Both Mill and Macaulay profess unbounded confidence in the virtue and wisdom of the middle,that is,of their own class.Macaulay hopes for a reform bill which will make the votes of the House of Commons,the express image of the opinion of the middle orders of Britain.'44Mill holds that the middle class will retain this moral authority,however widely the franchise be extended;while Macaulay fears that they will be swamped by its extension to the masses.The reform bill which they joined in supporting was regarded by the Radicals as a payment on account;while the Whig hoped that it would be a full and final discharge.The Radical held that no barriers against democracy were needed;he took for granted that a democracy would find its natural leaders in the educated and intelligent.The Whig,to whom such confidence appeared to be altogether misplaced,had to find some justification for the 'checks'and 'balances'which he thought essential.
II.WHIGGISM
I have spoken of Macaulay's articles because they represent the most pointed conflict between the Utilitarian and the Whig,Macaulay belongs properly to the next generation,but he appeared as the mouthpiece of the earlier group of writers who in Mill's time delivered through the Edinburgh Review the true oracles of the Whig faith.Upon that ground Mill had assailed them in his article.
Their creed,he said,was a 'see-saw.'The Whigs were aristocrats as much as the Tories.They were simply the 'outs'who hoped to be the 'ins.'They trimmed their sails to catch public opinion,but were careful not to drift into the true popular currents.They had no desire to limit the power which they hoped one day to possess.They would attack abuses --the slave-trade or the penal laws --to gain credit for liberality and enlightenment,when the abuses were such as could be removed without injuring the power of the aristocracy.They could use 'vague generalities'about liberty and so forth,but only to evade definite applications.When any measure was proposed which really threatened the power of the privileged classes,they could bring out a contradictory set of fine phrases about Jacobinism and democracy.Their whole argument was a shuffle and they themselves mere selfish trimmers.45To this Jeffrey replied (in December 1826)by accepting the position.46He pleaded guilty to a love of 'trimming,'which meant a love of the British Constitution.The constitution was a compromise --a balance of opposing forces --and the only question could be whether they were properly balanced.The answer was fair enough.
Mill was imputing motives too easily,and assuming that the Review ers saw the abuses in the same light as he did,and were truckling to public robbers in hopes of sharing the plunder.He was breaking a butterfly upon a wheel.The Edinburgh Review ers were not missionaries of a creed.They were a set of brilliant young men,to whom the Review was at first a mere pastime,occupying such leisure as was allowed by their professional pursuits.They were indeed men of liberal sympathies,intelligent and independent enough to hold by a party which was out of power.They had read Hume and Voltaire and Rousseau;they had sat at the feet of Dugald Stewart;and were in sympathy with intellectual liberalism.But they were men who meant to become judges,members of parliament,or even bishops.
Nothing in their social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against social injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.We may take as their interpreter the Whig philosopher James Mackintosh (1765-1832),a man of wide reading,both in history and philosophy,an eloquent orator,and a very able writer.Mackintosh,said Coleridge,47is the 'king of the men of talent';by which was intimated that,as a man of talent,he was not,like some people,a man of genius.Mackintosh,that is,was a man to accept plausible formulae and to make them more plausible;not a man to pierce to the heart of things,or reveal fruitful germs of thought.
His intellect was judicial;given to compromises,affecting a judicious via media,and endeavouring to reconcile antagonistic tendencies.Thoroughgoing or one-sided thinkers,and Mill in particular,regarded him with excessive antipathy as a typical representative of the opposite intellectual tendencies.
Mackintosh's political attitude is instructive.At the outbreak of the French revolution he was a struggling young Scot,seeking his fortune in London,just turning from medicine to the bar,and supporting himself partly by journalism.He became secretary to the Society of the 'Friends of the People,'the Whig rival of the revolutionary clubs,and in April 1791sprang into fame by his Vindiciae Gallicae .The Whigs had not yet lost the fervour with which they had welcomed the downfall of the Bastille.
Burke's Reflections,the work of a great thinker in a state of irritation bordering upon frenzy,had sounded the note of alarm.The revolution,as Burke maintained,was in fact the avatar of a diabolic power.It meant an attack upon the very organic principles of society.It therefore implied a complete breach of historical continuity,and a war against the reverence for 'prescription'and tradition which is essential to all healthy development.