lives is government by consent, but it is, all too clearly, likewise government bound up with much to which he is not consenting. Similarly, though in greatly magnified degree, with Burke. He saw that government by consent must needs involve for individuals many obligations to which they are not consenting. Only, having made this point good, he went on to include within its scope the whole system of Whig trusteeship, with its limited franchise and prescriptive aristocratic ascendency. It may be that, in insisting upon this, he makes his position untenable. To this we shall return. But this is no reason for supposing him to have ever parted company with his orthodox Whig faith in government by consent. The correct inference is that he was convinced that government by consent was, beyond all doubt, more substantially realised under Whig trusteeship, with its virtual representation,' than under any substitute which innovating radicalism, with its untried democratic franchises, was likely to put in its place.

It has been said by some that the Whigs had no foundations: Johnson said so when he called his friend a bottomless Whig.' It has been also said that they did not even miss the absence of foundations Carlyle said as much when he dubbed them amateurs' and 'dilettanti'; and James Mill said something more when he indulged all the

pleasures of malevolence in fastening upon the whole hateful connection the imputation of 'trimming,'' see-sawing,'' jesuitry of politics,' and much else to the same effect. But whatever truth may underlie the impeachment, the Whigs are not without their rejoinder. It is always open to them to point to the fact that if ever any statesman had foundations it was Burke, and that Burke's theory of government, be its value what it may, had its foundations deeply laid in his conception of a people, and in the profoundly conservative principles deducible therefrom.

CHAPTER X

RIGHTS

(a) What are the Rights of Man?

6

GOVERNMENT and rights are, needless to say, things closely related; and the relation is at its closest and simplest in Bentham. For to that great law reformer, as is well known, all rights were derivative. They were the creatures of legislation, and as such could not so much as exist prior to a legislating government. Real laws give birth to real rights.' 1 And from this it followed that all other rights not thus derived, and in particular the 'rights of man' of the radicals of the Revolution, were no better than the flimsiest of fictions. For, if these rights of man are dignified as antecedent to all law and all government, they would be prior to their own creator. It was thus that this great radical showed himself so eager to convert the world to the radicalism of utility, that he did not hesitate to overturn the radicalism of 'natural rights' to its foundations.

Now, if we compare this doctrine with that which 1 Theory of Legislation, p. 85.

may be gathered from many pages of Burke, nothing is easier than to develop a contrast. Nowhere do we find Burke committing himself to a doctrine so extreme as that there are no real rights but legal rights; and nowhere do we find him asseverating that the natural rights of man do not so much as exist except as the 'anarchical fallacies' of fools and fanatics. On the contrary, he not only asserts, but reiterates in explicit terms, that man does possess rights, even before civil society comes into being. Not only does he say that rights are 'natural' and that natural rights are 'sacred' 1. an admission that perhaps counts for little so long as the ambiguous word 'natural' is undefined-he does not dispute the doctrine, that very doctrine so dear to the hearts of Rousseau and Paine and all their following, that men have 'primitive' rights, and that, in becoming members of a civil society, they may be regarded as surrendering certain of these rights in order to secure the right of citizens who live under the protection of the laws of the State. His words admit of no other interpretation : 'One of the first motives to civil society, and which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is that no man should be judge in his own cause. By this each person has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man, that is, to judge for himself, and to assert his own cause. He 1 Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill.

abdicates all right to be his own governor. He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right to self-defence, the first law of nature. Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he may obtain justice, he gives uphis right of determining what it is, in points the most essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it. Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may, and do exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is their practical defeat.' 1 Liberty,' he says in another passage, must be limited in order to be possessed.' 2

From sentences like these (and there are others to the same effect) it is evident that conservative Burke is by no means so flatly hostile to the doctrine of the natural rights of man as radical Bentham. He does not, like that 'great subversive,' shake the very dust of the doctrine off his feet.

And yet, as all the world knows, Burke's antipathy to this doctrine is extreme. In the bitterness of his detestation of it he out- Benthams Bentham; nor can all the records of political controversy furnish stronger language than that which he hurls at its apostles. Almost he would persuade us that they and it are Antichrist. This being so,

1 Reflections.

2 Letter to the Sheriffs.

L