures in terms of their tendency to help or hinder different states on their paths of capitalist development. Wilson had first encouraged Bagehot to take on this role, expanding his original banking brief at the Economist, based on his 1859 National Review essay entitled ‘Parliamentary Reform’, which showed how far they agreed on the need to limit democracy. In it, Bagehot had argued that any extension of the franchise be limited to a top layer of rate-paying artisans in the largest towns – with artisans in smaller towns, farm workers and all unskilled labourers shut out, so as not ‘to deteriorate the general character of the legislature’. This was fair, he insisted, in his recalibration of natural law, for ‘every person has a right to so much power as he can exercise without impeding any other person who would more fitly exercise such power.’62
From that point on, Bagehot used the Economist itself to denounce the democratic tendencies of reform plans put forward by both Tories and Liberals, which, he said, risked turning a sensitive deliberative body into ‘class-government’, ‘a mere reflex of the popular cry’. ‘True Liberalism’ was at odds with ‘the extreme left of the Liberal party’, he wrote in the spring of 1860, with its ‘superstitious reverence for the equality of all Englishmen as electors’ based on a ‘glaringly false assertion’, that ‘the talents and attainments of the lowest peasant and mechanic are the measure of the electoral capacity of the most educated man in the land’.63
In a review of Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government, he hailed the first section, which he called ‘an exceedingly able protest, by the only living thinker of much authority among English Liberals, against that helpless and reluctant drifting of the Liberal party into pure democracy which is so melancholy a sign of their political imbecility.’64 This rhetoric forced the Economist to defend itself against charges of being ‘impractical, doctrinaire, theoretic’ and of promoting ‘Tory views’ – a reminder that it was uncommon for Liberals to be quite so openly anti-democratic.65 In 1860 Bagehot had even sent a signed letter to the editor, wishing to express himself categorically on the proper attitude of Liberals towards any further reform. ‘The question now is, what securities against democracy we can create; none are easy; none are perfect; which is the least defective and the least difficult to attain?’66
Bagehot tinkered with his answer to this question in the Economist before folding the results into the English Constitution. Early on, he was prepared to accept a slightly wider suffrage, provided there was also ‘a double test of numbers and property, giving every householder a vote, but taking property as the index of social station, and giving higher classes, therefore, a number of votes.’67 He soon had second thoughts about this, however. In a leader from 1864 he suggested a net transfer of members from ‘stagnant’ boroughs to industrial towns, which alone would enjoy a greater degree of popular participation.68 ‘A Simple Plan of Reform’ then became the appendix to the 1867 edition of the English Constitution.69
Here Bagehot gave a detailed rationale for the schemes he had posited in the Economist.70 For the efficient secret of the constitution to be kept, two things were required: the lower classes must not know it, and the upper classes must fully understand it, not falling for pious ‘paper descriptions’ of their government as one of perfectly calibrated checks and balances. So Bagehot made clear just how wide the chasm was between rulers and ruled. With the exception of an educated and propertied elite amounting to no more than ten thousand men, most were ‘no more civilized than the majority of two thousand years ago, narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious’ and ‘unable to comprehend the idea of a constitution’. Giving them votes would spell disaster, for that would mean ‘the rich and the wise are not to have, by explicit law, more votes than the poor and stupid’ – or, in big towns, the workers, whom he dubbed ‘the members for the public houses’ (i.e. pubs).
It is useless to pile up abstract words. Those who doubt should go into their kitchens. Let an accomplished man try what seems to him most obvious, most certain, most palpable in intellectual matters, upon the housemaid and the footman, and he will find that what he says seems unintelligible – that his audience think him mad and wild when he is speaking what is in his own sphere of thought the dullest platitude of cautious soberness. 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.71
Bagehot’s defeat in his third attempt to be elected a Liberal MP in 1866, just as he was finishing up the English Constitution, gave to it this very bitter edge, with masters advised to ‘go into their kitchens’ to confirm the witlessness of their servants. Passage of the Second Reform Act the next year – by the Tories, no less – surprised him and deepened his gloom. A change in tone is clear from the 1872 edition of the English Constitution. ‘What I fear is that both our political parties will bid for the support of the workingman.’ There was no worse misfortune ‘for a set of poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly offer to defer to their decision’. Or, rather, there was one: the poor and ignorant conferring among themselves. ‘In all cases it must be remembered that a political combination of the lower classes, as such and for their own objects, is an evil of the first magnitude.’72
Yet once again it was in the Economist that Bagehot first registered his shock and disgust at the bill that Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader in the Commons, crafted and pushed through both Houses in 1867. The Second Reform Act increased the number of working-class male voters in the towns and cities by extending the vote to occupiers (renters) paying at least £10 a year – in a move that altered neither the basis of the franchise in property, nor the balance of class forces in parliament. ‘We shall not be supposed to like a Reform of the present pattern. We have opposed it for years’, ran an Economist leader, comparing the debate over reform to a botched shar
eholders’ meeting.73 Bagehot’s constitutional theory was on the line, just a year after it was published. ‘We are not so great a political people as we thought,’ he wrote, ‘or we could not on a sudden change our deepest thoughts upon the most familiar and important of political questions.’74 ‘Why has the “Settlement” of 1832 So Easily Melted Away?’ contained a mixture of bitterness, and swipes at the British elite for misunderstanding the constitution, despite his attempts to enlighten it:
The English people have been told by the received authorities on their Constitution, that it contains, apart from the House of Commons, and in a position to resist that House, great conservative forces on which they might rely. Most people believe that no great change could be effected in a democratic direction, because of these old powers. ‘The Queen would not let it,’ is believed by many more than a London politician fancies, and ‘Thank God we have a House of Lords’ has passed into a cry. But now when it comes to business, these book checks are of no use.75
Bagehot cited the recently published correspondence between William IV and Lord Grey at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, and commended the latter: here was a minister ‘able to manage his sovereign without a trace of artifice, and without impairing his peculiar patrician austerity’. But this only revealed how much had changed. ‘We talk of Mr. Disraeli’s wonderful manipulation both in the Cabinet and the House of Commons. But the very name of Victoria is not mentioned, though in 1832 William was prominent and constant in everyone’s mouth. The check of royalty upon democratic change has turned out to be a fancy.’
Yet this was exactly what Bagehot had been saying it was all along. In the English Constitution he had urged the Queen to remain ‘hidden like a mystery’, a relic, ‘not to be brought too closely to real measurement’. Now in the Economist even he lamented her powerlessness. ‘Who cares about managing the Queen? She goes away to Scotland, and the world hardly knows where she is.’76 His objection to the ‘paper description’ of the constitution was that it took the idea of checks and balances at face value. His theory, however cheeky, was not so different: checks and balances were illusions, of course, but given the mental haze of the housemaids and footmen of England, he had counted on them being effective blocks on democratic change.77
The French Constitution
The trade-offs between democracy and socioeconomic stability were even more glaring in France, where the Second Empire exercised a lifelong fascination for Bagehot. Indeed, no one in history has made the case for Louis-Napoléon – the portly, preening nephew of the first Emperor, whose rule over France ended in a catastrophic defeat to Prussia in 1870 – quite like him. Bagehot never shared the view of much of the press: that ‘Plonplon’, Louis-Napoléon’s nickname, was an adventurer and a slightly ridiculous facsimile of his famous uncle. The Economist, on the contrary, treated him as a genius, who understood the French better than an elected assembly ever could.
Bagehot began his complex love affair with Louis-Napoléon in 1851, excusing his coup d’état as the surest way to restore ‘confidence’ and ‘security of industry’ to France, in the Inquirer. At this time, Bagehot based his support for a regime in Paris that he would never have tolerated in London on the concept of ‘national character’. Frenchmen were too ‘excitable, volatile, superficial, over-logical, uncompromising’ to enjoy the same freedoms as the English.78 What the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions in Europe had ‘taught men’ was just the opposite: ‘that no absurdity is so great as to imagine the same species of institutions suitable or possible for Scotchmen and Sicilians, for Germans and Frenchmen, for the English and the Neapolitans.’79
As editor of the Economist, Bagehot was somewhat more sober in his praise of Louis-Napoléon, but consistently backed his regime in France – a restless, revolutionary nation, in need of a firm hand to force down the bitter medicine of political economy.80 What nuance did enter the picture during the 1860s had more to do with the intellectual situation in England. Here disciples of the positivist French philosopher Auguste Comte were winning converts, Bagehot worried, with arguments that rapid material progress backed by a strong central state in France held lessons for overly individualistic, market-oriented England. In 1867 Bagehot attacked these thinkers, whose support for the Second Reform Bill was bad enough. They also believed, he said, ‘Parliamentary government is complex, dilatory, and inefficient. An efficient absolutism chosen by the people, and congenial to the people, is far better than this dull talking.’81 In Physics and Politics, he named ‘the secular Comtists, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Beesly, who want to “Frenchify English institutions” – to introduce here an imitation of the Napoleonic system, a dictatorship founded on the proletariat.’82 The Economist aimed at a similar audience of Francophiles, but tried to teach them different lessons: the point was to admire the view across the English Channel, not to import what they saw there.
Bonapartism, or Caesarism, as Bagehot often called it, ensured stability now, but in the long run no one could predict what would happen after Louis-Napoléon – now Napoleon III – died; and it was too democratic, cutting out the urban educated middle class, in favour of direct appeals to the ‘dumb majority’, the ‘populace, the peasantry and the army’.83 The ultimate sign of its shaky foundations? A few times a year the Economist was confiscated in Paris. ‘At one time any article with “French despotism” in it was seized, no matter what followed, and though it were laudatory’, Bagehot complained of censors too dim to tell a friendly editor from a subversive. ‘If the Economist would make a revolution, what would not make a revolution?’84 The English system was better, then, provided the people living under it were English. Any country would be wise to adopt the ‘true British constitution’, he said – that is, the secret one – but few could.
Yet despite his attempts to warn ‘young Englishmen’ off Bonapartism, its appeal in England had a lot to do with the Economist, where each week Bagehot reported the progress of France under Napoleon III in vivid detail. In 1863 ‘The Emperor of the French’ informed English Liberals of the popularity of this ‘Crowned Democrat of Europe’.85 In 1865 it hailed him as a progressive, vastly superior not just to the ancient ‘democratic despot’ Julius Caesar but the old monarchs of Europe as well. ‘Louis Napoleon is a Benthamite despot. He is for the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.”’ His regime was renowned for ‘orderly dexterity’, his ‘bureaucracy is not only endurable but pleasant.’ And whereas the English intellect was freer than the French, and better able to ‘beat the ideas of the few into the minds of the many’, it ‘has rarely been so unfinished, so ragged’. In Parisian society ‘higher kinds of thought are better discussed than in London, and better argued in the Revue des deux Mondes than in any English periodical.’
Above all Napoleon III had kindled an economic miracle to ‘amaze Europe and France itself’. ‘No government has striven to promote railways, and roads, and industry, like this government. France is much changed in twelve years.’86 The usual objection to despotism was that it made property insecure. But the modern model erected in France had nothing to do with this ‘coarse Asiatic despotism’. The Emperor handled property rights with ‘ostentatious care’, being ‘too wise to kill the bird which lays the golden egg’, and ‘is as good a free trader as there is in France’. As for a ‘common English notion that such freedom stimulates the demand for political freedom’, Bagehot wrote, with a wink, he ‘is aware that very often it does nothing of the kind’.87
Readers could be forgiven for wondering what if anything was wrong with ‘Caesareanism as It Now Exists’, the title of one Economist leader. To Bagehot there was a major flaw, which he identified in 1865. ‘Credit in France, to an Englishman’s eye, has almost to be created.’88 In the summer of 1867 the French and Austro-Hungarian emperors seemed to be plotting a war against Prussia. ‘Every bourse in Europe is trembling’, he wrote in ‘The Mercantile Evils of Imperialism’, for their intentions were ‘incalculable’. Parliaments had their uses, after all: furnishing b
usinessmen with ‘data to spell the future’. The Economist brimmed with illustrations of what this stunted financial development meant for France. ‘An English traveller sees nothing incalculably inferior to England. Means of communication, trade, agriculture, are all excellent.’ Only, ‘the French banking system is childish.’ Napoleon III had merely postponed the day of political reckoning that retarded the growth of financial capitalism. ‘A French banker, in answer to all comments upon his timidity, has a single reply: he says, “It is all very well for you to talk in England; but we in Paris, have revolutions; you were not here in 1848, I was.”’ Paris ‘is a great place of pleasure, – she is an inferior place of lending business.’89
Nations, Nationalism and the Franco-Prussian War
If Bagehot was clear in his political prescriptions for France, his predictions went hopelessly astray. His evaluation of the emperor suggested a war was impossible between France and Prussia. ‘A singular mixture of tenacity and hesitation, of daring and timidity’, Napoleon III was, the Economist assured readers, the last statesman liable to do something rash. ‘We may feel very confident that he will never face Europe, or run any risk of acting in such a fashion as to combine all Europe against him.’90 In 1867 it counted on his ‘sagacity and self-interest’ to hold back the warlike masses. While the Italian liberal nationalists Mazzini and Garibaldi crafted ‘mischievous projects’ in Italy, the wise rulers of France and Prussia beamed at one another from across the Rhine.91 Just months before Napoleon III was duped into a war in which he allowed his army to be trapped and himself taken prisoner, Bagehot wrote that the future would judge him the greater of the two Napoleons. The career of his uncle was ‘more sudden and brilliant and meteoric’ but though ‘an exciting story’ it did ‘not to our minds furnish one half so singular and unexampled in history as that of the present Emperor’s plodding, painstaking, uphill, intellectual efforts to gauge and adapt himself to both the superficial tastes and permanent demands of the French people.’92
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