ABSTRACT
“The matter in hand,” wrote Bacon in his large way, “is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human race and all power of operation.” I have already referred to the influence of T. H. Green in the seventies and eighties of last century. 1 The gospel of the old “philosophical radicals” had by that time worn thin. It had come to be seen that there might be other abuses of power than those committed by privileged classes. There might be such a thing as a “tyranny of the majority,” and there were certainly limits to majority rights to interfere with the liberties of minorities. Mill wrote his book with the object of laying down the principle of the limitation. It was to be found in the distinction between conduct which only concerned the individual himself and conduct which concerned the well-being of others. In 1860 Herbert Spencer wrote an article in the Westminster Review upon “Parliamentary Reform, the Dangers and the Safeguards,” which was later expanded into his celebrated essay, The Man Versus the State, challenging the whole course of recent Liberal legislation as an invasion of the natural rights of individuals. Green was as convinced as these two leaders that if Liberalism was to survive as a political creed it must have a philosophical basis. “Man,” he wrote in 1868, “above all the modern man, must theorize his practice, and the failure to do so must cripple the practice itself.” But he was equally convinced that neither of their philosophies struck deep enough or was adequate to the complexity of the problem. “Hence that peculiar characteristic of our time, the scepticism of the best men.” 2 Mill's distinction between self-affecting and other-affecting conduct was purely illusory. Spencer's appeal to “natural rights” was to set back the clock by a hundred years and to play into the hands of pure reaction. Coming to the task with a breadth of philosophical knowledge, a power of analysis and a practical experience of public affairs which neither of these writers possessed, Green developed in his political writings a theory of the ends of government and the principles of State action, which in its main outlines still “stands by its own mass” as the solidest contribution since the time of Locke to providing a formula “adequate to the action of reason as exhibited in nature and human society in art and religion.” 1 The essence of his teaching consisted first in the definition of social progress as consisting in the development in each man of his distinctively human capacities: (”Our ultimate standard of worth is the ideal of personal worth. All other values are relative to values for, of, or in a person. To speak of any progress or improvement or development of a nation or society or mankind except as relative to some greater worth of persons is to use words without a meaning.”) And secondly, in emphasizing the power which organized society possesses of furthering the conditions under which such development is possible. Green was aware of all that could be said about the dangers of “paternal government,” but he held that the true ground of objection to it is, not that it violates the principle of the laissez-faire or interferes with “natural rights,” or that it conceives of the office of government being the promotion of morality by making people “good,” but that it rests on a misconception of that in which morality and goodness consist. The real function of government is to maintain conditions of life in which morality, as the disinterested performance of self-imposed duties, shall be possible and “paternal government, by narrowing the room for the self-imposition of duties and for the play of disinterested motives,” does its best to make this impossible. As an illustration of the best type of the spirit that should inspire legislation in his own time his admiration of the Quaker statesman, John Bright, was unbounded. 2
