MR. WALTER BAGEHOT1

ENGLAND has lost this week a man of singular power as a political, economical, and literary thinker. And in saying a man of singular power, I do not use the word "singular" as a mere superlative to express a high degree, but in its more exact sense as expressing a very rare and, indeed, an almost unique kind of power, of which I do not know that I could anywhere find another equally well-marked example. Mr. Walter Bagehot, whose essays on finance, on banking, on economy, and on politics have so long been familiar to all the leading statesmen and politicians of England, and to many of those of France and Germany, died this day week at Langport, after two or three days' illness, at the early age of fifty-one. What we have lost in losing the further development of his political and economical principles it is, of course, impossible to conjecture; but of what kind that loss is, it is not difficult to say, since, of course, what we should have gained had his life been prolonged, must in all probability have been analogous to the many wise and original lessons which are contained in his various published writings. And

1 This article on Walter Bagehot appeared in the Economist, dated 31st March 1877.

it happens to be easy enough to give a general conception, even in Mr. Bagehot's own words, of the special nature of those lessons.

In an essay published about a year ago in the Fortnightly Review-an essay which was to have been one of a series, of which I can only trust that it may still be possible to give others to the world -Mr. Bagehot spoke of the science of political economy as follows :—

It is an abstract science which labours under a special hardship. Those who are conversant with its abstractions are usually without a true contact with its facts; those who are in contact with its facts have usually little sympathy with and little cognisance of its abstractions. Literary men who write about it are constantly using what a great teacher calls "unreal words "—that is, they are using expressions with which they have no complete vivid picture to correspond. They are like physiologists who have never dissected; like astronomers who have never seen the stars; and, in consequence, just when they seem to be reasoning at their best, their knowledge of the facts falls short. Their primitive picture fails them, and their deduction altogether misses the mark—sometimes, indeed, goes astray so far that those who live and move among the facts boldly say that they cannot comprehend "how any one can talk such nonsense"; while, on the other hand, those people who live and move among the facts, often, or mostly, cannot of themselves put together any precise reasonings about them. of business have a solid judgment, a wonderful guessing power of what is going to happen, each in his own trade; but they have never practised themselves in reasoning out their judgments and in supporting their guesses by arguments; probably, if they did so, some of the finer and correcter parts of their anticipations would vanish. They are like the sensible lady to whom Coleridge said,

Men

"Madam, I accept your conclusion, but you must let me find the logic for it."

Now, what Mr. Bagehot here so vividly describes as the great defect of economical writers who have no living knowledge of business on the one hand, and of men of business who have no true mastery of economical principles on the other hand, is just the defect which his great natural faculties, his careful, theoretical studies, and his large special experience, enabled him to avoid. And this applies not merely to the subjects of which he is specially speaking in this essay, but to all those which he was accustomed to handle. Even to pure literature he brought the keen practical observations, the caustic humour, the illustrative imagination for detail, of a man of the world. Those who do not know the remarkable volume called Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen, published now nearly twenty years ago, will find in every essay of that book, almost in every page of it, the evidence of that knowledge of the world which he brought to the illustration of literature, and evidence, too, of the powerful imagination which he brought to bear upon the world. Take, for instance, the essay on Sir Robert Peel, of which the leading idea is contained in the sentence, "A Constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities,"-an idea which is worked out with the same thorough knowledge of the meaning of our parliamentary system and the same dry humour, which were afterwards displayed in a still higher degree in the book on the English Constitution. Mr. Bagehot realised what Constitutional Government really means. He felt vividly,

as every original man has felt, what he himself called "the tyranny of your next-door neighbour." "What law is so cruel as the law of doing what he does? What yoke is so galling as the yoke of being like him?" But, unlike most original men, he could see all the advantages of a political government which depends on the predominance of average opinions as conceived by men of more than average abilities, and he followed out those advantages, and the inevitable disadvantages associated with them, into the whole working of the British Constitution. "You cannot," he said, "though many people wish you could, go into Parliament to represent yourself. You must conform to the opinion of the electors, and they, depend on it, will not be original." But it is in the book on the English Constitution that Mr. Bagehot first combined his theoretical insight with his great knowledge of life, in a manner so methodical as to make a definite and valuable addition to political science. Any one who reads that book will find the key to many criticisms which have been found in this journal on the great political crises of England, France, Germany, and the United States for many years back. Read, for instance, the chapter in that book on the House of Commons, and note how vividly Mr. Bagehot makes us feel the marvel of a Constitution where the centre of power is in a miscellaneous assembly of 658 more or less ordinary persons, whose opinions are necessarily conformed to those of millions of persons even more ordinary and more ignorant than themselves. "Of all odd forms of government the oddest really is government by a public meeting." We see a changing body of miscellaneous persons, sometimes few, sometimes many, never the same

for an hour; sometimes excited, but mostly dull and half-weary, impatient of eloquence, catching at any joke as an alleviation. These are the persons who rule the British Empire, who rule England, who rule Scotland, who rule Ireland, who rule a great deal of Asia, who rule a great deal of Polynesia, who rule a great deal of America, and scattered fragments everywhere." And having made his readers see the difficulty, as it is by no means easy for an Englishman, who is so well used to the phenomenon, to see it, he shows us the conditions -the very rare conditions if we look at the history of the world-under which alone such a paradox is not only possible, but beneficial: not, indeed, beneficial on every, or anything like every, subject; for, Mr. Bagehot shows, "a free government is the most dull government on matters its ruling classes will not hear," but still beneficial on the whole, if only for the political education which it diffuses.

on

And the happy combination of abstract principles with a vivid knowledge of the complex facts of political life, which Mr. Bagehot displayed in his book on The English Constitution, was to a considerable, though of course not to the same, extent, displayed also in the original little essay Physics and Politics, in which he showed the analogy between the principles determining the selection of the stronger and more enduring political states, and the principles determining the selection of the stronger and more enduring physical organisations. That book should be read in close connection with the essay on the English Constitution, for while in the latter he illustrated carefully the various and very complex conditions which are needful to make a parliamentary government