ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FOURTH EDITION.

The only changes that have been made in this edition are corrections of the press, the need of which has been discovered since the third edition was issued. For a few of these I have been indebted to the very carefully annotated American edition of Mr. Bagehot’s works brought out at Hartford, Connecticut, by Mr. Forrest Morgan, of the Travellers’ Insurance Society. In some cases I think that the American editor has missed Mr. Bagehot’s meaning, and have not, therefore, accepted his corrections.

R. H. H.

November 1, 1890.

[vi]

ADVERTISEMENT.

Several of the following Essays were published by Mr. Bagehot himself in a volume which appeared in 1858, entitled ‘Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen’—a volume which has now long been out of print. A good many others are republished, now for the first time, from The National Review, in which they appeared, while one other,—that on Henry Crabb Robinson,—is taken, with the kind permission of the Editor, from The Fortnightly Review; two short metaphysical papers are from the Contemporary Review, and three—one biographical and two political—from the Economist. The Prefatory Memoir is also republished, with the Editor’s permission, from The Fortnightly Review. In all cases the date of the first publication has been appended to each Essay. The Portrait was taken in photography by Monsieur Adolphe Beau, in 1864. It has been printed by Messrs. Locke & Whitfield by the Woodbury process.

November 1878.

[vii]

CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

[viii]

[ix]

MEMOIR BY THE EDITOR.⁠[1]

It is inevitable, I suppose, that the world should judge of a man chiefly by what it has gained in him, and lost by his death, even though a very little reflection might sometimes show that the special qualities which made him so useful to the world implied others of a yet higher order, in which, to those who knew him well, these more conspicuous characteristics must have been well-nigh merged. And while, of course, it has given me great pleasure, as it must have given pleasure to all Bagehot’s friends, to hear the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s evidently genuine tribute to his financial sagacity in the Budget speech of 1877, and Lord Granville’s eloquent acknowledgments of the value of Bagehot’s political counsels as Editor of the Economist, in the speech delivered at the London University on May 9, 1877, I have sometimes felt somewhat unreasonably vexed that those who appreciated so well what I may almost call the smallest part of him, appeared to know so little of the essence of him,—of the high-spirited, [x]buoyant, subtle, speculative nature in which the imaginative

qualities were even more remarkable than the judgment, and were, indeed, at the root of all that was strongest in the judgment,—of the gay and dashing humour which was the life of every conversation in which he joined,—and of the visionary nature to which the commonest things often seemed the most marvellous, and the marvellous things the most intrinsically probable. To those who hear of Bagehot only as an original political economist and a lucid political thinker, a curiously false image of him must be suggested. If they are among the multitude misled by Carlyle, who regard all political economists as ‘the dreary professors of a dismal science,’ they will probably conjure up an arid disquisitionist on value and cost of production; and even if assured of Bagehot’s imaginative power, they may perhaps only understand by the expression, that capacity for feverish preoccupation which makes the mention of ‘Peel’s Act’ summon up to the faces of certain fanatics a hectic glow, or the rumour of paper currencies blanch others with the

pallor of true passion. The truth, however, is that the best qualities which Bagehot had, both as economist and as politician, were of a kind which the majority of economists and politicians do not specially possess. I do not mean that it was in any way an accident that he was an original thinker in either sphere; far from it. But I do think that what he brought to political and economical science, he brought in some sense from outside their normal range,—that the man of business and the financier in him fell within such sharp and well-defined limits, that he knew better than most [xi]of his class where their special weakness lay, and where their special functions ended. This, at all events, I am quite sure of, that so far as his judgment was sounder than other men’s—and on many subjects it was much sounder—it was so not in spite of, but in consequence of, the excursive imagination and vivid humour which are so often accused of betraying otherwise sober minds into dangerous aberrations. In him both lucidity and caution were directly traceable to the force of his imagination.

Walter Bagehot was born at Langport on February 3, 1826. Langport is an old-fashioned little town in the centre of Somersetshire, which in early days returned two members to Parliament, until the burgesses petitioned Edward I. to relieve them of the expense of paying their members,—a quaint piece of economy of which Bagehot frequently made humorous boast. The town is still a close corporation, and calls its mayor by the old Saxon name of Portreeve, and Bagehot himself became its Deputy-Recorder, as well as a Magistrate for the County. Situated at the point where the river Parret ceases to be navigable, Langport has always been a centre of trade; and here in the last century Mr. Samuel Stuckey founded the Somersetshire Bank, which has since spread over the entire county, and is now the largest private bank of issue in England. Bagehot was the only surviving child of Mr. Thomas Watson Bagehot, who was for thirty years Managing Director and Vice-Chairman of Stuckey’s Banking Company, and was, as Bagehot was fond of recalling, before he resigned that

position, the oldest joint-stock banker in the United Kingdom. Bagehot succeeded his father as Vice-Chairman [xii]of the Bank, when the latter retired in his old age. His mother, a Miss Stuckey, was a niece of Mr. Samuel Stuckey, the founder of the Banking Company, and was a very pretty and lively woman, who had, by her previous marriage with a son of Dr. Estlin of Bristol, been brought at an early age into an intellectual atmosphere by which she had greatly profited. There is no doubt that Bagehot was greatly indebted to the constant and careful sympathy in all his studies that both she and his father gave him, as well as to a very studious disposition, for his future success. Dr. Prichard, the well-known ethnologist, was her brother-in-law, and her son’s marked taste for science was first awakened in Dr. Prichard’s house in Park Row, where Bagehot often spent his half-holidays while he was a schoolboy in Bristol. To Dr. Prichard’s ‘Races of Man’ may, indeed, be first traced that keen interest in the speculative side of ethnological research, the results of which are best

seen in Bagehot’s book on ‘Physics and Politics.’

I first met Bagehot at University College, London, when we were neither of us over seventeen. I was struck by the questions put by a lad with large dark eyes and florid complexion to the late Professor De Morgan, who was lecturing to us, as his custom was, on the great difficulties involved in what we thought we all understood perfectly—such, for example, as the meaning of 0, of negative quantities, or the grounds of probable expectation. Bagehot’s questions showed that he had both read and thought more on these subjects than most of us, and I was eager to make his acquaintance, which soon ripened into an intimate friendship, in which there was never any intermission between that [xiii]time and his death. Some will regret that Bagehot did not go to Oxford; the reason being that his father, who was a Unitarian, objected on principle to all doctrinal tests, and would never have permitted a son of his to go to either of the older Universities while those tests were required of the undergraduates. And I am not at all sure that University College, London, was not at that

time a much more awakening place of education for young men than almost any Oxford college. Bagehot himself, I suspect, thought so. Fifteen years later he wrote, in his essay on Shelley: ‘A distinguished pupil of the University of Oxford once observed to us, “The use of the University of Oxford is that no one can over-read himself there. The appetite for knowledge is repressed.”’ And whatever may have been defective in University College, London—and no doubt much was defective—nothing of the kind could have been said of it when we were students there. Indeed, in those years London was a place with plenty of intellectual stimulus in it for young men, while in University College itself there was quite enough vivacious and original teaching to make that stimulus available to the full. It is sometimes said that it needs the quiet of a country town remote from the capital, to foster the love of genuine study in young men. But of this, at least, I am sure, that Gower Street, and Oxford Street, and the New Road, and the dreary chain of squares from Euston to

Bloomsbury, were the scenes of discussions as eager and as abstract as ever were the sedate cloisters or the flowery river-meadows of Cambridge or Oxford. Once, I remember, in the vehemence of our argument as to whether the so-called logical principle of identity (A is A) [xiv]were entitled to rank as ‘a law of thought’ or only as a postulate of language, Bagehot and I wandered up and down Regent Street for something like two hours in the vain attempt to find Oxford Street:—

Bagehot has himself described, evidently from his own experience, the kind of life we lived in those days, in an article on Oxford Reform: ‘So, too, in youth, the real plastic energy is not in tutors, or lectures, or in books “got up,” but in Wordsworth and Shelley, in the books that all read because all like; in what all talk of because all are interested; in the argumentative walk or disputatious lounge; in the impact of young thought upon young thought, of fresh thought on fresh thought, of hot thought on hot thought; in mirth and refutation, in ridicule and laughter; for these are the free play of the natural mind, and these cannot be got without a college.’⁠[2]⁠

The late Professor Sewell, when asked to give his pupils some clear conception of the old Greek Sophists, [xv]is said to have replied that he could not do this better than by referring them to the Professors of University College, London. I do not think there was much force in the sarcasm, for though Professor T. Hewitt Key, whose restless and ingenious mind led him many a wild dance after etymological Will-of-the-wisps—I remember, for instance, his cheerfully accepting the suggestion that ‘better’ and ‘bad’ (melior and malus) came from the same root, and accounting for it by the probable disposition of hostile tribes to call everything bad which their enemies called good, and everything good which their enemies called bad—may have had in him much of the brilliance, and something also, perhaps, of the flightiness, of the old sophist, it would be hard to imagine men more severe in exposing pretentious conceits and dispelling dreams of theoretic omniscience, than Professors De Morgan, Malden, and Long. De Morgan, who at that time was in the midst of his controversy on

formal logic with Sir William Hamilton, was, indeed, characterised by the great Edinburgh metaphysician as ‘profound in mathematics, curious in logic, but wholly deficient in architectonic power;’ yet, for all that, his lectures on the Theory of Limits were a far better logical discipline for young men than Sir William Hamilton’s on the Law of the Unconditioned or the Quantification of the Predicate. Professor Malden contrived to imbue us with a love of that fastidious taste and that exquisite nicety in treating questions of scholarship, which has, perhaps, been more needed and less cultivated in Gower Street than any other of the higher elements of a college education; while Professor Long’s caustic irony, accurate and almost ostentatiously dry [xvi]learning, and profoundly stoical temperament, were as antithetic to the temper of the sophist as human qualities could possibly be.

The time of our college life was pretty nearly contemporaneous with the life of the Anti-Corn-Law League and the great agitation in favour of Free-trade. To us this was useful rather from the general impulse it gave to political discussion, and the literary curiosity it excited in us as to the secret of true eloquence, than because it anticipated in any considerable degree the later acquired taste for economical science. Bagehot and I seldom missed an opportunity of hearing together the matchless practical disquisitions of Mr. Cobden—lucid and homely, yet glowing with intense conviction,—the profound passion and careless, though artistic, scorn of Mr. Bright, and the artificial and elaborately ornate periods, and witty, though somewhat ad captandum, epigrams of Mr. W. J. Fox (afterwards M.P. for Oldham). Indeed, we scoured London together to hear any kind of oratory that had gained a reputation of its own, and compared all we heard with the declamation of Burke and the rhetoric of Macaulay, many of whose later essays came out and were eagerly

discussed by us while we were together at college. In our conversations on these essays, I remember that I always bitterly attacked, while Bagehot moderately defended, the glorification of compromise which marks all Macaulay’s writings. Even in early youth Bagehot had much of that ‘animated moderation’ which he praises so highly in his latest work. He was a voracious reader, especially of history, and had a far truer appreciation of historical conditions than most young [xvii]thinkers; indeed, the broad historical sense which characterised him from first to last, made him more alive than ordinary students to the urgency of circumstance, and far less disposed to indulge in abstract moral criticism from a modern point of view. On theology, as on all other subjects, Bagehot was at this time more Conservative than myself, he sharing his mother’s orthodoxy, and I at that time accepting heartily the Unitarianism of my own people. Theology was, however, I think, the only subject on which, in later life, we, to some degree at least, exchanged places, though he never

at any time, however doubtful he may have become on some of the cardinal issues of historical Christianity, accepted the Unitarian position. Indeed, within the last two or three years of his life, he spoke on one occasion of the Trinitarian doctrine as probably the best account which human reason could render of the mystery of the self-existent mind.

In those early days Bagehot’s manner was often supercilious. We used to attack him for his intellectual arrogance—his ὕβρις we called it, in our college slang—a quality which I believe was not really in him, though he had then much of its external appearance. Nevertheless his genuine contempt for what was intellectually feeble was not accompanied by an even adequate appreciation of his own powers. At college, however, his satirical ‘Hear, hear,’ was a formidable sound in the debating society, and one which took the heart out of many a younger speaker; and the ironical ‘How much?’ with which in conversation he would meet an over-eloquent expression, was always of a nature to reduce a man, as the mathematical phrase [xviii]goes, to his ‘lowest terms.’ In maturer life he became much gentler and mellower, and often even delicately considerate for others; but his inner scorn for ineffectual thought remained, in some degree, though it was very reticently expressed, to the last. For instance, I remember his attacking me for my mildness

in criticising a book which, though it professed to rest on a basis of clear thought, really missed all its points. ‘There is a pale, whitey-brown substance,’ he wrote to me, ‘in the man’s books, which people who don’t think take for thought, but it isn’t;’ and he upbraided me much for not saying plainly that the man was a muff. In his youth this scorn for anything like the vain beating of the wings in the attempt to think, was at its maximum. It was increased, I think, by that which was one of his greatest qualities, his remarkable ‘detachment’ of mind—in other words, his comparative inaccessibility to the contagion of blind sympathy. Most men, more or less unconsciously, shrink from even thinking what they feel to be out of sympathy with the feelings of their neighbours, unless under some strong incentive to do so; and in this way the sources of much true and important criticism are dried up, through the mere diffusion and ascendancy of conventional but sincere habits of social judgment. And no doubt for the greater number of us this is much the

best. We are worth more for the purpose of constituting and strengthening the cohesive power of the social bond, than we should ever be worth for the purpose of criticising feebly—and with little effect, perhaps, except the disorganising effect of seeming ill-nature—the various incompetences and miscarriages of [xix]our neighbours’ intelligence. But Bagehot’s intellect was always far too powerful and original to render him available for the function of mere social cement; and full as he was of genuine kindness and hearty personal affections, he certainly had not in any high degree that sensitive instinct as to what others would feel, which so often shapes even the thoughts of men, and still oftener their speech, into mild and complaisant, but unmeaning and unfruitful, forms.

Thus it has been said that in his very amusing article on Crabb Robinson, published in the Fortnightly Review for August 1869, he was more than a little rough in his delineation of that quaint old friend of our earlier days. And certainly there is something of the naturalist’s realistic manner of describing the habits of a new species, in the paper, though there is not a grain of malice or even depreciatory bias in it, and though there is a very sincere regard manifested throughout. But that essay will illustrate admirably what I mean by saying that Bagehot’s detachment of mind, and the deficiency in him of any aptitude for playing the part of mere social cement, tended to give the impression of an intellectual arrogance which—certainly in the sense of self-esteem or self-assertion—did not in the least belong to him. In the essay I have just mentioned he describes how Crabb Robinson, when he gave his somewhat famous breakfast-parties, used to forget to make the tea, then lost his keys, then told a long story about a bust of Wieland during the extreme

agony of his guests’ appetites, and finally, perhaps, withheld the cup of tea he had at last poured out, while he regaled them with a poem of Wordsworth’s [xx]or a diatribe against Hazlitt. And Bagehot adds, ‘The more astute of his guests used to breakfast before they came, and then there was much interest in seeing a steady literary man, who did not understand the region, in agonies at having to hear three stories before he got his tea, one again between his milk and his sugar, another between his butter and his toast, and additional zest in making a stealthy inquiry that was sure to intercept the coming delicacies by bringing on Schiller and Goethe.’ The only ‘astute’ person referred to was, I imagine, Bagehot himself, who confessed to me, much to my amusement, that this was always his own precaution before one of Crabb Robinson’s breakfasts. I doubt if anybody else ever thought of it. It was very characteristic in him that he should have not only noticed—for that, of course, anyone might do—this weak element in Crabb Robinson’s breakfasts,